Why Do I Go To Meetings?

Anyone with long-term sobriety asks themselves this from time to time. After all, we have lives that work – pretty much – and the last cravings for a drink or a drug were years ago, so why bother? I don't really have that much I need to share. I'm not sure the experience I have is all that transferable, as I'm an ACoA with a drinking problem, not an alcoholic with a parent problem. As for strength, I don't know that I have any: does it take strength to grind out endless forgettable days or just cowardice? I honestly don't know. And hope? I am so unfamiliar with it, I had to look up what it means: a feeling of expectation that something might happen; grounds for believing that something good might happen. Nah. Not so much. I would not even know what a “good” thing would be to wish for it. Everything in my world has consequences, after-effects and presents a bill for immediate payment.

It's been a long time since I went to a meeting and came out calmer and a little closer to centre – that used to happen all the time in the early days. So why do I go? To be honest, if I wasn't working in central London, I might not go that often, but my regular meeting is at six o'clock three hundred yards from where I work. Do I get any kind of social life from attending? Well, no. I don't. For one thing, I'm a lot older than most of the people there and I know how I felt about having guys with grey hair around when I was trying to have fun.

Maybe it's because I don't want to be crawling on the floor at two-thirty in the morning, crying with self-pity and thinking about calling someone to tell them how awful my life is. I don't want to be driving home someone back from a weekend in the country and almost falling asleep at the wheel because I've been up forty hours straight partying. I don't want to smell of booze on the commute and I don't want to behave like the piss-elegant asshole I could be after a little too much. I don't want entire weekends to vanish in hangovers and the pub and I don't want to find myself sloshed when I only needed a glass of wine with supper.

Do I honestly believe I will relapse? That I will lose what emotional poise I have? No. I think I'm pretty much okay there. I'm not the only person who goes to meetings “just in case”. It's an hour a week – what do I have to lose? Well, I can at times come out feeling worse than when I came in, but that, I have realised, is either because someone said something that stirred up stuff I'd been trying to ignore, or and more likely, that I started fancying someone and of course didn't do anything about it. (Which argues great sense: she's in a meeting fer gawd's sake! She's as screwed up as I am – or worse. Catch is, that's all true, but she's still attractive.)

“Just in case” is one reason. The other is that every now and then I hear in those rooms something that speaks directly to my experience, either of drinking in the past, how I felt in the past or living sober now. It reminds me I only look like I'm leading a normal life, but really I'm not. I am not like you. You are not going to die the next time you have a couple of whiskies to get rid of a shitty week. I will. And those people in the rooms are the only people who know I'm not exaggerating when I say that.

Where's The Re-Lo?

You will recall that my grades in my section of The Bank had a re-organisation in summer. That was itself six months after we were told that a re-organisation was coming. Part of the re-organisation was closing offices in Chester, much to the traumatic dismay of almost everyone there. Those with children were having nothing to do with London schools (here “London” means “London commuter zone”), which would, they rightly feared, turn their children into illiterate crack addicts or make them wear burquas. Those whose partners had the higher-paying job in the area weren't moving either. This left about twenty people who were interested in moving to London.

Well, it's five months later and the management still hasn't settled the relocation offer. The latest rumour is that The Bank will pay a premium for two years but if the taker leaves before three years then they will have to repay some of it. You may think that doesn't quite show the required generosity of spirit that an organisation with free cash flows in the billions could afford. You may think that a professionally-run organisation would have had the relocation package in place before making the announcement: after all, it should be part of their standard terms and conditions of employment, right? That, at least, is what some HR professionals of my social acquaintance tell me. In the meantime, anyone who was thinking of moving to London is getting more reluctant by the day. The lack of love and co-operation with which they are being greeted by other parts of the organisation when they try to do their jobs isn't making a good impression on them either. You may think that the organisation would want to get people down and settled in quickly, so it can get on with the difficult task of re-building morale and letting everyone establish their networks.

Oh yes, the morale is shot – at least in my part of the business. The results of the summer staff satisfaction survey sucked so badly that they weren't released. I was privy to a handful of the results. The third quarter survey has closed and I await the lack of announcement of those results with great expectations. Management has done nothing to raise morale – in fact, they are in chronic denial about how bad everyone is feeling. They send out weekly missives describing their meetings for the week and praising selected troops for their sterling efforts. Because everyone is really convinced by that.

The whole exercise has made me appreciate just how effective the old-fashioned re-organisation was. That's the one where the guy at the top decides who he wants to get rid of, then the guys he's keeping decide who they want to get rid of, then the guys those guys are keeping decide who they want to get rid of... and so on. HR is brought in to fill in the P45's, make offers that will dissuade solicitors from taking on employee grievances, and back-fill the due process paperwork. One day names are called, one of the salesmen tries to hit a manager, one of the girls breaks down and cries, rumours fly, no-one else does any work for the day and the announcement is released around midday. It's cheap and nasty, but it leaves most people unaffected because you don't actually change anything except a few reporting lines, and who cares about those? It's a little tougher to do when you have to negotiate with the Union and make announcements to the Stock Exchange, but frankly, what the hell do you employ HR, PR and all those other R's for if not to make it all look legit while you get on with the job? The Bank did it in a manner that was supposed to be “open” but the decisions were still made by a bunch of guys locked in a conference room passing the dutchie on the left hand side and the results bore no relation to anything anyone wanted.

My thought last week was this: five months is way too long to be incompetence. Expecting ordinary white-collar workers to commit for three years is some kind of fantasy, and a claw-back provision is evidence of a very mean spirit or a recognition that people will find those three years unbearable enough to want to leave. No. Something is going on in the Upper Political Stratosphere. It might have been the recent Competition Commission announcement, but if it was, why wasn't the final re-lo package announced afterwards? So it wasn't that. I'm out of options as to what might be going on. But then, The Bank is the ultimate insider business: only the Board and a few Ministers know what's going on. Everyone else is a spectator, a bag man or a messenger girl. Which itself makes for feelings of dignity and worth all round.

My Philosophy of Gadgets

Following on from that last post, what I really want is a gadget that's a phone, handles e-mails and file transfer and connects to anything in sight: 3G, GPRS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 2G, USB, landlines and LANs. It should let me make VoIP calls and handle Skype. It has to play nice with iSync and Outlook. Plus if I attach an external ariel, I want it to connect to satellite services. I want to be able to plug this thing into any telecomms outlet anywhere in the world, have it identify what sort of communication protocol is being used and hook me up. When I plug into a landline, it uses that and not the wireless signal. The microphone cuts out all the background noise and the speaker has hi-fi quality. When a new comms technology passes some kind of acceptance tipping point, I can get an upgrade to include it. I don't want it to be a camera and I don't want it to play music. I have dedicated gadgets for that. I know: it's going to cost. I would be willing to pay.

I was raised as an engineer. (Okay, I have an OND in Engineering and did the first year of an Electrical Engineering degree before going off to read Mathematics and Philosophy.) I regard gadgets as tools to do a job. Non-engineers coo over the champagne colour of their hi-fi separates or how nice the iPod Nano feels in their hands. Non-engineers think that Swiss Army knives are a good idea. Real Engineers would not be seen dead with one. Real Engineers want an optimised tool to do a job, not a gimmick that will break if you put any torque on it. Marketers and designers love smartphones, but Real Engineers don't.

There's another reason I want simplicity of function combined with depth of ability. I want to believe I understand and am or could be a master of my gadgets. A gazillion features are not something I can master. I get nervous around Swiss Army knives: is there a killer feature I haven't found that will make my life easier and more convenient? I still feel that way about my digital camera – there's all sorts of things it can do I haven't internalised yet. (Programming languages are only an apparent exception to that: I can master the language fairly easily and most IDE's are very similar. The libraries are separate toolkits: I don't mind whole boxes of neat stuff I can rummage around.)

A gadget with a dozen redundant features is an offence to my sense of a properly-built, elegant, efficient, simple world. The tools are there to extend my mastery of the world, not to taunt me with my ignorance of twenty-three features I haven't gotten to yet. Non-engineers don't feel that way: they think it's great that they've just discovered their phone can do horoscopes.

Phones, Cameras, iPods and Other Gadgets

My trusty iPod Mini is on its second battery and that's starting to deteriorate. Where once a charge would last four days of ordinary commuting, I'm lucky to get two days out of it now. I could take it back to the tech shop and have them swap in a new battery. Cost about £30. Or I could just upgrade.

If only it were that simple. But there are so many all-in-one options. My mobile is a Motorola V220. I like it, but it's even older than the iPod Mini. It plays nice with my Mac, which the Samsung U600 I had doesn't. I lost the phone I really liked, which was the Motorola V3 Razr. While we're on the subject, I carry a Canon A590 IS as my camera. That's staying. How many cameras have a viewfinder these days?

So why not upgrade to the iPhone? Because it's expensive and I'd still keep the Canon. At £35 a month for an 18-month contract, it costs £97 for the 8GB model. That's a contract cost of £727 or £485 a year. Sure I get all that bandwidth and minutes, but I don't need all those minutes and I won't use all that bandwidth. My life is nowhere near that interesting. Plus I have a fixed abode and a credit rating, so I can get fixed-line broadband. The iPhone is for three groups of people: Apple fanboys; people who think the Apple cool will rub off on them (it doesn't); and people who don't have credit ratings and fixed abodes. None of those groups are me. I can't deny I'm tempted, but I think I can resist it.

So then there's a Nano. The 8GB model is £115 from my nearby Regent Street Apple store or £105+p&p from Amazon. It's the closest replacement for my 4GB Mini. I doubt I'll use the camera, but maybe I will if it's there. In between is the iTouch. The 8GB model is £149 from the Apple Store. I get better software, WiFi, a bigger screen, the camera and all for an additional £34 over the Nano. Same question: do I have an exciting enough life? Plus, I'll only get e-mails if I'm on a WiFi at Starbucks or Virgin trains or like that. Okay: not the iTouch.

I think I can see where this is going. Except for the Apple devices, you know the MP3 players on regular phones aren't going to be as good as an iPod, plus there's no guarantee the phones will work with iTunes on a Mac. So the Nano it is, if I don't just get the battery changed on the Mini. So the last thing I need is an all-singing and dancing phone. Except they all are now.

My current mobile phone costs me around £180 a year on a £15 SIM-only contract. Occasionally I overrun, so call it £240. Finding a neat handset that plays nice with iSync isn't easy. The only reason I need to update is that The Sodding Bank has blocked all webmail accounts, so I have to get home to look at my mails. Or use an Internet shop at £1 a time. A phone with webmail would be useful. A Blackberry price plan from Vodafone costs £10 a month more than the SIM-only with the same amount of minutes, but that's on a 24-month contract for the Blackberry. The phone is free on £25 (or more) a month contracts. At least I could get my e-mails. The issue with the Blackberry is its lingering “Crackberry” image, but I have seen Young Folk using them recently. Looking through the forums, it seems the Blackberry can be made to play with Macs, but not easily. So when the job search starts in earnest I'll need the Blackberry or equivalent smart phone, but not until then.

On Soho Cafes

The best cafe in Soho used to be Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street. It had communal tables at the front and two long bench tables at the back. You might sit next to anyone and strike up a conversation. The staff were extravert Italians and the cakes as good as it got in London. In the mid-Oughties they took out the long communal tables at the back, installed some stairs and opened upstairs. The Italian staff went down the road to Amato. The current Pat Val's décor is drab and lifeless, which can be a description of the staff, who are not Italian anymore. I went down the road to Amato, following a lot of the people from Pat Val's. A year or so ago, Amato changed hands and badly re-furbished: the atmosphere vanished. I went there twice and gave up. It was replaced by a Richoux that is almost empty all the time. Running cafes is in a nation's blood: the Dutch can do it, so can the Italians, Spanish, Austrians and French. Caffee Nero gets it right because it models itself on Italian cafes; a good Starbucks is okay, a poor one is dismal. You don't need armchairs and piped music, but you do need atmosphere, the sound of cheerful activity, good coffee and sweet things to nibble on. Look for the university lecturer in the corner, her papers spread around her, marking or making notes as if she's been there for an hour. Then you've found a good one.

I like the Milkbar on Bateman Street to read after work;

the venerable Bar Italia on Frith Street for a quick espresso;

and Number 34B on Old Compton Street for pancakes.

There's A Place for Me, Somewhere A Place For Me...

For reasons that don't matter but weren't indicative of my ability to work and play well with others, I didn't have a good first year at The Bank. As a result, I got “Partially Met” in my appraisals. Since the grades are given out on a distribution, someone has to get one. Once you've got one, you get all the others. Added to which, I am not of a temperament to be a “manager” as that role is understood at The Bank. Middle managers in The Bank are bag carriers and messengers: when senior management wants their opinion, it tells them what it wants them to say, often in farcical sermons passed off as interviews in the house magazine. That is not me and never will be. You've gathered by now that I don't drink the Kool Aid either. By their standards, I will never meet the criteria for my grade. I accept that, where we differ is that I know their standards suck and they spend more energy in denial than an apprentice cocaine addict.

So when the re-organisation came along this summer, I was given a choice: I could be made redundant after the inevitable failed effort of finding a job in another section (my appraisals would guarantee I wouldn't even get an interview) or I could take a role a grade below mine. I took the money. Under the rules, my salary is protected for two years starting on my date of appointment, after which they can review it and my role, and adjust accordingly. Salaries in the next grade down are thirty percent lower.

So when I accepted that role, both the company and I knew that I would have to leave sometime in the next two years or take a whopping pay cut. Knowing and believing, believing and accepting, and accepting and being unaffected by, are utterly different states of mind. I've been working through them over the last few weeks and it's been painful. I'm almost there. It's only when I am there I can draft a CV and a campaign that will sound positive rather than just help-get-me-out-of-here.

I've been doing this working shit for thirty years. I don't have a pension worth a damn, so I can't take early retirement and get a lower-paid but more manageable job to keep going. Anyway, I'm not sure there are lower-stress, manageable jobs around. Teaching sure ain't it. No public sector job is.

I've worked at a string of companies with busted morale and broken organisations, and some of them are household names. It's left me wondering if all small companies are run by chancers and all large ones have outsourced all the real work and retained the politics. The Bank's Head Office is like one of those mythical castles, with servants, courtiers, knights and nobles. Servants excepted, no-one actually does a real job in those castles: it's all about making alliances, sabotaging your competitors and getting preferment. Am I just going from one frying-pan to another?

The answer to that question does matter because it will affect the way I interview. If I believe it's all bullshit, I'm scuppered, because I can't fool myself anymore. I have to believe that The Bank is dysfunctional – more accurately, that the whole financial services sector is dysfunctional (of course it is: they trained all those people to mis-sell pensions and savings plans and no-one said “no, stop, this is wrong” - not and kept their job anyway) – and that there are decent companies out there with useful products and a right relation with their customers and staff. And that I'll find one. Just like the song.

I Can't Live Without... Caffe Nero, Seven Dials

They know me here, as they know a lot of the people who come in through the doors before about half-past nine each weekday morning. I get a single espresso in the morning and a small tea in the afternoon.

Every now and then I confuse them by changing the order. Sometimes I get croissant in the morning and maybe something in the afternoon. If get either, I have to pay respects to the god of diet and recognise it means I'm feeling upset about something. The afternoon tea is a break from the office. In the summer, I and a colleague would get tea and sit and watch all the pretty girls go by. Then the winter came and all the pretty girls went back to Spain and Italy and France.