How Are Things at Work? I'm So Glad You Asked

Recently I entered the late-twentieth century at work: I was gifted a Tableau licence. Tableau is a data visualisation tool, basically a slick pivot-table and pivot chart program: the graphics are sharp and there’s a wider range of calculations available than Excel offers. And it doesn’t re-format graphs every time you change the underlying pivot table - Excel users will understand how valuable that is. It’s fast and organises a heap of charts way better than scattering them around on a worksheet. It’s a wonderful tool for analysts who do what I do.

At the moment my supervisor is a mid-level manager, rather than the ‘Head of’ I’m used to reporting to. She has chronic but low-level insecurity about her continued employment, so she thinks she needs to look as if she’s doing lots of things and taking lots of initiatives. In vain would I tell her that as a Head Office staff officer, she’s as secure as a) her ability to be seen to be bringing in business, or b) her ability to handle crap for her supervisor. Busy doing stuff is a nice-to-have in the good times, a point she doesn’t understand, but her predecessor did.

And somehow Tableau wound up on her busy-doing-stuff list. Which is exactly where it doesn’t belong. Because in and of itself, it reaps not, neither does it sow. It’s a better basket for carrying the corn, or perhaps, a better pair of sandles for walking over the field.

In the part of the business where I work, they are interested in two things: a) meeting their numbers; b) handling the crap that gets sent down from above. When we’re below budget, everything is judged by one criteria alone: will it get the business back on track? (You may think that everyone is business thinks like that, but in service departments, they don’t, and in analytical and strategy departments they never think of these things.)

This leads to extreme blinkers: if it doesn’t help the managers get done what they need to get done to look good against their targets, they simply aren’t interested. Dealing with the alternative reality of the company’s monumental bureaucracy takes up all their brain space, and they have nothing left for the real world. Consequently they have no interest in background knowledge, context and the broader view.

And then along comes my supervisor, asking for the benefits of using a souped-up pivot table, where ‘benefits’ means ‘something that people would think is useful, when they don’t give a crap about anything except making excuses for last week’s sales, improving next week’s sales, and progressing their projects’.

Um. No. Not going to happen. The only benefit to them is that it makes ‘more compelling’ Powerpoints they send back up the line when the high-ups ask silly strategic questions. Which, since that ‘compelling’ makes it look like we all know what the heck we’re talking about, is a helpful contribution to everyone’s job-retention. But of course, this is the one benefit that cannot be said aloud.

So my supervisor is looking to me to provide reasons that don’t exist for something that shouldn’t be discussed at that level anyway. (Tableau isn’t that expensive. If I wanted £100,000 for some of the fancy SAS visualisation tools, sure, I’d want a case as well.) Does that sound like something I can do? Or she should be doing?

That’s one reason I feel uneasy. I’ve got a supervisor who can’t read the politics very well. Still, she goes into bat for me at appraisal time, so I have to keep her happy.

The other is the thought of having to deal with the bureaucracy, with the incomprehensible online forms, sequences of web pages, questions that are written in a secret code that looks like English but really isn’t, and that require far too much background reading to deal with. And which end by sending my request for approval to a chain of people I’ve never heard of. Nobody understands this stuff, because there’s nothing to understand: it’s a series of ritual incantations: chant the right words in the right sequence and you get what you want. Get anything out of place and nothing happens, or you get refused and have to chant it all over again. And when I give up and have some priest talk me through it, it always turns out that the system wasn’t really designed to cope with the type of request I’m making.

If I’m not looking at data about customers and processes, I don’t feel like I’m doing the job I’m supposed to do. The bureaucracy can eat up all the time I give and ask for more. That’s not what I want to do.

Reception(s) 07:30

I suspect this sight can only be seen in one building in London. 

It's not that I haven't been starting posts, it's that I can't get those posts to end in a sensible manner. I can't even list the subjects I start and then don't finish, because when I'm half-way through, either it doesn't seem that important anymore or I realise I'm on the wrong track. So there's going to be a bunch of photographs to keep ticking over until I find something worth writing about again.

Random Thoughts - Part One

I read Jocko Wilnick’s Discipline is Freedom before the hot weather set in. He’s the Extreme Ownership guy with various TED talks and interviews, during which he suggests we all wake up at 04:30. Because, why wouldn’t you? It was just one step of gung-ho too much for me. I know the hurt-your-legs-train-your-arms routine. I do it myself from time to time. But not all the time and anyway, he must have at least 50% more testosterone than me. After a while at the self-improvement game, I have reached a state I can maintain that is challenging but leaves me able to deal with the day job and the household routine. If I don’t get out as much as I would like, that’s a consequence of where I chose to live in 1987, not of doing bench-presses in a gym in Soho.

Being an ‘older man’ also means that my health and fitness targets are about maintenance rather than improvement. If you’re under fifty-five and have not had a serious medical event, you should be looking to improve: mo’ weight, mo’ reps. Over fifty-five, and there will be a day when you realise that maintenance is demanding enough.

Reach this steady state and the excitement, the sense of purpose, goes. A daily and weekly routine, that ten years ago would have been a serious challenge, is now exactly that: a routine. It’s not ho-hum, but it’s not a thrill that I made it to the end of another week.

What do we do self-improvement for? As if the answer is: to be more attractive to women, or to get a promotion at work. We do self-improvement because our lives had become a mess and we looked, ate and felt like shit. Then we get to a decent condition and we realise: it’s one thing to get here, and another to stay here. It’s as much work to stay in shape as it is to get in shape.

As if the question is: now I’m in shape, what am I in shape for? The answer is: so you don’t get out of shape again. And that takes work. Everything around you and your own bodily self conspires to drag you back into the mire of out-of-shape. Being in shape is a goal in itself. It’s like making money: we have to keep on doing it.

The steady state gets to be a different kind of comfort zone. Waking up and going through they day after a decent amount of sleep, knowing that another decent night’s sleep awaits is a pleasant feeling. Going out at 19:30 to something that won’t finish until 21:30 and that I won’t get home until 22:45 and so will miss a cycle of sleep and wake up groggy the next morning...? That grogginess starts to be, not exactly unappealing, but inconvenient.

It’s been a while since I saw something at Sadlers Wells, or an early evening movie in the West End. Or since I’ve been to one of the major museums or galleries. I feel I should be doing those things. Perhaps on some kind of rotation. The truth is, when I leave the gym, either at the end of the day or on a Saturday morning, I don’t have that what-does-the-rest-of-the-day-hold bounce.

Maybe there’s a role for the gang-ho, JFDI, losers-make-excuses-winners-make-things happen, attitude in doing regular going-out stuff. After all, my ‘objective’ for the recent few and next few weeks amounts to re-establishing a routine that worked well a couple of years ago and I let slip. It’s not much, but it’s enough.

Drag your ass to the Tate Modern - what else are you doing today?

Doesn’t quite sound right.

September 2018 Diary

September 10th was my friend’s funeral. Ever get the wrong time for something in your head? Despite what the diary says? So I arrived what I though was ten minutes early to find I was twenty minutes late. One of the staff opened the doors for me, and I snuck in and sat at the back, while his partner was reading her tribute to him. We stood, sat, and sung half-heartedly, and his son and daughter read a tribute and geared up at the end of it. Then we trooped outside, I paid my condolences to the kids and his partner, made a vague gesture about having to go, and left.

I had lunch in Richmond, went home and read in the garden, and kept busy tidying up bits ands pieces. That felt a lot better than eating chocolate and tearing up over Rent, which was what I did the last time I went to a friend’s funeral.

When you get to my age, you will understand. The older I get, the more life is about dealing with today, and the greater proportion of my flagging energy it takes to do that. It’s not that older people are harder-hearted, it’s that we just don’t have the energy for demonstrative emotions.

I started the month by buying an Apple TV. Only after I had checked that I could use it to show Curzon Home movies on my TV. And that the MUBI monthly subscription is half the price of a single movie. Come home, pick a movie, stop half-way through to set up the next morning’s breakfast and gym gear, finish some time after 21:00, and just plain going to bed. The simple life.

I saw Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman at the Curzon Soho; The Lovers, The Soft Skin, 360, The Woman in the Fifth, The Nile Hilton Incident, Lourdes, 13 Assassins, A Man Escaped, The Decent One on Curzon Home Cinema; The Sheltering Skies, The Andromeda Strain, Spring Fever, Avalon, The Lady Eve, The Bling Ring, Enter The Void on MUBI; and The Sweet Smell of Success on DVD. Which is exactly what I got the Apple TV for.

I read Cameron McCabe’s The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor; Virginie Despentes’ Baise-Moi; Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography; and Dr Graham Easton’s The Appointment. I’ve also be riding through William Cobbett’s Rural Rides.

I stopped with the evening meal. No, really, just a piece of fruit and some fizzy water. While watching the movie. I don’t get acids reflux an hour after going to sleep and I feel better the next morning. It’s not strictly intermittent fasting because the fruit is in the evening, but it’s as close as I’m going to get.

I got myself a commitment at the meeting I go to. Literature secretary. It feels right, and it will make me turn up every week for a year. It was also the only time I’ve ever known three people put themselves forward on the day for Literature. One withdrew, as they were totally new to the meeting, so me and the other guy had to go outside while about eight people voted. That may be the first time that has ever happened in any meeting anywhere for that commitment.

Then I got The Autumn Cold. Once upon a time colds were all the same. Now every cold is different. This one hit me with a fever for the first two or three days, let me get back to work on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then just could not be assed to get out of bed for the Thursday and Friday. I felt rotten for the first couple of hours, and then picked up, thought I’d be up and running the next morning, and the next morning I’d feel like crap. Despite this, I only missed one training session.

The training you do when you’re feeling like crap is the best training you do. Because when you’re feeling okay again, you don’t have to spend a week or so getting back into shape.

We live, and the things around us live, through daily care

The title is a line from Ilse Crawford's Home Is Where the Heart Is. On the opposite page is an open shed door with four spotless brooms hanging on the inside of the door.

It’s one of those lines that I’ve always just nodded along to, consisting of words I understand arranged into a sentence whose meaning I never knew I didn’t know.

Then one day I got it. Daily care means use, cleaning, mending. That’s how, on a very elemental level, we live. Our lives consisting of using things, cleaning and repairing them. The brooms in the photograph are brushed out at the end of the day to remove the bits and pieces that remain in the brooms in my garden shed. Clean tools are the mark of a good tradesman: mine show I’m an amateur.

When I was at secondary school, the bicycles we rode to school were, every week, wiped over, chrome shined and moving parts oiled - cleaning the chain in turps and re-oiling it was considered hardcore. The point of ‘cleaning your room’ is only partly a clean room, mostly it’s that the time spent cleaning that speaks to self-respect. Take it too far, and it’s mere compulsion that gets in the way of life and speaks to mental instability. The balance matters.

The more things we have, the more things we have to care for, to use, clean and repair. Some will get more attention, some less, and some none. I have a food mixer in a corner of my kitchen that gets wiped down from time to time but never used. I keep thinking food mixers are something I should use, and then never do. After a while I take them down to the tip. Most of the other things I have I use, and feel I should dust and clean more often than I do.

The fewer things we have, the more care we could take of them, and the older those things, the more care we need to take care of them.

In the life of a commuter, what gets daily care?

So much of what we use belongs to someone else, and we spend so little time at home, we have too little time to clean and repair. Take a look at people’s shoes: some haven’t been polished for months. And how long does it take to polish shoes? Ten minutes? Sure, clothes washing. Bedsheets. Towels. How about wiping the iron down after using it? Cleaning your mobile with a glasses-spray? Brushing the dust off the remotes around the house? When was the last time you cleaned the TV screen?

Sound silly? Try it.