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.

I know what's coming, I'm not working...

I find myself caught in a strange kind of halfway house.

I've been productively spending my time volunteering... it keeps me busy and makes me feel like I'm doing something useful for the world after many years of working for a fairly soulless corporation.

As well as the MyGuide stuff that I've been doing for Guide Dogs, I'm also about to be appointed as a trustee for a Nottingham domestic abuse charity and I'm excited to get started with that and to learn the ropes. As I currently have the time, I have the opportunity to go and watch them working at first hand as well as learning what it means to be a trustee.

When I met the other trustees, one of the questions that they asked me was how, if I was looking to get back into paid employment, was I going to find the time to do all the volunteering I do.

It's a good question.

My answer was simply that, if I do go back into full time employment, nobody is making me work 60 hour weeks and I should therefore have plenty of time for my volunteering if I stick to a standard 37.5 hours.  They seemed happy with this and it's 100% true that no one was making me do the hours I ended up working in my last job. That was entirely down to me and a misplaced sense of responsibility.

If I've learned anything over the last few months, it's that I get far more satisfaction and fulfilment from the stuff that I do for nothing than I ever did for any job that paid.

But here then is the dilemma: why am I looking for a paid job back in the kind of thing that I used to do? I'm distinctly ambivalent about going back to work in a corporate environment and I don't really need the money.... so why am I not looking to do more volunteering or, at the very least, look for a job somewhere that won't pay so well but will be doing an awful lot more good for the world and for my soul?

This morning I spent some time looking at maybe volunteering at a food bank. It obviously wouldn't pay, but it would undoubtedly be a good way to use my time.  I then spent the next couple of hours looking at business analysis jobs that I could do but really don't want to. I might apply for one.

This shouldn't be this hard.

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.

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.

are you ready boots? start walkin'...

For a bit of change of scenery, I went store visiting in York today.  It's been a bit relentless over the last few weeks, with 11-12 hour days at my desk and then overnight stand-by too, so it was nice to just get away from the office for a day.  I won't lie to you, it was also a lovely day to be driving up the M1 with my sunglasses on and to get the chance to (briefly) walk around my old stamping ground in York town centre in the blazing sunshine.

As a favour to another colleague in the office, we also popped out to Selby on the way home to check on something for them. What I didn't realise, until I walked through the door of the shop, was that the thing I was checking on was the closure of a part of the shop and the redundancy of two members of staff who have been there for more than sixty years between them.  In fact, the person that I spoke to was on her last afternoon in the shop before her redundancy after 34 years, and although she was more than pleasant, to say that she was unamused and couldn't really give two shits about how the closure was going is probably an understatement.  She was still giving first class service to the customers who walked in when we were there too, and it's hard not to wonder at what the business is going to lose when all that experience walks out the door.

We were the first people from head office to speak to her about this, never mind to actually walk through the door and look her in the eye.  Nobody had even had the courtesy to explain what was happening to her beyond the bare facts of her redundancy, which seems astonishing.  We were only there as a favour to someone else (who neglected to mention all of this to us and let us walk into this situation totally unprepared), but it felt like the least we could do to thank her for all her years of hard work and to wish her well for the future. Thirty-four years is a pretty large chunk of anyone's life.

It's true that it's the people that make a business. I don't care how many years of glorious history a company might have, if you treat people like this, then ultimately the people worth having will vote with their feet.

Bobbins.  Proper bobbins.

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.

don't know much about geography...

I work with some intelligent people.  I say this now because of what follows....

One of my colleagues isn't a driver and has a somewhat tenuous grasp on geography, thinking that Leeds lies between Nottingham and London. As you can imagine, this causes much amusement in the office.

Because of this, someone shared this map that was drawn by someone in their team.

Um.

It's hard to know where to start, isn't it? What's happening to Northern Ireland up there?
"Other Citys"?
"Devon/Yarmouth etc"
What?

Perhaps stung by the insinuation that she might be *this* kind of idiot, my colleague took it upon herself to draw her own map of the UK.

This is what she came up with.

Detail on the East Midlands is quite good, but it's probably best not to dwell on much of the rest, especially if you're from Bristol, Somerset or Devon.  This splendid effort also prompted a conversation with another member of my team, also an intelligent person.

"My geography isn't very good, but I always know which direction I need to travel in."
"Really?"
"Yes, so if I want to go to London, I know that I need to go south."
"Well, that depends on where you are."
"Does it?"
"Well, if you were in Dallas, which direction would you need to travel in?"
"Oh.  East! I know that one!  Although Dallas is hotter than London, so it must be further south."
"But the South Pole is also south of London, and that's pretty cold...?"
"That's true."
"And how do you account for the fact that the sea to the east of England is called the North Sea?"
"No it isn't. That's the English Channel.  Does London have a beach? It's on the south coast, after all.
"...."

Like I said: intelligent people.

Well, no one knows everything, do they?

ain't that peculiar...

Have you ever found yourself caught in a conversation that you wish you hadn't started?

One of my colleagues started dating a guy who worked in the same office.  We weren't in the same team, but he sat fairly near-by me and we were on sort-of nodding terms.  "Sort-of nodding terms" are a bit like being on actual nodding terms, but because we're both British, it's somewhat more informal than that and a whole lot more awkward and embarrassed.

The knowledge that this chap was now dating one of my colleagues made the whole sort-of nodding terms thing even more awkward, because now we both knew that we had something more in common than just sitting near each other, but we hadn't ever actually been introduced.  At some point, my colleague decided that she would take some steps to get us past this point.  She didn't actually introduce us or anything, but she thought she would officially tell me that the two of them were an item (something she had never thought to do before because, being British, the start of their relationship was a little awkward and it was slightly awkward to introduce the idea that they were together into general conversation with their office colleagues, even though we all already knew).

Still with me?

Anyway.

"You know Andrew, don't you?"
"Not really.  We've not spoken, although I have seen him naked."
"Pardon?"
"I sometimes see him in the changing rooms when I cycle to work and we've stood next to each other in the shower"
"You've showered with him?"
"No.  I didn't say I'd showered with him; I said we'd showered next to each other"
"You all shower together?"
"Yes"
"You don't have individual cubicles?"
"No"
"And you don't think that's at all strange?"
"No"
"That you shower together and that you've seen my boyfriend naked but you've never spoken to him? Not at all peculiar? Not even a little bit"
"No.  We don't shower together; we sometimes shower separately but adjacent to each other. Stop trying to make this weird.  It's not weird...."
"....!"

It's not weird, right?

clones...

When he arrived in the office the other day, my boss greeted me warmly.  After exchanging pleasantries about our respective weekends, he told me that he had been watching the football on Friday night on the BBC with his wife. Apparently, when the managers were interviewed, they had the following conversation:

"You know you keep asking me about that guy who works for me and what he looks like?"
"Yes?"
"Well, he looks a bit like that guy's older brother"

Pep Guardiola is 46 next week. He's nearly 18 months older than my older brother.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this.  I think, on balance, I'll probably take it as a compliment.

I seem to have one of those faces. I once ran past a guy standing at a bus stop with his girlfriend, and the three of us stared at each other as we all realised that me and the guy looked almost exactly the same.  Five minutes later, I turned around and we repeated the whole thing when I ran past them again.  A few years before that, I was eating in a restaurant in York when I realised that all of the kitchen staff were lined up behind the serving counter looking at me.  I scanned from left to right, taking them all in, until I got to the chef on the end who looked exactly like me.  He gave me a little wave.

...and before you say anything, if you think that about my dad, then you haven't met my dad.

papa, don't preach...

I was slightly mortified last week to be referred to as someone's "work dad".

We were chatting away over the desks about a mutual colleague's new(-ish) boyfriend.  They've been going out for a few months now and seem very happy together, which is clearly very nice.  I was first introduced to this chap at a Twenty:20 game at Trent Bridge in the summer and I was saying to my colleague how nervous he seemed.

"Well, of course he seemed nervous.  It's quite a big deal meeting someone's work dad".

I'm sorry, what?

I'm about fifteen years older than these girls, who both used to be in my team a couple of years ago. To be honest, I don't tend to think all that deeply about our friendship: they're colleagues that I used to manage and with whom I get on pretty well. I certainly don't try and define our relationship in familial terms....Work dad, though?  REALLY?

...If I have to be a part of someone's work family, wouldn't I more naturally suggest the roles of cool older brother or groovy uncle?  Work dad?  COME ON!

I quickly changed the subject to conceal my outrage.

"I still haven't forgiven your boyfriend for standing you up before your first date"
"That was three years ago"
"I know."

Work dad.  I ask you!

private universe...

After a day spent with work visiting Worcester, Malvern and Evesham, I travelled home on the train from Bristol Parkway station.  After a change at Birmingham International, I settled down onto the train that was going to drop me off at Nottingham.

Initially, the carriage wasn't too busy, and I was able to take a table seat diagonally opposite the only other person there, each of us with an empty seat beside us.  She looked like she didn't much want to be disturbed and had her feet stretched right out underneath the seat opposite, so I left her to it.  It was rush hour, and as the train began to fill up, I was forced to ask her to move her feet so that I could scoot across to make some room.

The journey was a little over an hour, so I dug out my iPad and picked up where I'd left off with an episode of the West Wing. Occasionally, my attention would wander and I would look up from my screen at the people around me.  The girl sitting opposite caught my eye because she was reading a book on Lucrezia Borgia, but she held my attention because she was also idly playing with her phone and scrolling through songs on her iPod classic.  She was wearing a Gryffindor quidditch team t-shirt and looked a little awkward, or at least very self-conscious; perhaps a little uncomfortable in her skin. She was also clearly trying to keep herself to herself by hiding behind a big pair of headphones and losing herself in her own happy place.

As she hopped between songs on her iPod, she was bopping along with her head and occasionally mouthing along to the lyrics.  She looked really, really happy and content in her own little world.  It was nice to see.

Did I talk to her?  No.  I didn't.  I left her entirely alone because I'm not an arsehole.

(wasn't me)

I was doing a lunchtime pavilion event thing at work today. It’s one of those things where you offer a few free chocolates, pens and post-it notes and hope to entice unwary people in the office on their way to their lunch to stop and talk to you about the latest - invariably tedious - thing you’re working on. They make me do them from time-to-time, and unless you are a visting supplier with a celebrity handing out goodie bags (we had Jimmy Anderson in last week, I'm told), then you are mostly just ignored. Usually I like to just stand in as out-of-the-way a position as I can find, but since I became the boss, that’s been somewhat harder a trick to pull off.

Anyway.

As I was standing there sheepishly in my branded t-shirt and trying to direct people to enter the much more interesting quiz that could give you a chance to win a bottle of own-brand supermarket Prosecco, someone approached me and insisted on engaging me in conversation:

“Ah, so this is what you do. I’ve seen you around and often thought that you must have the best job in the world”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, because I always see you either in the changing rooms or in the gym. It was you I spoke to in the changing rooms the other day, wasn't it?”
“Well, maybe.   I cycle to work every day, so I’m often in the changing rooms at 0745 and 1800, so you might have seen me, but I’m not a member of the gym here, so you haven't seen me there.”
“Yeah, mornings and evenings and lunchtimes as well. Working out in the gym. I wondered how you find the time to work.”
“But I’ve never been in the gym here and I don't go into the changing room at lunchtime...”
"I wondered what kind of job you had!"

At this point, someone else comes over. I’d hoped that this might be a chance to change the topic of conversation, but apparently no.
“....this guy here has the best job in the world. He’s always either in the gym or in the changing rooms….”

WILL YOU PLEASE STOP SAYING THAT? WHY ARE YOU TELLING HIM THAT? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? I’M IN THE CHANGING ROOM FOR ABOUT TEN MINUTES IN TOTAL EVERY DAY AND I’M NOT A MEMBER OF THE BLOODY GYM AND HAVE NEVER SO MUCH AS SET FOOT THROUGH THE DOOR. WHY ARE YOU SAYING THESE THINGS? WHY ARE YOU SHARING THESE HALLUCINATIONS WITH OTHER PEOPLE?

“[chuckles] ….Yeah, he's always in the gym”

“…..”

I was so angry, I nearly directed him towards the Rum-Kokos that our lovely friends in Vienna insist on giving me every time we visit… but even I’m not that evil.

yin yang...

I’ve taken a dislike to the man who has the locker next to mine in the changing rooms at work (this is, by the way, the celebrity section of the locker room: Craig Davids and Richard Curtis are both located here). This might seem unreasonable, given that we haven’t exchanged a single word in the year since he moved in, but to my mind, it’s completely justified.

Let me put forward the case for the prosecution:

- He wears full lycra and cleats for his commute. To be fair to him, I have no idea how far he cycles every morning. Maybe it’s miles and miles and this is by far the most practical gear for his journey…. but this brings me to point 2

- He usually doesn’t shower. He comes in, wipes himself down and gets changed into his work gear… in spite of the fact that we have perfectly good showers in the changing rooms and he keeps a towel here. I put it to you that, if he doesn’t cycle hard enough to need a shower, then he definitely doesn’t need to wear full lycra and cleats. You can’t have it both ways

My locker, this evening.  His locker is behind the open door... but it's okay: he'd already gone.

- He’s very possessive of the space around his locker. If my locker door is open when he arrives, even if it isn’t open to the point where it’s over the front of his locker, he pushes it shut. If I have a towel or something hanging in the door of my locker on a hanger, he will move it so it’s hooked up and away from being anywhere near his locker. I wouldn’t mind this so much, except that he doesn’t mind hanging stuff over his own locker and apparently doesn’t see the contradiction

- I don’t like his face. Well, not his actual face as much as the picture on the ID card that’s on the front of every locker. Well, alright, I’m not a massive fan of his actual face either – he seems a bit humourless to me – but his picture is even worse, and I see it every single day even if he’s not actually in the locker room getting changed.

I know I sometimes come across here as excessively stoical and generally seem to possess an aura a little like a modern-day Buddha, but as you can see, I’m actually fairly petty and childish.

Yin and Yang, innit?

pictures of you....

My friend Tony is something of a photography buff, and he took many fantastic photos documenting our time in Scarborough (his wife is in the choir, Tony spent his time wandering around the town taking photos of whatever and whoever took his fancy). Because of his wife’s involvement as a singer, Tony has sort of become the choir’s unofficial photographer, snapping pictures of us as we sing at various concerts.

He took an excellent picture of me at our concert in Bolsover, just at the point in the Motown Medley where the basses and tenors have put on their sunglasses to sing “Heard it Through the Grapevine”.

A colleague of mine liked this so much that she bounded up to me when I was next in the office to show me that she had installed it at the background picture on her new phone. In fact, it was the only photo on her phone.

OK. Fair enough, I suppose. Apparently I lasted 24 hours, which with this girl’s attention span is probably something of a miracle.

Tony took another great picture of me in Scarborough this weekend, but when I got back to work, this same girl didn’t seem impressed:

“It doesn’t look like you”
“What do you mean it doesn’t look like me?”
“Your eyes look all black and you don’t have black eyes. You have blue eyes”
“Yes, but it’s a black and white photograph”
“It doesn’t look like you and I don’t like it”

Everyone's a critic.

make me wanna scream....

Maybe it’s because I’m not a parent, maybe it’s because I’m a miserable bastard…. But I find that the noise of a crying baby cuts right through me. I look around, and pretty much everybody else seems to be looking over at the wailing infant with happy, indulgent smiles, but for me it’s like fingernails down a blackboard. Only much, much more grating.

Am I weird? Am I perhaps missing some important nurturing part of my genetic makeup?

Or maybe – just maybe - it’s bang out of order to bring your screaming child into an open-plan office environment and then sit around chatting with your mates for nearly an hour.

Yeah. I reckon it’s that.

Take it away and don’t bring it back until it has learnt how to keep its unhappiness at being in that building locked away inside.

 We all feel like that, but the rest of us have learned to internalise our pain and to suffer more quietly.

It's a love story, baby....

Today, someone in all seriousness explained to me why the project to merge two teams together was called “Project Windsor”. Apparently it’s because the love of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson was so great that they were able to overcome all obstacles and opposition that was preventing them from being together, and this project was just like that. Well, what the person actually said to me was something like:

“I’ve just been in this incredibly boring meeting where some bloke explained how the project to bring our teams together was called Windsor because of the love of two people or something. I’ve no idea what he was talking about”
“Windsor? You mean Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson? The Duke and Duchess of Windsor”
“Yeah. That was them”
“And he was using them as a good example of love conquering all?”
“Apparently”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Don’t most people think they were pretty unpleasant people and Nazi sympathisers?”

Seems a bit of a strange example to me. Of all the star-crossed lovers you could have picked through all of history and literature, and you chose those two?  I suppose at least one person in the world has seen that apparently godawful Madonna film about them then, eh?

People are weird. I bet he’s probably seen that Diana film too.  Hell, even "Wessex" would probably be a better choice: the untold love story of Edward and Sophie.  No?  You're not buying that?  It would make an amazing film.  Especially that bit where he tells his dad he's leaving the marines to set up a theatrical production company.

(My wife - who is kind of a big deal and knows this sort of stuff - tells me that project names should be picked at random from the dictionary and have absolutely nothing to do with the thing you’re working on, no matter how obliquely. For that reason, I’m code-naming this post “Project Insulsity”)

I gave you my music, made your song take wing...

We started working on a Phantom of the Opera medley at choir last night. The first two sections we covered were “Music of the Night” and “That’s All I Ask of You”.

I sort of grew up with this stuff: neither of my parents are big music listeners and we didn’t have much in the way of records or anything when I was growing up. My dad grew up in a pub and apparently went to sleep every night with the sounds of “Top of the Pops” records playing in the lounge bar downstairs. Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s shown almost no interest in music of any kind since. My mum I think is a little bit more interested, but not really interested enough to buy much or even to listen to much. She once heard Coldplay’s first album on the PA in Homebase or somewhere, and after a bit of detective work to try and work out what it was, for a couple of years that was a fruitful source of presents for her… either a new Coldplay album or Keane or something similar. The only other music I can really remember her having was a cassette by someone called Peter Skellern, a little bit of classic Cliff Richard and various Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, most notably Cats and Phantom. She liked Michael Crawford, I remember and this would have been about the time that he was starring in the West End version with Sarah Brightman.  We mostly used to listen to those tapes in the car when we were driven to and from school. I thought they were alright.  You know.  As you do when you're about 12.

Anyway. I’ve had “That’s All I Ask of You” in my head all day today. When I mentioned this to a colleague, she called me highbrow.

Highbrow? You think that humming a song from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical makes me highbrow?

Oh wait, does considering Andrew Lloyd Webber a pretty damn long way from highbrow actually just prove that I am indeed highbrow?

Dammit.

alphabet aerobics....

My team does a quiz every Friday afternoon. The questions are always the same, but we draw a different letter from the alphabet each week and every answer has to start with that week's letter. The questions are things like: Country, TV Programme, Boy’s Name, Girl’s Name, Famous film star, alcoholic drink, fruit or vegetable, capital city, London Underground station, dessert…. Twenty-six questions in all. You get two points for a unique answer (i.e. no one else playing has the same one), one point for an answer anyone else has, and minus one for an incorrect answer or a blank.  Maximum score is 52 and the lowest possible score is -26.  Quite a range.

As you can imagine, it usually gets quite heated. This week’s letter was “F”, and almost every question prompts a debate.  Do you accept “A Fish Called Wanda” for film or do you think it technically begins with an “A”? If you say it starts with an “A”, does that mean that, when we draw “T”, you’ll accept anything beginning with “The”?  The Halloween Fancy Dress costume always provokes conversation too: Frankenstein was fairly obvious this week, but we also had Frank Sinatra and Flipper suggested. We're fairly relaxed about the "Halloween" part of the question and usually settle this one by searching google images: if “Flipper Fancy Dress” brings up a picture of someone wearing the costume on the first page of results, you can have the points. If not, then you’re shit out of luck. Likewise, if you’ve clearly guessed the answer to your restaurant, you have to say where it is…. You can’t just put Bob’s Diner unless you know it’s in Sioux Falls.

One big area of discussion is adjectives. You can’t just preface everything with an adjective and expect to get the points, but when does the adjective become a key part of the thing you’re describing? We wouldn’t accept “filthy pictures” as an answer for something you keep hidden, but we did accept “failing memory”. We also learned that flambé is a technique and not a dessert, so we wouldn’t accept that as an answer… but someone else had “flambéed bananas”. Is the word “flambéed” being used there as an adjective or as a key part of the dessert’s name?
 It’s a minefield.

Here’s one for you: Famous Band or Artist. Would you accept “Five” or would you insist that it was correctly “5ive”? This obviously led to a conversation about where you would file it in your alphabetised record collection. A theoretical discussion, obviously…..

I won, by the way.

41. Next nearest score was 26. The only negative I got was for failing to name a capital city. Mind you, everyone got a blank here: apparently you could have had Freetown (Sierra Leone), Funafuti (Tuvalu) or Flying Fish Cove (Christmas Island). ..then again we all missed “Washington DC” when we drew “W”, so we can't even get the easy ones.

Yes, you guessed it: it is usually me that kicks off these debates. I just can’t help myself.
But you all knew that.