You should always have an escape route. I don't think I have one.
There has been much talk about redundancies at work at the moment. The long and the short of it is that we're probably cutting work flow by about 50% with about 50% of the workforce possibly having to disappear.
The long and the short of it in terms of me is that I'm a little grumpy, irritable, prone to swearing a lot and sitting sullenly instead of trying to do something about it, because I don't really want to have to go and get a new job. I'm sure that there's nobody that thinks differently on this matter, but the whole interview process is very tiresome. I find it very difficult to go half an hour without saying something that might be construed as a little odd. When you've known me for a while and tuned into my particular sense of humour and my habit of coherently muttering nonsense as asides to myself, I think you can tune it out, but when its an interview situation, that probably doesn't go so well.
The last interview for a prospective job that I had was ok, but I was caught out by a question that was probably designed to catch me out. I was asked "if you could chose four people, living, dead, or fictional, who would you invite over for a dinner party and why?" My actual answer was bordering on the pathetic. I mumbled something about a few judges that I wasn't really interested in because I wanted them to think I really was interested in legal issues all of the time, and some other generic figures from history or public affairs. However, the first answer that leapt into my head that I didn't have the guts to say was "Mahatma Gandhi, J.K Rowling, Scooby Doo and Adolf Hitler, because I really like a challenge."
It's odd where your brain goes in a crisis.
Additional Notes:
On second thoughts, all that stuff about redundancies might be confidential. Best burn this blog after reading.
The challenge of course would be cooking a decent vegetarian meal.
Showing posts with label Job. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Job. Show all posts
Friday, 17 July 2009
Monday, 6 July 2009
A little bit Extra
Last week, I spent two days in a night club getting incredibly hot and sweaty, slightly bored and having to dance every now and then against my wishes. However, whereas I normally have to pay an entrance fee for this sort of experience, this time they were paying me, because I was one of about two hundred background artists being filmed as part of Ricky Gervais’ latest venture into the world of film.
Working as an extra is a lot of fun and I’d recommend it to anyone, regardless of whether you’re interested in the industry or not, because it just gives you such an appreciation of just how much work goes into these productions. The two days that lasted approximately twelve hours each probably constituted at most around five minutes of the film. The longest scene included one and a half pages of dialogue, which should equate to one and a half minutes. The number of times the retake scenes to get the best one possible is staggering, when they filmed the short fight scene that took place it took an entire afternoon so that they could film it from several different angles and mash it together afterwards and it was just unbelievable just how much time and effort the crew were dedicating to the project. What I can’t get over is that after those two days I was on the set, the rest of them carried on going with similar schedules the next day, albeit without two hundred extras, most of which behave like slightly arrogant sheep that are desperate to one day become a shepherd, or at least a supporting sheep dog.
This leads me to talk about some of my co-extras. That last statement I’ve just made probably makes it sound like high levels of contempt are being held on my behalf, but this isn’t the case. I honestly felt like most of us, myself included, at points in the day were like arrogant sheep. They still follow where they’re directed, but they complain about it a little bit and are under the delusion that their actions will lead to bigger and better things. Everyone I spoke to was very friendly and all of them interesting people. I got a few laughs when I said what I did for a living and did suddenly feel it a little absurd that I’d chosen to take two days holiday to go and stand in Koko at five in the morning until five in the afternoon when I was talking about how I wasn’t really intending to try and become a professional actor and it was very clear that I had one of the most stable day jobs there and almost everyone else worked in the industry or were at least desperately trying to.
But in fairness, at the age of twenty-four, I was one of the older extras there. Almost everyone else had just finished university, some had just finished college and were thinking about going to university, and a lot of them were saying something along the lines of “I’m going to move down to London soon and find work down here as an actor/actress” as if they hand work out at the job centre. I think what hit me about these statements is that shortly after university, that was probably my plan as well, however unreasonable it might have been. I’m not sure if it was a roomful of naivety, potential, or just sheer hope, but it was something that I felt surprisingly alien. I want to share that hope again, that idea that everything will work out by just being in the right place at the right time, and I honestly hope that some of these wild theories pan out for at least some of my co-extras. They were nice people and deserve a decent break.
All in all, it was a fun couple of days out that wore me out something stupid, but was completely worth it. I’d recommend it to anybody else, if only to experience that odd mixture of being incredibly excited and bored out of your mind at exactly the same time.
Additional Notes:
The film in question is called “Cemetery Junction” and should be out in 2010. I am wearing tight brown flares and a slightly-too-tight green tee-shirt and dancing horribly, so maybe you’ll be able to spot me quite easily.
Stranger things have happened: Apparently Harrison Ford was a carpenter on the set of Star Wars when he was pulled in to play Han Solo. I mentioned this to one of the extras I was talking to by way of conversation that had steered itself in that sort of direction. I don’t think he was really listening because he immediately dismissed this as “not a terribly effective career move”, as if I had been deadly serious in suggesting that the way to become a supremely successful performer was to train in carpentry.
Working as an extra is a lot of fun and I’d recommend it to anyone, regardless of whether you’re interested in the industry or not, because it just gives you such an appreciation of just how much work goes into these productions. The two days that lasted approximately twelve hours each probably constituted at most around five minutes of the film. The longest scene included one and a half pages of dialogue, which should equate to one and a half minutes. The number of times the retake scenes to get the best one possible is staggering, when they filmed the short fight scene that took place it took an entire afternoon so that they could film it from several different angles and mash it together afterwards and it was just unbelievable just how much time and effort the crew were dedicating to the project. What I can’t get over is that after those two days I was on the set, the rest of them carried on going with similar schedules the next day, albeit without two hundred extras, most of which behave like slightly arrogant sheep that are desperate to one day become a shepherd, or at least a supporting sheep dog.
This leads me to talk about some of my co-extras. That last statement I’ve just made probably makes it sound like high levels of contempt are being held on my behalf, but this isn’t the case. I honestly felt like most of us, myself included, at points in the day were like arrogant sheep. They still follow where they’re directed, but they complain about it a little bit and are under the delusion that their actions will lead to bigger and better things. Everyone I spoke to was very friendly and all of them interesting people. I got a few laughs when I said what I did for a living and did suddenly feel it a little absurd that I’d chosen to take two days holiday to go and stand in Koko at five in the morning until five in the afternoon when I was talking about how I wasn’t really intending to try and become a professional actor and it was very clear that I had one of the most stable day jobs there and almost everyone else worked in the industry or were at least desperately trying to.
But in fairness, at the age of twenty-four, I was one of the older extras there. Almost everyone else had just finished university, some had just finished college and were thinking about going to university, and a lot of them were saying something along the lines of “I’m going to move down to London soon and find work down here as an actor/actress” as if they hand work out at the job centre. I think what hit me about these statements is that shortly after university, that was probably my plan as well, however unreasonable it might have been. I’m not sure if it was a roomful of naivety, potential, or just sheer hope, but it was something that I felt surprisingly alien. I want to share that hope again, that idea that everything will work out by just being in the right place at the right time, and I honestly hope that some of these wild theories pan out for at least some of my co-extras. They were nice people and deserve a decent break.
All in all, it was a fun couple of days out that wore me out something stupid, but was completely worth it. I’d recommend it to anybody else, if only to experience that odd mixture of being incredibly excited and bored out of your mind at exactly the same time.
Additional Notes:
The film in question is called “Cemetery Junction” and should be out in 2010. I am wearing tight brown flares and a slightly-too-tight green tee-shirt and dancing horribly, so maybe you’ll be able to spot me quite easily.
Stranger things have happened: Apparently Harrison Ford was a carpenter on the set of Star Wars when he was pulled in to play Han Solo. I mentioned this to one of the extras I was talking to by way of conversation that had steered itself in that sort of direction. I don’t think he was really listening because he immediately dismissed this as “not a terribly effective career move”, as if I had been deadly serious in suggesting that the way to become a supremely successful performer was to train in carpentry.
Friday, 19 June 2009
Three Strikes and you're out
In recent news, we have been hit by a few strikes of late, namely from the RMT tube strike (that admittedly doesn’t exactly affect the whole country, but living in London makes it easy to forget that the tube network isn’t everywhere) and the postal strike that seems to have jumped out on us today. Working for an insurance company that maintains a trade union client base, you would hope that I might have some sort of insider knowledge into the workings of a strike and the dynamics of a trade union, but unfortunately, I am woefully ignorant and probably about to make myself small-scale flame-bait with ill informed opinions.
What I want to know is what is the point of striking and does it actually achieve anything?
The concept of a strike is simple. A work force is disgruntled with the way it is treated, therefore it refuses to do anything until an agreement is reached. This is a good example of a simple democratic “we are not slaves and you can not treat us as such” process and is a very effective way of avoiding being maltreated as an employee. Trade unions make this whole process slightly easier, more secure and less of a risk for the workers and despite them not having nearly as much power as they did in the pre-mining Thatcher strike breaking days, they’re still a force to be reckoned with and some of the unions have a reputation for being particularly militant.
Putting strike action into context at the moment means putting it alongside the ever present news of the ever present doom-and-gloom fuelled recession and enormous record breaking job losses. All in all, an unusual background with which to be dissatisfied with having a job.
Allow me to put forward a few examples:
The RMT Tube Strike
The name “Bob Crow” has become a curse word around London, and I suspect beyond. I don’t really know what his job is like, I don’t know how well he performs his abilities, but he certainly seems to enjoy a good strike. The last strike I remember happening was over a pay rise demand that was actually granted to them before the strike was about to commence, and they went ahead with it anyway. This breaks the fundamental concept of the strike in the first place if you’re going to strike even after you get what you want. It’s almost like the confused teenager that doesn’t know how to stop sulking even after he gets his own way.
The most recent strike was almost as bizarre, almost as if the demands had been written by two people with differing agendas. On the one hand they wanted an increased focus on health and safety, yet on the other they wanted two drivers that were fired for breach of safety regulations to be reinstated. Much as it must have been fun to see the reaction of commuters when the doors on the wrong side of the train opened, it’s not exactly going to win you employee of the month.
A lot of people will complain that tube drivers are overpaid anyway. I wouldn’t entirely agree with this. They have horrible hours, they have horrible working conditions, there’s a certain amount of danger attached to the job through accident, slow deterioration of health or attack from giant moles, and in the middle of all of that is what I can only imagine is mind numbing boredom. At the same time, demanding more pay at the moment when people are being sacked left right and centre is most definitely not going to win the hearts and minds of your passengers, many of whom will earn less than half of the drivers themselves if they are even employed in the first place.
In fairness to the drivers, I did get the impression that many of them weren’t interested in striking, as many of them turned up to work after a while anyway. This could be an example of a union trying to justify its position without really caring about what its members really want, but I don’t know.
The Postal Strike
I do feel that postal strikes have somewhat lost their impact. Aside from businesses not getting a collection or a daily drop off, I’m not sure anybody notices when Royal Mail strike. Also, any impact it has on business that it might have is instantly mitigated by the fact that everyone knows about the strike and everyone knows things might take an extra couple of days and nobody really cares.
I actually find myself sympathizing for the workers on this one. Whenever they go on strike, the create a massive backlog of work for themselves, meaning they have to work twice as hard the following day. I remember our old postman coming into the office the day after a strike muttering to himself about how it was a stupid idea to strike and he didn’t want to and how he then had to work overtime.
In my woeful ignorance I’m not actually too sure why the post office are striking this time around. At a guess I would assume it’s the threat of massive job losses and huge reform or even the threat of re-nationalization, and in fairness if I was about to be nationalized into the public sector at the moment I’d strike as well, but I would be curious to know how not turning up to work really affects the potential job losses factor. I suppose the people that work extra hard the following day get a gold star or something.
The Writers Strike
This is a bit of an unusual one. I realise this happened quite a long time ago as well, but the reason I bring it up is because it’s had one of the most insidious slow-releasing affects of a strike I’ve ever seen. Rail strike: No trains for the day. Postal strike: No post for a couple of days. Writers Strike: all current seasons of TV shows come up twelve episodes short and the films being released in two years time will be awful. The reason I’ve noticed this is because I’ve recently seen two films of vastly contrasting quality; Star Trek which was written just before the strike, and Terminator Salvation, that was due to be written just after the strike started.
As far as an impact goes, a lot of people noticed that their favourite shows had suddenly finished off earlier than expected, or that their favourite oh-so-witty talk show host suddenly wasn’t so witty, and now we’re getting an echo of that impact in the cinema over this summer and probably through to Christmas. As for how effective this was at achieving their aims, I’m not sure. I know that pre-strike, writers were being denied vast sums of royalty money from DVD sales and the like, but I also know that you don’t become a writer in order to make your millions.
A final note
I don’t disagree with striking, nor do I disagree with standing up for yourself if you’re being abused in some way, but I’m just not sure that it works. Going back to themes that I’ve found earlier in this blog, it’s probably the case that I can’t see the bigger picture, and that even a small victory as a result of a strike can result in a large impact on a work force, but sometimes demands are just unrealistic. A threat of a strike also doesn’t appear to be much of a threat most of the time, more a passive inconvenience.
Additional Notes
I might write about these films later if I can muster the apathetic bile I felt for Terminator. In short, if you want to see both, but can only afford to see one through limitations of funds or time, see Star Trek, even if you hate Star Trek.
What I want to know is what is the point of striking and does it actually achieve anything?
The concept of a strike is simple. A work force is disgruntled with the way it is treated, therefore it refuses to do anything until an agreement is reached. This is a good example of a simple democratic “we are not slaves and you can not treat us as such” process and is a very effective way of avoiding being maltreated as an employee. Trade unions make this whole process slightly easier, more secure and less of a risk for the workers and despite them not having nearly as much power as they did in the pre-mining Thatcher strike breaking days, they’re still a force to be reckoned with and some of the unions have a reputation for being particularly militant.
Putting strike action into context at the moment means putting it alongside the ever present news of the ever present doom-and-gloom fuelled recession and enormous record breaking job losses. All in all, an unusual background with which to be dissatisfied with having a job.
Allow me to put forward a few examples:
The RMT Tube Strike
The name “Bob Crow” has become a curse word around London, and I suspect beyond. I don’t really know what his job is like, I don’t know how well he performs his abilities, but he certainly seems to enjoy a good strike. The last strike I remember happening was over a pay rise demand that was actually granted to them before the strike was about to commence, and they went ahead with it anyway. This breaks the fundamental concept of the strike in the first place if you’re going to strike even after you get what you want. It’s almost like the confused teenager that doesn’t know how to stop sulking even after he gets his own way.
The most recent strike was almost as bizarre, almost as if the demands had been written by two people with differing agendas. On the one hand they wanted an increased focus on health and safety, yet on the other they wanted two drivers that were fired for breach of safety regulations to be reinstated. Much as it must have been fun to see the reaction of commuters when the doors on the wrong side of the train opened, it’s not exactly going to win you employee of the month.
A lot of people will complain that tube drivers are overpaid anyway. I wouldn’t entirely agree with this. They have horrible hours, they have horrible working conditions, there’s a certain amount of danger attached to the job through accident, slow deterioration of health or attack from giant moles, and in the middle of all of that is what I can only imagine is mind numbing boredom. At the same time, demanding more pay at the moment when people are being sacked left right and centre is most definitely not going to win the hearts and minds of your passengers, many of whom will earn less than half of the drivers themselves if they are even employed in the first place.
In fairness to the drivers, I did get the impression that many of them weren’t interested in striking, as many of them turned up to work after a while anyway. This could be an example of a union trying to justify its position without really caring about what its members really want, but I don’t know.
The Postal Strike
I do feel that postal strikes have somewhat lost their impact. Aside from businesses not getting a collection or a daily drop off, I’m not sure anybody notices when Royal Mail strike. Also, any impact it has on business that it might have is instantly mitigated by the fact that everyone knows about the strike and everyone knows things might take an extra couple of days and nobody really cares.
I actually find myself sympathizing for the workers on this one. Whenever they go on strike, the create a massive backlog of work for themselves, meaning they have to work twice as hard the following day. I remember our old postman coming into the office the day after a strike muttering to himself about how it was a stupid idea to strike and he didn’t want to and how he then had to work overtime.
In my woeful ignorance I’m not actually too sure why the post office are striking this time around. At a guess I would assume it’s the threat of massive job losses and huge reform or even the threat of re-nationalization, and in fairness if I was about to be nationalized into the public sector at the moment I’d strike as well, but I would be curious to know how not turning up to work really affects the potential job losses factor. I suppose the people that work extra hard the following day get a gold star or something.
The Writers Strike
This is a bit of an unusual one. I realise this happened quite a long time ago as well, but the reason I bring it up is because it’s had one of the most insidious slow-releasing affects of a strike I’ve ever seen. Rail strike: No trains for the day. Postal strike: No post for a couple of days. Writers Strike: all current seasons of TV shows come up twelve episodes short and the films being released in two years time will be awful. The reason I’ve noticed this is because I’ve recently seen two films of vastly contrasting quality; Star Trek which was written just before the strike, and Terminator Salvation, that was due to be written just after the strike started.
As far as an impact goes, a lot of people noticed that their favourite shows had suddenly finished off earlier than expected, or that their favourite oh-so-witty talk show host suddenly wasn’t so witty, and now we’re getting an echo of that impact in the cinema over this summer and probably through to Christmas. As for how effective this was at achieving their aims, I’m not sure. I know that pre-strike, writers were being denied vast sums of royalty money from DVD sales and the like, but I also know that you don’t become a writer in order to make your millions.
A final note
I don’t disagree with striking, nor do I disagree with standing up for yourself if you’re being abused in some way, but I’m just not sure that it works. Going back to themes that I’ve found earlier in this blog, it’s probably the case that I can’t see the bigger picture, and that even a small victory as a result of a strike can result in a large impact on a work force, but sometimes demands are just unrealistic. A threat of a strike also doesn’t appear to be much of a threat most of the time, more a passive inconvenience.
Additional Notes
I might write about these films later if I can muster the apathetic bile I felt for Terminator. In short, if you want to see both, but can only afford to see one through limitations of funds or time, see Star Trek, even if you hate Star Trek.
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
But how does it make money?
I’ve recently obtained some work as an extra. I’ve done some work as an extra before, and if you have made an extensive study of the film “Starter for 10”, you will have seen me a grand total of 3 times, but then, actually, if you have seen me and made a note of the superb performance that I gave, then I’ve been a lousy extra as they’re meant to melt into the background...
The thing I’ve noticed is how much time, effort, and money is being piled into this film even at such an early stage on a relatively inconsequential group of extras. I’ve already attended a fitting that was being run by several costume workers, the pay for the two days filming and the fitting itself is pretty good, and they include travel money as well. It’s also clear that there are a lot of extras that they need to work with.
My question therefore is how on earth do these damned things make money? If vast quantities of time and money are being spent on extras that are in essence untrained instructable monkeys like myself, what are they paying the camera crews, the sound departments, the writers, costume and makeup departments or the name actors, not to mention any post production that's done?
I realise that films can get fairly decent budgets and grants and can pull in a lot of money from the box office, but the scale of these productions seems gigantic, even on smaller low-budget films. I was staggered by the size of operation that was responsible for the 15 seconds of film that my 12 hour day on the set of “Starter for 10” turned into.
Finally, if you can make a decent argument for “films do make money actually”, then transfer the question to television. Clearly we’re on a smaller scale again, but I see the methods of making money through television even more intangible. Really, where does it come from? I can only assume the license fee comes to an enormous sum and revenue from advertising produces the equivalent for non-BBC counterparts.
Maybe I can’t think big. Maybe I can’t see the larger picture when it comes to film and television and revenue therein. Maybe I’m alone in thinking that somewhere, someone forgot to carry the 1 and is now sat billions of pounds in debt but doesn’t want to tell anyone because everyone enjoys film and television too much. Whatever the case actually is, from the minimal amount of time I’ve spent “working” on film sets, I’ve gained a huge appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into even the crappiest of productions.
Additional Notes:
Of course, having seen how much time effort and money goes into these things, it’s even harder to reconcile it with examples of where they just don’t get things right. Not enough films start with a script…
As a quick reccomendation, Starter for 10 is actually a very enjoyable film. A bit quirky, but great fun, and yes of course I'm biassed.
The thing I’ve noticed is how much time, effort, and money is being piled into this film even at such an early stage on a relatively inconsequential group of extras. I’ve already attended a fitting that was being run by several costume workers, the pay for the two days filming and the fitting itself is pretty good, and they include travel money as well. It’s also clear that there are a lot of extras that they need to work with.
My question therefore is how on earth do these damned things make money? If vast quantities of time and money are being spent on extras that are in essence untrained instructable monkeys like myself, what are they paying the camera crews, the sound departments, the writers, costume and makeup departments or the name actors, not to mention any post production that's done?
I realise that films can get fairly decent budgets and grants and can pull in a lot of money from the box office, but the scale of these productions seems gigantic, even on smaller low-budget films. I was staggered by the size of operation that was responsible for the 15 seconds of film that my 12 hour day on the set of “Starter for 10” turned into.
Finally, if you can make a decent argument for “films do make money actually”, then transfer the question to television. Clearly we’re on a smaller scale again, but I see the methods of making money through television even more intangible. Really, where does it come from? I can only assume the license fee comes to an enormous sum and revenue from advertising produces the equivalent for non-BBC counterparts.
Maybe I can’t think big. Maybe I can’t see the larger picture when it comes to film and television and revenue therein. Maybe I’m alone in thinking that somewhere, someone forgot to carry the 1 and is now sat billions of pounds in debt but doesn’t want to tell anyone because everyone enjoys film and television too much. Whatever the case actually is, from the minimal amount of time I’ve spent “working” on film sets, I’ve gained a huge appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into even the crappiest of productions.
Additional Notes:
Of course, having seen how much time effort and money goes into these things, it’s even harder to reconcile it with examples of where they just don’t get things right. Not enough films start with a script…
As a quick reccomendation, Starter for 10 is actually a very enjoyable film. A bit quirky, but great fun, and yes of course I'm biassed.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
10 things you could do after you Graduate
Below is a small list of things that you can do with your life once you’ve finished university. All of this is to be taken with the knowledge that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I haven’t tried half of these things, and I am constantly going through stages of melancholy with regards to my own post-graduation situation, never knowing if I’m doing the right thing anyway. What I’m trying to say is this is not concrete advice, more musings and suggestions. When I am rich powerful successful and 100% happy with life, I’ll get back to you with that actual advice.
“Fund Raising” for a “year”
This is either a means to an end or a desperate attempt to drag yourself at least part way out of debt before doing something else. I knew people at university who really desperately wanted to keep studying full time, but just couldn’t afford it, even with sponsorship and funding, so they worked for a year for the sole purpose of building funds. The only downside to this is that earning money can become incredibly addictive and you might find yourself spending more than you intended to save anyway, so this strategy is probably only really for those who are driven by something specific and those with bucket loads of will power. As far as I know, at least one of the people I knew from university managed to stick out the fund raising for a whole year and successfully earned enough to sustain their further studying.
Temping
Temping looks fun to me; you get given a job that lasts for a few days/weeks/months and then get given something new when that job is over. You can be a temp in practically any field you like the look of and there are agencies all over the place. I’m actually tempted to break away from my cosy employment and start temping sometimes. The downsides to temping are of course that it isn’t secure work, there’s no certainty that you won’t have a couple of weeks downtime between contracts, if you’re ill you don’t get paid, the temping agency tends to take a cut of your pay and I don’t know whether this is a downside or not, but the company you’re temping for might try and snap you up and sign you on to a full time contract.
Freelancing
If you’re a decent writer, or a budding photographer, or have some other skill that can be freelanced, you may find flexibility and a certain amount of success doing your own thing for various different people. I know one person who has had some moderate success with freelance technical writing, but she is very good and is focusing on a rather specific niche. I’m also aware of a few sites that people have had a small amount of revenue from as a result of selling photographs, but it’s nothing that you can really live on. The major downside of this appears to be the issue of being self employed; the amount of work you put in is proportionate to what you get out of it, but unfortunately, as a start-up, even working incredibly hard won’t get you very far. I think freelancing is probably something you can only realistically consider if you know that you’re really good at something or if you have a pre-built good reputation.
Self Employment
I’ve already briefly discussed this in a previous post but I’ll summarise briefly. On the plus side, the way to the real heights of success is by working for yourself. You get to be your own boss, set your own hours, work habits and code of conduct. On the negative side, the hours you work have to be all of them if you want to actually survive, there is no security in your job if you fall ill or want to take a holiday and you have to be unbelievably self motivated. Normally, people that become self employed have some sort of work experience first, understanding the industry they are working in or at the very least the pressures of a working week. I know of a couple of people who are self employed and for the most part they seem happy about it, but I know I for one am not ready for this.
A basic job to do whilst you get something better
This is pretty much what I went for. Again, I recently discussed how I don’t know how or why I’m still here after two years, much less if I should be, but I decided that some employment was better than nothing whilst I looked for something more interesting. This is of course right. The one time in my life that I have been completely and utterly down in the dumps was when I was doing absolutely nothing and pretending I was making all the efforts in the world to find work, but be very careful in finding a job just to tie you over; If you lose sight of things, you could find yourself there forever. Whereas this undoubtedly has its merits, it might not be what you really want.
Visit a Recruitment agency
Similar to a basic temporary job, visiting a recruitment agency might give you some ideas and might help you find something you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. The one major downside of this is that recruitment consultants rarely have your best interests at heart. For every individual they get into employment, they get a rather hefty bonus, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself being bundled into something wholly inappropriate by some inept bonus-crazed recruiter. On the other hand, with this in mind, maybe going into recruitment wouldn’t be a bad idea…
Internship / Graduate Scheme
For those of you with relevant degrees and organisational skills, you could register yourself and get accepted onto some kind of scheme for graduates or an internship with promises of greater things in the future. Any sort of graduate training scheme from a big company will be highly beneficial, with downsides being potentially very long working hours, but if that’s not a problem, then maybe this is worth a shot.
Career path
Maybe you’re one of those people that, sickeningly enough, know what they want to do and have done since they were five years old. If so, you are probably aware of the particular road you need to start trudging down. The major downside to this is probably only that you might feel devastated if you discover half way down that it just isn’t for you. I know this is what will happen to me whenever I try and stick something out for any length of time. Although I’ll make it to the end, I’ll be bored for the last half at least.
More Studying
I wouldn’t do this, but some people really really like what they studied and like studying it even more. If this is you as well, maybe a masters degree isn’t such a bad idea. Sure, it’ll put you further into debt, and the work is much harder than a bachelors, but if you’re a true academic and your heart is in it, then good for you. Really, I’m being a little facetious here, but I know people who have done this and regretted it, and I know people who have done this or are about to do this that will get loads out of it. I think the trick is to not kid yourself into thinking going back to university will solve all of your troubles.
Even More Studying
If you’re really good and popular with your university, you could always apply to do a PHD. Weirdly enough, I can see more point to this than a masters degree. This is really crossing the line into the parallel career path of the academic, and cementing yourself as a leading mind in your field. Sort of. The idea and sentiment is there anyway, and it’s a big step to go from learning and studying a subject, to teaching and researching a subject. I’d never be able to pull this off due to my scatterbrain inconsistency and inability to keep going with anything, but again, for some people this is the perfect choice.
If you have any additional or any better suggestions, I’d love to hear them, if only to actually consider them for myself.
Additional Notes:
At the age of 5, I think I wanted to be an inventor, closely followed by an astronaut, followed by an author. I also remember saying that I “wouldn’t mind going into soliciting”, thinking that was how you said “becoming a lawyer”. Either I was confused or making my very first sarcastic joke about the legal profession.
“Fund Raising” for a “year”
This is either a means to an end or a desperate attempt to drag yourself at least part way out of debt before doing something else. I knew people at university who really desperately wanted to keep studying full time, but just couldn’t afford it, even with sponsorship and funding, so they worked for a year for the sole purpose of building funds. The only downside to this is that earning money can become incredibly addictive and you might find yourself spending more than you intended to save anyway, so this strategy is probably only really for those who are driven by something specific and those with bucket loads of will power. As far as I know, at least one of the people I knew from university managed to stick out the fund raising for a whole year and successfully earned enough to sustain their further studying.
Temping
Temping looks fun to me; you get given a job that lasts for a few days/weeks/months and then get given something new when that job is over. You can be a temp in practically any field you like the look of and there are agencies all over the place. I’m actually tempted to break away from my cosy employment and start temping sometimes. The downsides to temping are of course that it isn’t secure work, there’s no certainty that you won’t have a couple of weeks downtime between contracts, if you’re ill you don’t get paid, the temping agency tends to take a cut of your pay and I don’t know whether this is a downside or not, but the company you’re temping for might try and snap you up and sign you on to a full time contract.
Freelancing
If you’re a decent writer, or a budding photographer, or have some other skill that can be freelanced, you may find flexibility and a certain amount of success doing your own thing for various different people. I know one person who has had some moderate success with freelance technical writing, but she is very good and is focusing on a rather specific niche. I’m also aware of a few sites that people have had a small amount of revenue from as a result of selling photographs, but it’s nothing that you can really live on. The major downside of this appears to be the issue of being self employed; the amount of work you put in is proportionate to what you get out of it, but unfortunately, as a start-up, even working incredibly hard won’t get you very far. I think freelancing is probably something you can only realistically consider if you know that you’re really good at something or if you have a pre-built good reputation.
Self Employment
I’ve already briefly discussed this in a previous post but I’ll summarise briefly. On the plus side, the way to the real heights of success is by working for yourself. You get to be your own boss, set your own hours, work habits and code of conduct. On the negative side, the hours you work have to be all of them if you want to actually survive, there is no security in your job if you fall ill or want to take a holiday and you have to be unbelievably self motivated. Normally, people that become self employed have some sort of work experience first, understanding the industry they are working in or at the very least the pressures of a working week. I know of a couple of people who are self employed and for the most part they seem happy about it, but I know I for one am not ready for this.
A basic job to do whilst you get something better
This is pretty much what I went for. Again, I recently discussed how I don’t know how or why I’m still here after two years, much less if I should be, but I decided that some employment was better than nothing whilst I looked for something more interesting. This is of course right. The one time in my life that I have been completely and utterly down in the dumps was when I was doing absolutely nothing and pretending I was making all the efforts in the world to find work, but be very careful in finding a job just to tie you over; If you lose sight of things, you could find yourself there forever. Whereas this undoubtedly has its merits, it might not be what you really want.
Visit a Recruitment agency
Similar to a basic temporary job, visiting a recruitment agency might give you some ideas and might help you find something you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. The one major downside of this is that recruitment consultants rarely have your best interests at heart. For every individual they get into employment, they get a rather hefty bonus, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself being bundled into something wholly inappropriate by some inept bonus-crazed recruiter. On the other hand, with this in mind, maybe going into recruitment wouldn’t be a bad idea…
Internship / Graduate Scheme
For those of you with relevant degrees and organisational skills, you could register yourself and get accepted onto some kind of scheme for graduates or an internship with promises of greater things in the future. Any sort of graduate training scheme from a big company will be highly beneficial, with downsides being potentially very long working hours, but if that’s not a problem, then maybe this is worth a shot.
Career path
Maybe you’re one of those people that, sickeningly enough, know what they want to do and have done since they were five years old. If so, you are probably aware of the particular road you need to start trudging down. The major downside to this is probably only that you might feel devastated if you discover half way down that it just isn’t for you. I know this is what will happen to me whenever I try and stick something out for any length of time. Although I’ll make it to the end, I’ll be bored for the last half at least.
More Studying
I wouldn’t do this, but some people really really like what they studied and like studying it even more. If this is you as well, maybe a masters degree isn’t such a bad idea. Sure, it’ll put you further into debt, and the work is much harder than a bachelors, but if you’re a true academic and your heart is in it, then good for you. Really, I’m being a little facetious here, but I know people who have done this and regretted it, and I know people who have done this or are about to do this that will get loads out of it. I think the trick is to not kid yourself into thinking going back to university will solve all of your troubles.
Even More Studying
If you’re really good and popular with your university, you could always apply to do a PHD. Weirdly enough, I can see more point to this than a masters degree. This is really crossing the line into the parallel career path of the academic, and cementing yourself as a leading mind in your field. Sort of. The idea and sentiment is there anyway, and it’s a big step to go from learning and studying a subject, to teaching and researching a subject. I’d never be able to pull this off due to my scatterbrain inconsistency and inability to keep going with anything, but again, for some people this is the perfect choice.
If you have any additional or any better suggestions, I’d love to hear them, if only to actually consider them for myself.
Additional Notes:
At the age of 5, I think I wanted to be an inventor, closely followed by an astronaut, followed by an author. I also remember saying that I “wouldn’t mind going into soliciting”, thinking that was how you said “becoming a lawyer”. Either I was confused or making my very first sarcastic joke about the legal profession.
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Should you Stay or Should you Go?
I Bumped into someone that started working here at the same time as me the other day and they were worried about whether they were doing the right thing by staying here and not looking for work somewhere else. I remember when we started working at the office that we both discussed how this was a temporary position for us and we’d only be here for a maximum of six months, and that actually, we’d probably leave before the probationary period of three months was up. This discussion was over two years ago now and we’re both still in the same company.
Is it a good idea to job hop, or is it a good idea to stay in one place for a prolonged period of time? I don’t really know what the answer is, so instead I can only really hypothesize on the advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages
Looking on the bright side first of all, the longer you work in one place, the more experience you build up. I have learnt a lot more in my job than I would have done had I left after six months. As a fresh graduate, one of the biggest problems you will find yourself up against is that most places want you to have experience in that particular line of work, which is of course ridiculous because as a fresh graduate, chances are you’re not going to have the right experience for anything. If you can build up some sort of transferable skill then that’s a good start. Any working experience is going to be good in the long run.
Not only do you build up experience, but you can also build up a reputation of loyalty. Loyalty in business is a tricky beast as you must remember that nobody is irreplaceable, but being able to show to a prospective employer that you are capable of sticking something out for any length of time is highly beneficial. I’ve heard it said that one of the biggest benefits of going to university in the first place is so that you can show somebody that you’re capable of sticking something out for at least three years.
From a more personal side of things, staying in the same place is comfortable. I wouldn’t be able to do my part time course or my various personal projects if I was constantly being kept on my toes at work, so knowing where I am and where I stand is incredibly helpful. However, this can work against you as well, as some future employers will see this as you not wanting to push yourself, and of course, from a human resources point of view, that’s a massive faux pas.
Disadvantages
Following directly on from being comfortable, let’s break in to the negative aspects to staying in one place. First of all there is the risk of stagnation. Staying in one place for a long time probably shows a lack of innovation. Although I’ve previously discussed whether or not this is a good thing, a lot of interviewers would undoubtedly tell you it is a very bad thing. Nobody wants to employ someone who just wants to coast through the week.
There is also a high risk of boredom and depression sinking in if you stay in one place for too long. I frequently catch myself thinking to myself “why am I still here?” and I actually don’t mind my job too much. It’s not exactly making the most of my skills, but I do occasionally have to think. If I were in a job that was just fractionally worse than this, I would very quickly find myself at rock bottom.
Attached to the boredom and depression, you may start thinking that you’re not capable of working anywhere else. Some people find it very difficult to adapt to being the “new guy” again and the longer you’ve been in one place, the very thought of having to learn to do something new can be incredibly daunting, especially if it’s something that requires that much more brain power anyway.
In Closing
I’ll finish on a final time-specific advantage, which will be specific again probably in another twenty years when we face the worst recession in history…again. At the moment, having a job is a bit of a rarity. I’m not denying that some people have hit hard times as a result of the recession and that some companies have genuinely fallen into economic troubles, but I’m betting some companies are using it as an excuse to cut off excess baggage and streamline their workforce a little, so if you have a job that you can keep hold of, it might be best to do so for the time being.
I think this discussion is another one of those annoying “sitting on the fence” moments I have and it’s also clear that I have plenty of excuses as to why I’m staying where I am and have done for so much longer than I intended. The only thing I can really say for certain is that some work is better than no work for purposes of finance and mental health, but that’s about it. Maybe it’s time to move on, but maybe it’s not.
Additional Notes:
I don't know why, and maybe it's just the way my oddball brain works, but whenever someone says the phrase "job hopping" to me, I always imagine one of those penguins with the odd tufts of hair on their heads. I know that they're not actually called job-hopper penguins, but my brain has still made the connection.
Throughout my blog posts you may have noticed an odd inconsistency with spelling between English and American English. I am having a prolonged war with the spell checker bundled with Microsoft office and I think I'm probably losing. The only reason I bring this up is because I have no idea if "hypothosize" is meant to have a "z" in it or not.
I'm going to stop making misinformed remarks about the global economic crisis, or whatever it is they're calling it now. Sooner or later it's going to get me into trouble and I'll find myself talking to somebody who actually knows a few things about economics.
Is it a good idea to job hop, or is it a good idea to stay in one place for a prolonged period of time? I don’t really know what the answer is, so instead I can only really hypothesize on the advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages
Looking on the bright side first of all, the longer you work in one place, the more experience you build up. I have learnt a lot more in my job than I would have done had I left after six months. As a fresh graduate, one of the biggest problems you will find yourself up against is that most places want you to have experience in that particular line of work, which is of course ridiculous because as a fresh graduate, chances are you’re not going to have the right experience for anything. If you can build up some sort of transferable skill then that’s a good start. Any working experience is going to be good in the long run.
Not only do you build up experience, but you can also build up a reputation of loyalty. Loyalty in business is a tricky beast as you must remember that nobody is irreplaceable, but being able to show to a prospective employer that you are capable of sticking something out for any length of time is highly beneficial. I’ve heard it said that one of the biggest benefits of going to university in the first place is so that you can show somebody that you’re capable of sticking something out for at least three years.
From a more personal side of things, staying in the same place is comfortable. I wouldn’t be able to do my part time course or my various personal projects if I was constantly being kept on my toes at work, so knowing where I am and where I stand is incredibly helpful. However, this can work against you as well, as some future employers will see this as you not wanting to push yourself, and of course, from a human resources point of view, that’s a massive faux pas.
Disadvantages
Following directly on from being comfortable, let’s break in to the negative aspects to staying in one place. First of all there is the risk of stagnation. Staying in one place for a long time probably shows a lack of innovation. Although I’ve previously discussed whether or not this is a good thing, a lot of interviewers would undoubtedly tell you it is a very bad thing. Nobody wants to employ someone who just wants to coast through the week.
There is also a high risk of boredom and depression sinking in if you stay in one place for too long. I frequently catch myself thinking to myself “why am I still here?” and I actually don’t mind my job too much. It’s not exactly making the most of my skills, but I do occasionally have to think. If I were in a job that was just fractionally worse than this, I would very quickly find myself at rock bottom.
Attached to the boredom and depression, you may start thinking that you’re not capable of working anywhere else. Some people find it very difficult to adapt to being the “new guy” again and the longer you’ve been in one place, the very thought of having to learn to do something new can be incredibly daunting, especially if it’s something that requires that much more brain power anyway.
In Closing
I’ll finish on a final time-specific advantage, which will be specific again probably in another twenty years when we face the worst recession in history…again. At the moment, having a job is a bit of a rarity. I’m not denying that some people have hit hard times as a result of the recession and that some companies have genuinely fallen into economic troubles, but I’m betting some companies are using it as an excuse to cut off excess baggage and streamline their workforce a little, so if you have a job that you can keep hold of, it might be best to do so for the time being.
I think this discussion is another one of those annoying “sitting on the fence” moments I have and it’s also clear that I have plenty of excuses as to why I’m staying where I am and have done for so much longer than I intended. The only thing I can really say for certain is that some work is better than no work for purposes of finance and mental health, but that’s about it. Maybe it’s time to move on, but maybe it’s not.
Additional Notes:
I don't know why, and maybe it's just the way my oddball brain works, but whenever someone says the phrase "job hopping" to me, I always imagine one of those penguins with the odd tufts of hair on their heads. I know that they're not actually called job-hopper penguins, but my brain has still made the connection.
Throughout my blog posts you may have noticed an odd inconsistency with spelling between English and American English. I am having a prolonged war with the spell checker bundled with Microsoft office and I think I'm probably losing. The only reason I bring this up is because I have no idea if "hypothosize" is meant to have a "z" in it or not.
I'm going to stop making misinformed remarks about the global economic crisis, or whatever it is they're calling it now. Sooner or later it's going to get me into trouble and I'll find myself talking to somebody who actually knows a few things about economics.
Friday, 30 January 2009
Did not think that through
I came into work an hour and a half early this morning to let some engineers in so that they could do some work on our network that required it to be taken offline. This was going to be done before anyone else turned up so as not to interupt anybody's work. I decided that whilst they were working, I could start doing my work and browse the internet a little.
Who else can spot the subtle flaw in my plan?
It's moments like this that I realise I could probably use a little more sleep.
Who else can spot the subtle flaw in my plan?
It's moments like this that I realise I could probably use a little more sleep.
Thursday, 29 January 2009
Adapting a Student Lifestyle to a Post-Student Lifestyle
One of the most jarring things about going from a student to a graduate for me was the change in lifestyle. The way that I’ve adapted my life to fit around work and a slightly stricter timetable isn’t perfect and I’m sure it could have been done better by someone with more willpower, but it works for the most part.
I am aware that not everyone had the same student experience as me. Some people took a much more serious approach to studying, some people locked themselves in a room eschewing all social contact, and some people threw themselves into every single student society possible leaving no room for pub-based socializing. This probably won’t apply to any of those lifestyles or make sense to you if you are one of those people. Also, this isn’t a way of me saying that I think you’re wrong, just that you've had a different student experience.
My advice to anyone who is trying to break out of a student routine that was similar to mine and into a more professional routine is as follows:
Find a balance. You should know what you can and can’t do, so don’t deny yourself a night out, but just know when is a good time to finish. Staying out all night will undoubtedly catch up with you if you do it too much. Of course, a lack of sleep affects different people in different ways, but it can also be subtle in the way it affects you. You may not realize that you’re not functioning as per usual or that it’s taking you an extra couple of seconds to answer questions that have been put to you.
Hangovers are not your friend. A recent medical report has said that there is no cure for a hangover, but I’m fairly confident that we all have ways of avoiding them that are moderately effective. The best one is of course to not drink, but that’s the boring sort of thing that a parent or a policeman might say, so I understand it's effectiveness and uselessness at the same time. Other methods involve lots of water, pre-emptive painkillers, fatty food, more drinking or staying up so late that the alcohol seamlessly processes itself. I probably wouldn’t recommend the last two for a subsequent release into a working environment.
Find a way of getting up in the morning that works for you. Lying in until the last minute and then having to rush around is no good. You can get away with turning up to a lecture disheveled and reeking of beer, but the slow-witted quick-to-comment colleagues you collect in an office might make mention of it in that irritating faux-sarcastic manner. Time to clean up a little in the mornings is pretty useful and not having to rush around puts you in a better and more mellow mood.
Eat Breakfast. This makes a massive difference. It’s not just subversive marketing by Kellogs that suggests breakfast is important, it really is a life-saver of a meal. Something to wake you up is also good and whereas I’m not going to tout a caffeine addiction, I have to say that I am a different person without that first cup of tea.
Last night reminded me of the way I used to live, as I went out with some friends and probably drank a bit too much. As I said before, I know not everyone has had the same student experience, but mine took me to a lot of pubs and bars at least three times a week. My nights out would also almost always involve very late nights that would occasionally continue once I got home through to four o clock in the morning. A couple of times it even got to the point whereby the sun was starting to come up and I decided that there probably wasn’t much point in sleeping anyway and I have now found out that after about thirty six hours, I involuntarily fall asleep.
This morning also reminded of the way I failed to adapt early on in my working life. I wouldn’t say that I have a hangover, but my brain does feel a little bit like over-cooked rice; all my thoughts are sticking together and several of them are welded to the bottom of my skull. I remember having this sort of feeling when I was still making sales over the phone and I remember it being deeply unpleasant. The morning after a night out is always enough to make you swear off never going again and for me, it has got to the point where I’ll start seriously thinking about how things will be in the morning whilst I’m still drinking. Maybe that’s a sign of adaptation, maybe it’s a sign of growing older and more responsible, I’m not sure.
Everyone is going to have different routines and capabilities. How far your life adapts or needs to adapt is also dependant on how lenient your job is, or even what your job is. I’m approaching this from the standard viewpoint of nine until five hours, but different hours will inevitably invite different lifestyles. It’s best to find what’s right for you and don’t be surprised if you don’t get it right first time. It will take a good few months at least to get used to the change.
Additional Notes:
Apparently, only being able to stay awake for thirty six hours makes me somewhat of a lightweight but it’s not something I necessarily want to work on. A recent adventure to Belgium and back on a six to eight hour coach journey in which one could only take short naps before being interrupted by an inconvenient ferry trip and all the complications surrounding boarding, traveling on and disembarking the said ferry taught me that I could probably stay up much longer if I cheated and took short naps throughout the day. The blog I mentioned a few days ago has an interesting article on Polyphasic sleep patterns that might be worth trying some day.
Ironically enough, I made more sales when I was hung over. My theory on this is that nobody really wants to buy insurance from someone who sounds overly polite and cheery, because they instantly think it’s some kind of fraud. Maybe they’ve read the KPMG profile of a Fraudster that I mentioned the other day, but regardless of the reason, more people seem to buy things from someone that sounds like their spirit has been crushed.
I am clearly bitter that my flat mates can have a lie in after a night like last night. The night was fantastic, as we went to my old university’s comedy night and saw a forgettable but passable female working class comic, whose jokes seemed entirely based around the fact that she was female, working class, or female and working class, we saw Dave Gorman who was unbelievably funny, and an up and coming group called “Pappy’s Fun Club” that was so unexpectedly brilliant that my cheeks still hurt from laughing. I even got a hug from compare Alex Zane who then looked as confused/drunk as I felt.
I was however sensible/boring and came home before going with the others to the student union bar that stayed open late. My main motivation behind that was because the union bar on a Wednesday night is normally full of drunken rugby players, who by eleven are predominantly naked. Nobody needs that.
I am aware that not everyone had the same student experience as me. Some people took a much more serious approach to studying, some people locked themselves in a room eschewing all social contact, and some people threw themselves into every single student society possible leaving no room for pub-based socializing. This probably won’t apply to any of those lifestyles or make sense to you if you are one of those people. Also, this isn’t a way of me saying that I think you’re wrong, just that you've had a different student experience.
My advice to anyone who is trying to break out of a student routine that was similar to mine and into a more professional routine is as follows:
Find a balance. You should know what you can and can’t do, so don’t deny yourself a night out, but just know when is a good time to finish. Staying out all night will undoubtedly catch up with you if you do it too much. Of course, a lack of sleep affects different people in different ways, but it can also be subtle in the way it affects you. You may not realize that you’re not functioning as per usual or that it’s taking you an extra couple of seconds to answer questions that have been put to you.
Hangovers are not your friend. A recent medical report has said that there is no cure for a hangover, but I’m fairly confident that we all have ways of avoiding them that are moderately effective. The best one is of course to not drink, but that’s the boring sort of thing that a parent or a policeman might say, so I understand it's effectiveness and uselessness at the same time. Other methods involve lots of water, pre-emptive painkillers, fatty food, more drinking or staying up so late that the alcohol seamlessly processes itself. I probably wouldn’t recommend the last two for a subsequent release into a working environment.
Find a way of getting up in the morning that works for you. Lying in until the last minute and then having to rush around is no good. You can get away with turning up to a lecture disheveled and reeking of beer, but the slow-witted quick-to-comment colleagues you collect in an office might make mention of it in that irritating faux-sarcastic manner. Time to clean up a little in the mornings is pretty useful and not having to rush around puts you in a better and more mellow mood.
Eat Breakfast. This makes a massive difference. It’s not just subversive marketing by Kellogs that suggests breakfast is important, it really is a life-saver of a meal. Something to wake you up is also good and whereas I’m not going to tout a caffeine addiction, I have to say that I am a different person without that first cup of tea.
Last night reminded me of the way I used to live, as I went out with some friends and probably drank a bit too much. As I said before, I know not everyone has had the same student experience, but mine took me to a lot of pubs and bars at least three times a week. My nights out would also almost always involve very late nights that would occasionally continue once I got home through to four o clock in the morning. A couple of times it even got to the point whereby the sun was starting to come up and I decided that there probably wasn’t much point in sleeping anyway and I have now found out that after about thirty six hours, I involuntarily fall asleep.
This morning also reminded of the way I failed to adapt early on in my working life. I wouldn’t say that I have a hangover, but my brain does feel a little bit like over-cooked rice; all my thoughts are sticking together and several of them are welded to the bottom of my skull. I remember having this sort of feeling when I was still making sales over the phone and I remember it being deeply unpleasant. The morning after a night out is always enough to make you swear off never going again and for me, it has got to the point where I’ll start seriously thinking about how things will be in the morning whilst I’m still drinking. Maybe that’s a sign of adaptation, maybe it’s a sign of growing older and more responsible, I’m not sure.
Everyone is going to have different routines and capabilities. How far your life adapts or needs to adapt is also dependant on how lenient your job is, or even what your job is. I’m approaching this from the standard viewpoint of nine until five hours, but different hours will inevitably invite different lifestyles. It’s best to find what’s right for you and don’t be surprised if you don’t get it right first time. It will take a good few months at least to get used to the change.
Additional Notes:
Apparently, only being able to stay awake for thirty six hours makes me somewhat of a lightweight but it’s not something I necessarily want to work on. A recent adventure to Belgium and back on a six to eight hour coach journey in which one could only take short naps before being interrupted by an inconvenient ferry trip and all the complications surrounding boarding, traveling on and disembarking the said ferry taught me that I could probably stay up much longer if I cheated and took short naps throughout the day. The blog I mentioned a few days ago has an interesting article on Polyphasic sleep patterns that might be worth trying some day.
Ironically enough, I made more sales when I was hung over. My theory on this is that nobody really wants to buy insurance from someone who sounds overly polite and cheery, because they instantly think it’s some kind of fraud. Maybe they’ve read the KPMG profile of a Fraudster that I mentioned the other day, but regardless of the reason, more people seem to buy things from someone that sounds like their spirit has been crushed.
I am clearly bitter that my flat mates can have a lie in after a night like last night. The night was fantastic, as we went to my old university’s comedy night and saw a forgettable but passable female working class comic, whose jokes seemed entirely based around the fact that she was female, working class, or female and working class, we saw Dave Gorman who was unbelievably funny, and an up and coming group called “Pappy’s Fun Club” that was so unexpectedly brilliant that my cheeks still hurt from laughing. I even got a hug from compare Alex Zane who then looked as confused/drunk as I felt.
I was however sensible/boring and came home before going with the others to the student union bar that stayed open late. My main motivation behind that was because the union bar on a Wednesday night is normally full of drunken rugby players, who by eleven are predominantly naked. Nobody needs that.
Friday, 23 January 2009
Getting Through Boring Commitments
We’ve all been stuck in situation where time appears to have actually started going in reverse. The following short tips can apply to pretty much anything, be it a board meeting, a tutorial or lecture for a much loathed subject, or even family commitments that you couldn’t think of a decent excuse to get out of in time.
1) Don’t watch the clock: This is my absolute number one rule to avoid time slowing down. Stop watching the time. A watched clock becomes insecure and stops ticking out of fear that you’re eyeballing it for making too much noise. I regularly glance at my watch thirty minutes into an hour long lecture only to find that the next thirty minutes feel like days.
2) Preparation: This is another one of those things where I find myself not practicing what I preach. A little preparation for whatever it is you’re about to go in to can go a long way. Even if it takes half an hour out of your schedule before hand, you will consider that time well spent once you’re able to use that preparation, as it will make the time fly past if you have a vague idea about what is going on.
3) Be interested: If you pretend to show an interest, you might inadvertently become interested and once you become interested you’ll probably uncover all sorts of new information that you wouldn’t have found otherwise that you would genuinely consider interesting anyway. You often get out of something what you put in and a positive attitude will normally yield positive results.
In my own experience, I have often had problems getting through Tutorials in an academic scene. These often take a topic from a lecture and force a discussion about the topic in a small group of about twenty people. This requires you to know the subject in order to participate in the session and the hour can turn into torture once it becomes apparent that nobody has done any of the required background reading. These sessions have traditionally been ones that I have eyeballed the clock into submission, attended unprepared, and have not been interested. Recently, I’ve been preparing more, I’ve not been watching the clock and I’ve been pretending to show an interest and miraculously enough, it’s worked and even the driest subjects have actually started becoming quite engaging. Even the law of Equity and Trusts has become at least partially interesting and Equity and Trust law is far from interesting.
These three little points are nothing earth shatteringly original, I realize that, but I actually first discovered that they work when I was asked to stand in for my boss on a management meeting. Management meetings are particularly dry affairs that managers tend to dread, as they have a tendency to run for over three hours, but I loved it and it went by remarkably quickly because I was prepared, interested and I didn’t watch the clock.
This again probably boils down to the idea of making the best of a bad situation. As tempting as it is to sit around whistling “always look on the bright side of life”, I realize it’s not all sunshine and optimism, but a little of the latter can go a long way.
Additional Notes:
Just a quick disclaimer to any family who may be reading this, by family commitments you can’t get out of, I’m certainly not relating any personal experience there, nor am I suggesting that it was an excuse that I used to get out of your last barbeque; the dog really had eaten my shoes. Honest.
I also fall apart in tutorials because I can’t bear awkward silences, which normally results in me trying to answer something that I have absolutely no knowledge about, thus humiliating myself and turning the awkward silence into an awkward conversation, which is only a minor improvement.
Admittedly, I loved the management meeting because I could believe for three hours that I was important and had a higher salary than I actually do. It’s always good to day dream.
1) Don’t watch the clock: This is my absolute number one rule to avoid time slowing down. Stop watching the time. A watched clock becomes insecure and stops ticking out of fear that you’re eyeballing it for making too much noise. I regularly glance at my watch thirty minutes into an hour long lecture only to find that the next thirty minutes feel like days.
2) Preparation: This is another one of those things where I find myself not practicing what I preach. A little preparation for whatever it is you’re about to go in to can go a long way. Even if it takes half an hour out of your schedule before hand, you will consider that time well spent once you’re able to use that preparation, as it will make the time fly past if you have a vague idea about what is going on.
3) Be interested: If you pretend to show an interest, you might inadvertently become interested and once you become interested you’ll probably uncover all sorts of new information that you wouldn’t have found otherwise that you would genuinely consider interesting anyway. You often get out of something what you put in and a positive attitude will normally yield positive results.
In my own experience, I have often had problems getting through Tutorials in an academic scene. These often take a topic from a lecture and force a discussion about the topic in a small group of about twenty people. This requires you to know the subject in order to participate in the session and the hour can turn into torture once it becomes apparent that nobody has done any of the required background reading. These sessions have traditionally been ones that I have eyeballed the clock into submission, attended unprepared, and have not been interested. Recently, I’ve been preparing more, I’ve not been watching the clock and I’ve been pretending to show an interest and miraculously enough, it’s worked and even the driest subjects have actually started becoming quite engaging. Even the law of Equity and Trusts has become at least partially interesting and Equity and Trust law is far from interesting.
These three little points are nothing earth shatteringly original, I realize that, but I actually first discovered that they work when I was asked to stand in for my boss on a management meeting. Management meetings are particularly dry affairs that managers tend to dread, as they have a tendency to run for over three hours, but I loved it and it went by remarkably quickly because I was prepared, interested and I didn’t watch the clock.
This again probably boils down to the idea of making the best of a bad situation. As tempting as it is to sit around whistling “always look on the bright side of life”, I realize it’s not all sunshine and optimism, but a little of the latter can go a long way.
Additional Notes:
Just a quick disclaimer to any family who may be reading this, by family commitments you can’t get out of, I’m certainly not relating any personal experience there, nor am I suggesting that it was an excuse that I used to get out of your last barbeque; the dog really had eaten my shoes. Honest.
I also fall apart in tutorials because I can’t bear awkward silences, which normally results in me trying to answer something that I have absolutely no knowledge about, thus humiliating myself and turning the awkward silence into an awkward conversation, which is only a minor improvement.
Admittedly, I loved the management meeting because I could believe for three hours that I was important and had a higher salary than I actually do. It’s always good to day dream.
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Making the Best of a Bad Situation
I was directed to this article this morning about how a French checkout girl called Anna Sam has gone on to write a best seller based on her eight years experience working behind a till in a supermarket. This has been pulled together from the blog that Anna Sam has been keeping as a vent for various frustrations provided by the nature of the job and above all else the customers. If you speak French, the blog can be read here.
The article makes for an interesting read, and I wouldn’t mind reading the book. This is a fantastic example of someone making the best of a bad situation and finding an escape route to bigger and more exciting things. There’s nothing wrong with being a checkout worker, we all need them and the queues wouldn’t move very fast without them, but there is something a lot more exciting about what Anna Sam has managed to achieve.
If everyone kept and published a record of their daily lives, there would be a huge amount of poorly written and boring text out there, but there would also be the occasional shining example of a genuinely interesting, amusing and maybe enlightening piece of literature. If you’re bored, or depressed about your situation, why not write about it and see if it can transform into something interesting?
Additional Notes:
Reading about the content of her book, this confirms a suspicion that I’ve had for a long time that the checkout workers at my local supermarket are judging me based on the things that I buy. Seeing as the supermarket is so close, I use it as my own personal fridge, because if I buy things in bulk, I am the proverbial squirrel that can’t remember where he’s buried his winter supplies and I forget I have food whilst it slowly rots in the fridge. As a result, the combinations of food that I buy are by their very nature quite odd. A bunch of bananas, a bag of rice and branston pickle, for example, raises silent questions as to exactly what it is I’m planning to cook. There’s also the more direct judgment when I bring a crate of beer and a packet of super noodles and nothing else to the check out to be confronted with the chatty one who asks “oh, is you’re girlfriend away tonight?”
The article makes for an interesting read, and I wouldn’t mind reading the book. This is a fantastic example of someone making the best of a bad situation and finding an escape route to bigger and more exciting things. There’s nothing wrong with being a checkout worker, we all need them and the queues wouldn’t move very fast without them, but there is something a lot more exciting about what Anna Sam has managed to achieve.
If everyone kept and published a record of their daily lives, there would be a huge amount of poorly written and boring text out there, but there would also be the occasional shining example of a genuinely interesting, amusing and maybe enlightening piece of literature. If you’re bored, or depressed about your situation, why not write about it and see if it can transform into something interesting?
Additional Notes:
Reading about the content of her book, this confirms a suspicion that I’ve had for a long time that the checkout workers at my local supermarket are judging me based on the things that I buy. Seeing as the supermarket is so close, I use it as my own personal fridge, because if I buy things in bulk, I am the proverbial squirrel that can’t remember where he’s buried his winter supplies and I forget I have food whilst it slowly rots in the fridge. As a result, the combinations of food that I buy are by their very nature quite odd. A bunch of bananas, a bag of rice and branston pickle, for example, raises silent questions as to exactly what it is I’m planning to cook. There’s also the more direct judgment when I bring a crate of beer and a packet of super noodles and nothing else to the check out to be confronted with the chatty one who asks “oh, is you’re girlfriend away tonight?”
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Making Use of Wasted Time with Computer Games
There’s a fantastic cartoon from Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” that shows two adoring parents proudly watching their son play computer games and imagining job adverts in the future that require expert Mario players with hours and hours of video game experience. The world we live in today might be coming closer to that, but it’s still a long way off, however, computer games and employment are starting to nod to each other in vague recognition as they pass each other in the street. This article that I’ve stumbled upon is an interesting look at how principles from the World of Warcraft can be used to improve innovation in the work place. It’s a good principle and I’ve already seen that you can take elements of a game to make your work easier to do and talked about it in an earlier post about how I made a “quest log” of all the things that I had to do .
This made me wonder if I haven’t been wasting my time as much as I think by playing so many computer games in my spare time. There are undeniably some benefits that I have picked up as a result of hours and hours of my spare time sunk in to the digital addiction. However, just as a quick disclaimer, a lot of gaming is still a massive waste of time. If you already play games then this is the silver lining to your stormy cloud, but if you don’t, I wouldn’t recommend starting a forty-hour-a-week gaming habit in an attempt to gain some small perceived benefit. If you want to try, that’s great, but just remember, all things in moderation . Additionally, if you are going for a job interview or are talking to a particularly quick-to-judge boss, I wouldn’t recommend babbling on about how playing your level 78 Gnome Warlock has given you team management skills. Most of the time when people hear “spends a lot of time playing computer games” they still hear “wastes a lot of time” and in many ways they are right.
What follows is a list of skills that I think you can gain from games. For the purposes of the following, I’m really talking about the World of Warcraft, but some of the ideas will apply to other games as well. Feel free to skip to the end if you just want to know where I’m going with this
Mathematics
Undeniably, there is a lot of maths involved in games. Most of the time it’s hidden beneath the surface and obscured by the game engine, but for games like Warcraft, it’s very much at the forefront of being effective in the game. Balancing all of the numbers that go in to your character can drive people obsessive and is one of the driving forces behind acquiring more stuff and spending more time playing. Keeping track of which items stack on to which skills, and which skills give you a percentage bonus to which actions and all the associated intricacies that go with it frequently baffle me, but I’ve found a greater confidence in numbers and throwing them around since I’ve started playing the game. At the same time, this isn’t exactly calculus.
Problem Solving
Especially in the later part of Warcraft, some of the group activities require some very specific actions to get around certain problems. The earlier quests do also challenge you to a certain extent, but this rarely extends beyond some ambiguous directions and map reading problems which has frequently highlighted that I often muddle East and West. The only caveat that I’ll throw in here is that most of the problems are already solved for you. You often get directed by members of your group who have done it before in how to play, or told to go and look at the tactics filmed and posted on YouTube. I actually find this very frustrating, but the problem solving is still there on some level.
Team Work
Running on from the problem solving is the more obvious element of team work. Even being told how to do something, it takes a certain amount of skill and co-ordination to pull things off. Developing the efficiency of a team and finding out what works and what doesn’t work is easy to do in Warcraft and happens seamlessly the more you form groups with the same people. You could however argue that this is building the wrong kind of team work to transfer to the real world, unless you end up working somewhere that kills trolls as part of their business.
Social Skills and Team Management
Even if you successfully dismiss the problem solving and teamwork points, if you have gotten in to any of the social aspects of Warcraft, you can not deny that you will be building experience in resource management and efficient allocation of team members, not to mention a healthy amount of dispute resolution. Getting a group to work together at all is an effort, but getting them to work well together is almost a full time job in itself, and some people become very successful with social skills through Warcraft and gain a massive amount of confidence. If nothing else, the game can teach you a lot about people that you might not otherwise know.
Time Management
The very nature of Warcraft is the attainment of goals. Balancing what to do and where to go and working out how to do it effectively has pretty much become the game for me. I like planning our little expeditions that get as much done in as short an amount of time as possible and it’s made me very good at identifying what is and isn’t a good use of my time. This will sooner or later break in to real life, and for all I know, I’m using these skills already. I think in some ways this goes back to the “all things in moderation” argument as well; I’m very conscious of the fact that I could easily spend far too much time playing this game, so I try and get as much out of it as quickly as possible. As a result I also despise waiting around whilst other people mess about wasting time trying to get ready.
Hand Eye Co-ordination
This is probably pushing it, but I’ve often heard it argued that gaming greatly improves hand eye co-ordination. From personal experience, this is a lie. I still appear to have two left hands, which is a problem as I’m right handed, and I can’t help feeling you’re more likely to get carpal tunnel syndrome or RSI before any positive benefits.
Other Games of Note
This made me wonder if I haven’t been wasting my time as much as I think by playing so many computer games in my spare time. There are undeniably some benefits that I have picked up as a result of hours and hours of my spare time sunk in to the digital addiction. However, just as a quick disclaimer, a lot of gaming is still a massive waste of time. If you already play games then this is the silver lining to your stormy cloud, but if you don’t, I wouldn’t recommend starting a forty-hour-a-week gaming habit in an attempt to gain some small perceived benefit. If you want to try, that’s great, but just remember, all things in moderation . Additionally, if you are going for a job interview or are talking to a particularly quick-to-judge boss, I wouldn’t recommend babbling on about how playing your level 78 Gnome Warlock has given you team management skills. Most of the time when people hear “spends a lot of time playing computer games” they still hear “wastes a lot of time” and in many ways they are right.
What follows is a list of skills that I think you can gain from games. For the purposes of the following, I’m really talking about the World of Warcraft, but some of the ideas will apply to other games as well. Feel free to skip to the end if you just want to know where I’m going with this
Mathematics
Undeniably, there is a lot of maths involved in games. Most of the time it’s hidden beneath the surface and obscured by the game engine, but for games like Warcraft, it’s very much at the forefront of being effective in the game. Balancing all of the numbers that go in to your character can drive people obsessive and is one of the driving forces behind acquiring more stuff and spending more time playing. Keeping track of which items stack on to which skills, and which skills give you a percentage bonus to which actions and all the associated intricacies that go with it frequently baffle me, but I’ve found a greater confidence in numbers and throwing them around since I’ve started playing the game. At the same time, this isn’t exactly calculus.
Problem Solving
Especially in the later part of Warcraft, some of the group activities require some very specific actions to get around certain problems. The earlier quests do also challenge you to a certain extent, but this rarely extends beyond some ambiguous directions and map reading problems which has frequently highlighted that I often muddle East and West. The only caveat that I’ll throw in here is that most of the problems are already solved for you. You often get directed by members of your group who have done it before in how to play, or told to go and look at the tactics filmed and posted on YouTube. I actually find this very frustrating, but the problem solving is still there on some level.
Team Work
Running on from the problem solving is the more obvious element of team work. Even being told how to do something, it takes a certain amount of skill and co-ordination to pull things off. Developing the efficiency of a team and finding out what works and what doesn’t work is easy to do in Warcraft and happens seamlessly the more you form groups with the same people. You could however argue that this is building the wrong kind of team work to transfer to the real world, unless you end up working somewhere that kills trolls as part of their business.
Social Skills and Team Management
Even if you successfully dismiss the problem solving and teamwork points, if you have gotten in to any of the social aspects of Warcraft, you can not deny that you will be building experience in resource management and efficient allocation of team members, not to mention a healthy amount of dispute resolution. Getting a group to work together at all is an effort, but getting them to work well together is almost a full time job in itself, and some people become very successful with social skills through Warcraft and gain a massive amount of confidence. If nothing else, the game can teach you a lot about people that you might not otherwise know.
Time Management
The very nature of Warcraft is the attainment of goals. Balancing what to do and where to go and working out how to do it effectively has pretty much become the game for me. I like planning our little expeditions that get as much done in as short an amount of time as possible and it’s made me very good at identifying what is and isn’t a good use of my time. This will sooner or later break in to real life, and for all I know, I’m using these skills already. I think in some ways this goes back to the “all things in moderation” argument as well; I’m very conscious of the fact that I could easily spend far too much time playing this game, so I try and get as much out of it as quickly as possible. As a result I also despise waiting around whilst other people mess about wasting time trying to get ready.
Hand Eye Co-ordination
This is probably pushing it, but I’ve often heard it argued that gaming greatly improves hand eye co-ordination. From personal experience, this is a lie. I still appear to have two left hands, which is a problem as I’m right handed, and I can’t help feeling you’re more likely to get carpal tunnel syndrome or RSI before any positive benefits.
Other Games of Note
As I’ve said, above I’m really talking about World of Warcraft and you can not apply these principles to all games because of the variable nature of differing gameplay. There are a few other examples of note however:
- Eve Online is fantastic for the mathematics side of things and the game essentially trains you to become a stock broker or business manager.
- Guild Wars was very good for the Team Work and Social Skills side of things in terms of finding the right skills, people and combinations to get through things.
- Finally, something like LittleBigPlanet I have to mention for the sheer creativity of the Problem Solving included in the core gameplay.
Conclusion
Maybe it’s not that one can learn skills through a game, but maybe it’s that games have become so much more like work. The elements I’ve discussed above could easily be seen as an emulation of work activities rather than anything more abstract. Perhaps it’s our very nature to want to work and make efforts towards a larger goal; Warcraft is after all a hugely popular game with somewhere in the region of 11 million players, if one is to believe the official Blizzard figures. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that anything you do in life is bound to teach you something that you can transfer to something else and in gaming, there may be more than you think. In nature, young predatory mammals play-fight with each other to teach themselves to hunt, so maybe we are doing the same with our games.
Additional Notes:
I have a problem with my lefts and rights, my easts and wests, I also whilst playing occasionally miss enormous landmarks and walk off cliffs because I’m not looking where I’m going. This is a true and accurate representation of my directional skills in real life. I once took my girlfriend when I first met her to see Buckingham Palace and couldn’t find it. Buckingham Palace, as you probably realise, is not exactly inconspicuous, especially as it has a road leading up to it that is specifically designed so that you could land a plane on it.
Thinking about team work, it might also make management uncomfortable if you say that you are “used to working with a group of people to take down bosses”.
Monday, 19 January 2009
The Fallacy of University
I don’t regret going to university, but I would have done if the only thing I got out of it was of an academic nature. Through the use of my psychic intuition, I get the impression that a lot of people that have been to university probably feel the same way.
The very nature of academia can seem shallow to those not entirely immersed in the student ethos. I got through university and was spat out the other side with a good degree, but during the process, I got by on the bare minimum. I saw people killing themselves with stress, worry and sleep deprivation in order to keep up with the recommended reading and ending up with the same grade as me. However, without that wider reading, the academic experience is undeniably going to be a shallow one and for me, all it became was a series of skin-deep essays and exams. I didn’t do spectacularly well in any of them, but I did well enough to get the same classifications as those of my colleagues who had eaten drank and slept the world of Ancient History for the full three years. The frustrating thing is that I was a bad student in reality but on paper I was one of the best. The call for decrying the numerical grading systems of the academic world is a subject for another day, but how can someone really assess a person’s mastery over the discipline of History or any of the more subjective arts subjects with a score between one and one hundred?
The academic side of things is obviously not the only reason that people go to university, even if it should be the main reason. There are a lot of good things that one can get out of the university experience. It is a time when you are among several like minded individuals who you should get along with, societies could lend weight to an existing interest or allow you to try out new things that could become valuable to you later in life, and the experience of living away from home but still retaining a certain degree of a safety net is invaluable. I owe my independent lifestyle that I have at the moment to being able to face the real world one step at a time through the university experience and then put it all together after graduation.
I find it a real shame that there is such a massive drive to get everyone going to university. This isn’t sour grapes in the sense that I feel the experience should be more exclusive, but I feel that it shouldn’t be mandatory. We all know people that have gone to university that are either not capable of meaningful studying or just wouldn’t get anything out of it and so many people get pushed into it by schools, parents and the government when what they would really benefit from is starting work or learning a different kind of skill. I’m sure a lot of school leavers end up going to university because they feel they have to and that they would be a failure if they didn’t.
I have a friend that joined the police instead of going to university. As it happens, this friend was more than capable of university level of study, but he wouldn’t have gotten as much out of it as he has done with the police force, because he is perfectly suited to the job; He has good presence and charisma, he’s remarkably good with people, he’s strong and confident and he has enough intelligence to understand what’s going on. If we had more police officers like him, the country would be a much safer place. If more people followed paths that they were more suited to, we would have a country that would make a lot more sense.
If you don’t feel you got what you wanted to out of university, it’s not too late to follow your dreams and expectations. It may be time to take up part time studying as I so strongly advocate (see my ramblings on the matter here) but for me, I’m going to be happy with the fact that I did at least get something out of it and wasn’t purely there because I thought I had to be. I know people who want to get into radio and so spent their university life running the studio, gaining a vast amount of knowledge and huge number of contacts, I know people who wanted to get into journalism that spent their time snooping around the university digging up a surprising amount of dirt and I know people that wasted their time and didn’t get anything out of their three years, but it doesn’t matter what you have done, it’s what you do with it that will count.
Any graduate out there may think that they’re at a significant advantage to non-graduates in the job market. In my albeit limited experience, I would argue that the playing field is a lot more level than you may think.
Additional Notes:
Academia should be the driving force behind going to university, but I did meet someone who never intended to study in the first place. He attended the first year of his university six times, using it as some kind of expensive holiday reosrt, before ending up having to work twelve hour shifts without holidays or weekends for the following four years in order to pull himself out of debt. The interesting thing is that he didn’t regret a second of it.
I actually had a radio show at university as well. It was great fun to do but just occasionally you would find yourself suddenly realizing that you were sat in a small dingy basement room, listening to music and talking to yourself.
The very nature of academia can seem shallow to those not entirely immersed in the student ethos. I got through university and was spat out the other side with a good degree, but during the process, I got by on the bare minimum. I saw people killing themselves with stress, worry and sleep deprivation in order to keep up with the recommended reading and ending up with the same grade as me. However, without that wider reading, the academic experience is undeniably going to be a shallow one and for me, all it became was a series of skin-deep essays and exams. I didn’t do spectacularly well in any of them, but I did well enough to get the same classifications as those of my colleagues who had eaten drank and slept the world of Ancient History for the full three years. The frustrating thing is that I was a bad student in reality but on paper I was one of the best. The call for decrying the numerical grading systems of the academic world is a subject for another day, but how can someone really assess a person’s mastery over the discipline of History or any of the more subjective arts subjects with a score between one and one hundred?
The academic side of things is obviously not the only reason that people go to university, even if it should be the main reason. There are a lot of good things that one can get out of the university experience. It is a time when you are among several like minded individuals who you should get along with, societies could lend weight to an existing interest or allow you to try out new things that could become valuable to you later in life, and the experience of living away from home but still retaining a certain degree of a safety net is invaluable. I owe my independent lifestyle that I have at the moment to being able to face the real world one step at a time through the university experience and then put it all together after graduation.
I find it a real shame that there is such a massive drive to get everyone going to university. This isn’t sour grapes in the sense that I feel the experience should be more exclusive, but I feel that it shouldn’t be mandatory. We all know people that have gone to university that are either not capable of meaningful studying or just wouldn’t get anything out of it and so many people get pushed into it by schools, parents and the government when what they would really benefit from is starting work or learning a different kind of skill. I’m sure a lot of school leavers end up going to university because they feel they have to and that they would be a failure if they didn’t.
I have a friend that joined the police instead of going to university. As it happens, this friend was more than capable of university level of study, but he wouldn’t have gotten as much out of it as he has done with the police force, because he is perfectly suited to the job; He has good presence and charisma, he’s remarkably good with people, he’s strong and confident and he has enough intelligence to understand what’s going on. If we had more police officers like him, the country would be a much safer place. If more people followed paths that they were more suited to, we would have a country that would make a lot more sense.
If you don’t feel you got what you wanted to out of university, it’s not too late to follow your dreams and expectations. It may be time to take up part time studying as I so strongly advocate (see my ramblings on the matter here) but for me, I’m going to be happy with the fact that I did at least get something out of it and wasn’t purely there because I thought I had to be. I know people who want to get into radio and so spent their university life running the studio, gaining a vast amount of knowledge and huge number of contacts, I know people who wanted to get into journalism that spent their time snooping around the university digging up a surprising amount of dirt and I know people that wasted their time and didn’t get anything out of their three years, but it doesn’t matter what you have done, it’s what you do with it that will count.
Any graduate out there may think that they’re at a significant advantage to non-graduates in the job market. In my albeit limited experience, I would argue that the playing field is a lot more level than you may think.
Additional Notes:
Academia should be the driving force behind going to university, but I did meet someone who never intended to study in the first place. He attended the first year of his university six times, using it as some kind of expensive holiday reosrt, before ending up having to work twelve hour shifts without holidays or weekends for the following four years in order to pull himself out of debt. The interesting thing is that he didn’t regret a second of it.
I actually had a radio show at university as well. It was great fun to do but just occasionally you would find yourself suddenly realizing that you were sat in a small dingy basement room, listening to music and talking to yourself.
Friday, 16 January 2009
The Benefits of Part Time Studying for Graduates
Studying is good for your level of happiness. This is probably because it is constantly challenging your definition of happy as you wade through countless lectures, tutorials and deadlines that you thought you had put to rest at your graduation ceremony, but it is still good for your level of happiness. Let me climb back onto my soapbox and tell you why it is a good idea for you to study again alongside a day job.
Why should you?
Starting with the very obvious and easy to understand reason first, it will give you new skills, new experiences and a new qualification. Even at the very least, it will give you one of those three. Some career paths may open up to you once you’ve done a little bit of extra studying, including some that may not be initially obvious, and you may find that employers will see extra training that you’ve done, or are in the process of doing, after your graduation and think “hey, this one isn’t lazy! Let’s talk to him and find out what he’s all about”. I don’t totally agree with doing things for your CV alone, but it is undoubtedly going to be a pleasant side effect of studying.
Secondly, I always find, the more I have to do, the more I get done. Part time studying forces you to do a certain amount of things in your spare time, which means that the remaining spare time you have is a lot more focused. You’re much less likely to spend an unfulfilling evening watching rubbish that you dislike on television if those three hours have become more precious to you and your spare time slightly more scarcely available.
The main motivation behind my part time studying was for the sake of my sanity. My brain wasn’t getting much of a work out during the day and there wasn’t much to occupy my mind in the evening either, as I would inevitably find myself burnt out after work anyway and vegetate in front of the TV or a computer. This is similar to the point above, in that studying gives you something to focus on and refines any other spare time into spare time that you use as opposed to waste. You might have also found yourself in a situation whereby every day feels like a grind and that your job covers the same ground a lot. I quite like my job, but that doesn’t stop it from being a repetitive mind-masher that eventually turns your brain to sludge.
Finally, studying part time is good for the ego. It means that you’re able to say when people ask that you work in x company by day, but by night, you study to become a lawyer/doctor/IT consultant/superhero. This will, if you are anything like me, make you feel better and reaffirm to yourself that you are going somewhere and not stuck in a dead end or boring job. Whereas you shouldn’t boast, you should allow yourself to at least take a little pride in your efforts.
What should you do?
You should do something that you enjoy. I absolutely loath that piece of advice, so allow me to clarify: You should do something that interests you and that you can see yourself sticking to, or you should do something that you’ve always wanted to try. Before going to university, everyone used to say to me that you should do something that you enjoy, but really, I don’t know how you’re meant to know what you will enjoy once you get to university. I enjoyed Music, English literature and Theatre Studies at the time, but I knew that three years of studying would kill either one of them for me and at the same time I knew I enjoyed History and suspected that this would be more likely to survive three years of studying, hopefully allowing me to enjoy it even more over time. As it turned out, I was wrong and three years of studying smashed any positive feelings I had for History into kindling instead. The point is that I thought I would enjoy History and it turned out that I didn’t, and there is no way that anyone could have told me that would happen, nor was there any way that I could have known. People have told me I will hate law, but so far I haven’t experienced even a glimmer of negativity about the subject. You will never know if you enjoy something or not until you try it, but a lot of the time you will have a rough idea, so go with your instincts. Essentially, don’t start an intensive medical degree if you can’t stand the sight of blood, or an IT consultancy training program if you can’t stand the sight of wires.
As a graduate, chances are you’ll have a choice of places. Most places say that a 2:1 is preferable, but don’t lose hope if you don’t have that as they will often interview you, if not just give you a place anyway. With part time courses in particular, it is much easier to get a place in a college than it is to get a place for a degree after A levels. The cynical view is that they want your money and the realistic view is probably that….well, they want your money. I know that I applied for a place on my course at BPP way beyond the deadline and about three weeks before term was due to start. My place was confirmed almost instantly and I only have a fairly pedestrian academic record.
What to avoid
A lot of places give you funny qualifications. Training is big business and there is a lot of money to be made, which means a lot of people are trying to take money from training programs that really aren’t worth it. Do some research into what you’re signing up for. A lot of IT training appears very suspect in that it masquerades as a job interview process that advertises on the job training with no prior experience necessary. I applied for one of these thinking it was a genuine job opportunity and was given a telephone interview that seemed perfectly legitimate until they started talking about course fees at the end of the call. I would be instantly suspicious of anything that doesn’t directly advertise itself as training.
Also, in a similar vein, avoid anything that promises to make you lots of money very quickly. If it’s too good to be true, blah blah blah you’ll be ripped off and end up selling your soul and your home will be repossessed and you’ll die alone with cats and the cats will eat you if a fire burns down your house (that has already been repossessed) etc. Some training courses claim they’ll guarantee you a job after you’ve finished as well. This could also not be as good as you may think it is as they could easily dump you in a dead end job and tell you they’ve done what they said they would.
In general, it would be best to go for something that is being taught from an institution with at least a little bit of a positive reputation. I’m not suggesting you should only settle for Oxbridge style quality, but anyone that is in a position to study part time should be able to do better than “Learningz4U, location: Back room of Euston station.”
When should you? When should you not?
Make sure you have at least some spare time in which to study. Of course, having said that, it may not take up as much time as you would suspect, as I’ve mentioned above, the more you have to do, the more you get done and once you get into a routine and so long as you set a little time aside every now and then, you can get through all manner of work that is required of you each week.
I would recommend part time studying only if you have a job first. Also, it’s a good idea to see if you can work full time and still have energy to do it. I was able to get enough experience so that I can, if necessary, work on autopilot, leaving me more energy to do the studying in the evening. If you have a highly demanding job, or if you’ve just started a job, it would be better to wait until you feel you would be able to manage what is essentially extra work on top of what you already have to do.
Be aware that if your life is full, part time study could completely knock you out. If you have a hectic work life, a hectic family life, children, other commitments that you don’t want to lose, other projects, second jobs, or anything that is dominating your time, part time study will finally break you. The window of time doesn’t have to be massive, but it does have to be there!
My last suggestion is an absolute no-brainer. Studying does cost money, significant sums of money in some cases and basic extortion in others, but even the lowliest evening class will cost money. Therefore, going back to my first point here, working is an absolute must. Studying just for the sake of something to do during the day is a tremendously bad idea, as is studying in order to stay away from work. Although it’s a short wander away from the subject, a lot of people I know have done masters degrees after their bachelors, purely because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. This really just puts you in even greater debt and doesn’t always advance you as far as you would have thought. If on the other hand you desperately want to do a masters degree, you’re passionate about the subject or your particular career path demands it, then that is a different matter. My flat mate is applying to do a masters degree for decent reasons and he will undoubtedly get a lot out of it.
How will it affect your life?
Studying will for the most part make you happier and give you a little more fulfillment in your life. It will also make you slightly more stressed out most of the time and will make you think really hard about whatever stupid advice you took that lead to you doing it in the first place and might possibly encourage you to start practicing voodoo on any relevant advice givers.
The major downside of it is one that I’ve already touched on and that is the cost. You will have to cut back a little and set aside more than usual to pay for it, which can be incredibly daunting if you are already in debt from a pre existing student loan or something similar.
The only other major thing that is a little unfortunate is that you will find yourself with a few more commitments during the week that you have to honor. This of course will vary depending on what it is you’re studying and where you are studying it. I am fortunate enough to study at BPP where they provide you with all the lectures on DVD and give you a USB stick with all the lecture slides on at the beginning of the year, which means if you can’t attend one of the lectures, you can catch up with it at home. This of course reduces the set-in-stone commitment level of set hours a week and is an absolute gift to anyone who has an even slightly variable weekly timetable.
What I do and how it has helped me.
If you think I’m a tedious bore, feel free to stop reading (although how you’ve made it this far already I don’t know). This is just to show you that I’m not completely plucking these ideas and opinions out of the ether.
I graduated and spent about two months out of work, desperately-yet-not-trying-too-hard searching for a job. I then got a job in a call centre selling insurance. After three months of that, I got a job in the same company administrating the sales and processing applications and doing a lot of paper work. Five months after that, I had worked out all of the subtleties of the job and I was critically and dangerously bored and needed a change. Instead of a change, I started my part time law GDL conversion course at BPP. I chose the conversion course because it was something I had always considered doing, with law being something I was particularly interested in and because it was something that a lot of people had suggested I would be good at. I am now about three quarters of the way through it and due to finish this year.
The course has given my brain something to do, it has given me an overall goal, it has made me more productive (even with huge periods of non-productivity, I’m still better than I was before), it has introduced me to new people, it has given me something interesting to put on my CV, it has given me a huge number of interesting things to talk about and think about and it has obviously taught me a huge amount about our legal system. If nothing else, this course has kept me going whenever I’ve felt a bit down and given me something to focus on, giving me direction and an idea that I can get somewhere if I work hard enough. It doesn’t matter if I don’t eventually train as a lawyer, the course has already paid for itself ten times over.
I’m not saying that I’m a model student, a model employee, a model friend, a model individual, or a….model….but part time studying has improved my life and lifestyle no end and made me feel a better person for it. I can’t stress enough how much I recommend trying it.
To Conclude
The truth is that life is a lot like studying, but without the leniency in time limits. There will always be deadlines and things you need to work for and learn and develop so you should abandon the notion that once you’re done studying, you’ll never have to do it again. What you should bear in mind though is that the second time round, in a different environment and with a different ethos, it can be a lot of fun and you will find yourself appreciating the act of studying a lot more. It’s now no real mystery to me why mature students at university always got their work done and put the hours in; it was because they had a different way of thinking, and it was almost a frivolous hobby for them, whereas for the rest of us, “student” was our label, our attitude and our profession.
Part time studying is not for everyone and I’m not saying everyone will be as happy with it as I am, but it’s worth a try and might just revolutionize your life.
Additional Notes:
I attend BPP professional education in Waterloo for my conversion course in law and can genuinely sing their praises. Apart from them forgetting that I’d paid one set of my course fees, I have absolutely nothing negative to say about them. I know that they also do courses in accountancy and actuary and I can only imagine they do these courses just as well (especially accounting: they get free coffee and everything).
Although they are technically rivals of BPP, I have also heard good things about the College of Law, but I can’t give them a personal recommendation.
There are several universities and colleges across the country that specialize in evening classes and part time courses. In central London, I can also offer a recommendation for Birkbeck College as I know a few people who have done things there and say they’re pretty consistent, but elsewhere it’s worth digging around and seeing what is on offer.
The law training is starting to kick in now as I feel myself compelled to write: I am not to be held responsibility for any regret, loss of sleep, sanity or sensibility due to any perceived misrepresentation of the benefits of part time studying.
Any requests for parts of my hair for use with voodoo dolls will be considered on a case by case basis.
Why should you?
Starting with the very obvious and easy to understand reason first, it will give you new skills, new experiences and a new qualification. Even at the very least, it will give you one of those three. Some career paths may open up to you once you’ve done a little bit of extra studying, including some that may not be initially obvious, and you may find that employers will see extra training that you’ve done, or are in the process of doing, after your graduation and think “hey, this one isn’t lazy! Let’s talk to him and find out what he’s all about”. I don’t totally agree with doing things for your CV alone, but it is undoubtedly going to be a pleasant side effect of studying.
Secondly, I always find, the more I have to do, the more I get done. Part time studying forces you to do a certain amount of things in your spare time, which means that the remaining spare time you have is a lot more focused. You’re much less likely to spend an unfulfilling evening watching rubbish that you dislike on television if those three hours have become more precious to you and your spare time slightly more scarcely available.
The main motivation behind my part time studying was for the sake of my sanity. My brain wasn’t getting much of a work out during the day and there wasn’t much to occupy my mind in the evening either, as I would inevitably find myself burnt out after work anyway and vegetate in front of the TV or a computer. This is similar to the point above, in that studying gives you something to focus on and refines any other spare time into spare time that you use as opposed to waste. You might have also found yourself in a situation whereby every day feels like a grind and that your job covers the same ground a lot. I quite like my job, but that doesn’t stop it from being a repetitive mind-masher that eventually turns your brain to sludge.
Finally, studying part time is good for the ego. It means that you’re able to say when people ask that you work in x company by day, but by night, you study to become a lawyer/doctor/IT consultant/superhero. This will, if you are anything like me, make you feel better and reaffirm to yourself that you are going somewhere and not stuck in a dead end or boring job. Whereas you shouldn’t boast, you should allow yourself to at least take a little pride in your efforts.
What should you do?
You should do something that you enjoy. I absolutely loath that piece of advice, so allow me to clarify: You should do something that interests you and that you can see yourself sticking to, or you should do something that you’ve always wanted to try. Before going to university, everyone used to say to me that you should do something that you enjoy, but really, I don’t know how you’re meant to know what you will enjoy once you get to university. I enjoyed Music, English literature and Theatre Studies at the time, but I knew that three years of studying would kill either one of them for me and at the same time I knew I enjoyed History and suspected that this would be more likely to survive three years of studying, hopefully allowing me to enjoy it even more over time. As it turned out, I was wrong and three years of studying smashed any positive feelings I had for History into kindling instead. The point is that I thought I would enjoy History and it turned out that I didn’t, and there is no way that anyone could have told me that would happen, nor was there any way that I could have known. People have told me I will hate law, but so far I haven’t experienced even a glimmer of negativity about the subject. You will never know if you enjoy something or not until you try it, but a lot of the time you will have a rough idea, so go with your instincts. Essentially, don’t start an intensive medical degree if you can’t stand the sight of blood, or an IT consultancy training program if you can’t stand the sight of wires.
As a graduate, chances are you’ll have a choice of places. Most places say that a 2:1 is preferable, but don’t lose hope if you don’t have that as they will often interview you, if not just give you a place anyway. With part time courses in particular, it is much easier to get a place in a college than it is to get a place for a degree after A levels. The cynical view is that they want your money and the realistic view is probably that….well, they want your money. I know that I applied for a place on my course at BPP way beyond the deadline and about three weeks before term was due to start. My place was confirmed almost instantly and I only have a fairly pedestrian academic record.
What to avoid
A lot of places give you funny qualifications. Training is big business and there is a lot of money to be made, which means a lot of people are trying to take money from training programs that really aren’t worth it. Do some research into what you’re signing up for. A lot of IT training appears very suspect in that it masquerades as a job interview process that advertises on the job training with no prior experience necessary. I applied for one of these thinking it was a genuine job opportunity and was given a telephone interview that seemed perfectly legitimate until they started talking about course fees at the end of the call. I would be instantly suspicious of anything that doesn’t directly advertise itself as training.
Also, in a similar vein, avoid anything that promises to make you lots of money very quickly. If it’s too good to be true, blah blah blah you’ll be ripped off and end up selling your soul and your home will be repossessed and you’ll die alone with cats and the cats will eat you if a fire burns down your house (that has already been repossessed) etc. Some training courses claim they’ll guarantee you a job after you’ve finished as well. This could also not be as good as you may think it is as they could easily dump you in a dead end job and tell you they’ve done what they said they would.
In general, it would be best to go for something that is being taught from an institution with at least a little bit of a positive reputation. I’m not suggesting you should only settle for Oxbridge style quality, but anyone that is in a position to study part time should be able to do better than “Learningz4U, location: Back room of Euston station.”
When should you? When should you not?
Make sure you have at least some spare time in which to study. Of course, having said that, it may not take up as much time as you would suspect, as I’ve mentioned above, the more you have to do, the more you get done and once you get into a routine and so long as you set a little time aside every now and then, you can get through all manner of work that is required of you each week.
I would recommend part time studying only if you have a job first. Also, it’s a good idea to see if you can work full time and still have energy to do it. I was able to get enough experience so that I can, if necessary, work on autopilot, leaving me more energy to do the studying in the evening. If you have a highly demanding job, or if you’ve just started a job, it would be better to wait until you feel you would be able to manage what is essentially extra work on top of what you already have to do.
Be aware that if your life is full, part time study could completely knock you out. If you have a hectic work life, a hectic family life, children, other commitments that you don’t want to lose, other projects, second jobs, or anything that is dominating your time, part time study will finally break you. The window of time doesn’t have to be massive, but it does have to be there!
My last suggestion is an absolute no-brainer. Studying does cost money, significant sums of money in some cases and basic extortion in others, but even the lowliest evening class will cost money. Therefore, going back to my first point here, working is an absolute must. Studying just for the sake of something to do during the day is a tremendously bad idea, as is studying in order to stay away from work. Although it’s a short wander away from the subject, a lot of people I know have done masters degrees after their bachelors, purely because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. This really just puts you in even greater debt and doesn’t always advance you as far as you would have thought. If on the other hand you desperately want to do a masters degree, you’re passionate about the subject or your particular career path demands it, then that is a different matter. My flat mate is applying to do a masters degree for decent reasons and he will undoubtedly get a lot out of it.
How will it affect your life?
Studying will for the most part make you happier and give you a little more fulfillment in your life. It will also make you slightly more stressed out most of the time and will make you think really hard about whatever stupid advice you took that lead to you doing it in the first place and might possibly encourage you to start practicing voodoo on any relevant advice givers.
The major downside of it is one that I’ve already touched on and that is the cost. You will have to cut back a little and set aside more than usual to pay for it, which can be incredibly daunting if you are already in debt from a pre existing student loan or something similar.
The only other major thing that is a little unfortunate is that you will find yourself with a few more commitments during the week that you have to honor. This of course will vary depending on what it is you’re studying and where you are studying it. I am fortunate enough to study at BPP where they provide you with all the lectures on DVD and give you a USB stick with all the lecture slides on at the beginning of the year, which means if you can’t attend one of the lectures, you can catch up with it at home. This of course reduces the set-in-stone commitment level of set hours a week and is an absolute gift to anyone who has an even slightly variable weekly timetable.
What I do and how it has helped me.
If you think I’m a tedious bore, feel free to stop reading (although how you’ve made it this far already I don’t know). This is just to show you that I’m not completely plucking these ideas and opinions out of the ether.
I graduated and spent about two months out of work, desperately-yet-not-trying-too-hard searching for a job. I then got a job in a call centre selling insurance. After three months of that, I got a job in the same company administrating the sales and processing applications and doing a lot of paper work. Five months after that, I had worked out all of the subtleties of the job and I was critically and dangerously bored and needed a change. Instead of a change, I started my part time law GDL conversion course at BPP. I chose the conversion course because it was something I had always considered doing, with law being something I was particularly interested in and because it was something that a lot of people had suggested I would be good at. I am now about three quarters of the way through it and due to finish this year.
The course has given my brain something to do, it has given me an overall goal, it has made me more productive (even with huge periods of non-productivity, I’m still better than I was before), it has introduced me to new people, it has given me something interesting to put on my CV, it has given me a huge number of interesting things to talk about and think about and it has obviously taught me a huge amount about our legal system. If nothing else, this course has kept me going whenever I’ve felt a bit down and given me something to focus on, giving me direction and an idea that I can get somewhere if I work hard enough. It doesn’t matter if I don’t eventually train as a lawyer, the course has already paid for itself ten times over.
I’m not saying that I’m a model student, a model employee, a model friend, a model individual, or a….model….but part time studying has improved my life and lifestyle no end and made me feel a better person for it. I can’t stress enough how much I recommend trying it.
To Conclude
The truth is that life is a lot like studying, but without the leniency in time limits. There will always be deadlines and things you need to work for and learn and develop so you should abandon the notion that once you’re done studying, you’ll never have to do it again. What you should bear in mind though is that the second time round, in a different environment and with a different ethos, it can be a lot of fun and you will find yourself appreciating the act of studying a lot more. It’s now no real mystery to me why mature students at university always got their work done and put the hours in; it was because they had a different way of thinking, and it was almost a frivolous hobby for them, whereas for the rest of us, “student” was our label, our attitude and our profession.
Part time studying is not for everyone and I’m not saying everyone will be as happy with it as I am, but it’s worth a try and might just revolutionize your life.
Additional Notes:
I attend BPP professional education in Waterloo for my conversion course in law and can genuinely sing their praises. Apart from them forgetting that I’d paid one set of my course fees, I have absolutely nothing negative to say about them. I know that they also do courses in accountancy and actuary and I can only imagine they do these courses just as well (especially accounting: they get free coffee and everything).
Although they are technically rivals of BPP, I have also heard good things about the College of Law, but I can’t give them a personal recommendation.
There are several universities and colleges across the country that specialize in evening classes and part time courses. In central London, I can also offer a recommendation for Birkbeck College as I know a few people who have done things there and say they’re pretty consistent, but elsewhere it’s worth digging around and seeing what is on offer.
The law training is starting to kick in now as I feel myself compelled to write: I am not to be held responsibility for any regret, loss of sleep, sanity or sensibility due to any perceived misrepresentation of the benefits of part time studying.
Any requests for parts of my hair for use with voodoo dolls will be considered on a case by case basis.
Thursday, 15 January 2009
Tackling Absurdity in the Workplace
No amount of natural intelligence or education will ever prepare you for the absurdity one will face in the world of work.
My theory is that on paper, a lot of things work incredibly well but they often fail in practice due to small over-looked details. If you magnify this way of thinking, that is what you get in the workplace.
Our own office is currently suffering from a constant bombardment of incompetence and small oversights that is reducing our ability to work efficiently. My fellow administration dragons and I recently moved from the Camden call centre office over to new premises in Kentish town. Although a few glitches are going to be unavoidable in a moving process, there were immediately issues with the way in which the office was set up. First of all, there was about half as much storage for twice as much letter headed paper. Secondly, the network and computers were so locked down that it wouldn’t recognize USB devices or CDs, which are occasionally required for the smooth running of transferring data. Thirdly, the internet was not set up as it was assumed we wouldn’t need it and finally, in the initial move, royal mail hadn’t been informed of our departure from Camden, and a large quantity of our post ended up sitting around in a sorting office. For all we know, it might still be there (wherever there might be).
In trying to analyze the reasons behind each of these small-by-themselves blunders, it’s clear to see the intentions were good or the excuses reasonable. The storage might not have been an issue had we not just started dealing with a very large group of new clients, the network was locked so as to prevent sensitive data such as bank details being taken off site, the internet wasn’t set up due to a gross underestimation of what we actually do in admin, and the post wasn’t set up because two people thought that the other had already done it.
The absurdity creeps in when for example you don’t have the storage, yet you’re told that the boxes of paper are in the way of walkways for health and safety reasons, and might fall on someone if they’re stacked too high. There’s also the absurdity of locking the computers down so tightly that you can’t move data off site, or access it completely, or actually perform basic tasks that you are so used to performing, especially considering that if I really wanted to steal bank details, I could jot them down on a piece of paper. Equally, taking our internet away from us and expecting us to still have that mysterious encyclopedic knowledge of medical conditions required for processing the applications has elements of inconsistency as does not setting up a delivery address and wondering why we don’t get any post.
The people I work with are not stupid. As it is a small company, almost everyone here ends up doing things they haven’t done before, aren’t suited to and don’t really want to do. For example, I wouldn’t chose to carry a trees worth of paper up and down several flights of stairs most days, but when the deliveries turn up, we all have to chip in. As a result of this, things can be rushed, done badly due to a lack of experience, or things can just be overlooked. Most often however, things just aren't thought throught properly. A recent conversation that our IT manager had with the builders with regards to how much to enlarge the server room by in our office means that the walls are now closing in, as our IT manager is apparently not good with dimensions and instead appears to have thought of a random number between 1 and 100, leaning towards a larger number just to be on the safe side.
The current issue is that our space is rapidly disappearing, and the rest of the staff from Camden are going to be moving to an office next door to the new premises we’ve moved to, and they want to use our office for storage. Short of suspending them from the ceiling, I can’t see where new filing cabinets will go and I can’t help feeling this is another example of someone in charge not really thinking things through. To put it in more literal terms, imagine your bedroom and whatever you have in it. Now imagine your partner, friend, parents or whoever you may live with comes up to you and says “guess what, I ordered two new wardrobes, a side table and a grand piano for your room! Isn’t that great?” I am sure that unless you are disgustingly lucky with the amount of space that you have in your bedroom that you would have a few choice words for your partner, friend, parents or whoever you may live with.
The more I work in this place, the less I find situational or even surreal comedy funny. A lot of the time, it’s just things that have happened to the writer retold slightly out of context. King Arthur being asked to cut down the mightiest oak in the forest with a herring by the knights who say “Nee!” whilst participating in Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail is significantly less funny when you realize that you’ve been asked to do things of similar impossibility or absurdity (even if it is without the herring).
In any office, the right hand will never know what the left hand is doing and invariably they will both be telling you to do slightly different things like a miniature angel and devil sat on your shoulders debating about whether or not to burn the whole place down and be done with it, but the real terror comes when the two hands start working towards a common goal, with all the apptitude of an easily distracted cage of chimps.
Additional Notes:
“The people I work with are not stupid.” Let me clarify that: Most of the people I work with are not stupid. Another thing that university will never prepare you for is the diversity of intellect found in the workplace. Sometimes that diversity and wide range of intellect can be found in just one person.
In terms of things that I used to find well executed, creative and devastatingly funny, I’ve also come to realize that “Dilbert” is probably not in fact a comic strip, but a daily journal in picture form.
When I used to work on the river as an assistant lock keeper for the Environment Agency, I was amazed at how all the staff up and down the river could effectively mesh together and work as a well oiled and slick machine in their single minded purpose. The only problem was that there were still frequent absurdities and contradictions being thrown around, largely due to the fact that their single minded purpose was to annoy and frustrate head office.
My theory is that on paper, a lot of things work incredibly well but they often fail in practice due to small over-looked details. If you magnify this way of thinking, that is what you get in the workplace.
Our own office is currently suffering from a constant bombardment of incompetence and small oversights that is reducing our ability to work efficiently. My fellow administration dragons and I recently moved from the Camden call centre office over to new premises in Kentish town. Although a few glitches are going to be unavoidable in a moving process, there were immediately issues with the way in which the office was set up. First of all, there was about half as much storage for twice as much letter headed paper. Secondly, the network and computers were so locked down that it wouldn’t recognize USB devices or CDs, which are occasionally required for the smooth running of transferring data. Thirdly, the internet was not set up as it was assumed we wouldn’t need it and finally, in the initial move, royal mail hadn’t been informed of our departure from Camden, and a large quantity of our post ended up sitting around in a sorting office. For all we know, it might still be there (wherever there might be).
In trying to analyze the reasons behind each of these small-by-themselves blunders, it’s clear to see the intentions were good or the excuses reasonable. The storage might not have been an issue had we not just started dealing with a very large group of new clients, the network was locked so as to prevent sensitive data such as bank details being taken off site, the internet wasn’t set up due to a gross underestimation of what we actually do in admin, and the post wasn’t set up because two people thought that the other had already done it.
The absurdity creeps in when for example you don’t have the storage, yet you’re told that the boxes of paper are in the way of walkways for health and safety reasons, and might fall on someone if they’re stacked too high. There’s also the absurdity of locking the computers down so tightly that you can’t move data off site, or access it completely, or actually perform basic tasks that you are so used to performing, especially considering that if I really wanted to steal bank details, I could jot them down on a piece of paper. Equally, taking our internet away from us and expecting us to still have that mysterious encyclopedic knowledge of medical conditions required for processing the applications has elements of inconsistency as does not setting up a delivery address and wondering why we don’t get any post.
The people I work with are not stupid. As it is a small company, almost everyone here ends up doing things they haven’t done before, aren’t suited to and don’t really want to do. For example, I wouldn’t chose to carry a trees worth of paper up and down several flights of stairs most days, but when the deliveries turn up, we all have to chip in. As a result of this, things can be rushed, done badly due to a lack of experience, or things can just be overlooked. Most often however, things just aren't thought throught properly. A recent conversation that our IT manager had with the builders with regards to how much to enlarge the server room by in our office means that the walls are now closing in, as our IT manager is apparently not good with dimensions and instead appears to have thought of a random number between 1 and 100, leaning towards a larger number just to be on the safe side.
The current issue is that our space is rapidly disappearing, and the rest of the staff from Camden are going to be moving to an office next door to the new premises we’ve moved to, and they want to use our office for storage. Short of suspending them from the ceiling, I can’t see where new filing cabinets will go and I can’t help feeling this is another example of someone in charge not really thinking things through. To put it in more literal terms, imagine your bedroom and whatever you have in it. Now imagine your partner, friend, parents or whoever you may live with comes up to you and says “guess what, I ordered two new wardrobes, a side table and a grand piano for your room! Isn’t that great?” I am sure that unless you are disgustingly lucky with the amount of space that you have in your bedroom that you would have a few choice words for your partner, friend, parents or whoever you may live with.
The more I work in this place, the less I find situational or even surreal comedy funny. A lot of the time, it’s just things that have happened to the writer retold slightly out of context. King Arthur being asked to cut down the mightiest oak in the forest with a herring by the knights who say “Nee!” whilst participating in Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail is significantly less funny when you realize that you’ve been asked to do things of similar impossibility or absurdity (even if it is without the herring).
In any office, the right hand will never know what the left hand is doing and invariably they will both be telling you to do slightly different things like a miniature angel and devil sat on your shoulders debating about whether or not to burn the whole place down and be done with it, but the real terror comes when the two hands start working towards a common goal, with all the apptitude of an easily distracted cage of chimps.
Additional Notes:
“The people I work with are not stupid.” Let me clarify that: Most of the people I work with are not stupid. Another thing that university will never prepare you for is the diversity of intellect found in the workplace. Sometimes that diversity and wide range of intellect can be found in just one person.
In terms of things that I used to find well executed, creative and devastatingly funny, I’ve also come to realize that “Dilbert” is probably not in fact a comic strip, but a daily journal in picture form.
When I used to work on the river as an assistant lock keeper for the Environment Agency, I was amazed at how all the staff up and down the river could effectively mesh together and work as a well oiled and slick machine in their single minded purpose. The only problem was that there were still frequent absurdities and contradictions being thrown around, largely due to the fact that their single minded purpose was to annoy and frustrate head office.
Friday, 9 January 2009
Principles of Productivity
The further along the road of life that I plod, the more I come to realise that most of the people considered great in this world for their deeds and accomplishments did not achieve what they achieved through luck, sheer intuitive skill, or innate intelligence. The majority simply work hard for it and are as a whole incredibly productive a lot of the time. I think everyone realises that the time they pour in to sitting in front of a television or a computer or a pint or f*cebook is probably always too much and that they could be using that time to much greater effect.
Time, it would appear, is a trick. A wholly human construction to codify the positioning of the sun so that we can end up being late for work, I often wonder if the brain was actually built to accommodate a sense of time, as it is so remarkably easy to lose track of, both intentionally and unintentionally. If one sets out to do nothing, the time will fly past and it will be time to sleep, yet equally if one is engrossed in a project, the time will go equally quickly. There is also a middle ground where time stops which is when you enter a state of boredom, or that odd slice of time that is too close to something else to start anything with, but too long to just sit and wait it out. Regardless of the ways in which time flies around, the only thing that is consistent about the way it feels is its inconsistency.
I have had periods of my life where I have become incredibly productive. I have the initial workings of a series of very promising children’s books that have begun to form a pre-book soup on my computer thanks to a week or so of frenzied typing. I also have some basic knowledge in programming thanks to a “Teach Yourself” book that I actually sat down and read thanks to a weekend where I became quite compulsive in my efforts to get to the next chapter. I have a vast array of semi-coherent comic pages, some of which containing semi-complete narrative thanks to an absolutely absurd idea I had whilst reading a graphic novel which went somewhere along the lines of “I’m sure I could do something as good as this”. However, the things that I have created have happened in bursts when some random mood has gripped hold of me and not let go for a few days and I can’t find myself in the mood to carry things on with any regularity.
The key to mixing the trick of time with productivity is clearly not easy. I’m tempted to say it is a simple issue of willpower, which it could be, but I think routine might be more appropriate. I know that whilst I was still at school, I had orchestra rehearsals on a Wednesday evening. There was never any issue of whether you felt like it or not, that was the night that orchestra happened and so that’s what happened. With this, there wasn’t an issue with motivation, or not being in the right mood to play “Take Five” or “Tequila” again, it was merely time to get the saxophone out. With anything that comes up now, it is far too easy to decide not to do it and watch television instead, because there’s no routine. If you think to yourself that you can do anything you want with your spare time, chances are you don’t want to do anything, so it’s probably best to decide what you’re going to do before hand and not to think of it as spare time in the first place.
There are some of those out there who are naturally driven to do great things. It’s not because they are talented, or intelligent, or even particularly lucky, but because they just keep at it. I have a friend that wanted to learn the guitar that essentially just started playing and hasn’t stopped to this day. He was not a natural per se, but in a relatively short space of time, you would now believe that he was born with a silver plectrum in his mouth, just by continuously learning by doing.
I think what I’ve really come to realise is that spare time has become remarkably precious to me, yet I still succeed in wasting it. My days at work are filled with me daydreaming about all the projects I can work on once I get home, and I genuinely get fired up about them, yet the second I walk through the front door, any motivation I may have sustained on the bus ride home evaporates. If more people spent their time in a more productive way, I’m not sure what sort of a world we’d live in, but I’m betting it would be a happier one.
Additional Notes:
There is also another type of time which only exists during working hours whilst at work. This is an odd functioning of the fourth dimension in which time has slowed to a near-standstill, yet you can feel your life whizzing past you.
I like “Take Five” with its five crotchets per bar time signature. I think it’s a genuinely interesting and amusing piece of music. The only problem that I have with it now is that I can’t hear the tune without superimposing a conductor yelling “ONE TWO THREE, ONE TWO, ONE TWO THREE, ONE TWO” in the style of a confused drill sergeant in my head.
The real irony behind this whole post, of course, is that right now I’m procrastinating and putting off a myriad of job and training contract applications.
Time, it would appear, is a trick. A wholly human construction to codify the positioning of the sun so that we can end up being late for work, I often wonder if the brain was actually built to accommodate a sense of time, as it is so remarkably easy to lose track of, both intentionally and unintentionally. If one sets out to do nothing, the time will fly past and it will be time to sleep, yet equally if one is engrossed in a project, the time will go equally quickly. There is also a middle ground where time stops which is when you enter a state of boredom, or that odd slice of time that is too close to something else to start anything with, but too long to just sit and wait it out. Regardless of the ways in which time flies around, the only thing that is consistent about the way it feels is its inconsistency.
I have had periods of my life where I have become incredibly productive. I have the initial workings of a series of very promising children’s books that have begun to form a pre-book soup on my computer thanks to a week or so of frenzied typing. I also have some basic knowledge in programming thanks to a “Teach Yourself” book that I actually sat down and read thanks to a weekend where I became quite compulsive in my efforts to get to the next chapter. I have a vast array of semi-coherent comic pages, some of which containing semi-complete narrative thanks to an absolutely absurd idea I had whilst reading a graphic novel which went somewhere along the lines of “I’m sure I could do something as good as this”. However, the things that I have created have happened in bursts when some random mood has gripped hold of me and not let go for a few days and I can’t find myself in the mood to carry things on with any regularity.
The key to mixing the trick of time with productivity is clearly not easy. I’m tempted to say it is a simple issue of willpower, which it could be, but I think routine might be more appropriate. I know that whilst I was still at school, I had orchestra rehearsals on a Wednesday evening. There was never any issue of whether you felt like it or not, that was the night that orchestra happened and so that’s what happened. With this, there wasn’t an issue with motivation, or not being in the right mood to play “Take Five” or “Tequila” again, it was merely time to get the saxophone out. With anything that comes up now, it is far too easy to decide not to do it and watch television instead, because there’s no routine. If you think to yourself that you can do anything you want with your spare time, chances are you don’t want to do anything, so it’s probably best to decide what you’re going to do before hand and not to think of it as spare time in the first place.
There are some of those out there who are naturally driven to do great things. It’s not because they are talented, or intelligent, or even particularly lucky, but because they just keep at it. I have a friend that wanted to learn the guitar that essentially just started playing and hasn’t stopped to this day. He was not a natural per se, but in a relatively short space of time, you would now believe that he was born with a silver plectrum in his mouth, just by continuously learning by doing.
I think what I’ve really come to realise is that spare time has become remarkably precious to me, yet I still succeed in wasting it. My days at work are filled with me daydreaming about all the projects I can work on once I get home, and I genuinely get fired up about them, yet the second I walk through the front door, any motivation I may have sustained on the bus ride home evaporates. If more people spent their time in a more productive way, I’m not sure what sort of a world we’d live in, but I’m betting it would be a happier one.
Additional Notes:
There is also another type of time which only exists during working hours whilst at work. This is an odd functioning of the fourth dimension in which time has slowed to a near-standstill, yet you can feel your life whizzing past you.
I like “Take Five” with its five crotchets per bar time signature. I think it’s a genuinely interesting and amusing piece of music. The only problem that I have with it now is that I can’t hear the tune without superimposing a conductor yelling “ONE TWO THREE, ONE TWO, ONE TWO THREE, ONE TWO” in the style of a confused drill sergeant in my head.
The real irony behind this whole post, of course, is that right now I’m procrastinating and putting off a myriad of job and training contract applications.
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
Self Employment
I can't help feeling that everyone at some point in their life has thought how great it would be to be self employed. After all, you won't ever be late for work, you can normally work from home, you can take holidays whenever you like and to put things simply, you are your own boss.
That has to be a naive view of the situation.
Immediately after graduation, I was in a situation many of my contemporaries were in due to my employment status. I didn't have a job and I was stupid enough to think that if I applied to a couple of places on the internet, they would get back to me, or that someone would headhunt me for my incredible academic mediocrity. The thought also entered my mind that I could make some money working for myself. The one critical error in that train of thought is however that I did not have any sort of saleable skill that I could have marketed at that time, nor for that matter do I have anything right now. I'm honestly not too sure what was running through my mind, or what I was hoping to achieve; maybe I thought my writing would earn me some money, despite the fact that I wasn't really writing anything of any substance or worth, maybe I thought my comics would pick up, despite an erratic update schedule and being remarkably sub-par compared to the competition, or maybe I thought that unsolicited bags of money would somehow fall into my bank account. I know people who are self employed and I know that they don't really sleep. Of course, they can chose when and where to work to a certain extent, but what that usually means is that they chose to work all the time so that they can keep their head above water in terms of money. A nine-until-five office job may be soul crushingly dull and repetitive, but somehow I’ve never found that monthly deposit into my bank account dull and repetitive. It’s good to know that it’s coming. It is certainly true that if you want to see the big money and truly great success, you have to work for yourself. I’m currently standing at a fork in the road with regards to my legal prospects as I agonise over whether or not to train as a solicitor or a barrister. A solicitor works in an office doing similar things to what I’m doing now, along with the monthly wage, national insurance and paid leave, whereas a barrister who is self employed gets the dramatic TV-drama-friendly side of the legal career standing up before a judge on behalf of their clients, presenting cases and just occasionally nose diving in court destroying their career because they haven’t slept in five days. It has been said that the way to make serious money is by becoming a barrister. It is also painfully clear that “becoming a barrister” is not simple at all in the first place, and staying successful as a barrister is just as hard. I have frequently thought that I am imaginative, I have the ability to think outside of the box and am probably smarter than the average bear, so therefore surely I can think of a way of making money that does not involve me going in to work every day for eight hours. That is probably true, I can certainly think of ways to make money. What I would be unable to do is to stick it out for any length of time. I turn up to work every day because I have to, but if I knew I had the option of not working, it would be far too tempting to do just that. For anything where you are your own boss, you really do reap what you sow with the amount of work you put in being directly proportional to the success you receive. Of course, the added bonus to the “work = success” equation is that sometimes that won’t be the case and you’ll fail anyway due to some unforeseen complication. One of the legal definitions of being self employed (from Ready Mixed Concrete v Minister of Pensions) is that an individual shares the benefit and loss of the organisation. That is a perfect definition in my opinion. I’m sure all of us can deal with the benefit, but I myself am not quite ready for the loss right now and so the only course of action left to me is to run on the office hamster wheel for a little longer.
Additional Notes:
I haven’t given a full citation for Ready Mixed Concrete because I am lazy and a poor academic. If anyone wants a summary on the case, do what every high performing student does and pay a visit to the best refernce site in the world.
That has to be a naive view of the situation.
Immediately after graduation, I was in a situation many of my contemporaries were in due to my employment status. I didn't have a job and I was stupid enough to think that if I applied to a couple of places on the internet, they would get back to me, or that someone would headhunt me for my incredible academic mediocrity. The thought also entered my mind that I could make some money working for myself. The one critical error in that train of thought is however that I did not have any sort of saleable skill that I could have marketed at that time, nor for that matter do I have anything right now. I'm honestly not too sure what was running through my mind, or what I was hoping to achieve; maybe I thought my writing would earn me some money, despite the fact that I wasn't really writing anything of any substance or worth, maybe I thought my comics would pick up, despite an erratic update schedule and being remarkably sub-par compared to the competition, or maybe I thought that unsolicited bags of money would somehow fall into my bank account. I know people who are self employed and I know that they don't really sleep. Of course, they can chose when and where to work to a certain extent, but what that usually means is that they chose to work all the time so that they can keep their head above water in terms of money. A nine-until-five office job may be soul crushingly dull and repetitive, but somehow I’ve never found that monthly deposit into my bank account dull and repetitive. It’s good to know that it’s coming. It is certainly true that if you want to see the big money and truly great success, you have to work for yourself. I’m currently standing at a fork in the road with regards to my legal prospects as I agonise over whether or not to train as a solicitor or a barrister. A solicitor works in an office doing similar things to what I’m doing now, along with the monthly wage, national insurance and paid leave, whereas a barrister who is self employed gets the dramatic TV-drama-friendly side of the legal career standing up before a judge on behalf of their clients, presenting cases and just occasionally nose diving in court destroying their career because they haven’t slept in five days. It has been said that the way to make serious money is by becoming a barrister. It is also painfully clear that “becoming a barrister” is not simple at all in the first place, and staying successful as a barrister is just as hard. I have frequently thought that I am imaginative, I have the ability to think outside of the box and am probably smarter than the average bear, so therefore surely I can think of a way of making money that does not involve me going in to work every day for eight hours. That is probably true, I can certainly think of ways to make money. What I would be unable to do is to stick it out for any length of time. I turn up to work every day because I have to, but if I knew I had the option of not working, it would be far too tempting to do just that. For anything where you are your own boss, you really do reap what you sow with the amount of work you put in being directly proportional to the success you receive. Of course, the added bonus to the “work = success” equation is that sometimes that won’t be the case and you’ll fail anyway due to some unforeseen complication. One of the legal definitions of being self employed (from Ready Mixed Concrete v Minister of Pensions) is that an individual shares the benefit and loss of the organisation. That is a perfect definition in my opinion. I’m sure all of us can deal with the benefit, but I myself am not quite ready for the loss right now and so the only course of action left to me is to run on the office hamster wheel for a little longer.
Additional Notes:
I haven’t given a full citation for Ready Mixed Concrete because I am lazy and a poor academic. If anyone wants a summary on the case, do what every high performing student does and pay a visit to the best refernce site in the world.
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
The Key to Success
According to a birthday card I received, the key to being successful is looking like you already are. My initial reaction of coughing and spluttering and my vehement disagreement has subsequently softened significantly.
I have recently emerged from beneath a mop of hair that can only really have been classified as “too long” after a much needed and much delayed hair cut, to discover that we really do send out different messages about ourselves by the way that we look. Whereas having long hair in no way makes you incapable of performing certain jobs and doesn’t affect the person that you are deep down, it can hamper a first impression, or even the way a person that you’ve known for a long time responds to you. When applied to an employment situation, in particular an interview, I can only imagine that the issue is further compounded, leaving you less of an opportunity to get where you want to. Even if you say all the right things and act in just the right way, if you don’t look the part, that’s probably all they’ll need to make their decision. I was recently struck by how un-extraordinary I was compared to other individuals in my field when talking to a fellow class mate at my law school who quite casually said that she too was an ex-UCL student with a 2:1 in History, just like everyone else. It sounds ridiculous (and I must admit a little smug) but those sort of qualifications are fairly standard for a lot of people in my situation, and so if you have four candidates interviewing for a post that are the same in academic and professional expertise, they probably are not going to employ the one that looks like a metal band reject in a bad suit.
Of course, just looking the part isn’t enough. The guy who turns up to the school reunion in the brand new Ferrari definitely loses that initial impression once the first things out of his mouth are details of his repayment plan and how he had to move back in with his parents to afford it. In fact, any good visual impression can be completely thrown out the second that someone starts talking, but regardless, it’s impossible to say the reverse is true; fighting a negative first impression by saying all the right things is still an uphill battle.
All this boils down to that one piece of advice that everyone groans and rolls their eyes at when it’s repeated and that is that you can make a good first impression by being neat, tidy, smart and clean. When it’s brought down to such a fundamental level, I can’t believe I’ve found myself writing about it, but even on a macro level, it appears to have a lot of truth behind it. If I’m being brutally honest with myself, being aware that I look more human and presentable has improved my mood tremendously as well.
I am well aware of the irony of titling an entry “the Key to Success” as the current situation of writer/lawyer/comic book artist extraordinaire David Hing is far from perfect, but I honestly feel that looking the part, even in some small way, is the “Key” to success. As for the actual door, that’s going to take a little longer to find.
Additional Notes:
The only slight quirk with having a fairly dramatic change in hair length is that it’s taken my girlfriend a while to get used to it. Just occasionally she would give me a look that I came to realise meant that she didn’t quite recognise who I was and was probably expecting me to announce that I was in fact my identical twin brother and it was all an elaborate practical joke.
It does seem to be that my tutor group at my law school is made predominantly of 2:1 students in either English Literature, Geography or History that have day jobs in an administration post. I’m hoping that’s just a coincidence, as surely if it were not, then somebody would have mentioned that trend earlier on in my academic career…
I have recently emerged from beneath a mop of hair that can only really have been classified as “too long” after a much needed and much delayed hair cut, to discover that we really do send out different messages about ourselves by the way that we look. Whereas having long hair in no way makes you incapable of performing certain jobs and doesn’t affect the person that you are deep down, it can hamper a first impression, or even the way a person that you’ve known for a long time responds to you. When applied to an employment situation, in particular an interview, I can only imagine that the issue is further compounded, leaving you less of an opportunity to get where you want to. Even if you say all the right things and act in just the right way, if you don’t look the part, that’s probably all they’ll need to make their decision. I was recently struck by how un-extraordinary I was compared to other individuals in my field when talking to a fellow class mate at my law school who quite casually said that she too was an ex-UCL student with a 2:1 in History, just like everyone else. It sounds ridiculous (and I must admit a little smug) but those sort of qualifications are fairly standard for a lot of people in my situation, and so if you have four candidates interviewing for a post that are the same in academic and professional expertise, they probably are not going to employ the one that looks like a metal band reject in a bad suit.
Of course, just looking the part isn’t enough. The guy who turns up to the school reunion in the brand new Ferrari definitely loses that initial impression once the first things out of his mouth are details of his repayment plan and how he had to move back in with his parents to afford it. In fact, any good visual impression can be completely thrown out the second that someone starts talking, but regardless, it’s impossible to say the reverse is true; fighting a negative first impression by saying all the right things is still an uphill battle.
All this boils down to that one piece of advice that everyone groans and rolls their eyes at when it’s repeated and that is that you can make a good first impression by being neat, tidy, smart and clean. When it’s brought down to such a fundamental level, I can’t believe I’ve found myself writing about it, but even on a macro level, it appears to have a lot of truth behind it. If I’m being brutally honest with myself, being aware that I look more human and presentable has improved my mood tremendously as well.
I am well aware of the irony of titling an entry “the Key to Success” as the current situation of writer/lawyer/comic book artist extraordinaire David Hing is far from perfect, but I honestly feel that looking the part, even in some small way, is the “Key” to success. As for the actual door, that’s going to take a little longer to find.
Additional Notes:
The only slight quirk with having a fairly dramatic change in hair length is that it’s taken my girlfriend a while to get used to it. Just occasionally she would give me a look that I came to realise meant that she didn’t quite recognise who I was and was probably expecting me to announce that I was in fact my identical twin brother and it was all an elaborate practical joke.
It does seem to be that my tutor group at my law school is made predominantly of 2:1 students in either English Literature, Geography or History that have day jobs in an administration post. I’m hoping that’s just a coincidence, as surely if it were not, then somebody would have mentioned that trend earlier on in my academic career…
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