be brave...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been called cynical. Cynical, negative and pessimistic. For a time, I was called it so often that I almost believed it myself and began to build my sense of self around it. 

The cynic. 

To be honest, I’m not sure that this has ever really been the case. It certainly is true that, as a younger man, I would throw stones and would criticise without feeling the need to offer up anything constructive. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in going through that phase. It’s also true that, when feeling frustrated or powerless at work (annoyingly often), I would sometimes deliberately seek to tear people down in a way that was ultimately self-destructive…. But I was young and stupid and I don’t work there anymore (which is probably just as well: some people choose never to forget the person you were fifteen years ago, even if you’ve long since changed). 

I think it probably boils down to this: I like to ask questions. These days, it’s usually to genuinely try to understand something because I’m curious. The problem is that lots of people don’t like to be asked questions; they don’t like to be challenged by someone because, if you don’t know the answers or you aren’t very secure in your opinion, it can feel as though you’re being criticised. No one likes to be criticised, right? I try not to be threatening about it, but nobody’s perfect and I’m probably not the finished article even now. 

I think my MS has changed me, actually. Or maybe it’s just revealed another side to my personality. Nobody knows what causes MS, nobody knows if it will progress for me or what my outcome will be. There’s very little that I can do to change any of these things. I’m not really one for serenity prayers, but I do think that this has taught me acceptance. To paraphrase Kipling, to meet with Triumph and Disaster and to treat those two imposters just the same. I’m calmer, more relaxed and better able to approach life on an even-keel (whilst also remaining perfectly capable of frothing in indignation watching the news. Nobody is perfect. My wife is doubtless scoffing as she reads this). 

What’s the point in being pessimistic? I’m well aware what MS might do to me and I know all too well what it’s already done. I simply don’t see how dwelling on either of those things does me any good at all. MS pages on Facebook seem full of people wrapped up in their own invisible pain and suffering. I don’t doubt that they suffer, but I simply don’t understand the attitude because I try never to allow myself to think like that. Perhaps that’s easy for me to say, but I hope it’s a philosophy that will stay with me, whatever happens. “The Road not Taken” by Robert Frost is one of my favourite poems; my interpretation of it is that you should never waste time regretting the path you didn’t take. 

They say that a pessimist is never disappointed. I think they’re always disappointed. Besides, I’m a runner, and as Kipling also said:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, 
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, 
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son! 

Well, I can definitely do that. Maybe not as fast as I use to be able to do it… but I can still do it.

what a waste, what a waste, what a waste of time...

As the great email clear-up continues, I find myself in 2011 and with the first draft of a blog post. Just reading through it is a reminder of why I never want to find myself working for this sort of company ever again. Just look at this nonsense. It's surely a form of low-level psychological abuse. For some reason, I put up with this for more than 20 years!

"Intellectually intimidating"? Imagine giving someone that feeback, ffs.

--

As the financial year ends, I'm finding that the usually serene progress of my working day (**ahem**) is being somewhat interrupted by the sour inevitability of year-end performance reviews. A particular favourite of mine is the 'consistency forum', where the senior people in my department try to objectively compare the populations of each grade to decide who has exceeded expectations, who has met expectations and who has fallen short based upon a combination of what people have achieved over the year and their "behaviours".

Unfortunately, the outcome of this forum is important because it determines the size of any pay rise or slice of bonus that we get. Objectivity is, of course, impossible. I'm not even sure they really even aim for it, to be honest, as each manager tries to get their own people into the top right hand "exceed" box at the expense of everyone else. When it comes to the "behaviours" score, in particular, perception is king. Your customers might all think that you are the best thing since sliced bread, but that's not as important as the impression you've made on the colleagues who are judging you. You are supposedly only being ranked on your performance in the last twelve months, but in practice, this is cobblers: there's no time limit on the judgement these people have made on you and there's certainly no measure

Take me as an example: coming out of my consistency forum, I was told that although my behaviours had improved markedly over the last six months, I was still scoring slightly lower there because of the time before that.

Um. But I've only been back at work for six months after taking most of last year off. So, what am I being judged on, exactly?

I actually did quite well in my forum, and yet they've still managed to find a way to piss me off.

One other piece of feedback I got out of my session was that I am apparently "intellectually intimidating". I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that, to be honest. Is that something I should be actioning? Is it even a criticism?

-

We waste our lives, we really do.

Speaking of the sort of nonsense people waster their time and money on in a work environment.... I saw someone on an MS charity's Facebook page today kick off a poll to see what myers-briggs personality types we all had to try to assess if there's a link between personality type (specifically the way we handle stress) and multiple sclerosis.

...OF COURSE THERE ISN'T!

It's all made up, pseudo-scientific nonsense where people use confirmation bias to try and pick out how much their profile really reflects their true personality. There's no link between a myers-briggs personality type and your personality, so there's hardly likely to be a link with the severity of your MS, is there?

Sheesh.

something changed...

I was made redundant a little over a year ago. 

Even with all the various ins-and-outs of my career, outsourcing, insourcing and all the rest of it, it still felt like a pretty significant moment. After all, I first walked through the doors on 15 September 1997 as a graduate trainee and finally left on 7 June 2019. 

That's nearly 22 years. 

An awful lot happened in that 22 years that had nothing at all to do with work. Apart from anything else, in that time, I lost something like 40kg in weight and most of my hair and I gained a house, cat and wife (not in that order or in that order of importance). I was 23 years old when I arrived and 45 years old when I left. 

Given that I spent nearly half my life to that point working there, it was amazing how quickly I put it all behind me. If they hadn't made me redundant, I'd probably still be there now and still taking their salary.... but almost immediately, it became clear that they had done me a massive favour. Even if my departure hadn't been sweetened by a pretty hefty payment, this would still definitely have been the case.

I wasn't sure when I left what I wanted to do. The money meant that I didn't have to rush into anything, and I spent a good few weeks just decompressing from a job that, by the end, was sucking up a good 11 or 12 hours of my life every weekday and also involved out of hours and weekend cover. 

No one made me work those hours, but it's amazing how, when you stop working them, you realise how absurd it all is. Every single day of the working week, I was cycling to work, showering and getting to my desk by 07:15, often  not leaving to cycle home until after 18:00.

That's ridiculous.

My last job was probably the one in which I made the biggest contribution to the business and where I got the most satisfaction.... but as soon as I stopped doing it, it all disappeared in my rearview mirror and I didn't give it a backwards glance. I'm sure they didn't miss me either.

I'm now back in work. This wasn't a given, but I ultimately decided I wanted to do something and the right thing came along. I work three days a week over four days, and I now can't imagine working full time. In an ideal world, I'd be doing more volunteering, but the pandemic has put almost all of that on hold. When a more normal life returns, I'll have the space to resume that stuff. It's all good.

I'm healthier and happier. Even during a lockdown, I feel like my life is much more balanced than it was before.

So what have I learned in the last year since that redundancy? Something that I should have known all along: that life is short and time is precious. Do things that make you happy. No matter how important you think that job is, I bet there are thousands of better things you could be doing with your time that create more good in the world. 

Go and do them.

your boy all glowed up...

As I received another job rejection without interview, it's just dawned on me that my CV seems to mean that I get rejected out of hand for more junior, lower paying jobs and seems to receive more consideration for better paid, more senior jobs.  It's true that my experience is probably better suited to those kinds of roles, but I rather naively assumed that somebody might be glad of the chance of getting the benefit of that experience on the cheap.

Here's the thing:

I don't really want (or need) a more senior, better paid job.

This is leading me to reconsider my career path. I'm starting to think that I really might be better served doing more volunteering and seeing where that leads me. I know how the recruitment process works. Hell, I've been a recruiter myself and have no doubt rejected plenty of people who could have done an excellent job. It's an imperfect process and you'd be a fool to take it personally.

All the same, it's been lovely working with people who really appreciate what I have to offer rather than just binning me off via email on the basis of my CV. (Or, more typically, not bothering to reply at all).

Volunteering only doesn't pay well in monetary terms. In every other way, it's much more rewarding.

time is on your side...

It's now been 7 months since I stopped working. Technically, as they paid my notice, I suppose I've only actually been out of work for 4 months... but it all amounts to the same really.

As I've mentioned before, I decided about three months ago that I was actually going to look for a paying job. This wasn't always a given, and it took a bit of time away from the long hours of my last job to start to be able to see things more clearly.

Looking for work is a vaguely depressing activity: you need to give it the attention it deserves if you're really serious about it, but at the same time it all seems frustratingly arbitrary. It's a buyer's market, and although job sites and electronically stored CVs means that it's probably never been easier to apply for a job, lots of these places don't even bother to acknowledge your application, never mind telling you that you've been passed over.

As anyone who has been in this position before will know, you just can't take these thing personally. At the same time, sometimes the process is so arbitrary that you just want to scream. There's never going to be a really fair way of recruiting people, but there are certainly plenty of unfair ways. David Brent famously said that you can avoid employing unlucky people by throwing half of the CVs you receive straight into the bin. I sometimes wonder if that's a fairer process than some of the ones I've recently had the misfortune of being exposed to.  The University of Nottingham was already in my bad books for rejecting me for a job on the basis of a competency based interview they tried to carry out over the phone in 15 minutes with a two person panel on a dodgy line. They went even further down in my estimation when they gave me 8 days notice of an interview with a presentation (which itself was on a subject which had nothing to do with the job, but that's another story). The problem wasn't the relatively short notice, it was that I wasn't available on the day of the interview. As is always the way now, the invitation to interview suggested I contact them if I needed any accommodation. Well, presumably you can shift the date of the interview to a date I can attend? No, came the answer, we can't. Thanks for your interest. What?

Anyway. The search continues. In the meantime, I'm carrying on with voluntary work. I've been acting as a sighted guide for the Guide Dogs MyGuide service, and this has seen me acquire a chap I take out running once a week, and another who I take out for a walk every other week. As well as this, I've been doing my usual volunteering for parkrun and, as of this month, I'm now officially a trustee of a Nottingham-based domestic abuse charity. All together, this little lot takes up around 3 days of my week, more or less. To be honest, I'm not sure how I managed to find the time for a full time job. As I said to the chair of the trustees when he asked me how I would find the time to keep up this level of volunteering when I do manage to find another paying job, you don't have to work 60 hours a week, do you? Towards the end in my last job, 50-60 hour weeks were fairly common. No one was making me do them, but I did them all the same. When I get back into work, I'm going to free up all that extra time by trying to just stick to my contracted hours.

Let's see how that plan stands up to the first contact with the enemy, eh?

I'm also thinking of starting to volunteer at the local Oxfam store. It's not out of the question that I might try to find a part time job that brings in a bit of spending money but leaves me with the freedom to spend my time doing the things that I really find fulfilling.

It's nice to have the flexibility in my life. I don't need to find a paying job at the moment, I'm just choosing to look for one.

Anyway. Happy new year.

2020 already looks like it's going to be a difficult one for the world, but as long as we each try to do our bit, then we have something positive to hang onto, eh?

the hardest way to make an easy living...

Perhaps it's the weather.
Perhaps it's because I've finally started to read the bleak, dystopian vision presented in  "The Handmaid's Tale".
Perhaps it's something else entirely.

Whatever it is, I've been feeling discombobulated for a couple of weeks now.

Yeah. You're right. I do know exactly why.

It's now a full 12 weeks since I stopped working. As you might expect, I haven't missed working or sitting in an office for 11 hours a day or being on call 24x7 for a moment. Not even once. It's a ridiculous way to spend your life and I've spent enough of my life doing it already. Everyone knows that, don't they? Very few people would work if they could afford not to. With the time and space to actual think about it, stopping doing that job is one of the best things that could have happened to me. Them paying me to stop doing it was even better.

With all that time back in my days, I've generally been pretty good at keeping myself busy. As well as all the usual running and coaching and things that I normally do, I've started doing some volunteer work as a sighted guide for Guide Dogs, I've been doing some facebook moderation for shift.MS and I'm going through the process of becoming a trustee for a Nottinghamshire Domestic Abuse charity. I've also been trying to do a little bit of reading and writing and generally clearing my head of the chiff-chaff of 22 years of full time work to see if I can work out what I want to do next.

I think it took the full three months to really blow away the cobwebs of all that time working a full-time job. I suppose, in the grand scheme of things and after 22 years, 12 weeks isn't really that much decompression time and I might easily have expected it to take longer. In the end, I surprised myself by actually applying for a full time job. It wasn't something that I had been planning, and I don't really need to seek paid employment at all for a little while.... but a job advert popped up in front of me  the other day and I was curious enough to follow it up, to ring the recruiter up to talk to him about the role and then interested enough to apply for it.

Even more surprising to me was that this was an IT job. I've been out of IT for about 5 years and honestly never thought it was something I would want to go back to.

I don't know if anything will come of this application. After all, I'd be pretty lucky to land the first job I looked at.... but at the same time, going through the job specification and putting my application together showed me that I do actually have the skills and experience this company need and that I do apparently have the energy to help them with this thing.  It's really easy to become institutionalised when you spend a long time in one place, to lose sight of your own value. Slowly rediscovering that has been a pretty positive experience and  the application process was quite a revelation for me as I buffed up my CV and crafted my covering letter.  I really do know how to do this stuff, whether I get this particular job or not.

The application went in a couple of weeks ago with a deadline of last Sunday. And now I wait. I haven't heard anything yet, but nor could I reasonably expect to have done so. So I wait.  And as I wait, my focus on the other things I was doing seems to have drifted a little.

The very fact that I have put an application in for a job when I had no immediate plans to do has been like crossing the Rubicon: I was quite happy in my little routines and my little plans for the future, and all of that seems to have been thrown up in the air as I wait to see what happens next.

Perhaps this will come to nothing; perhaps they won't even reply at all; perhaps the won't want to interview me... who knows? What I do know is that I now feel a little trapped in no man's land as I ponder whether I should start a more systematic campaign of job applications, or if I should just be patient and trust that -- as I did with this one -- I'll know a job that I actually want to do when I see one.

I know the answer to that question too.

fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way....

"Time is relative; its only worth depends upon what we do as it is passing." (Albert Einstein)

I've been experiencing just how relative time is since my redundancy.

On the first Monday, I felt a sense of elation that I was free from the grind; that I didn't have to get up at 06:00 and I wouldn't be at my desk by 07:15; that I wouldn't spend ten or eleven hours sitting in pointless meetings or sending emails no one would ever read. By Tuesday, I was already starting to feel the weight of that sudden freedom pressing down on me. I was struggling to fill the day, even with a Cricket World Cup on to distract me with some of the games being played 5 minutes from my front door. Surely I should be doing something useful with all this time? Even though I was about to receive a pretty substantial redundancy payment, I started to worry about where the money was going to come from. I knew that I didn't want to jump straight back into another corporate job, but that afternoon I found myself tentatively looking online at what jobs might be available in the local area. I don't think I seriously wanted to apply for anything, and actually it really just confirmed my thinking that this wasn't at all what I wanted to do, but without any focus in my day I was already starting to feel itchy.

Time passed and I started to relax and find other ways to fill my day. It wasn't really until the end of the second week that I began to find a bit of purpose and direction in what I was doing.  I definitely didn't want another corporate job, so I stopped the idle, anxious looks at the job sites. I realised that I did want to find something to help fill my days constructively, but now understood that I suddenly had the freedom to do something that didn't necessarily need me to earn any money. I started looking for volunteering opportunities.

As a result, I've spent this week, the third since my redundancy, sorting out a volunteering role with Guide Dogs and lining up some other opportunities with Shift.MS. I'm going to start taking my initial steps as a My Guide volunteer next week.  I imagine that it's distinctly possible that I'll be wondering where all the time goes by the end of week 4.

As Albert Einstein also apparently said,  “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”

--
One of the things I thought I might do with all this time is to look at an MA in creative writing.  What I've decided is that I won't rush into this and won't be applying for the academic year starting this September.  Although I've done a reasonable amount of writing over the years, here and elsewhere, I haven't really done all that much creative writing proper and have a lot to learn.  I've decided instead to spend some of my time getting some actual writing practice done.  As you might expect, there's piles of advice and exercises to be found on the internet. As a starting point, I've been watching some YouTube videos of a series of lectures Brandon Sanderson gave for a writing course at BYU in Utah (they start here). Each lecture deals with a different subject like characterisation, plot, world building and the writer's toolbox. It's giving me bags of ideas and I hope will start to make me a better writer and provide some focus to my output.  Writing is something that I really enjoy, so I'm looking forward to finding out if it's something I think I can make a go of now that I have the time.

Watch this space, I suppose.  Probably literally.

average....

I don’t believe that I am an exceptional person. Like anybody else, I have my strengths and weaknesses, but I’m not really convinced that I’m good at anything much at all. This isn’t false modesty: I was bright enough to cruise through school on the basis of having a pretty good memory and being naturally quite good at exams, but I don’t think that’s exceptional. At that stage of your life, those two skills are enough for most people to assume that you’re pretty bright. After all, that is how we tend to measure those things, and nobody really bothers to look much more closely than that. Some of that perception has stuck to me as I’ve moved through my life, even though the magic of my exam skills was already starting to wear a little thin as I completed my degree and my tutors started to rumble that I’m not a particularly original thinker, no matter how well-constructed my essays were.

I am certainly not exceptional.

Although, to be honest, what kind of a knob goes around believing themselves to be exceptional? Is that an assessment you can ever objectively make about yourself? The comedian Daniel Kitson used to joke that having a personalised number-plate itself doesn’t necessarily make you a dickhead, but it’s a tick in the dickhead column. Perhaps thinking yourself exceptional at something is the same: it doesn’t guarantee that you’re a dickhead, but it’s a definite tick in the dickhead column.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being average. By definition, most of us are. We must be. Not that human potential is something that can be empirically measured. Where’s the top? Who’s at the bottom? Is humanity like a giant pack of Top Trumps with 7.5b cards? What would the categories even be? Strength, intelligence, speed, cunning, self-belief, humility, humour, free jazz? Who are we kidding: there’s probably already a quiz somewhere on Facebook that will tell you exactly where you rank.

The process for redundancy involves selection pools: if you’re at risk, you are placed into a pool and there is then a selection process that determines who goes and who stays. It’s a ridiculous process really. Any kind of scoring like this is an attempt to make an entirely subjective process seem objective when really it can’t be. How could it be? How can you measure something like “Leadership” in a way that enables you to compare it between individuals? And if you could measure it, is giving it a mark from 0-4 and then applying a multiple of 3 to the score really going to give you the granularity you need to make a selection between a group of people? Of course not. And yet, that is exactly what happened to me.

I had three separate meetings relating to my scoring. The first one was to present my provisional scoring (benchmarked by three different people) and to give me an opportunity to challenge. I left that first meeting feeling bang average and with an inescapable feeling that I was fatally holed below the waterline, and not only because I felt my score was making redundancy a very real possibility. I put a lot of effort into that job, I worked hard and felt like I made a difference over the last couple of years. If that’s what you really think of me, then whatever the outcome of this process, why would I want to bother? Why would I cycle to work to be at my desk for 07:15 every morning and not walk back through my front door until gone 18:00? When I was informed of my redundancy at the next meeting a week later, my boss told me that I shouldn’t take this personally. There were two ways to react to this: on the one hand, it couldn’t be more personal as you’ve lined up my scores against everyone else’s and decided that I’m bottom of the pile. On the other hand, it’s such a manifestly flawed way of making a selection, why would I think that this was anything other than a bullshit process and your inability to score my ability?

In the end, none of that mattered. They tried to find ways for me to stay, but I turned them all down and took the money. I’ve spent nearly 22 years sitting at a desk in those buildings and now they were actually going to pay me to do something else. That in itself was probably reason enough to go, but actually staying may well have been worse as the job was getting bigger and harder and I now knew for sure that they didn’t appreciate the work that I was already doing.

It’s been quite difficult over these first two weeks to adjust to the abrupt change in pace. It’s impossible to go from working 50+ hours a week to nothing without feeling a little bit dislocated… but I haven’t missed the actual work even a tiny bit. This is a golden opportunity to do something else with my life.

Now I just need to work out what that something is.

Hopefully something where I can exceed average. Failing that, something that is making a little bit of positive difference in the world. Making a billionaire a little bit richer doesn’t really cut it for me any more.

all takin' and no givin'

It's been a very strange week.

After nearly 22 years, I was made redundant last week.  I first knew that I was under threat at the end of February, but once the decision was made, it all happened very quickly: I found out that I was definitely going a couple of weeks ago, and ten days later I was gone.  It was only officially announced to most people the day before I left the building for the last time.  Typically, I was the last person to leave on my last day and I had to hand my pass and locker key and things in to the out of hours team.

The last couple of years of my career there have been by far the most satisfying. Given the way that things have turned out, I suppose that's a touch ironic.  Still, it's true.  I've been generally been getting to my desk by 07:15 most mornings and not walking back through my own front door until gone 18:00.  When you factor in out-of-hours and weekend cover, that's a pretty significant chunk of my life.

Suddenly, all that time has been returned to me.

It's quite a change of pace and I think it's going to take some getting used to.

Inevitably, I don't miss the work at all.  I worked hard because it was something that I wanted to do well, but I think I've always been pretty good at leaving it behind me when I left the office.  It's just a job.  This attitude has stood me in pretty good stead to deal with redundancy.  I'm also arrogant enough to believe that the whole selection process for redundancy has not been a reflection on my abilities so much as an indictment of my management's ability to understand my worth.

It's a cliche, but I do miss the people.  For far too long in my career, I thought that I was a self-contained island and that the only thing that mattered was the quality of my own work.  It was only latterly that I realised that the only reason I came to work at all was because of the people. I don't miss the work at all, but I am missing spending my days surrounded by many of those people who filled my days with laughter amidst all the nonsense.

So what's next? I don't know.  It would probably be easy to fall back onto my skills and experience and to go contracting or something like that.  I'm hoping I'll be able to resist that.  I've spent a long time making a billionaire slightly richer and I'd like to think I could do something more worthwhile.  The redundancy has given me the gift of time by liquidating my golden handcuffs. They're even paying 12 weeks' notice, so there's no particular rush to jump into something quickly.

Could I write?  Maybe.  Now seems like a pretty good opportunity to find out.  I'd also like to do something a bit more community based.  I'm lucky enough that we're pretty financially secure, so this has gifted me the opportunity to find something constructive to do with the next step.

This week has mostly been spent sleeping. I seem to have a lot of sleep to catch-up on.  Working those hours, perhaps that's not too surprising.  Next week? Who knows?

One thing is for sure: my brilliant career is entering a new phase.

tell me pretty lies...

I was away for a couple of days last week on a team building thing.

TEAM BUILDING.  Now, there are two words to strike fear into the heart of any office worker. Luckily, we don't do this sort of thing very often and it really wasn't as bad as I feared.

Amongst all the usual fun (treasure hunts! presentations! a quiz!), we had one session on the first morning where we were split into teams and asked to spend some time thinking about our "values". To help us, we were given a sheet of paper containing a hundred words to help inspire us: joy, integrity, curiosity, intelligence, perseverance.... things like that (although I do wonder if anyone ever actually picks words like holiness or serenity from that list...).

I was slightly surprised when most people in my team started drawing out different lists for values for home and for work.  I really don't make that distinction: my values are just my values.  Then again, that might just be me.  After all, I could never understand it back in the day when people said they hated the idea of a casual dress-code in the office (Ah, how The Gap loved those times). These people liked to make a clear distinction between their time at work and their time at home, and apparently this becomes a lot more difficult if you don't change clothes between the two.  Um.  If you say so.  Although, is that really a good enough reason to wear a tie?

I digress.

After some discussion, the teams came back together to discuss the values we'd chosen and to see if we had (m)any in common.

"Honesty...." began the spokesperson for one team

I jumped in.  "...is such a lonely word?"

Everyone turned to look at me blankly and a confused hush fell across the room.

Well, here's what I learned at my team building event: if the people you work with aren't Billy Joel fans, then you're probably working with the wrong people.

the summer of the soul in December...

I was very excited to hear the news that The Muppet Christmas Carol would be receiving a cinematic re-release this December.  Whilst I can't honestly say that is my absolute favourite seasonal film*, it's a film that brings back some very happy memories and holds a special place in my heart.  Besides, has Michael Caine - who plays Scrooge entirely straight, with no regard to the fact that the vast majority of his co-stars are muppets - ever been better in all his long and illustrious career?



It's in the singing of a street corner choir
It's going home and getting warm by the fire
It's true, wherever you find love
It feels like Christmas

Irresistible, right?

Well, as I was talking about this with my team at work, whilst Jack was very enthusiastic and wanted to look up when screenings were on in Nottingham, the girls in the team were entirely indifferent.  In fact, most of them hadn't even seen it.  "It's a boy's film", said Alice, dismissively.

Wait, what?

As a man, perhaps it's my privilege speaking here, but I would never in a million years have The Muppet Christmas Carol down as a boy's film.  It's hardly Die Hard, is it?  We spent the next few minutes doing a sampling of all the people around our desks, and indeed..... most of the girls hadn't seen it and thought it was a boy's film, and most of the boys were fairly enthusiastic about it.

Say it ain't so!

Of course, the whole concept of there being "boy's films" and "girl's films" is nonsense, but if you allow the concept, then surely Muppet Christmas Carol would be nowhere near the top of anyone's list.  Even amongst seasonal films, it's nowhere near the top, is it?

I'd be fascinated to hear what you think.

Oh, and guess what I'm giving every single member of my team as a Christmas gift.

---
* Elf**

** or maybe Bad Santa***

*** probably Trading Places.****

**** Just don't talk to me about Love Actually.  In my view, that's a vile, cynical film where every single male character behaves as though they don't have an ounce of respect for any of the women.  Ugh.  

I got news for you baby, you're looking at the man...

You know you've arrived at work when you're the guy that your boss's boss entrusts with a call at a quarter to six in the evening with an important mission.  The fact that she knew that I would almost certainly still be in the office is neither here nor there; I was definitely her go-to person; someone that she knew that she could absolutely trust in a crisis. 

And now that crisis was here: her boss's boss  - so my boss's boss's boss's boss and one of the most senior people in the company - had lost his iPad and thought he might have left it on his desk. Would you mind going to check?

I checked.  It wasn't there.  Whilst I was there,  I also took the opportunity to have a little spin in his fancy chair... something that didn't go unnoticed by those of my colleagues still in the office, who immediately began hurling abuse about my delusions of grandeur.

I didn't care.  I was on a mission.  Not quite from God, but almost.

This isn't just any iPad we're talking about here, you know.  This guy doesn't even bother with a laptop now (actually, he doesn't even know where it is).  His iPad is everything.  His alpha and omega.  To lose it is unthinkable.  He must have been in pieces on his way back to London, barely holding it together.

Hmm.  So, if it's not on his desk, where might it be?

My boss's boss had a suggestion.  Apparently, le grand fromage thought there was a chance that he might have left it in the old executive toilets at some point that morning.  Worth a look?  Well, why not? Now, these are fancy toilets: the kind that have oak panelled traps, marble all around and ashtrays over the urinals (I'm not even joking about that).  If you're going to leave your iPad anywhere...

So I looked.... and there it was, an iPad mini sat on the marble fittings near the sinks in a sky-blue case tucked underneath a little moleskine notepad (lined, not squared like the cool kids use) and (cheap) pen.  Perhaps if it had been a squared notebook with a better pen, someone would have had it.  Still, it was still there.

My boss's boss was delighted.  So too, I have no doubt, was her grateful and relieved boss's boss.

As I locked them away in my draw, I marvelled again at what a thrilling and fulfilling job I have.

What a rush. 

I'm worth every penny they pay me and more.  Definitely.

Living the dream.

this shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

7/10, earlier

Is it strange that I sometimes just take against a piece of fruit? I bring them into work with me on a Monday morning and, almost immediately, I decide that I don’t like the look of it. I won’t throw it away until Friday evening, but from that moment, I know that I’m just never going to eat it.

I mention this because I’ve had an excellent banana week. I’ve eaten three bananas from two different bunches and they’ve all been good: peaking at an 8.5 / 10 and only dropping as low as a 7 / 10. My team were on tenterhooks this afternoon and actually asked me when I was going to eat my banana as they were keen to know the score. They were a touch disappointed that it was only a seven after the high point of Wednesday’s banana, but there’s no disgrace in a seven and that’s a perfectly acceptable piece of fruit. I actually stopped to chat to an old colleague of mine the other day and noticed that she had a rather sad looking banana sat next to her monitor. It had been there long enough for someone to write “banana” on the peel in biro.
“Are you ever going to eat that, do you think”
“No. Probably not.”
“You’ve taken against it, haven’t you?”
“Yes. Yes I have”.

You see… it’s not just me!

Some types of fruit are reliable – it was put to me today that the apple is the McDonalds of the fruit world: safe and with very little risk. Well, that depends on the variety and the time of year. At the moment, I’m really enjoying English apples, but I find that I only really get on with them if I cut them up with a knife – a Granny Smith I’m perfectly to crunch up direct from the core. On the other hand, the pear is a low percentage fruit: at their best, they’re fantastic… but how often do you catch a pear like that? 1 in 100? The other 99 won’t get beyond a 5 and the minor disappointment of each one adds up to outweigh bothering to find a good one.

There was mild consternation in our office this week when one of the team started munching a kiwi fruit without bothering to peel it or to scoop it out: he just wolfed it down, skin and all. He didn’t understand why everyone else was so horrified and maintained that the skin contained all sorts of nutrients that would otherwise be lost… but we’re not beasts, are we? Surely, peeling a kiwi is what separates us from the animals?

Everyone else thinks of fruit in these terms, right?

back....

Although nominally signed off sick until this coming Wednesday, as I've already mentioned, I’ve actually been back at work since last week. That might sound crazy, but my rationale for this is that:

a) the surgeon initially told me that I’d need a week off, then two weeks – which I arranged with work – and then, on the day of the operation itself, three weeks. Once I’d established that I was going to be experiencing discomfort rather than pain, I didn’t really want to string things out any longer than necessary. My stitches have nearly dissolved now and everything

b) I was going a bit stir-crazy, rattling around by myself at home and needed some company. I was in the most ridiculously good mood as soon as I got back into the office purely because I like my team and I was delighted to be spending time with them, work dramas notwithstanding

The plan was that I would ease myself back in with a week of shorter days, trying to leave for home by about 3pm. I’m still not allowed to cycle or run, so I’ve been forced to bring my car in too… so at least this would mean missing all of the traffic.

I sounded optimistic that I could make this work but obviously, just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, this plan worked for all of two days, both of which saw me home early enough to pop up to Trent Bridge for an hour or so of country cricket after work. So far, so good.

Then Friday happened: there was a major incident at work that saw me staying at the office until gone 8pm, then up on Saturday for a 7am conference call and a weekend of multiple conference calls (about nineteen in total) and quite a lot of sitting at my desk working. I was then into the office for 06:30 on both Monday and Tuesday, as the incident rumbled on.... and will be on Wednesday too, and probably the rest of the week too.

I also don’t get paid any overtime.

Oh well. I tried.  My sick note expires tomorrow and I'm back to work as per normal.

*sigh*

Good times.

guess who's back, back again....

Today, two weeks after my operation, I returned to work.

When I initially spoke to the surgeon about the procedure, he suggested I'd need a week off work; then, when we booked the surgery, he suggested I'd need two weeks... so I arranged that with work... and then on the day of the operation itself, he signed me off for three weeks.

Great.

Apart from a lingering concern about exactly *why* I'd need to take three weeks off work, I didn't really think for a moment that I wouldn't be back at my desk after two.  I 'd asked about what sort of pain I could expect after surgery, and when the surgeon told me he would be sending me home with ibuprofen and paracetamol, I knew I'd probably be okay.  That's discomfort rather than real pain, right?

Thankfully, that's pretty much how it transpired.

After worrying that I wouldn't know what to do with myself, I've actually kept myself pretty busy over the last fortnight.  I've not even watched all that much TV (except when the cricket was on), and I've been doing loads of reading and trying to make sure I get enough walking done to hit my daily steps target.

Have I missed work?

Hell no. Let's be honest, although I really like the people I work with, there's pretty much nothing about my job that is worth getting stressed about.  That doesn't stop people getting stressed and trying to transmit that stress and drama to me and my team.... but I find that a really helpful perspective to hang onto, and I try and transmit that to my team.  In fact, our team motto is "Save the drama for your llama".  When things look to be getting a little fraught, I point at the llama and we all take a deep breath.

So, I didn't miss work, but I did miss my team... and as I seem to be healing pretty well, I went back to work a week ahead of schedule.

When I got back to my desk this morning at a little after 07:30, I found this on my keyboard.

I think they sort of missed me too.

It was good to see them and I've been smiling all day.

cool water...

I was running intervals this evening, so throughout my day at work, I kept meaning to go and buy a bottle of water to take with me... but I kept forgetting and I was busy so never seemed to quite get around to it.  When I finally remembered at around 1645, I was mildly irritated to discover that all of our catering outlets had shut.  This was irritating because they say they're all open until 5pm, but that seems to be based upon my foolish belief that the opening hours reflect when a customer can shop rather than the moment when the staff leave and pull down the shutters.

Not to be deterred, I set out to have a look at the various vending machines we have around the place. Hmm.  Unless I wanted a can of Coke, it looked like I was out of luck.

Oh... hang on a minute.  This machine has cartons of apple juice.  That'll do.  I scramble around for the loose change and the machine slowly dispenses me a carton.  I open the drawer and discover that the bloody thing doesn't have a straw.

Never mind.

I'll buy another one.  I'll drink that much anyway and I can just use the one straw on both cartons.  I put in my remaining change, but for some reason the machine won't dispense me another carton.  I seem to be 15p short and it won't take coppers and that's all the change I've got left.  I try and refund the money and now it won't come out of the machine at all.  OK.  Whatever.  I dash upstairs to borrow 20p and run come back to the machine only to find it has now swallowed my money (or someone has nipped in and used up my credit in the time I've been away).

Deep breath.

I take some money out of the cash machine round the corner and use the nearby change machine to turn a £10 note into ten £1 coins.  I now have a bulging wallet, but the funds needed to buy another carton of juice.

There are no further vending machine related incidents to report, so I head back to my desk with two cartons of juice, one straw and a funny story to tell my neighbour.

"Oh.  You need a bottle of water?  Well I've got one from my meal deal that you can have if you want.  It was free"

....... sigh.

I took my apple juice and IT WAS DELICIOUS.

I only needed one carton.

jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash...

We had a royal visit at work today.  For those of us trying to get some work done, it was a massive pain in the arse, to be honest.  There were Special Branch policemen all over the place and various parts of the building were completely off-limits for several hours.  Not to mention, of course, that lots of people in the building took the opportunity of the visit and the speeches by the various dignitaries to waste as much time as possible. There's a certain kind of person, I find, who derives an enormous amount of self-importance from the simple proximity to a VIP, even if they're only giving them coffee and holding their coat.  There were lots of those people around too.  We also had a memo sent round explaining what the protocol was if we should happen to meet the royal visitor.  Apparently it's Ma'am to rhyme with "ham" and not Ma'am to rhyme with "palm", if you were wondering.

I was particularly inconvenienced because the visit coincided exactly with the time slot given to me for the delivery of my Avonex.  Every month, I have the prescription for my weekly injections delivered to me in the office.  Usually, this works pretty smoothly and I have a good relationship with reception and they're happy to make an exception their usual rules about signing for packages and take my meds in until I can get down to pick them up.  They also know the drill about not accepting a new sharps bin (they try and give me a new one every month, when actually one will last me a couple of years) and they also pretty good about not taking the vast outer packaging with chill packs and at making sure the drugs get into the fridge too.

The royal visit kiboshed all this quite nicely, and I had to fight my way through a massive crowd of gawkers trying to catch sight of the royal party parking up and walking into the building to get across to a side exit to meet up with the courier (who was struggling to be let onto the site by security at the gates) and to sign for me drugs.

Sadly, the courier was super-helpful and persistent, so this whole process didn't take anywhere near long enough to stop me catching the speeches on my way back across the building to my desk.

I'm not a royalist, as you can probably tell.  I will however concede that the purpose of the visit was a good one: my company has helped to put together some wash bags that are given to women who have been raped and have been through the further indignity of a medical examination by police doctors looking for genetic evidence... it's an initiative that is patronised by this particular royal, hence her presence.  For some reason, I was taken aback by quite how posh she sounded when she spoke.  In fact, she had a surprisingly deep voice and sounded a bit like Tim Nice-But-Dim with a heavy cold.

Later, as I was in the changing rooms getting ready for the cycle home, we cyclists naturally chatted over the events of the day:

"Well that was fun, wasn't it?"
"Splendid, although they could have sent a better royal"
"What, you mean like Prince Philip?"
"Well, you have to admit, he would have been more entertaining because you couldn't ever really be sure what would come out of his mouth"
"Whilst representing a charity for rape victims?  What's the worst thing that could happen?"
"Hmm. Maybe that's why they didn't send him"
"Well, it could have been worse. This one was at least a little further up the pecking order than Sophie Wessex"
"Joey Essex...?"

Joey Essex?  Now you're talking.  His speech would probably have been more memorable than the one the Duchess of Cornwall managed (which was fine and vastly more comprehensible than the utterly impenetrable speech of one of the other VIPs).

The building also smelt of wet paint all day.  It's easy to believe that most of the royal family think that this is how the whole world smells.

What a weird job that is. What a weird life that is.

a fortress, steep and mighty...

When I first started work, I thought that I was going to be managing director; I thought that it was only a matter of time... ten years at the outside.  I also thought that I liked working autonomously and that I didn't really enjoy being part of a team where it meant I would be dependent upon the work of other people in order to succeed.  For a long time, I worked in a role where I was basically responsible for my own output, and that suited me just fine.

As I grew older, I realised that I didn't actually want to be managing director...not that it was likely to happen. I also realised that, far from being an island, the main reason I went to work at all was because of the people. I'm an introvert by nature in the sense that I derive energy from within myself and find prolonged contact with other people draining, so this realisation sort of took me by surprise.

Not coincidentally, I've also been a lot happier at work since I've had a team to manage.  You can blag your way through a lot of things at work, but people management should not be one of those things; it's the one thing that you shouldn't shortcut and I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that I'm doing the right things by my team.  I've won awards at work, but I think the single thing that makes me proudest is that my team scored me 100% in all the line manager questions in our last company-wide colleague temperature check survey.

I like to think my team like and respect me.

Today I received concrete proof: they gave me this as a birthday present:

I can only imagine that this little beauty must be a bestseller amongst Wolves fans and that literally hundreds can be seen on the home fans every match at Molineux. You'll notice that, I might just turned another year older, but apparently I'm not too old to pull this little beauty out if it's (Spider-Man) wrapping paper and put it straight on in the middle of the open plan office...

I'd wear it skiing, but I already wear a helmet when I'm skiing so it wouldn't really work.

They also gave me a luminously lime green Wolves 3rd strip and some beer.

I'm telling you, those guys are the best team anyone could possibly hope for.  I'm a lucky boss.

18 and life...

It's eighteen years to the day since I started work at my current place of employment.

Some of my friends find that inconceivable, but in that time, I have done a number of completely different jobs in very different businesses, been outsourced, been insourced and been TUPE-d on no fewer than four separate occasions.  There and back again, you might say.

Twice.

I could have moved many times, and no doubt be earning loads more money somewhere else, but the simple truth of the matter is that work just isn't that important to me and I'm not that ambitious. I earn a decent amount and I generally like the people I work with and the work that I do.  I feel like I can make a difference in what I do, and I like to do as good a job as I can, but at the end of it all, it is just a job.

What more do you need to know?

In the last couple of years, I've had more fulfilment at work than I have in years.  Why? Well, it's because I realised that the only reason I really go to work is because of the people.  It's not the money; it's not the work... it's the people.  This may not be much of a revelation to most people, but it totally changed the way I think about my job and why I do it.  Maybe as a direct result of this realisation, I'm actually happy at work.  Eighteen years is a long time, and it took me a good chunk of that to get to where I am now, but I'd say that was worth the trip. I'm thinner, balder, older but better person than the guy I was when I started work in September 1997.

Perhaps I'd be better off jacking it all in and doing something more obviously worthwhile or by writing a novel or something.    Maybe I will.

Maybe I'm wasting my talent, but I'm not dead just yet and the only person whose opinion on that really matters is my own.  Besides, if I hadn't started work here, I wouldn't have met my wife....

Eighteen years!

Eighteen years, man and boy.  Hardest game in the world.

hold on to your kite...

I’ve been accused of many things in my time, but tact has rarely been one of them. Not very many people at work think of me as political either. I’m the kind of person who wears what I think openly on my face; who doesn’t have a professional poker face and who generally speaks openly and without guile when I’m asked for my opinion. I think of these as valuable traits in an individual, but I have to be perfectly honest about the fact that none of them have ever been particularly good for my career. It seems that many of the senior managers I’ve encountered over the years don’t take too kindly to some artless twonk questioning their decisions or asking them awkward questions. Go figure.

I’ve changed over the years. Initially I was naïve and spoke freely without fearing the consequences, then I was cynical, speaking up without caring about the consequences. These days, I find myself in a job I like, working with people I respect and where I feel my opinion is valued. All of this means that my less corporately acceptable tendencies are much less in evidence: I don’t feel the need to speak up because I’m no longer outside the tent pissing in; I’m consulted and involved and not just dictated to. I still bristle at corporate bullshit, and the awkward stick is never too far away…but I’m much more comfortable in my own skin. I’m not helpless, angry and bitter anymore. I know why I come to work.

But tactful? Political? That sound you can hear is my wife laughing at the very thought of it....but I’ve been called both of those things today. Apparently, I have a real gift for writing difficult emails and communicating with difficult stakeholders in such a way as to get my point across clearly without upsetting anybody.

Well fancy that.

After nearly 20 years in the corporate world, it seems that we've finally found something that I’m good at.

Good times.

Enjoy your long weekends, everyone.