I should have kept my mouth shut. I wasn't entirely happy about the inertia plan, but I was prepared to go with it - until my insightful friend came round on Saturday and blew it out of the water like the feeble construct it was. She asked me to consider whether I'd prefer a passive existence of the type I'd uneasily embraced, or something more dynamic. She wanted to know whether I felt I'd be happier engaging with the world I've chosen to work in or effectively opting out; whether I'd like to feel as though I'm making a contribution and controlling the course of my life or allowing events to dictate everything. And what I realised as she shone this bright light of common sense onto the murky nonsense of my plan was that I was the only person likely to suffer as a result of this nonsense. It's my confidence that's in decline, not my employer's; it's me whose experience is stagnating and whose self-belief is evaporating. So clearly it's not good enough to simply roll over and take it.
But the alternative we came up with isn't very appealing either, frankly. Because the cause of this malaise isn't just macro-economic. There's something going on rather closer to home that I can address much more easily: a disempowering relationship with my overbearing boss, whose control freakery has reached such ludicrous levels that I no longer bother trying to 'add value' to the stuff we work on together because it's invariably wrong in her eyes (nothing personal - everyone else is wrong too). It's very easy to simply do what she says, to take the occasional bollocking for falling short, but to make up for this by simply being available whenever she wants me to be, by never complaining, rarely disagreeing and not getting riled when her top blows - which it does regularly.
So there's a conversation to be had; one that involves me being frank about our working relationship and my desire to break out of the pattern we've established so that I'm offering more of the kind of stuff I'm capable of, the company benefits from my engagement, and her workload is eased. It's very obvious, yet even as we were agreeing how obvious it all is, an inner voice was screaming "Don't do it! It's easier not to! You'll only end up with more work, more stress, and probably more bollockings!" It's not going to be that easy to escape from this intertia it seems. And my friend knows this, because yesterday she texted me to say how much she'd enjoyed the evening - and how much she was looking forward to hearing about the conversation I'd promised to have with my boss.
Monday 23 March 2009
Thursday 19 March 2009
Inertia emergency plan
It even sounds feeble to me, this resistance plan of surreptitious inactivity, so God knows how feeble it would sound to anyone reading this who didn't know me (or did, for that matter). Good job there's no one reading this I guess :)
I'm unlikely to change the plan though, because doing as little as possible for as long as possible has long been a tactic of mine when I find myself outside my comfort zone. I did it at school and was very nearly kicked out for my troubles; I did it again at university with the same results; I've done it in one way or another with most of the jobs I've had; I've even tried it in relationships, romantic and otherwise. It never really works but it's always what I fall back on when I can't think what else to do. I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different if my default reaction to a challenge was to rise to it as best I could in a sort of American gung-ho kind of way. It's possible to spend quite a lot of time wondering such things, when caught in one of my periods of inactivity.
There's this guy I know who's been reading a lot of stuff on the internet. Perhaps too much. He's now convinced that the world has just fallen off a massive precipice and that society as we know it is never going to recover from the bump it's going to get when we hit the bottom. Capitalism is over, he reckons. It's in its death throes. What follows is as uncertain to him as it is to everyone else, but he's sure it will involve a great deal of conflict between the haves and have-nots. He's put his house on the market, and he's spending all his time and money on preparing his holiday home in Italy for a post-capitalistic existence - in a nutshell: self-sufficiency...survival.
Thing is, he could be right! We are in an unholy economic mess and it doesn't seem to be getting better however much money governments throw at the problem. Then there's the food problem; and the population problem; and the water problem; and the climate problem; and the fossil fuel problem. They're all still here and they're all still getting worse and we're still not doing anything very much to address them, not in the big scheme of things. I read a news story yesterday about the possibility of water, food and fuel shortages combining to cause a 'perfect storm' that will lead to global unrest and conflict. It's all very alarming. But reading my friend's posts all I could do was pick holes in them - to find reasons to deride his response to a series of problems he understands an awful lot better than I do. To justify yet another inert response to another threat. I'll probably get away with it again, as will most of the countless millions of others all over the world that won't take any steps to prepare for the worst. But this is how it'll be before the real apocalypse isn't it? Most people will be sitting on their hands, laughing increasingly nervously at those who are prepared to act on the signs they see and the dangers they sense. And they'll probably keep laughing until it's too late.
I'm unlikely to change the plan though, because doing as little as possible for as long as possible has long been a tactic of mine when I find myself outside my comfort zone. I did it at school and was very nearly kicked out for my troubles; I did it again at university with the same results; I've done it in one way or another with most of the jobs I've had; I've even tried it in relationships, romantic and otherwise. It never really works but it's always what I fall back on when I can't think what else to do. I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different if my default reaction to a challenge was to rise to it as best I could in a sort of American gung-ho kind of way. It's possible to spend quite a lot of time wondering such things, when caught in one of my periods of inactivity.
There's this guy I know who's been reading a lot of stuff on the internet. Perhaps too much. He's now convinced that the world has just fallen off a massive precipice and that society as we know it is never going to recover from the bump it's going to get when we hit the bottom. Capitalism is over, he reckons. It's in its death throes. What follows is as uncertain to him as it is to everyone else, but he's sure it will involve a great deal of conflict between the haves and have-nots. He's put his house on the market, and he's spending all his time and money on preparing his holiday home in Italy for a post-capitalistic existence - in a nutshell: self-sufficiency...survival.
Thing is, he could be right! We are in an unholy economic mess and it doesn't seem to be getting better however much money governments throw at the problem. Then there's the food problem; and the population problem; and the water problem; and the climate problem; and the fossil fuel problem. They're all still here and they're all still getting worse and we're still not doing anything very much to address them, not in the big scheme of things. I read a news story yesterday about the possibility of water, food and fuel shortages combining to cause a 'perfect storm' that will lead to global unrest and conflict. It's all very alarming. But reading my friend's posts all I could do was pick holes in them - to find reasons to deride his response to a series of problems he understands an awful lot better than I do. To justify yet another inert response to another threat. I'll probably get away with it again, as will most of the countless millions of others all over the world that won't take any steps to prepare for the worst. But this is how it'll be before the real apocalypse isn't it? Most people will be sitting on their hands, laughing increasingly nervously at those who are prepared to act on the signs they see and the dangers they sense. And they'll probably keep laughing until it's too late.
Tuesday 17 March 2009
Constructive disengagement as a recession-beating tactic
This is the first recession - depression, slump, whatever you want to call it - that's going to hurt me personally. I can feel it. I don't yet know how badly it's going to hurt, but I know it's going to happen.
It's an odd feeling, after a lifetime (45 years and counting) of privileged insulation from what are the harsh economic realities of life for many people, to know that finally I'm going to feel the pain for a change. It may just be a mild inconvenience - a blip in the value of my house or a momentary judder for my pension fund - or I may lose my job and really start feeling the heat. Time will tell.
I work in internal communications for a large company, which means that I'm privy to some of the conversations that senior managers have about the way to present bad news to the foot soldiers. So I know that it's all about the numbers in the end, and nothing to do with the people, whatever they say publicly. Which is why, as I sit here waiting for the train to come thundering down the track, I get irritated beyond measure to hear insincere corporate fuckwits telling me how awful it is that someone close to me - and I mean close in the sense that they've worked near me for a few years (and even when I say 'near me' I actually mean organisationally rather than geographically) - is going to have to be asked to leave the company because the numbers dictate that it must be so.
It's irritating because it's true and because it's unavoidable. It's irritating because I'm not doing anything about it. It's irritating because even if I wanted to do something about it there's nothing I could do. But mostly it's irritating because the company expects you to give your all to keep it healthy and it gives you fuck-all in return and when it's in trouble all it does is haemorrhage people as quickly as it can because people are its most expensive assets and the numbers dictate that they're the ones you get rid of first when the shit hits the fan.
So in the spirit of rebellion, albeit rather feeble rebellion, I'm going to do as little as possible and keep myself as disengaged from the whole sorry mess as it's possible to be without actually getting the sack. If my efforts actually made any difference to the course of corporate events in the grand scheme of things, this could be seen as a somewhat counterproductive strategem. As they make no difference whatever, it can't!
It's an odd feeling, after a lifetime (45 years and counting) of privileged insulation from what are the harsh economic realities of life for many people, to know that finally I'm going to feel the pain for a change. It may just be a mild inconvenience - a blip in the value of my house or a momentary judder for my pension fund - or I may lose my job and really start feeling the heat. Time will tell.
I work in internal communications for a large company, which means that I'm privy to some of the conversations that senior managers have about the way to present bad news to the foot soldiers. So I know that it's all about the numbers in the end, and nothing to do with the people, whatever they say publicly. Which is why, as I sit here waiting for the train to come thundering down the track, I get irritated beyond measure to hear insincere corporate fuckwits telling me how awful it is that someone close to me - and I mean close in the sense that they've worked near me for a few years (and even when I say 'near me' I actually mean organisationally rather than geographically) - is going to have to be asked to leave the company because the numbers dictate that it must be so.
It's irritating because it's true and because it's unavoidable. It's irritating because I'm not doing anything about it. It's irritating because even if I wanted to do something about it there's nothing I could do. But mostly it's irritating because the company expects you to give your all to keep it healthy and it gives you fuck-all in return and when it's in trouble all it does is haemorrhage people as quickly as it can because people are its most expensive assets and the numbers dictate that they're the ones you get rid of first when the shit hits the fan.
So in the spirit of rebellion, albeit rather feeble rebellion, I'm going to do as little as possible and keep myself as disengaged from the whole sorry mess as it's possible to be without actually getting the sack. If my efforts actually made any difference to the course of corporate events in the grand scheme of things, this could be seen as a somewhat counterproductive strategem. As they make no difference whatever, it can't!
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