Gis a job…
Well things have plummeted so low at work that I’m really going to have to find myself another job for the sake of my own sanity. I’ve just come out on the wrong side of a Kafkaesque job-matching process followed by an appeal held in my absence. Like Josef K., I feel like I’ve been led to the quarry and am now expected to do myself in.
I’m only speaking figuratively of course. Even the peons in the HR department probably don’t expect me to kill myself. But their attitude and their failure to understand the ‘human’ part of their job title does seem more geared toward pushing people in the direction of suicidal behaviour.
Looking for another job isn’t scary, it’s just a bit of a pain to be honest. It’s unsettling and, in a way, a bit demeaning. I’ve just never been good at all that nonsense around having to sell myself. And the job ads don’t sit well with me either, couched as they are in such meaningless language and euphemism. I’m expected to be ‘proactive’ and a ’self-starter’. I’ll have a ‘glowing track-record’, a ‘high delivery of KPIs’ and a ‘flexible’ attitude to working hours (for that read: ‘willing to work like a dog for long hours’).
What I want to see is a person spec asking for:
- Someone whose heart is in the right place
- Someone who would like to make a positive difference in the world
- Someone who wants to do something interesting and stimulating
- Someone is more bothered about a friendly working environment than gym membership and health scheme
- Someone who responds to being treated like an adult rather than a number on the payroll
This is all in preference to my current job, which over the last year has increasingly involved being to be held to ransom by HR harridans, I.T. idiots and procurement plebeians every time I need to do something not accounted for in the corporate handbook.
Sorry, do I come across as bitter?
How to report the news
Charlie Brooker shows how every new report you’ve ever seen is exactly the same as every news report you’ve ever seen:
Computer says ‘no’…
In seeking to find an image of our old website at work, I turned to the endlessly fascinating ‘Way Back Machine’ at the Internet Archive.
The strapline on the top of the archive page reads thus:
Whereas, the message returned by my browser was this:
Oh the irony!
Apparently the site was ‘deemed by the administrator to be unsafe or unsuitable for access’. But personally, I deemed this to be infantilising, restrictive and nonsensical.
There is nothing quite like the empowering feeling of being trusted and treated as an adult in the workplace is there…
Jean Simmons R.I.P.
British-born Hollywood actress Jean Simmons dies at 80
And not Gene Simmons, as Mrs A originally thought…
Say what?
It’s kind of nice to be surprised by the missus after 21 years of marriage.
Last night I was watching Gary Moore playing live in Dublin on one of the Sky Arts channels. Being an old rocker, I was enjoying the bluesy stuff and wandering down memory lane as he was joined by Brian Robertson, Scott Gorham and Eric Bell for a run-through of some of the old Thin Lizzy standards.
During Moore’s extended encore version of Parisienne Walkways, he was obviously off somewhere in hard rock heaven, totally in the moment, throwing shapes and grimacing in fret-fuelled ecstacy and whipping the audience into a frenzy.
At this point Mrs A looked up from her school marking and piped up with a question:
Do you think that’s his wank face?
Thankfully it was the end of the performance, as I would have had trouble watching after that thought…
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