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.

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.

Learning Curves

I’ve recently obtained a copy of “Rock Band” for my beautiful and reliable and ever so un-necessary luxury item, the Playstation 3, and have been struck by how quickly and slowly different people take to the same thing and how persistent they are in their efforts.

The game is a simple colour matching rhythm game that taps into the base-line fantasy of being some kind of demi-god of rock and roll on a stage in front of baying fans, giving you a selection of plastic instruments to play to make the experience feel more tactile. I am currently favouring drums, because I’ve always wanted to be good at the drums and this is making me actually believe it’s possible. The thing I’ve noticed is that everyone that plays the game takes a different amount of time to get good at it. It’s not always dependant on actual musical ability or rhythm, but I believe something more about the people themselves.

The whole thing reminds me of when I was learning to drive. I tend to take to things quite quickly and pride myself on being a fast learner, and so I was under the impression that I would be able to get in a car and drive straight away; after all, I’d played plenty of Grand Theft Auto games, so therefore I must have been an advanced driver already. I very quickly got very despondent when I realized I couldn’t separate the functionality of my hands from my feet whilst keeping an eye on traffic at the same time. I didn’t actually crash, but I hit the curb at sixty more than once and visibly winced every time a car came towards me on the other side of the road in the opposite direction.

Other friends of mine learnt to drive very quickly. Even the moronic chimps that inhabited all of my least favourite classes seemed to be able to grasp the nuances of the automobile whereas I was still having a miniature nervous breakdown every time I got to a roundabout. It has become clear that different people learn different things at different speeds but I think it’s more than just learning, I think it’s taking time to adapt as well and the persistence with which one carries on trying. I saw one of my friends who was visiting attempt a drum track thinking it looked easy, which it does, and then fall to pieces in the first few seconds without really putting any consolidation effort into it. If he had put more effort into it, he might have at least learnt a bit more, and the attitude with which we enter certain tasks is undoubtedly going to affect what we get out of them.

It took me a long time to adapt to working life, as I’ve mentioned before, but I’m mostly there now. I know people who are still trying to adapt and I know people that adapted the second that they left university and it’s all down to the natural diversity of the human experience. Whereas my learning and adaptation can take a long meandering route at times, it’ll climb steep inclines at other times, and everyone else is the same.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s important to stay positive. A positive attitude will take you further along a learning curve than a defeatist one, so just be prepared to clench your teeth in first gear for a while and you will get there.

Additional Notes:

I famously don’t like loud noises, which is a bit of a bar to entry to the world of rock and roll, particularly drumming. I’ve already taped some sponge onto the end of the sticks to make it a little more bearable.

It’s curious that I’ve chosen to talk about drumming and driving here. Somebody once told me that drummers make very good drivers and learn how to drive remarkably quickly because they’re used to separating their hands and feet and operating pedals in different ways to achieve different results. The key appears to be to stop thinking. I have experienced a lack of thinking a couple of times whilst driving, where I have suddenly woken up from some sort of day dream to realise I have no recollection of the previous ten minutes.

Another classic trait of David Hing the learner driver was that I couldn’t find the biting point of the clutch, and so stalled on a regular basis. This in itself isn’t unusual, but it lead to me trying to avoid stalling at all costs, which of course meant avoiding actually stopping the car at all costs. My mother and all cars in the immediate area got increasingly scared as I would continue edging very slowly forwards at junctions or red traffic lights. As it happens, I still sometimes involuntarily clench my teeth when launching into first gear for fear of stalling.

Finally, driving isn’t the only thing I didn’t take to straight away. When I was very young, I assumed that I could sail a boat by myself; I’d been taken out in a boat by my father plenty of times and I knew the theory of it (and that should sound familiar considering my attitudes towards my first time in a car) but somehow, it just didn’t take. I very quickly found myself crying in the bottom of the boat spinning around in circles. The really sad thing is, from this, and my experiences with driving, if I ever earned enough money to learn to fly, I’d probably still assume that I could fly straight away; I’ve seen Star Wars plenty of times so I must be an expert pilot…..

A Few Inches of Snow

It’s amazing how everything falls to pieces when something unusual happens. The whole of London tends to collapse with just a little bit of snow, as I discovered to my joy yesterday. I was able to have the day off work, because if the HR department can’t make it in, they can’t tell if anyone else has turned up either, and I was able to spend the day doing frivolous things and relaxing with Fien. Of course, I should have been catching up on things on my “to do list”, or writing essays and blog posts, but I didn’t.

Our country seems to do this a lot. A little bit of extreme weather and nobody really knows what to do. Some minor flooding and people panic, some strong crosswinds and the trains start worrying about leaves on the line, a slightly heavier-than-usual rain and people can’t go outside for fear of hurting their heads. You try and get excited about the snow that we had yesterday to anyone from a country that gets snow on a more regular basis and they laugh at your pathetic enthusiasm and relate stories of how their bus network still ran in eighteen inches of snow.

I have found as of yesterday, that I am a bit of a herd animal, in that if everyone else has made an excuse that they can’t do anything because it’s snowing, I do the same. Unlike some people, I could have easily made it in to work yesterday, seeing as I live within walking distance, and failing that I could have certainly done a little private project work at home, but I didn’t because I was content with the national excuse of “it’s snowing, I can’t work today”.

However, all my careful efforts to get things done and to develop a good system of living that I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks have been undone as of yesterday. This morning I was unable to get up when my alarm went off, I didn’t organize myself with lunch, I’m no longer really motivated to do things, and in short, my whole schedule has been completely thrown off by one day of playing in the snow.

I suppose it’s very easy to get caught up on a national excuse. If everyone else says “I can’t do this” then why bother being the only one that tries? I suppose I’m starting to develop a fear of standing out on some level, but maybe I’m just content to reveal my lazy nature.

In spite of everything, it was a great day yesterday. I still love the snow.

Additional Notes:

Saying how much I love the snow is almost definitely insensitive to some people who have had genuine issues as a result of the snow. Hearing the adventures that my boss had trying to get back into London sounds nightmarish and people having to spend the night in their cars on the M25 can not be too impressed by the whole thing. I know I’m not alone in my enjoyment of the snow though; Regent’s Park was full of people that couldn’t get into work as well.

I have also discovered that Fien has a vicious streak when it comes to snow balls. She'll scoop up a nice ball of fluffy snow, compact it down into a rock-like chunk of ice and then aim it with surprising precision at my neck. In retaliation, I persisted in trying to surprise her with random snow balls, but every single one sailed about two inches over her head without her ever realising.

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.

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.

Issues of Naivety and Trust

Due to a mixture of a rarefied existence at university and a natural lack of life experience, I often find myself assuming that everyone is trustworthy and deep down a generally good person. I often find myself saying “oh, but they’re ok really” and I’ve recently started to wonder if that’s always going to be the case.

This sentiment is often called naivety, but it made me think that maybe it’s not such a bad thing. It could be that the basic levels of trust are what gets us through society as a whole and maybe this naivety is just a good intention to get through life as smoothly as possible. I’m confident in the fact that even people that you couldn’t possibly describe as naive get caught out by people betraying them or otherwise acting in an untrustworthy manner, so maybe on some level we just need to forget about it, get past it and just hope we don’t get stung.

The following quote is from KPMG’s profile of a Fraudster published in 2007:
“Why are people often caught unaware when somebody is accused of fraud? Because it
is usually the colleague who is known to be helpful, polite and inconspicuous.
But most importantly it is the colleague that enjoys the absolute trust of both
superiors and colleagues.”

This is quite a frightening summary, and if we are to believe it, it means we need to become entirely self reliant in all matters and probably go and live in a cave, fending for ourselves for fear that the mild mannered guy who does all the printing might be the one stealing your sandwiches. Let the quote sink in for a while and you realise that what it is telling you is that those most likely to betray you are those that inspire the most trust in you.

It’s clear that everyone gets caught out. The number of frauds that take place on a daily basis are staggering and we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of them coming to light as we hit the recession, as the majority of frauds always come to light when money is a little bit more scarce. I’m guessing that this is because people start looking at their account books a little closer only to notice a few holes, and the most famous recent holes in account books started to become apparent around 20 years ago on the last market slump, such as the Robert Maxwell pension scandal, and we’ve already had some crackers in the financial crisis leading to our current recession, such as Bernard Madoff, whose fraud can no longer be called a fraud, but more of a lifetime achievement.

Despite massive frauds taking place on a daily basis, trust isn’t a bad thing. It is required for a smooth running of society after all. You have to trust the postman to deliver your letters, the bank manager to direct your finances without skimming bits off the top, the insurance company not to steal your credit card details when you give it to them over the phone, your contractors not to swipe your beer from the fridge, and your government not to give away your personal details, including the names, addresses and private phobias of your children. Whether or not you can trust them is irrelevant, you have to trust them on some level, other wise it all falls apart and you have to move in to that aforementioned cave.

I’m not saying that we should all live with our heads in the sand. It is clear in some situations that you shouldn’t hand money over for something. I’m not saying that you should respond to all those “update your information” requests that get emailed to you from “Loylds” or “Bralcays” or “Hallifacts” bank, or that you should give money to the Nigerian colonel in order to unfreeze his assets, but at the same time, try to have a little faith in the rest of humanity. I hate to go on about it, but my adventure with the washing machine generated a lot of distrust towards the man I was buying it from and in all sensibility I should have walked away, but as a result of having a little faith, I do now have a functioning washing machine and clean underwear again.

With the quote above in mind, look twice at the mild mannered man in grey who never offends but that just seems like a cog in the machine, but remember that not everyone is a fraudster and the majority of people are still for the most part good and deserve your trust.

Additional Notes:

Bernard Madoff: the man with the most comical name for a fraudster embezzling money. Really though, once you get to swiping fifty billion dollars before anyone notices, that’s undeniably talented.

You’ll notice I painfully avoided the phrase “Credit Crunch”. I can’t stand it. What’s even worse is that at some point I heard a stupid joke referring to a cereal called “Credit Crunch” and now all I can see when someone says something about financial complications, is a bowel of cornflakes.

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.

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?”

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

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”.

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.