new car, caviar, four star daydream...

Arnold Schwarzengger’s disembodied head has just made me £615.

Although aware of PPI, it never really occurred to me that I might have a claim until I watched an advert featuring the aforementioned head on tank tracks, urging people to put in their claims as the window closes next year and the banks will be off the hook.  Apparently, the Financial Conduct Authority have seen millions of people flooding to their website and making claims since their £42m advertising campaign started.... although you might argue that £42m makes it a very expensive stable door, and that an Authority like that might be better served by actually regulating the banks effectively in the first place.  But anyway....

When I first took out a credit card, back in 1997, it came with a card payment protection insurance policy. It was annoying because I never asked for it, but it was only a couple of quid a month, and as it was my first credit card, I wasn’t really sure if it was something that I needed or not. So I left it. It seemed to be a fairly amorphous kind of insurance. Ostensibly, it was to help me out in the event that I couldn’t pay my bill, but it also seemed to offer lots of other services too. At one point, they sent me a key ring and some stickers to put on stuff, so that if they ever got lost, then they would find their way back to me. It annoyed me, but not enough to actually get around to cancelling it (which, every time I looked into it, seemed harder than it ought to have been). Apparently, it ultimately took me until 2005 to cancel the damn policy, which I think is when I binned the credit card.

I'd long since assumed that this was my own inertia that caused this and that there was no one to blame but myself, but then I saw that advert caught a couple of months ago and it was Arnold Schawarzenegger’s disembodied head shouting at me that finally got me off my (metaphorical - I remained seated throughout) arse and looking at the website of the financial ombudsman to see if I maybe had a claim.

One 16 (sixteen!) page form and a long conversation with a claims assessor from HSBC later, and the result is an offer of settlement of a little more than £615. The statement that came along with the offer showed that I had paid a total of £218.58 in premiums over the time that I had the policy (that's approximately £2.30 a month!), with the rest made up of lost interest and things like that. Given that I wasn’t 100% convinced that this was PPI in the first place or that it was significant enough, this is all something of a bonus.

I wouldn't normally be shouting "where there's a blame, there's a claim" from the rooftops... but this is the banks we're talking about, and who really feels sorry for them? That couple of quid a month really niggled me for EIGHT YEARS.  Not enough to actually do anything, but.... you know.

This definitely counts as sticking it to THE MAN, right? In the most middle-class way possible, but still sticking it to him, one PPI claim at a time....

hell...

Holidays can be pretty tough.

You have a couple of weeks away in the cold, clear mountain air with the people you love; you enjoy excellent food and drink excellent booze; you spend your time in relaxing, pleasurable pursuits and do your very best to forget about work.

Yup, holidays can be hellish all right.

You can usually see it in the photos, if you know what you're looking for.  It's always the same.  Yes, there might be a smile on the face, but look at how hollow and empty the eyes are.  Is that the face of someone enjoying themselves?  I don't think so.

Thank goodness we all went back to work today.

 Just for good measure, and to make sure the terrors of my holiday were well and truly behind me, I also made sure I had a dental appointment at 9am today before I went into the office. I think that did the trick and I should be able to forget about all leisure pursuits for a good little while to come and enjoy a properly cold and dark few weeks in the office in the depths of winter. I hope we have another cold snap so I can fall off my bicycle in the frost on the way to work in the gloomy pre-dawn light, perhaps in freezing fog.

That's what life is really all about, after all.

It's great to be back.

endless red tape to keep the truth confined....

I picked up my new car on Friday; I left work early, swung by the garage, filled out the endless reams of paperwork, handed over my old car and -- eventually -- left with a shiny, new one.  What does it look like?  Um.... exactly the same as the old one.  Seriously.  Exactly the same.  Work pays me a car allowance, so I just lease, and when the lease deal is up, just get another car exactly the same as the last one.

Anyway.  So, I drove my new car to work for the very first time on Monday morning and - so an email I received this morning told me - got caught speeding on my way to the car park at precisely 08:02.  The speed limit on the site is 20mph, so it's easily done, and there's pretty much no consequence.... but it made me chuckle that their processes were already efficient enough to link me to my new numberplate and send me a beautifully pissy little email.  Although as they also took the care to tell me in the email that this was the first time I had been caught -- strike one! -- their processes clearly aren't efficient enough to connect my two cars to the same owner who has been caught speeding onsite before, even though both were registered to the same person with the same email address and I registered my change of numberplate with the Automatic Numberplate Recognition System we use to control the gates.  Yeah!  Sticking it to The Man!

As well as registering with the ANPR, I also had to inform the people who organise the car share that I was changing car (we're allowed to park in special places, you see... but only if we display our special badges that show the license plate number of the car we're allowed to park in those special spaces).  That was easy enough, but I wasn't quite done.

I then had to transfer my Workplace Parking Levy permit.  Now, if you're not familiar with Nottingham's local politics, this is a scheme that the City Council have put in place whereby they fund the unwanted second phase of the tram by charging every company within the city boundaries for every single parking space they offer their employees.  If they've got an ounce of business sense, these companies then pass this on to their employees.  Great, right?  Everyone wins pays.  At my company, to show that you've paid the levy, you get a special parking permit.

With me so far?

Ok.  Well, I emailed these people to say I was changing car and that I needed to transfer the permit from one numberplate to another.  (In theory they could check this to make sure that the permit matches the car.  They never, ever will.... but they could).  Simple, right?  No.  They emailed me a form and told me that I would need to fill out the form, send it back to them with my old permit, and they would send me my new permit.

Ridiculous.  Who would make up a process like that?  More importantly, why would you make up a process like that?  If you have the record of who has paid for a permit and who owns what car, why would you be so stupid as to fail to be able to put those things together and keep track of which permit belongs to which person and instead employ people specifically to collect and reissue permits when people change cars?  It's bad enough that the council are making us pay this stupid stealth tax, but making a whole cottage industry of it is.... well, entirely typical of my employer.

Hey, at least we're not having to put up with 24 months of massively congested traffic across the whole of Nottingham for a tram system that most people will never use, right?  Oh, that's right... we are.  My 15 minute commute is currently taking about an hour every evening.

23.5 months to go.....

Grumble, grumble.  As you were.  More supernatural/office based fiction soon.

gimme money (that's what I want)....

So, apparently there's a whole shitstorm kicking off at the moment around the government's work experience scheme.  To cut a very long and tedious story short, this is a scheme that allows 16-24 year olds on benefits to volunteer to do unpaid work without losing their benefits.

I'm hardly a fan of this government, but it seems to me self-evident that this is a scheme - which may well have been launched and communicated badly, to be fair - designed to give kids some real experience of a working environment and not, as has been suggested, "unpaid forced labour".

This is a good thing, right?

We had a recent graduate in our office the other week.  He was unemployed and had been due to do a year's sandwich placement in industry as part of his course, but the collapse in the economy meant that the companies that supported this were pulling out and it had to be cancelled.  You know what he did?  He used his own initiative to look for opportunities to get some experience that might help him get a job.  He lives in Essex, but came up to Nottingham to work with us for a couple of weeks.  He wasn't interested in being paid for this work, and we filled his time by spending some time showing him how the different areas of the department worked.  I hope it wasn't too boring for him, but he made a good impression on almost everyone who spent time with him and was actually offered a paying job soon after, but he had already found himself work nearer home.  He showed some initiative and he found himself a job. Good for him.

I was also reading an article the other day about the way that Cambridge University chooses undergraduates.  Competition is, of course, intensive and standards are very high.  You know what marks people out and makes a difference in whether or not they get a place at the University?  Voluntary work, particularly work that is directly related to the degree the candidate wants to study:

"For medicine, the tutors look for both a strong aptitude for science and the beginnings of a bedside manner. This candidate has divided his interviewers. While the clinicians thought highly of him, there is a question mark over his scientific ability. Keeler seems inclined to attach greater weight to his exam performance than the interview. "The interview is just part of the picture – his four A*s is the summation of many years of work," he says. He carries on leafing through the folder, looking for evidence of what the candidate is doing now. "Looking at the personal statement for medicine, it's important that they have a range of activities and, particularly, that they have done a serious level of volunteering – handing out teas in a hospice, working with disabled children. Something where they have to take on a caring role and think about why doctors can't cure everybody.
"He's been on a gap year," Keeler notes.
"If he's been sitting on a beach for a year, I'll put him in the bin ..."
He turns a page of the folder and reads the candidate's statement: "He's been volunteering with St John Ambulance. And also training to be a special constable – that's something I've never seen before. He's clearly doing something worthwhile. He's currently volunteering at a care home." The admissions tutor smiles. "That's a tick for me.""

Volunteer work - especially if you are still receiving payment in the form of your benefit - sounds like a pretty good idea to me.  Not everyone agrees.  The Unions were up in arms, and a group, a little ironically, called The "Right to Work" campaign said of the government's scheme:

"Forced unpaid work still continues in the form of the mandatory work activity and community activity programme... There should not be any young person anywhere forced to work for no pay. Everyone on any training scheme should receive minimum wage or above."

Today is February 29th.  It's a leap year and today is the extra day that realigns our calendars with the pattern of the Earth's orbit around the sun.  There are 366 days this year.

Is it just me, or is it ironic that this particular issue should have reared its head on the one day in four years that everyone on an annual salary works for free?

I don't get paid by the hour; I have an annual rate.  I get paid the same in a year with 366 days as I do in a year with 365 days.  The Man got today for nothing.

DAMN HIM.

On the plus side, my personal productivity today was poor, so....

And you have to pay me on the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Bank Holiday later on this year.  I don't even like the Royal Family!  Ha!

Take that, The Man!

news of the world....

I’ve mentioned before that I have to write a little weekly highlights report on the activity that takes place within my team at work. It’s a bit of a waste of time, as when the report is emailed around to everyone on a Monday morning, it’s so long that no one really bothers to read it. With that in mind, my approach to writing it is to make sure that I at least entertain myself. I’ve long incorporated song titles and the odd lyric, but occasionally I’ll really go to town…. We have a new boss (my boss’s boss), and because he has a distinct 1980s look (think Steve Guttenburg crossed with Rick Moranis in a business suit and you’re pretty much there), last week I managed to incorporate the titles of no fewer than 23 classic 80s films in the two paragraphs of text (including Goonies, Sure Thing, Back to the Future, Die Hard, Weird Science, For Your Eyes Only….).

No one outside of my immediate team said a word. Pearls before swine.

Not deterred, this week I managed to incorporate a joke about Medieval law courts and toilets and very little actual, business-related content at all.  Here's an excerpt for you:

Black Magic:- Judging by the more-stressed-than-normal look on [my boss’s] face, it’s been Star Chamber budgeting this week: apparently when it comes to the dark arts, some people can be Voldermort, but someone has to be Neville Longbottom. If we’re going to name things in the department after Medieval Courts though, why stop there? The [meeting where they agree project budgeting] could be called the Court of the Exchequer, the Leadership Team meeting is the Court of the King’s Bench, the [daily – pointless - 15 minute huddle at the start of the day] is the Court of Common Pleas and the Leaders For Change meeting is clearly the Privy Council. They’ve lit a match, but you might want to give it a minute……

Did I say one joke about toilets? I meant two:

Ironic:- Speaking of privies… there was excitement down our end of the office this week then someone managed to get stuck in the toilets. We think it was the engineer who was sent to fix the broken door. I realise that it’s not quite the same thing as a black fly in your chardonnay or 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife but I’m pretty sure that it is ironic.

I also included updates on a couple of projects, thanking the various people involved etc.  Not especially interesting, but there you go. Once I’d finished, I emailed my few paragraphs off to the various members of the leadership team who take it in turns, week-by-week, to paste everyone’s contributions into the report, and then I got on with the rest of my day, quietly pleased with my work (especially the medieval "privy" gag: how many people have managed that in a business news update, eh?  You tell me that?).

Within about 10 minutes, I’d had an email back from the new guy.

 
Oooh! Feedback! This is new!

“Thanks for this.
It looks like there’s much to celebrate this week particularly with the [two tedious projects] you mentioned. I’ll be picking up with [your boss] on Monday to see how he’s marking the occasion!
Keep up the good work.”

Right, so he’s picked up on the boring bits and not mentioned the other stuff AT ALL, not even in passing. This guy has been about for a couple of weeks now, and I haven’t actually met him in person, although he seems pretty straight-laced (albeit straight-laced in a 1980s stylee). Am I being over-sensitive to see this email as a prelude to a request to change the house style of my weekly updates?

Well, I tell you this for nothing… if I get asked to be more serious about this pointless weekly exercise, then I’m quitting and they can find someone else to write the damn thing.

Yeah. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

In spite of the fact that my deadline is midday on a Friday for this, whichever of my betters is supposed to be sending out the report for Monday morning hasn’t yet bothered to do so. Tsk. Incompetents.

Do you hear me The Man? Incompetent.  "Never walk past less than the best" is what they tell us.  If that was true, I'd be in the office until midnight every night waiting for them all to leave.

I am SO self-righteous.  Why hasn't my career gone further?

the big fish eat the little ones....

I think I am distrustful of authority.  At work, anyway.  Actually, I'm not sure that's right: it's not that I am distrustful of authority figures at work, exactly, it's that I am demanding of them.  I expect high standards.  If you want me to do something, then I expect you to have thought it through before you ask me to do it.  I don't do this deliberately, but if I am told to do something that I think is (or might be) ridiculous, then I have a tendency to ask questions that make this stupidity plain.  Initially they're just questions, but the answers often lead me to more questions.  After all, who is the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?

This has probably definitely not been good for my career.

Today I discovered that, just as the hierarchy at work is layered, apparently so too is my distrust of authority.  I have long held a healthy disdain for the select group of people in my department known collectively as "The Leaders for Change" (or, if you must, the L4C).  They sit at the job banding just above my own and represent the top 50 managers in the department.  I don't know what I find most depressing: the fact that these people - on the whole - are patently not leaders and seem to have little interest or ability to drive change, or the fact that I'm not considered worthy of membership into a group with such apparently low standards.

Reader, I'm ashamed to say that I sometimes mock them and make light of their abilities and achievements.  It seems ridiculous to me that (many, not all) of these people are put into positions of authority they scarce seem to merit and jobs they cannot really do.  Is it any wonder we're such a shambles?

...but then I heard that someone in the leadership team at the very top of the department had been voicing exactly the same thing about this group; that they couldn't collectively inspire their way out of a paper bag*.

You'd imagine that I would feel in some way gratified that one of the really big kahunas seemed to share my view.

No.

My immediate, instinctive reaction was to jump to the defence of the very same people I like to criticise: they didn't ASK to for those positions, did they?  Is it their fault that they have been put into these jobs?  If they aren't up to the task, then who is supposed to be performance managing them or giving them the coaching that they need to step up to the mark?  If your talent pipeline is so broken that it is cludged up with chaff that isn't able to do the job, then whose fault is that?  The blame for putting the wrong people into key positions and for their continuing poor performance surely does not lie solely with the people in those jobs.

Yup, the responsibility for the failures of this group ultimately lies further up the management pyramid. When it comes to self-defeating finger pointing and career limiting self-righteousness, I've discovered that there's always a bigger fish.

Next time: sticking it to The Man - and it surely is a man - who runs the whole damn industrial-military complex.  He's to blame for EVERYTHING, right?  The buck stops with him. Let's finish this thing.  YOU AND ME.  Mano a mano..... etc.

I'm such an idiot. I might as well howl at the moon for all the good this does me.

[*actually, on further investigation, it turns out that the whole thing was only a rumour: the leadership are apparently remaining consistent in their lack of attention to their underlings.....]