Personally, I consider myself pretty lucky, work-wise. I like it. I get paid not too badley for doing something I don’t at all mind doing. And I get an odd sort of kick out of knowing that what I’m doing is absolutely a here-and-now sort of thing. A today kind of job. I mean, ifyou’d said to somewone twenty years ago, [I’m] a web designer, they’d have gone, eh? They’d have been thinking crochet work. It’s like operating the Spinning Jenny at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution – or stoking the first steam engine or whatever. Nobody’s done this before, I say to myself. Nobody’s spent their days sitting in front of a box with a glowing window, flicking images around. What I’m doing is precisely where the human race is at, today.
Polly, in “The Photograph”
Penelope Lively, 2003
