the wrong impression....

My 22 year old colleague was this week the inaugural recipient of a "Plonker of the Week" trophy from some of our colleagues. His mistake was to get a bit confused about the meaning of the word "harem", thinking it was an all-purpose collective noun for a group of people, and then using it to describe someone's new - female - employee. A touch embarrassing, perhaps, but a harmless enough mistake you would have thought.

The plonker of the week is apparently going to be chosen from a shortlist of nominees in a team meeting, with the winner then receiving a little trophy and having their photo taken receiving the award displayed somewhere in the department. It's all pretty harmless and, as he usually does, 22 y.o. took it all in pretty good spirit, even when he then spent the rest of the evening explaining to everyone who asked about the trophy at his desk what he had done to warrant the award.

Apparently the award will be a little like the World Cup, and if you win it three times, you get to keep the trophy. The joke was that bookies had already stopped taking bets on who was going to keep the trophy even though it had only just been awarded for the very first time....

All very amusing.... but 22 y.o.'s boss got in this morning having been working at home yesterday, and she found the whole thing far less funny. She stormed off down the office to take the picture down, and then proceeded to give her young apprentice a long lecture about how he needed to think about how he was perceived by his colleagues and by other people. What kind of impression is this going to make on people who haven't met him before? How much more difficult could something like this make it to be to be taken seriously by these people? This, she said, was nothing more than workplace bullying.

To some extent, I can see what she means: even when marveling at the things that 22 y.o. doesn't know (like the names of three of the four Beatles), I've tried really hard to not make him feel stupid. He may not know loads of things - some of them quite alarming - but that doesn't make him an idiot. I'm not sure that everyone has troubled to make the same distinction between ignorance and stupidity. The Plonker of the Week award is intended, I'm sure, to be taken as a light-hearted bit of banter with no malice. I'm also pretty sure that 22 y.o. won't be the only person to win it (I reckon I must have been a candidate for this). But does my colleague have a point: is he being bullied? Or does her intervention - a little like your mum wading in at school on your behalf - make it all the more embarrassing for him?

Or is it all just political correctness gone mad?

stupid bloody tuesday....

Um, Something Street?

Amongst all the coverage of the launch of Beatles Rock Band last week, I heard Nicky Campbell on Five Live wondering whether there could really be anybody who would be discovering the music of the Beatles through this game. The guy he was talking to, some expert who has written a book on the band, told him that he would be surprised how many people, especially those in their 20s and 30s, were relatively unfamiliar with the band. Well, I'm in my 30s and I own several Beatles albums, so I wasn't sure about that. To test the theory, as soon as I arrived in the office, I wandered over to the 22-year old in our team:

Me: "Have you heard of the Beatles"
22: "Yes"
Me: "Can you name them?"
22: "Ermmmm. Ahhhh. Hmmmm. Ummmmmm. Aha! Paul McCartney!"
Me: "Yes. And the other three?"
22: "Erm. No"
Me: "John Lennon?"
22: "Yes, heard of him"
Me: "George Harrison"
22: "Never heard of him"
Me: "Ringo Starr"
22: "Isn't he dead?"

This was a level of ignorance that I hadn't been expecting.

Me: "Can you name any of their songs or albums?"
22: "Um. Something Street or Road?"
Me: "Abbey Road?"
22: "That's it"
Me: "Anything else?"
22: "Um. Not off the top of my head"
Me: "Eleanor Rigby?"
22: "Nope"
Me: "Yesterday?"
22: "Yes, heard of that one. Long and Winding Road. Was that them?"
Me: "Yes. Yellow Submarine?"
22: "Is that the same as the song you sing in Nursery?"

....and so on.

22y.o. subsequently had a quick trawl through wikipedia and wrote down a number of other Beatles songs or albums he thought he had heard of ("Sergeant Pepper? I think I know that one"). He thought he was normal, and if anything, he was a little taken aback by the shock with which his lack of Beatles related knowledge was causing in those who had overheard our little conversation.

Not wishing to appear stupid, he set off to prove that he wasn't the anomaly, and that there were other people with a similar lack of knowledge.

He faced an initial setback when the 18 year old who has just joined us for a placement as part of his degree turned out to be something of a fan, but he was undeterred. His policy of asking people much older than him didn't bear much fruit ("Name the band? I can name the two that left!"), but he did have some success when a surprising number of people were completely unable to name George Harrison as a member of the Beatles (surprising in that there were about four or five people who didn't know. I was mildly surprised that anyone didn't know who he was. My Sweet Lord, indeed).

I've never been one of those people who thinks that the Beatles are somehow above criticism. A band that highly praised cannot help but be overrated, if you ask me. I think what's really amazing about them is how so much of their work still sounds pretty fresh today. Not all of it does: I'd just listened to "Revolver" in the car, so I was very well aware that some of the sitar-heavy numbers in particular were very much a product of their era (or perhaps the start of the era itself?). Much of the songwriting remains incredibly fresh though. How many better song lyrics have there ever been than those in "Eleanor Rigby"? Or am I now unable to view a song that is so embedded into our popular culture with anything approaching objectivity?

Meanwhile, as 22 y.o.'s quest continued, he faced an increasing level of incredulity from those around him:
"Are your retarded?"
"Is it too late to have him shot?"
Whilst it's true that I hadn't even been born by the time by the Beatles had split up, that I had parents who weren't really into music, I still managed to discover the band. I was therefore somewhat surprised by his total lack of knowledge on the subject. Even so, I soon started to feel mildly uncomfortable about what I'd started. Was it really fair to call him ignorant? After all, "Free As A Bird" and the fuss around the release of the Anthology albums happened as far back as 1995. 22 y.o. would have been 8 years old. Is it all that surprising that he might have missed out on the Beatles entirely?

I became more uncomfortable the next day when 22 y.o. was grilled about his knowledge of Queen - much harder than knowing about the Beatles, surely? Before long he was being asked about capital cities. Perhaps he should know what the capital of Australia is, but should we really be laughing at him? He took it all in good spirit, but by the time he was confronted with "The Ultimate Beatles Quiz" from the Times, I wouldn't blame him if he was thoroughly bored of the whole thing and starting to feel a little got at. He got 0 out of 40. A big fat zero. Then again, I don't think I got more than about half of the questions.

"Who was the first Beatle to sport a moptop?"
"Name the Beatles first wives"
"Who suggested that John Lennon change the line "Waiting for the man to come" to "waiting for the van to come" in I Am The Walrus?"
"Who pressed the panic button in Yellow Submarine?"
"Who is the only guest musician to be credited on the label of a Beatles record?"

Not impossible - but if you don't know who George Harrison was, then I'd suggest you're going to struggle with some of those.

22 y.o. hit back this morning with some questions for me:

He tried to test me initially by asking me to name the members of Girls Aloud, only to find that I could (I am seeing them live at Wembley on Friday, after all....), but he found more fertile ground with some questions from a football quiz he was at on Monday night.

"Tony Roberts (the old QPR goalkeeper) was the first goalkeeper to do what?"
"Which striker made his debut for Manchester Utd in the 2007 season, playing up front with Ole Gunnar Solskaer, and made a total of 3 appearances for the club?"
"Name the three Australian players in the Leeds Utd squad in 2001"

I got none of them right, and he felt a bit better about himself (even if he actually only knew the answer to one of those questions himself...)

I don't know though. Is it right to mock someone for something like that? I might perhaps marvel at how he hasn't been inquisitive enough to pick up practically anything at all about the Beatles, but it's entirely possible that they just haven't crossed his radar. Incredible though that sounds, they just don't register with him. Why should they? Is it fair to call him ignorant because of that? They're just a band, aren't they?

At what point does the teasing become bullying?

if you know when to take them....

At about 07:30 this morning, just as I was about to get into the shower, there was a loud bang on the front door. Cursing, I quickly grabbed a towel and ran down the stairs to see what was going on. I unlocked, opened up and cautiously peered out from behind the door - after all, who wants to be confronted at that time of the morning by a semi-naked man? It was the postman, of course, clutching a small plastic envelope. I scrawled my signature approximately on his little digital screen and took the delivery. I opened it up, and was stunned by what I saw: it was short letter with a cheque stapled to the bottom.

The cheque was made out to a sum that equates to about 3.5 years salary.

Tax free.

My mind flashed back about five or six years, and I could see myself flicking through the brochure that came with my critical illness insurance. Let's look down the list of conditions and see what I could maybe tolerate in order to get a payout: obviously you don't want something nasty like cancer, but could I lose a limb? An eye? All good fun, and then I filed the paperwork away and thought nothing more of it. Who really thinks that there may come a time when they will be diagnosed with one of the conditions on that list? Who would really want to be?

To be honest, I was only dimly aware that you might be well advised to take out life and critical illness insurance when you take out a mortgage. Getting the mortgage itself was a big enough step for me. Luckily for me, I was well advised, and my very diligent and professional financial advisor made sure that, as well as getting an excellent deal on our mortgage, we signed all the necessary paperwork and got ourselves properly covered. In fact, I'm not sure I can ever thank LB enough for his foresight.

....And now my critical illness policy has paid out. Without any great fuss or fanfare, my insurance company has paid up the full amount less than a month after they received my claim form, at a stroke making all the inconvenience of that lumbar puncture worth the bother.

I stared at the cheque for a few minutes. Then I sat down and stared at it some more.

Then I went to work.

Then I came home from work and after a game of football and I stared at it again.

That's quite a lot of money.

That money is not consolation or compensation for having multiple sclerosis, but it does offer me financial security. More than that: it presents me with some new options and opens up some interesting choices. I have MS, but at the moment I'm still relatively unaffected. Who knows what will happen tomorrow, or in a year's time, or in five years time.... that's was true before my diagnosis, but somehow the present feels all the more precious to me. Every mile that I run, every game of football that I play (even ones where I feel rubbish, as I did tonight)... it all feels like something to be cherished because I really don't know how long I will be able to play. I'm not worried about my future, really. Good job really, as there's not a damn thing I can do about it. I might be one of the 'lucky' MS sufferers who are barely affected by the condition throughout their lives. I might not be. No one can tell and there's not much point worrying about it. I do wonder, however, if I really want to spend my the bulk of my time sat at a desk doing a job that is hardly the passion of my life.

Surely there are much better things I should be doing with my life? I want to go to Australia again; I want to go to New Zealand; I want to go back to South America; I want to travel in Africa and to go on a walking safari; I want to learn how to scuba dive; I want to see whales and dolphins and sharks; I want to see lions and tigers and elephants; I want to travel around the great cities of Europe and to see the works of the Great Masters and the soaring cathedrals. There are so many better things I could be doing than sitting at my desk as a tiny cog in the wheels of a big company. Perhaps this money is my opportunity to get out and do some of those things whilst I still can.

The big question, I suppose, is whether or not I am brave enough to seize that opportunity.

Hmm.

Millions of people swarming like flies round waterloo underground....

I was in London today, and I really don't know how you people do it. The architecture's alright: St Pancras has improved out of site, of course, and - the monstrous carbuncles around the National Theatre aside - the South Bank is quite pleasant too. Nottingham's not much to look at, truth be told, so a change of scenery is no bad thing. But how on Earth do you cope with all the people? It wasn't even rush hour by the time I arrived, and it's not really all that hot at the moment, but the underground from King's Cross to Waterloo, via Green Park, was horrible: it's dirty, smelly, hot, cramped..... and generally really quite unpleasant. I was certainly very pleased to finally surface into the fresh(-ish) air from a seemingly impenetrable labyrinth of subterranean corridors and endless escalators.

Going home was even worse. We were travelling at the very edge of the evening rush hour, crowds weren't yet really thick, but already people were travelling in that protective bubble that Londoners seem to acquire. Is it acquired, or is it something you have to be born with? That trance-like cocoon that envelops people and protects them from the heat, the dirt and most of all from the crowds. Some people use their books or their newspapers as shields; other people use their iPods; others just stare blankly into space. Everyone seems to avoid eye contact. For an out-of-towner like me, it's like travelling with zombies. Certainly a far cry from the four old dears who joined a nearly deserted train at Leicester on the way down. There were no reservation tickets on the backs of any of the seats, and the carriage was pretty much empty, but they insisted - politely, but they insisted nonetheless - that the people sat at their table moved so that they could sit in their rightfully allocated seats. I'm not sure how they would cope on a tube, to be honest. I doubt that even the full fury of four righteous old ladies would be powerful enough to get past the forcefields on display on the Underground. They'd likely have to stand pressed up against the doors like the rest of us.

Do I sound enough like a provincial ingenue yet? A greenhorn from the sticks with a hayseed hanging from my lips and a corn pipe?

I tell you what......that there London? You can keep it.

Went there. Didn't like it much. Soon came 'ome.

territorial pissings....

If you'll pardon the lowering of the tone (and there are very few places where what I'm about to say wouldn't lower the tone, and I'm pretty sure that the ones where it doesn't are not really places that people like you or I would tend to frequent)..... it never fails to amaze me quite how disgusting the gents toilets can be.

I'm not talking about those dank squat affairs that you still occasionally find in places like rural France, South America or Africa. Oh no. When you're travelling somewhere remote, a disgusting toilet is pretty much par for the course. After all, hard though it may be to believe, there are still many toilets in the world which aren't systematically cleaned on an annual basis, nevermind on a twice daily basis, and one or two don't have access to fresh running water. I know! No, I'm talking here about the toilets in the head office building of a large, very well known and, you'd imagine, pretty cleanly company. People around here don't generally wear flip-flops and sarongs and have large back packs and horrible dirty white man's dreadlocks; they have neatly cut hair and tend to wear stiff-collared shirts, smart trousers and, more often than not, a tie. There isn't a shortage of clean, running water here. In fact, we have hot and cold running water on demand, and all of the toilets around here are connected to the sewage main and have flushes and everything. There's soap too, and occasionally those little pineapple cubes of bleachy freshness.

So how come they're so disgusting? And they are, let me tell you, utterly revolting. What does it say about the men who work here that we allow these toilets to get into such a state, even when they are all cleaned twice a day? I can understand that, how to put this, sometimes things can come out at an unexpected angle, but I fail to see how that would mean that you might miss a urinal entirely and spray the products of your mecturation all over the wall tiles and the floor. And why spit your chewing gum out into the drain? And am I the only man who doesn't feel the urge to pick my nose whilst standing at the urinal? Is there some kind of unspoken rule that the product of this nasal exploration should be smeared onto the wall next to where you stand?

It's even worse in the cubicles. Is it too hard to lift the toilet seat up before having a piss, or is it no big deal to spray your mark all across the seat and the floor? Is it really? And if you are planning a, shall we say, longer stay, is it really asking too much that you might consider flushing, or even that you might pay a bit of attention to where you are leaving your deposit (no, trust me, the seat is not the right place)? Is it wrong of me to expect that anyone leaving a cubicle might pause to wash their hands with the soap provided before heading back out into the office where they presumably then smear their microscopic particles of shit across everything that they touch? Or that, actually, a small smattering of water sprinkled on your hands after pissing is not really the same thing as spending an extra ten seconds doing the whole thing properly and using a dash of soap? Hell, when the people who do wash their hands throw their used hand towels onto the floor rather than into the bin, perhaps I should be grateful that more people don't wash their hands, else I might not be able to open the door to get inside in the first place.

Quite how people feel able to wash their coffee mugs in here, I really don't know.

Ick.

all your diction dripping with disdain....

Ah, back from a pleasant few days staying with some friends in Oxford. Ostensibly, the reason for my visit was that I was going to be working in our store there on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. It was also, of course, an excellent opportunity to catch up with my friends down there, culminating with the 11th annual Juxom Street Christmas Party on Saturday. Work in the store was as good as ever, even if it did make me realise that life at the sharp end of a retail business is very, very hard on the feet (and they're not as busy as they should be at this time of year, either). I had a lovely 20 minute stroll from my digs with Rich and Laura, over Magdalen Bridge and past their lovely illuminated chapel and into the town centre itself, which made a most welcome change from my usual commute by car to a large industrial estate.

The evenings were busy though: Tuesday night spent in a nice Italian with my hosts; Wednesday spent intially with The Ultimate Olympian for a few pints and then a meal with my colleagues from Nottingham also working in the store; Thursday spent in a chinese restaurant with the Pollstar, taking the chance to be introduced to his lovely, charming (and far too good for the likes of him) girlfriend and then on to a pub to watch Leon perform at an open mic night; Friday catching up with friends and helping with last minute party preparations and watching "Ivor the Engine", and Saturday itself spent at the party, starting with the traditional drink (champagne this year) at noon. It's the 11th time we've had this Christmas party now, and I think it's fair to say that things have changed - not least because there are now several children in attendance, so things are naturally a little more restrained (actually, we all ended up in the kitchen listening to Dire Straits at one point, so we are officially turning into our parents).

It's all good though... an excellent way to spend the week. I may even be feeling a touch festive.... something I'm sure work will choke out of my before the end of working week.

Anyway.

Music maestro?

Shuffleathon 2008 Update

Reviews are starting to come in now, with new ones by Cody Bones, Russ L, Ben, Ian all now in. Several more CDs have also reached their destinations, with asta discovering that she drew the shortest of short straws in this game and received a mixtape from me.....

There are still a few to be sent out. I realise that this is a busy time of the year, but it would be great if everyone could try to get their CD done and out into the post before the end of the year (or at least drop me a line to let me know that they're still alive and on the case....). As always, if you could drop me a line when you have sent / received / reviewed your CD, then I'll keep this slightly unwieldy table up to date with links and suchlike.

Right? OK then.

Shuffler	Posted out	Received?
1. Me	yes
2. Mandy		yes
3. Charlie	yes
4. Planet Me	yes	yes
5. Ian		review
6. Mike
7. Jerry	yes	review
8. monogodo
9. Erika	yes	yes
10. Michael	yes	review
11. Lisa	yes	review
12. Cody Bones	yes	review
13. Del		yes!
14. RussL	yes	review
15. Tina	yes	review
16. Wombat	yes
17. Joe the Troll	yes	yes
18. JamieS	yes
19. Cat	yes	yes
20. Rol	yes	review
21. Beth	yes	yes
22. asta	yes	yes
23. bedshaped
24. Paul	yes
25. Alan	yes
26. Astronaut	yes	yes
27. Threelight		yes
28. The Great Grape Ape	yes
29. Paul W	yes
30. Ben	yes	review

Oh, and can you email me your 5 votes for Earworms of the Year please? Ta.

it's a fashion that we follow that we should be forgetting...

You know when you walk past someone that you vaguely know, and just at the last possible moment they don't just smile or say hello or something, but they also ask you how you are? They can't seriously be expecting an answer as you both continue to walk in opposite directions, and yet how often do you find yourself stopping, turning around and replying to their ever more distant back, perhaps even going so far as to call out after their back to ask how they're doing? The fact that they keep moving says to me that they're only asking out of pure reflex and they aren't really interested in how you are at all. With that in mind, the logical thing to do is probably to give a quick answer and keep walking, or even to just keep walking. In fact, a smile is probably enough, but no one wants to seem rude, do they? Once the question has been asked, it sort of requires an answer, and conversational norms also dictate that you should follow up your answer with the same polite inquiry. The fact that the other person is now several hundred yards away from you and likely won't even hear you asking is neither here nor there. It's just the way things work.

I sometimes find myself having terrible dilemmas when I see people that I vaguely know standing in a queue that I'm about to join. If I join the line behind them, then small talk is inevitable because horrible, awkward, forced small talk is clearly much better than blanking someone and pretending that they're not there. This happens quite a lot at work, and I have to say that I will quite often delay my coffee for 5 minutes just to avoid a mildly uncomfortable social situation. It's ridiculous. I know it's ridiculous, but there you go.

I don't think I'm very good at small talk. I think I understand the unwritten rules on paper, if you see what I mean, but I have a nasty feeling that my practical application of the theory is woefully lacking. I had to get in work early the other day, so after my first meeting, I joined the breakfast queue to get a bagel. A colleague of mine that I vaguely know joined the same queue moments later. Hiding was not an option, so I resigned myself to the fact that conversation of some kind was now inevitable. I've worked with this person before, so my opening move was a thin smile of acknowledgment. Often that's enough, and far better than a total blank, but I rather think she saw this as encouragement.

"Hello. How are you?"

My usual gambit in conversations like these is to make some weary comment about how near / far we are from the weekend. A shrug and a resigned "It's Monday" will be taken by most people as being a more than adequate response that somehow conveys lots without actually saying a great deal. Similarly, remarking that "things can never be that bad on a Friday" somehow expresses how drab a week in the office is, but also hints at the approaching nirvana of the weekend and all the exciting and possibly nefarious things you have planned. Most importantly of all, neither phrase exactly invites more conversation on either side unless you want it to. A chuckle and a raised eyebrow is more than sufficient. Thus your small talk obligations can be easily fulfilled with one short sentence. This particular day was a Thursday morning though, and still quite early: the weekend still felt a bit far off to discuss. Hm. I tried to keep things simple.

"I'm fine thanks"

I'm aware that the norm here would be to ask my partner in this reluctant conversation how she was in return. I didn't want to leave that door open, so I didn't ask. Is that rude? Do I have to return her feigned interest in me with a feigned interest of my own? Sadly, she clearly expected more from the conversation and persisted.

"Did you have a good weekend?"

Wow. Asking about my weekend on a Thursday? Her grasp of the rules that govern small talk seemed tenuous at best.

"Yes thanks."

Again, no expansion on why my weekend was good and no polite rejoinder to inquire about hers.

"Anything planned for this weekend?"

Sure, the long bank holiday weekend was in sight and this was perhaps a valid inquiry, but she clearly wasn't taking her conversational cues from my increasingly monosyllabic responses. Damn her eyes.

"Nothing much. I've got friends coming up."

There you go. There's some actual information about my weekend. Are you happy? Eh?

"Oh, for the whole weekend?"

Oh for Christ's sake!

"No. Just on Saturday evening"

Luckily, before she could extract from me the vital information that they were coming up around about 7pm and that we were thinking of having a barbeque, her toast appeared and she tottered off to get a coffee, leaving me to wait a few beats longer than necessary when picking up my bagel to make sure that she had actually gone before I went to order my own Americano.

The funny thing is that she actually seems to be a perfectly pleasant person, and I hadn't really set out not to talk to her or anything... I just wasn't really interested enough to have a nothing conversation with her, and ultimately I just wasn't very interested in knowing how she was and what she had planned for the weekend.

Does that make me a bad person? It certainly makes me feel a little socially inadequate.

king of the world...

I think it was Jean Paul Sartre who said that "L'enfer, c'est les autres": Hell is other people. On the whole, I prefer to think that he's wrong, but almost every day, my faith in people's inherent goodness is sorely tested. Of course, if we're looking for evidence of man's inhumanity to man, there's the big, obvious stuff like wars, preventable diseases, terrorism, oppression and things like that. You only have to read a newspaper or watch the news on the telly to see what a godawful mess mankind is making of the world. Actually, though, it's the little things that trouble me the most; the things that people do to each other on a much smaller scale; the small acts of rudeness or inconsiderate behaviour that slash at my optimism and slowly infuse me with cynicism. At work, it's those people who think nothing of putting other people down so that they might advance themselves. This is anathema to me. If the only way to get ahead is to climb over other people, then I don't want anything to do with it. Actually, I don't believe it's the only way, and I think one of the great achievements of C's career is that she is moving forward on her own merits. Sadly, this doesn't appear to be something that is valued where I work, and one of the things I detest most about my job is that the people who do this, the people who are clearly pursuing their own interests above anything else, are often the people who seem to be getting ahead.

It's not just the snakes in my office who get me down though. I can compartmentalise my job easily enough: work is not the centre of my life and I refuse to let it upset me. When I leave the office in the evening, I am more than capable of putting the behaviour of a few idiots behind me. Sadly, it seems that idiots exist outside the hermetically sealed world of my office too, and I can't so easily ignore them. They're all over the roads, for starters. I like to think of myself as a considerate driver: I don't drive too fast, and I try to retain an awareness of other people on the road. I let people out at junctions, I slow down to create a gap to let cars change lanes, I assidiously thank people who do the same for me. Is it too much to expect that other road users might extend the same courtesy to me? Apparently it is. I'm sure that most people are essentially considerate drivers, but it's always the other ones that stick in my mind: that guy who forces his way out of a junction; the car that pulls over a red light and forces you to brake and wait when your light has long since turned green; the person who elbows their way into the gap you have left for them and doesn't even acknowledge your presence with a simple gesture of thanks, as though that space magically and conveniently appeared just when they needed it most, and had nothing to do with my consideration for them at all. It's the air of entitlement that gets me: the road is there purely for their benefit and every other road user's needs are of secondary importance. They know when they are turning off on that roundabout, so why bother to indicate? Why be concerned that the lack of a signal has meant that other people have had to wait before pulling out? Sure, it only delays me for about 10 seconds, but it's a needless 10 seconds, and it's not the wait that's the issue for me - it's the arrogant assumption by that other driver that they are the most important thing on the road and to hell with everyone else.

I can't even escape this kind of behaviour in the gym either. I went for a swim the other night and was pleased to see that the pool was relatively quiet and I was only sharing my lane with one other swimmer. I think it's important in these circumstances to have an awareness of the needs of your fellow swimmer: if the person behind me in the lane is swimming faster than me, then I try to keep an eye on where they are relative to me and wait between lengths to let them through so that they are as little inconvenienced by me as possible. By the same token, if I am the faster swimmer, then I also try not to crowd or hurry the person in front of me. It doesn't take a great deal of energy to be alive to the other people in the lane, but because I display this consideration myself, I expect other people to do the same to me. On the whole, people are pretty good. They may not realise at once, but over the course of a few lengths, I find that I generally reach an unspoken understanding with the other swimmers in my lane as we grow accustomed to our relative swimming paces. Some people are terrible though, and the guy I was swimming with the other night was the worst of all: at the end of every length, and irrespective of how close behind him anyone else might be, he turned and kicked off. There were three of us in the lane, and both of the other swimmers were moving faster, which meant that we had to interrupt our swim on a regular basis to deal with the issue of how to get past him. The other swimmer took the approach of stopping before the end of the length and turning around before he had the chance to touch and turn. I took the approach of either dipping into the lane next door (when it was clear) to overtake him, or trying to time my swim so that I hit the end just as he did and turning and kicking off before he had a chance to react. I don't even think that this guy was being deliberately inconsiderate as he swam, but I do think he was guilty of being totally unaware of anyone else's needs but his own, and I find that kind of selfishness hard to forgive. I understand that to some extent you have to look to your own needs, and I know that I'm far from blameless myself, but don't we all have some responsibility to each other? Aren't we all in this together?

In their own way, I find each of these little slights as painful as reading about the bigger issues in the newspaper. Why? Well, there's arguably not very much that you or I can do to directly influence events in Iraq, but each and every one of us can do something to make all of our lives a little bit more tolerable. What's the cliche? Think global, act local? Be the change you want to see in the world? Pay it forward? Or may Bill and Ted put it best: Be excellent unto each other.

Whatever. If we all stopped behaving like we were the centre of the world and started showing each other a little more basic consideration and respect.... then maybe, just maybe the world might become a nicer place.

I've got a feeder for you to perch on....

As I set out on my run at lunchtime today, I heard a noise to my left-hand side. I turned, just in time to see two birds locked together and flying straight towards me. After a heartbeat wondering what on earth they were doing (do birds mate on the wing?), I realised that it was a hawk holding a smaller bird tightly in its talons. The smaller bird was stuggling weakly and crying out desperately in its attempt to avoid becoming the larger bird's lunch. It looked grim, but as the hawk tried to gain height, it became clear that its eyes were bigger than its stomach and that it had bitten off more than it could chew, and it was forced to release its prey before they both hit the ground. The hawk then wheeled away and flew off into the distance, cursing, leaving the smaller bird to fly off slowly and a touch gingerly, probably a bit stunned about quite how lucky an escape it had just had.

Ask me again tomorrow morning, but at the moment I feel a little like that smaller bird, struggling in the talons of a hawk, mewling pathetically. My first meeting was at 09:30 this morning, my last meeting finished at 17:45. Meanwhile, at 17:00, the change window opened for the big release that we're doing tonight on the system I'm responsible for. In preparation for that I have had to:

-> talk to building management to get our security passes extended so that we'll be able to get in and out of the office after 10pm (the point at which the doors are usually sealed for the night)

-> talk to facilities management to ensure that the heat and lights stay on through the night in the bit of the office we'll be working in.

-> talk to site security to make sure that we'll be able to get through the gates and off the site before they reopen at 6am.

(could all of that be managed by one person? of course it could.... but when outsourcing to three separate companies saves you a few quid, why would you make anything easy?)

Between 5pm and sometime in the small hours of the morning, we'll be working on implementing some big system changes and then checking that everything came back up in one piece in time for the start of business tomorrow. It might take 12 hours, it might take more. Best case scenario is that we're all done by 2am, but we could be here until the rest of the office arrives to start the new day. The only thing I know for certain is that the point of no return, the point at which we can't put the old system back if everything's gone horribly wrong, is not until 4am.

Sounds like a fun night, eh?

If everything goes well and the hawk lets me go at some point in the small hours of the morning, then I might be able to fly woozily back to the nest to get some sleep before my 9am meeting on Thursday morning.

Work, eh? Bobbins.

repeat after me....

I was all set for a late night in the office today. The first of several big changes affecting the system I'm responsible for was due to be implemented this evening. I'm not in the least bit technical, so I wouldn't be doing anything especially practical by staying in the office, but on occasions like this, I think it's important to offer a bit of moral support to the guys actually doing the work. You know, make cups of tea, order the pizzas and stuff like that [*].

The change window opened at 6pm, and I was all ready for the long haul into the night.

....I'd set Sky+ for the Apprentice and everything.

A little before 6pm, we discovered a small problem where someone had neglected to give us all the information that we needed. We could go ahead, but we'd be doing so with our fingers crossed, as we wouldn't know for sure what would happen. There then followed a period of discussion, negotiation and general wrangling as we worked out what to do. As the responsible person on the scene, it was my job to represent both my key business users (who need the system to be working) and the development team, both in India and onshore (who would have to pick up the pieces). It quickly became apparent to me that if we went ahead with the work, we would be taking a risk with the system - quite how big a risk, we couldn't quantify, but a risk nonetheless. That was enough for me. Naturally, no one really wanted to make the call, so it fell to me, then, to go find the other interested parties and convince them that we should shelve the change.

To cut a long and boring story short, we eventually cancelled the change and stood the team down at about 19:30... so quite a long day at the office for everyone anyway, and a really long one for the team in India, for whom it was already quite late into the night.

The change has, of course, been rescheduled for tomorrow night.

Same time tomorrow night then. Brilliant! I'm looking forward to it already.

Still, at least I get to watch those clowns trying to impress siralun.

Work is proper bobbins, it really is.

---

* I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I have always had myself down as a logical and analytical person, and in general all of the psychometric tests I have done have tended to agree with me. It's not that I don't like or care about people, because I do, it's just that my instinct is to analyse first and worry about other stuff (like people's feelings) later. In a way, I've been oddly proud of that tendency and I fancy that I choose not to worry too much about my 'softer' (and somehow, by implication, less valuable) skills. Perhaps I've been a little too eager to put myself into a box and have been happy to let other people do it too; I stereotype myself. In the last few months, I've noticed that my perception of myself has started to change, and I'm starting to take a lot more notice of my softer skills, my EQ as well as my IQ, if you like. In fact, I've realised that, for all my bluster about myself, I'm actually quite a collaborative worker and that I place great importance in how other people in my teams feel about things and to think about the human impact of decisions. Not only have I noticed that these things are important to me, but I've noticed that often I'm the only person in a room to think about them and express concern about them. In fact, I think the only thing that really annoys me at work, or at least annoys me the most, is the way that people are often a secondary concern. I stood as an employee rep, for heaven's sake!

I think this realisation first came to mind when I did an HBDI Brain Dominance test for work a few months ago. You'll have heard of left brain / right brain thinking, right? Well this test divides the brain into four: on the left-hand side we have analytical thinking and sequential thinking, and on the right-hand side we have interpersonal thinking and inspirational thinking. As a team, before we were given our actual results, we were asked to score where we though we would chart, and where we thought other people in our team would score. I put myself way out to the left, and so did everyone else. What the results actually showed were that I was the most 'balanced' person in the team, and that I scored far higher in the bottom right-hand interpersonal corner than anyone else in the room. This surprised me and everyone else, but the more I have thought about it since, the more I think it's true.

I think I'm finally starting to climb out of the box I've insisted on putting myself in all these years. I'm still analytical and logical, of course, but now I'll crush your argument with the logical power of my mind and then give you a cuddle and make you a cup of tea. Or something. [**]

[**] I think this footnote is now longer and more interesting than the main post itself. Oh Well. [***]

[***] It interests me, anyway. [****]

[****] Although I am quite easily pleased, to be fair.

he was born scentless and senseless....

I love watching The Apprentice.

I think we're supposed to see it as reality TV, where some of the brightest young business brains in the country go toe-to-toe for a prestigious job working with Sir Alan Sugar. It's "the job interview from hell", apparently.

Well, clearly it's not that. For starters, I think it's stretching the truth beyond breaking point to call this bunch of arrogant, puffed up salesmen the cream of young British business talent (or if they are, then we really are screwed). Claiming, as they all seem to do, that you're going to throw yourself into every task "one thousand percent" in an effort to get a job with SIRALAN (as everyone must call him) is just silly, and everyone who actually does have a brain can see that quite clearly. Besides, would "the best salesman in Europe", as one of them keeps referring to herself, really going to take a "six-figure salary" working in the arse-end of London knocking out crappy telephones, or whatever it is SIRALAN now does since he flogged off his sky box business? Wouldn't you expect to be earning a shitheap more than that already?

No, it's just entertainment. The way I look at it, these clowns have volunteered to make monkeys out of themselves over and over again for several weeks purely for my enjoyment on a Wednesday evening.

They have me screaming at the TV every week. They're all self-important, over-confident and utterly without any kind of substance. They spout every kind of business jargon that they have ever heard, and yet they are revealed time and time again to be braggarts and empty vessels. It's brilliant. Actually, it's better than brilliant, I actually believe that this programme is therapeutic. There's something incredibly soothing about watching a TV programme that is basically a version of my own office environment taken to its most ludicrous extreme.... except that in this world, the biggest muppet of the week gets fired and has to take their little wheelie bag out of the "boardroom" and into a waiting taxi. If only real life were more like that.

No one ever really gets fired anymore do they? In my experience, the most incompetent people are usually promoted somewhere they'll be someone else's problem. To paraphrase Jarvis, they say that the cream cannot help but rise to the top, but I say....shit floats.

Dance monkeys! Dance!

---

* Excellent minute-by-minute coverage of the show, often by Anna, available here

** Excellent after-the-event analysis here

Workin' for the man every night and day....

There are yet more changes afoot at work. The new owners are doing some shuffling of the legal entities and, to cut a long story short, almost everyone who works here has been put under consultation with a view to being transferred into the new legal entities. This is purely a formality, they tell us, and we mustn't worry ourselves about it. In fact, although the normal TUPE period is several months, if everyone is in agreement, perhaps we could speed that up, just to get it all out of the way? Yes? Most people believe them and aren't much bothered, but this is the fifth time in the last five years that I have been put under consultation with a view to a transfer of the undertakings and protection of employment - TUPE to you and me. I'm apparently far less trusting than most people. Perhaps I am worrying too much, but is it really sensible to entirely trust to the altrusitic motives of a bunch of cut-throat capitalists out to line their own pockets? Do we really believe that they invested (literally) billions of pounds in this company and are going to care greatly about the fluffier side of people management, even if it costs them money that they might otherwise be able to save? TUPE law protects my contractual terms and conditions, so things like my basic salary and holiday will be protected by law, but I know through experience that lots of the other benefits associated with anyone's employment are non-contractual and can thus be legally changed or removed in this kind of transfer. For instance, although my employers are obliged to continue to offer me a pension by law, they are not actually obliged to offer me the same kind of pension... thus I could lose my (increasingly rare) final salary pension, as well as a pile of other stuff. Maybe I've got nothing to worry about, and everything will stay just the same, but there's got to be no harm in going through the consultation process properly to make sure, is there?

I made the mistake of mentioning this in a team meeting the other week, and so now I have the distinct pleasure of being the Employee Representative for about 800 people in my part of the business in the TUPE negotiations. I had to be elected and everything, and there were ballot papers and padlocked ballot boxes and all sorts.... although it was interesting to note that the majority of the other areas of the business didn't bother to nominate a representative at all, apparently happy to let this thing drift through. Still, luckily for them, I suppose they only need one good person representing their interests and they should be okay, eh? I was not exactly keen to stand, but I found myself talking passionately about what could happen and being met by blank faces, so rather than trust in someone else to represent me, I thought perhaps I should do it for myself.

The employee representatives were announced on the company intranet last week, and one interesting by-product of this is that I am apparently now being seen as a pillar of the establishment - another clear demonstration that people here don't know what the role is about. The employee rep role is actually about standing up for the employees in order to protect them from changes that the company is trying to force upon them. I'm sure it won't come to this, but this is a role that could lead to conflict with the new owners. I am putting my head above the parapet, but I am hardly doing so in a way likely to ingratiate myself. Apparently it is not seen like this by most people, and some of C's colleagues remarked that she must be proud to be married to such a company man, a pillar of the community. They asked her if I would also be putting myself forward as a trustee for the pension fund (which also sent out nomination forms a couple of weeks ago). When she told me this, I assumed they must have been taking the piss.... but apparently they were in deadly earnest: someone who puts himself forward to be an employee rep is the kind of person who would put themselves forward to be a trustee of the pension.

Good grief. Has it really come to this?

Rest assured though, this revolution will not be televised.

Just call me Citizen Swiss from now on. Power to the people!

don't leave me hanging on the telephone....

One of my first tasks at work this morning was to ring someone up to gather some information from them some detail on a number of key tasks that I need to get done in the next week or so (boring work stuff - you know how it is). I don't really like talking to people cold, even more so when it's a mobile phone number that I have been given to ring. For some reason I always have an image of the phone ringing at some awfully inconvenient moment and I consequently half-expect to be dealing with someone who is annoyed with me for ringing before I've even started talking. Much to my surprise though, this particular call seemed to be going quite well, and I thought I was really making some progress towards getting the information that I needed. There was one small sticking point though: the lady was going to have to check on something crucial and then get back to me. Ok. No problem. I gave her my phone number. I had no reason to worry until we had the following exchange:

"Thanks for that. I'll call you back as soon as I have that info. What was your name again? Paul?"

"No, it's Tim"

"Tim. Right. Thanks for that Paul".

She didn't ring me back all day, and what do you suppose my chances are of ever getting that call back?

Slim to none, I would suggest.

I hung up with a heavy heart and carried on with my day.

Oh my God, I can't believe it....

I spent a couple of days last week working in our big Milton Keynes branch, lending an extra pair of hands to help shovel more Christmas tat out onto the shelves. To be honest, I was quite glad to escape the politics of the office to do something completely different and to have the chance to interact with some real customers. There's something very soothing about making sure that the shelves are well stocked and nicely presented, and I'm convinced that there is zen to be found in shelf stacking.... in fact, it would be a great job if the bloody customers didn't keep ruining it by moving stuff about. Tsk.

Anyway. The reason I chose the Milton Keynes store is that it is fairly close to where my mum and dad live. We're not spending Christmas with them this year, so it was an opportunity to spend a couple of evenings with them before we bugger off to France at the end of this week. C. and I usually eat our dinner in the living room in front of the telly or in the kitchen, so it was really nice to have a couple of proper sit-down dinners at the dining room table with my parents. Of course, this also meant that instead of making sure we were up to date with the episodes of "Californication" we have got sitting on the Sky+ box, I was obliged to engage them both in honest-to-goodness conversation.

For real.

As is often the case with my parents these days, the conversation soon took a turn towards God. I'm a heathen, of course, so they really should know better, but their new house is pretty much in the hulking great big shadow of the church of St. Winnicent the Magnificent (or whatever) and they just can't seem to help themselves. My mum is only really interested in the community of the church, and busies herself with things like the church cleaning rota and baking cakes, but my dad has always had bible-thumping tendencies and has had his passion well and truly reawoken by the arrival of a new vicar a couple of years ago.

"Father" Gary is an Anglican vicar, but he likes to call himself "High Anglican", which - as far as I can tell - essentially means that he's Catholic in all but name, but likes to hold out the forlorn hope that he might one day get a girlfriend..... he believes in confession, he likes to abase himself in front of the cross at Easter, and he abhors the idea of women priests.... that kind of thing. Long before I actually met him, I heard an enormous amount about him from my parents who seemed to think that we would have a lot in common and would get on like a house on fire. Imagine my surprise, then, that when I finally met the elusive "Father" Gary, he turned out to be a horrible little sneery weasel of a man. I resigned myself to having to talk to him only to see him duck meeting me... something (I'm delighted to report) that he has continued to do ever since.

So. There I was at the dinner table enjoying a rather tasty roast chicken and a glass of white from the excellent local wine shop, when dad decided he would engage me in a conversation about the church in general, and "Father" Gary in particular. I was tired from a long day in store, but I had also had just enough wine that I was feeling mischievous enough to probe exactly what "High Anglicanism" is. My dad launched into some rambling explanation or other, but I decided to cut to the chase:

"Where do they stand on the whole transubstantiation and consubstantation debate then?". I studied Medieval history, so although I'm not in the least bit religious, I do have an enduring fascination with the history of the church. I find it amazing that schisms have started and wars have been fought over such nonsensical questions as to whether or not the host used at communion is LITERALLY transformed into the body and the blood of Christ, or if it only SYMBOLICALLY represents it. Quite why anyone would waste any energy over that, I don't know, but I do know that it is at the nub of the differences between Anglicanism and Catholicism.

"Ah, I'm pleased you asked me that", replied my dad.
"Really?"
"Yes, because under the articles of faith for the Anglican church, it's actually forbidden to believe that the the host actually becomes the body and blood of Christ"
"mmmm. So where does this leave "Father" Gary?"
"Well, I asked him this question, and he simply tapped the side of his nose and said, 'Well, let's put it this way: if I spilt some of the wine onto the floor, I'd have to burn the carpet'".
"What?"
"Yes"

(apparently, Gary also marvelled at how the methodist church in the village could use an actual loaf of bread in the communion service instead of those little discs. Imagine the crumbs! You can't be leaving the actual body of Christ for the mice, can you? Heavens! The corpse of our Lord is only to be enjoyed by true believers!)

I was now confused.

"So where does "Father" Gary stand on the Pope then?" Another key difference between the religions this one: Catholics believe that the Pope is the emissary of God and that what he says has an equal standing in the eyes of the church to that of the Gospels. Anglicans, presumably having paid rather closer attention to some of the clowns who have held the role, tend to believe that this is nonsense.

"Oh, Gary doesn't like the Pope. He doesn't believe that the Pope is the special emissary of God or any of that stuff"
"Right."

I paused to deliver my killer blow.

".... but wasn't the whole issue of transubstantiation created as a result of a papal edict anyway? I don't believe that Jesus left any specific instructions about the actual presence of his body at communion in the gospels did he? It's all the interpretation of the Catholic Church."

Aha!

My dad refused to allow this (or my long history of heathenism) to dent his enthusiasm though. "I've got a book I think you'd really enjoy". He jumps up from the dinner table and returns 30 seconds later, handing me a book. I glance at the cover: "The Meaning of Jesus". I put it down on the table.

"I'm never going to read this book Dad"
He picks it up from the table and gives it back to me.
"It's a discourse between two Oxbridge academics. One is a liberal Anglican, the other is much more traditional. They're actually really good friends, but it's amazing how opposed their positions on different things sometimes are!"
I glance at the cover and then put the book back down on the table. "But I'm never going to read it. Life is far too short. There are plenty of literary masterpieces already that are well ahead of this on my reading list."
"I think you'd enjoy it. It's really good!"
"I'm sure it's a real page-turner, but I'm still never going to read it"

.....and so on.

As you can imagine, conversations round the dinner table at home are a right barrel of laughs. Now I think of it, this might be the reason that C. and I are going to spend Christmas with her parents in France this year.....

hot, hot, hot, hot stuff....

I quite like this time of year. I know that it always seems to be dark, miserable and wet, but even in a horrible stormy week like this one, you sometimes get those beautiful clear, crisp days that really seem to lift the spirit. The sun didn't quite make it out through the clouds today, and it wasn't frosty, but it was still a nice enough afternoon. Certainly nice enough that I took the opportunity to escape from my desk to go for a run, anyway.

I took my normal route out along the canal and back along the river, and as I headed back into the changing rooms, I was very much looking forward to my lunch. The changing rooms were now quite a lot busier than before, filled mostly with guys who had been working out in the on-site gym. I've been running at work now for a couple of years, and I've got to know some of the faces quite well: there's the funny looking guy who is pretty ripped and who clearly looks after his body but who never, ever showers.... preferring to get straight out of his gym kit and into his suit; there are the two older guys who are probably both in their sixties but still go running about three times a week; there are the two miserable looking chaps who spend the whole time they are getting changed arguing whose turn it is to buy lunch. None of this lot were in the changing room today. Instead, I was treated to the hardcore gym-bunnies: these are the guys who spend a lot of time in the changing rooms drinking protein shakes and discussing their various exercise programmes at great length.

"Yeah, I've had a 5% dip in performance, but I don't think that's too bad for the first session back after a two week holiday."
"Yeah? Not bad, not bad at all. I've been working on some gluteus presses at olympian intensity in supersized squat intervals."
"Sweet. What did you do?"
"About 1231. Funny thing is that the machine told me that this only just put me into the demi god category!"
"What? What the hell does that make most of the lard arses sat at their desks?"
"Yeah, exactly.
"Exactly".

What is it about men and their constant need to talk utter rubbish whilst simultaneously comparing the length of their genitalia? Why can they not just exercise and be done with it? Working out in the gym is not a competitive sport, is it? Am I missing out on something by going running on my own? The thing that amuses me the most, I think, is that none of these guys is particularly well-conditioned. They are just 40-something year old blokes with paunches and silly fingerless weightlifting gloves.

They appear to have a project: a new guy joined their team a few weeks ago, and they have clearly managed to talk him into coming down to the gym with them. He's a fairly normal looking guy. He's not fat or anything, but he's perhaps let himself go a bit in the last few years and is trying to put a stop to that incipient middle-aged spread. The gym boys have got him on a programme. When I first saw the new guy with them in the changing rooms, they were talking him through his first 5km run on the treadmill and asking him how he felt. Knackered, by the looks of him, but in a hurry to get off to a meeting. Once he had gone, the gym boys discussed their pupil:

"What did he do again?"
"35:23"
"35:23? Bloody hell"
"Yeah, but first time"
"Fair enough. How old is he?"
"About 43. He's in reasonable shape, I suppose, but he's what? 95 kilos? He's carrying a bit of weight"
"Yeah"
"Once he works that off, his performance will really hit the up-curve"

...and so on.

I suppose their intentions are good and -- bless him -- he's as keen as mustard, but I can't quite get over the fact that these chubby, middle-aged guys are offering another chubby, middle-aged guy the benefit of their dubious experience and expertise over a completely superfluous protein shake after a short workout. Haven't you had enough calories?? Do you really think you need more?? What's for lunch??

Not long after I had arrived back into the changing rooms today, I was joined by their protégé. He looked dead on his feet. Absolutely dead. He sat down on the bench, and put his head between his knees trying to catch his breath. About five minutes later, he was joined by his advisors:

"You alright?"
"Yeah."
"Sure?"
"Yeah. Just tired. That was hard. How many more did you do?"
"Oh, only another 345"
"345? Really? Christ."
"Yeah. But I've done more before. I usually do more"
"Yeah?"

etc.

Jesus Christ. Get a room so you can compare properly, why don't you?

As if that wasn't enough excitement for one day, Darren was also in the changing rooms today. You might remember Darren as the guy who insisted on engaging me in conversation whilst he was stark bollock naked.

He topped that today.

When I first came in to get changed, he tried to make small talk with me whilst he was wearing the most ridiculously skimpy pair of running shorts I have ever seen. That was bad enough, but when I came back in from my run a bit later, he was just on his way to the shower and decided this was a great time -- naked, of course -- to exchange a few words with me. To complete the set, he then decided to wander across the room for a chat after I'd had my shower. Not only was I only wearing a towel and wanting to get dry and back to my desk, but he was also wearing nothing but a really tiny pair of pants and a winning smile. A really tiny pair of pants.

Tiny.

Three great looks, I think you'll agree. Sadly, every time I shut my eyes, I now find one of those three unforgettable images of Darren burned onto my retina.

Brilliant.

I think he waxes his chest.

we gotta take the power back.....

I hate office politics.

I'm not that big on the office full stop, but I certainly can't be doing with those people who play games. I go to work, I do the best that I can and then I go home. On the whole, I like to think that people are essentially decent and honest and that very few will actually go out of their way to deliberately do somebody else down so that they can get ahead. Perhaps I'm being naive, but it's certainly the way I try and behave when I'm in the office: treat other people as you would wish to be treated yourself. There will be times when you disagree with people and when people have perhaps messed things up, but I don't think anybody gains anything by slinging mud and stabbing people in the back. We are where we are, so let's all just get on with it, eh?

I'm working on a massive, multi-gabillion pound merger at the moment, and inevitably the whole project is a nest of snakes jockeying for position, from the king cobras all the way down to the adders. I try to stay out of this as much as possible, but over the last few weeks I have found myself in a position where I think that someone is trying to build up their own position at my expense. He's a nice enough chap, I suppose, but I first thought he was up to something when he decided to take the opportunity in a very public forum to tell me that "technically, if you look at the organogram, you work for me...". It was nonsense, of course, and he was smiling when he said it, but he was very clearly trying to flex his muscles and exert authority over me. I ignored him. I needed nothing from him and was utterly disinterested in getting involved in a pissing contest with him.

Ignoring him didn't work though: he didn't go away and he kept on niggling away and trying to score points and shift accountabilities and stupid, petty things like that. All of this started to come to a head at the end of last week when I presented a plan of how to move forwards with one particular set of systems. I'm an expert in this system. It is my key accountability. I understand the business priorities and had proposed a way that we could deliver what they needed in the timescales they needed it.

My plan was poo-pooed. At first I took a deep breath and took the trouble to run him through the proposal in person, carefully answering all his questions and listening to his concerns. I thought we had made some real progress and were finally pulling in the same direction..... and then he got back to his office and fired out an email, copying in everyone naturally, pulling apart my proposal and raising all kinds of phantom issues. It made me angry because I'm not trying to play games here; I'm not trying to position myself. I'm simply trying to move things forwards as best I can. I neither need nor deserve to be slapped down like a child by someone who hasn't even troubled themselves to understand the issues.

Right. You've asked for this.



I have spent all day today working my way around the key stakeholders and business sponsors of this project. Using only careful, rational language, I have explained why my proposal is the only sane way forwards and how it will meet their key requirements. I have not spent my time running this other guy down - only taking people through what I genuinely believe is the best way forwards. Because I have spent a lot of time working on this over the last two years, I am in a position where I know this system, I know the business requirements and objectives and I know the key decision makers. This numbnuts who is trying to play politics with me does not know any of these things. He does not even have a credible alternative suggestion as to how we might proceed.

In short, he has it coming.

He's travelling up to my office tomorrow to deliver what he thinks will be the coup de grace.

My prediction? My prediction is PAIN.

that's the word out on the town....

I had my performance review at work the other day. It wasn't the big review that we get at the end of the financial year, but a smaller interim one to cover the first six months of the year and to let me know how I have been getting on. Like most people, I don't take these things terribly seriously. In fact, I only sat down with my boss to write the performance contract I was reviewed against about 3 weeks before the actual review, for heaven's sake. I suppose I would care more if I felt that I had any great influence over the score that I get, but this is controlled more by quotas than by individual performance, so I satisfy myself with trying to do the best that I can. Doing the job. That's the really important thing, right?

Hmm. Perhaps this defeatist attitude is the reason why my career has only reached the dizzy lowlands it currently occupies.

Anyway.

In the session, I discovered that I now get scored slightly differently. "Delivery" is now only one part of my performance measure. If I only exceed in "delivery", then apparently I will only be doing half a job. What other measure can be as important as delivery then? Why, "Behaviours", of course.

I suppose that would be reasonable enough, if the "behaviours" in question were the ones I used with my customers to support my "delivery"... but no.... the way I behave with my customers has got nothing to do with it. Those "behaviours" are part of my "delivery". These other "behaviours" are a measure of how much I conform to the "culture" and "people charter" of my department (both of which are new inventions) and how much I adhere to the department's "process" (which is both insanely complicated and largely pointless).

Oh bugger.

The second I heard this, I knew I was likely to be in for a rough ride. I work really hard to try and make sure that I support my customers. A rather large part of that work involves me trying to protect them from the needless complication and confusion that my department tries to foist on them as it struggles to operate in a difficult outsourced environment that we keep making more and more complex. I know it's a horrible job to come up with a perfect process, and I try to follow this one as best I can, but with the best will in the world, I reckon it's actually now impossible to make head or tail of any of the detail of it. You simply cannot explain it to anyone. It just can't be done. Dilbert and David Brent have got nothing on my lot. We have endless briefings where this already convoluted process is made yet more labyrinthine in an attempt to "clarify" and to "simplify". I tell you, if Sisyphus worked in our department, not only would his boulder be made bigger every time he tried to push it up the hill, but it would also be gradually "improved" into a less rollable shape, and the hill would be gradually made steeper and bumpier. Eventually he would be trying to push a giant cube up a greased right angle.

It's utter rubbish, and the people responsible for it should be shot.... well, perhaps that's a bit strong.... but they certainly keep on trying to vigorously polish that turd and they sure seem to be enjoying themselves.

My problem is that I tend to point this out whenever we have these endless bloody meetings to try and work out what's going wrong and how we can move forwards. I can't help it. I have an analytical mind, and although I know I would be better just shrugging my shoulders and ignoring the whole steaming pile of shit, I can't. I want to understand why someone thinks this is a good idea and why they think this is beneficial for the business. Unfortunately, the more questions I ask, the more people think I'm attacking them for being ignorant tossers. That may be true, but it's not my intention: I genuinely do want to understand and to see what they are trying to do.

So when my boss told me that this was a key measure of my performance, I asked him if I was being assessed on my behaviour with my customers, or my behaviour with my colleagues. He smiled and asked me who I thought had done the scoring.

Shit. My colleagues. The ones who think I think they're fools (incidentally, a big hello to any of them who happen to be reading this!)

Behaviours like these are important to some extent - I don't have any argument about that. But are they really equally as important as what we deliver? Really? a 50:50 split?

I like my boss, and I think that -- although he's far too professional to say so -- he is sympathetic towards my views. So I asked him which me he would prefer: the employee who was really good with his customers and had a good record of delivery and good feedback, or the one who was not so good at that, but said all the right things in team meetings. Not surprisingly, although he smiled suggestively, he simply said that he wanted a combination of the two. Fair enough.

My overall score was okay, but my "behaviours" were right down near the "fall short" mark. I've got six months to learn how to bite my tongue to get a better performance grade at the end of the year.

How do you rate my chances?

and all the nobody people, and all the somebody people...

I was sat at my desk yesterday afternoon when a gopher arrived with some post for my boss that needed to be signed for. As my boss was at his desk, I paid this no mind until he then turned to me and handed me the post. It was an envelope containing a card signed by the Managing Director and congratulating me on ten years of service.

Ten years.

Technically speaking, I suppose that I have only actually worked for this company for about half of that time - I formally left when I went to go and work for the joint venture that built the company website in 2000 for three pretty happy years at the height on the dot com boom, and then after my return, I was outsourced to a completely separate company for a couple of years in 2004...before being insourced back last August. My service, however, has legally been deemed to be continuous. As far as the company is concerned, I joined them on 15th September 1997 and have been working for them ever since.

Far from seeing this as cause for congratulation, I find the whole thing a little bit depressing, to be honest. There's no such thing as a job for life. I don't think anybody now seriously thinks that they will remain with one company throughout their working life. The concept of loyal service has been pretty comprehensively exploded, to the advantage of both the worker and the employer. So how come I'm now 33 and I'm sitting in front of a PC working for the same company I joined when I was 23? Shouldn't I be doing something else by now? Something better?

Of course, if I have to point fingers, then the icy finger of blame here points squarely at me: I could have left; I could have gone looking for another job somewhere else, perhaps somewhere that would pay me more or get me to the top faster. I haven't done these things, and at the end of the day that's the reason I'm still here. If I'd really wanted to move on, then I would have moved on.

Does this mean I love my job?

Nope.

Does this mean that there are things keeping me here other than my job? Does this mean that my career isn't the most important thing in my life? Absolutely.

My office is a ten minute drive from my house on a bad day. I see my wife and I sleep in my own bed almost every night of the week. Hell, I met my wife here. I work long hours, but mainly because I choose to. The flip side of that is that I often stroll into the office after 9am and have a relatively slow start to the morning, and no one really bats an eyelid as I do my work and I more than do my hours and people know this. I am able to pop out at lunchtimes and go running alongside the river, or leave the office early because I have to pop into town. I can work at home if I want to. I've been here for while and I do a good job. People generally let me get on with it.

The bottom line is that although I could earn more money somewhere else, I get paid reasonably well and I get time to do the things that are more important to me than getting on at work. I don't love my job, it's true... but I don't hate it either and it keeps my mind engaged most of the time (and I increasingly find all of the machinations and office politics amusing more than anything else, which perhaps tells its own story about how involved I am).

If you could have said to the 23 year old me in 1997 who really thought that he wanted to be Managing Director that this is what I would have become, then I think he would have sneered at you.... but frankly, what the fuck does he know?

Incidentally, my congratulations card came with a £25 "bonus bond" voucher (that's about 1p per day here). A quick look at the leaflet that comes with this reveals that I can spend this at (amongst other places) Threshers. So perhaps it's not all bad news.

*blows tiny party horn*

The milky bars are on me!

anonymous call; a poison pen; a brick in the small of the back again

I lost a pen yesterday.

It wasn't an especially nice or an especially expensive pen, but I liked it. It was a blue/black gel pen that I bought in Muji for less than a pound. I liked writing with it and I was sorry to discover that I had lost it somewhere. At the first opportunity I will buy another one.

...and then in my first meeting of the day, I noticed that the guy sitting next to me had a blue/black gel pen from Muji.

I supressed my instincts to decry him as a thief and instead tried to shrug and accept that it wouldn't really be that surprising if someone else had the same pen as me. He could have bought it himself, after all.

...and then he picked up the pen and carefully read the sticker on the side, as though seeing it for the first time.

It doesn't mean anything. Deep breath. Deep breath. Concentrate on the meeting.

... and then he opened up his notebook and started to draw a couple of lines with the pen, examining the nib carefully each time, as though trying it out for the first time.

IT'S MY PEN! HE'S GOT MY PEN!

It cost me less than a pound.

He could have his own or he could have found mine lying around on the floor somewhere and picked it up. It doesn't mean anything. I lost the damn thing and I'm going to buy a new one.

So why do I still find myself to be mildly annoyed?

you're not the boss of me now....

In stark comparison to my so-called career, C's doing quite nicely for herself at the moment. After a frustrating few years when she always seemed to be highly regarded but constantly passed over for jobs in favour of less able candidates, she's finally been getting a bit of recognition recently. The company has just been merged with another large retailer/wholesaler and has been taken off the stock market and is now in private ownership. As you might imagine, this has caused a certain amount of upheaval. The changes don't really affect me much, and actually I've been roped in to work on a large project related to the integration itself. C's position has been rather more fundamentally changed, with lines of management being completely redrawn and it looks like there's going to be further significant restructuring ahead. C's job is changing, but in spite of all of the uncertainty that brings, I get the sense that her stock has never been higher. After all, what's not to like? She's a very unusual beast in what is essentially a UK retailer because she speaks several languages fluently and is very good at everything she turns her hand to. As such, I think the new owners prize her, even if they have a rather funny way of showing it.

Last night, C. and the executive team of her part of the business were taken out to dinner by their new boss. Not only does their new boss head up the sizeable international wholesale business of the company, but she also happens to be the long-term partner of the new owner and has a hefty personal stake in the company. I've never met the woman, but I've heard lots of whispers that she's not really much cop, that her part of the business is run terribly, but no one dares to say anything to her because of her relationship with the boss. If that's true, then it's a rubbish state of affairs.

Anyway.

At dinner last night, apparently everyone was unsurprisingly falling over themselves to try and butter up their new boss and to make an impression... everyone, that is, apart from C, who didn't have the energy or the inclination because she's tired of being messed around and she's tired of the politics. At one point during the evening, in the middle of a conversation, the new boss lady stood up, walked across the room to the sofa where C. was sitting and began to stroke her hair. Not surprisingly, conversation dried up and people stopped to stare in slack-jawed amazement. C's response to this was to keep her composure and to say (in French - new boss is Italian and not very comfortable conversing in English) that she was going to stand up now as conversation was awkward between them with her sitting on such a low sofa.

Nicely done, but there's no escaping from the fact that this was a very clear gesture by the new boss to everyone else present in the room, people who had been busy trying to impress her all night, that C. is the one she has picked out. Later on in the evening she was busy telling C. (perhaps a little wistfully) that she had done so well, considering she was "just a baby".

Hmm.

Whilst I'm convinced that this woman was very much trying to make a point to everyone there, I'm also pretty sure that the way she chose to go about it was simply a reflection of a cultural difference between a hot-blooded Italian and a bunch of stiff-upper-lipped brits. I'm sure she didn't mean to offend anyone.....(except perhaps C's current boss, who is presumably very much threatened by this development). Of course, my rather less mature response to this story when a slightly ruffled C. relayed it to me later that evening was to insinuate that she was being "groomed" by the new boss for an entirely different reason....

For some reason, I also now can't shake the image of the White Witch from "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" feeding Edmund Turkish Delight, as if he were some kind of pet.