Movies For The Naive: Outing "Brief Encounter"

For years I heard people talking about Brief Encounter. It was a deeply moving study of unrequited love, middle-class self-control, a Noel Coward script, excellent acting and some wonderful black-and-white photography.

Finally, I was in the room when it was on television. I settled down to watch it, and no more than twenty minutes in turned to the others in the room and said "you know this is about a gay relationship, right?"

You need some context. It was 1947. Britain had been at war for six years until 1945 and the soldiers were still returning in 1947. For those years, the British did not give up sex. Indeed, they committed adultery, casual affairs, knee-tremblers, and the men shagged foreign women while their girlfriends wrote them Dear John letters. All of which was just fine while the Germans were throwing bombs and bullets around, but not so good when they weren't. And so began one of the larger exercises in society-wide denial. The English were not, in 1947, clueless about sex, illicit affairs and one-night-stands. If today a man as good-looking as Trevor Howard met a woman as handsome as Celia Johnson, he would entertain the thought that they might fool around a little. And so would she. Newsflash: people are much the same now as they ever were.

The giveaway scene is in Stephen's flat, which Alec and Laura have borrowed for an evening alone. Stephen returns unexpectedly and Laura leaves quickly, leaving her scarf behind. Stephen sees the scarf and holds it up accusingly saying to Alec "I'm disappointed in you. I thought you'd stopped this sort of thing."

A remark that makes no sense made between two single professional men in their thirties in 1947. But which makes complete sense if it's a man's scarf. This is Noel Coward, not some hack who might very well have written the line by accident. The Master knew exactly what he was writing and what it might mean. It was his one explicit clue.

My English Literature studying companions would have nothing of it. I didn't understand that the story was about "Laura's...horror at the thought of betraying her husband and her settled moral values, tempted though she is by the force of a love affair. Indeed, it is this very tension which has made the film such an enduring favourite. The values which Laura precariously, but ultimately successfully, clings to were widely shared and respected (if not always observed) at the time of the film's original setting..." (Wikipedia).

Yes. Right. You go on believing Celia Johnson wasn't playing a man in disguise. The movie was a huge hit because it showed told an Official Truth its audience wanted spreading: "There dear, that's how it was for me when you were in Africa / Sicily / Normandy."

As if.

Employment Market Opportunists Number 13: The Franchiser

Read this and try not to gag on the fluff...

"Hi Seven Dials

I’d love the opportunity to talk to you about your CV! Your credentials are very impressive, your background and track record closely resemble some other highly successful individuals. We have worked with many such professionals and helped them realize their dreams to become successful entrepreneurs. Based on your CV, I can see that you are quite accomplished in your field and may welcome the chance to apply your expertise in a more entrepreneurial setting.

Recession has touched us all, but some industries have turned it into a business growth opportunity. Franchising is one industry where success, profitability and economic stability have actually made incremental strides. My role is to carefully select and personally invite qualified individuals to explore franchising in all its potential and you fit the profile.

With your background in management and leadership positions adding weight to your credentials, I am confident that you are likely a great fit. We know you have the initiative, skills and educational qualifications that are the building blocks of a successful business. Finding the missing link - the right franchise opportunity - will be a breeze with our help and advice. The research, qualification and application services I provide costs you absolutely nothing.

Imagine the possibility of applying your experience in a business of your own, increasing your earning potential, gaining the flexibility of working your own hours in a career you enjoy and more importantly never having to worry about losing your job again. It doesn’t have to be a pipe dream anymore! Here’s a chance at work-life balance like never before!

Please visit www.franrecruiting.co.uk and find out more information about my services. Once you are there, fill out the “Get Started Today” form and I’ll give you a call within 48 hours to discuss the next steps.

Best regards,

Rachel Taylor
Franchising Coordinator
rachel@franrecruiting.co.uk
www.franrecruiting.co.uk"

MyFranchiseCareer is a real company.  It's a recruiter for various franchisers. Franchising is where you pay for someone to supply their branding, operations and product and then they take about 10% off the top. That's what we did at Hertz back in the day.

My MacBook Pro's Mail thought this message was Junk Mail. Right on.

Employment Market Opportunists Number 11: The Fishing Ad

It comes as a shock to many when they find out that a number of job advertisements are not advertising actual jobs at all. In the old days you could tell them because you would ask the agency about the fantastic role in the window and they would tell you it had just been filled. But while you were here, are you registered with them and what are you looking for?

Fishing ads. Here's a goodie, from Total Jobs.

Time Series Analyst needed to make a difference, London, 30 – 45k

Location:London
Salary:Unspecified
Date posted:08/10/2010 15:21
Job type:Permanent
Company:Corporate Recruiter Network Ltd
Contact:Sarah Gray
Ref:Totaljobs/TJ/1560/SCJob ID:48735774

Time Series Analyst needed to make a difference, London, 30 – 45k
Remember when you started out with the idea to get into finance but somehow ended up elsewhere – or maybe you suddenly fancy a change and the opportunity to apply your expertise to the fabulously rewarding world of finance. Well, here is your opportunity to move from any industry into the fast paced high flying world of banking. As long as you have strong Time Series regression modelling, analysis and forecasting experience, the door is open to jump ship into a fantastic banking role giving you the means to train in finance, whilst building on your existing skills.
To apply all you need is:

* An analytical mind, set on success
* A passion for econometrics / statistics / numerical analytics
* Preferably with SAS experience, but if not then an aptitude for programming and a desire to learn SAS, if you can use SPSS syntax, STATA etc
* Strong technical Time Series ability and forecasting experience in a commercial environment
In return you will enter a team of like minded professionals in a dynamic and proactive working environment. You will receive a hefty remuneration package depending on the skills and degree of experience you bring. Grasp this opportunity with both hands and get on the spaghetti junction a role in finance offers.
Send your CV now for a discussion on what opportunities we have in your area.
Yorkshire, London, Manchester, Gloucester, Cardiff, Essex, Bristol, Durham, Nottingham, Lincoln, Herefordshire, Worcester, Warwick, Kent, Surrey, Reading, Oxford, Wiltshire…

There's a website for Corporate Recruiter Network Ltd and it looks okay at first glance. Their address is Admiral's Way in Docklands, but the photograph is of the landmark One Canada Place building. And they have about 380 jobs on file. For number-crunchers in SAS / Business Objects / SPSS and other such across Credit Risk, econometrics, direct mail and other such areas. 380 jobs. Nah. Look more closely and a LOT of the jobs look the same. And how many people are handling these jobs? Sarah Grey. The busiest employment consultant in London. There's a photograph of an office with fancy logos and all, but somehow I'm not sure I believe it.

For me, the first giveaway is that the ad looks like it's for a specific job, but ends with "send you CV now for a discussion of what opportunities we have...". The second is that they are waving "banking" in front of you. There's two types of "banking": retail and investment. The money is in investment banking and you need PhD's to crunch numbers for Morgan Stanley. If the job is paying £40k, it's in a retail bank such as where I work and it's strictly non-glamorous.

I call something fishy fishy.

Just A Phase I'm Going Through

I spent a while a few nights ago not booking a ticket to and an hotel in Paris. For a couple of days. I'd take in the monumental Basquiat exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Wander round. Go home. But I didn't book the ticket. Airfare and hotel would have been £400-£500. Why would I want to pay that to be aloine in Paris when I could be alone in London for free? Because that's the point: I would be on my own. I haven't been on an "away" holiday - except for a short break to see my friends in Utrecht and a trip to Nice - since I broke up with my last girlfriend. Two years ago.

The emotional truth of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood was that I was alone, as in lonely. When my parents moved us from Bexleyheath to Teddington in the summer of 1967, the boys and girls in my class got up a collection and bought me a car for my Scalextric. We went ten-pin bowling. I don't know if that makes me popular. I'm not sure I felt as if I belonged at my own leaving do.

I was one of those children who say they don't have any friends. I didn't share anyone's life, see the inside of their homes, meet their parents. Except Geoff Mason, who was another slight misfit at Erith Grammar. We hung out from time to time, but that was it. We didn't go off on any adventures (we were eleven years old: going into central London would have been an adventure). And a guy called Derek Hasted who was into model railways and at Junior School played the descant recorder well enough to get to play the treble recorder (as I did) and later, as I've just discovered through Google+Facebook, became a guitar teacher and runs a number of guitar groups.

You can live a life on your own right up until the day it occurs to you that everyone else has a partner and you're the Old Guy With No Friends Of Their Own. Slightly creepy. I've started seeing myself as a creepy old guy, and if you don't shake that suspicion, you're done for. If someone doesn't validate you by finding you sexually attractive and pronto, you start to want not to be in other people's company. Because when you are you feel creepy. That's how I feel.

If I'm feeling ironic, I'll say that I can remember either what I used to do with attractive women, or why I used to do it, but not both at the same time. Ha ha. I've got so used to not having someone to share my sexual feelings with, I barely let myself have any, lest I remember how nasty the bitterness of sexual disappointment is. How it alters everything I say and do and how it stains everything else I feel. And then there are days when I think I would rather feel that than feel the bland nullity I usually feel. Feeling-good becomes feeling-good-because-you're-not-feeling-bad. Not feeling-good-because-you-got-laid-last-night-and-it-was-fabulous.

I have lost the sense that other people are magic. That they can and will make my life better, enhance it, add to it, and otherwise make getting out of bed a better idea. Lose that and you're left with habit as the only reason for leaving the front door.

This too shall pass, as we say in AA. And the sooner it does the better. But right now, it's where I am. And if I don't share it and name it, it will go on being where I am.

Oh Comely - The Official Magazine of Pixie Girls Everywhere

The third edition of Oh Comely is out. I found a copy of the second edition about five weeks ago in one of the many absurdly-well-stocked newsagents in Soho and Charlotte Street. (Those newsagents have magazines - mostly fashion, style and design - that you couldn't even find in Borders before it went broke. I'm pretty sure there isn't a newsagent outside that square mile anywhere near as well-stocked. Certainly not W H Smug.) It describes itself as "a magazine about people and their quirks and their creativity, rather than money and what it can buy". If it were any more cute, it would be twee, and it is so girly it could never be gay. It took me a while to understand what it is, but it's the long-awaited official Pixie Girl Magazine.

To understand that, you have to know what a Pixie Girl is. She isn't the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" of the movies, though they may look alike. MPDG's are a male fantasy. Real Pixie Girls are, well, they look like Nadia Dahlawi and Sara Jade, who are not only the record label Young and Lost Club, but also damn near reference PG's.

The PG is feminine without being sexual, and attracted to all things slightly insubstantial (cupcakes, embroidery, folk music, non-corporate careers). Confident without being assertive, she yet has an air of uncertainty, and while she isn't a Material Girl she does like the trinkets and objects she surrounds herself with. They can be promoted without being ambitious and while they would never admit to husband-hunting, when they grow up, PG's become those self-satisfied well-off suburban wives and mothers (aka "Twickenham Wives") you see during the day in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Guildford, Putney and other such places. No-one was ever a PG at school: it's something that happens to a girl in the summer between the school and university.

The magazine has many nice moments and lots of wistful photographs of pretty girls. The essays and interviews are refreshingly not about successful people, and I could buy it just for the quirky decision tree at the back. The guiding lights / editors are liz bennett and des tan (it's a lower-case kind of magazine) and they seem to have decided that they're tired of the usual editorial tone of modern magazines, which, let's be honest, hasn't changed much since the early 1990's and is of marginal relevance to the 2010's. It's also not about money, just like it says, and that's probably what attracts me to it.

Buy a copy. Really. Enter a gentler world.

Promotion As An Anti-Climax

I have done my share of bitching and moaning about The Bank. And I will do some more when they deserve it. But a couple of weeks ago something happened that, well, in cliche-land it would have taken me by surprise, but this is the real world.

Last summer I'd taken a job below my personal pay band because I had had a couple of bad appraisals (the justice of which were mixed), I didn't fit in with any of the jobs on my grade but nor did they want to lose me, and nor did I want to be unemployed. The rules gave me three years' salary protection, but there would be no pay rises. After that, HR could cut my salary back to match the grade if they so chose.
Absent that threat, I couldn't care about grades.

So I came back from a week's break and my new line manager took me aside and told me that they were prepared to offer me a senior analyst role that was in the same pay band as I am. They have been interviewing for a couple of months and the people with more skills than me won't take the job (not enough money, not CV-enhancing enough), whereas the people who will take the job are way short on my skills. Which I knew. I said "I should just shut and say thank you, shouldn't I?" Which was what I did. What I didn't do was feel a deep sense of relief, a sudden uprush of gratitude, a lightening of the spirit or any great urge to rush out and celebrate. I didn't even rush to tell my friends. I didn't even feel a I-told-you-so victory.

Instead, my back and shoulders locked up and became so painful I had to go see my osteopath on Harley Street. And that's where my emotions are: locked. I have no idea what I'm feeling at the moment. I've spent the last fifteen months under the threat of having my salary cut, and on an fifteen month job interview. You might unwind from that in an instant, but I can't.

I've felt lost since. Before I was someone trying to remove a threat to their salary. Now I'm not. Now I have to figure out what I do next. I have to keep up the same pace I've been doing to prove myself, and maybe even exceed it. I have two newbies to train over the next few months, which I can turn into a learning and CV-enhancing opportunity. But right now I feel lost. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. Not for The Bank, but for me.

Guru Advice and The Real Seven Habits

I mentioned that all the management trainers mentioned Stephen Covey's book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I have no intention of reading it and fortunately I don't need to. Mr Covey has provided a useful summary on his website, and it's that I'm going to refer to. The Habits are fairly simple, it's the gloss he puts on them that's objectionable, but I'm not going to discuss it.

Habit One tells you to focus on you Circle of Influence (what you can do something about) instead of their Circle of Concern (what you worry about but can't change); Habit Two tells you to develop an Personal Mission Statement, defining what you want to do, on your "plan for success"; Habit Three suggests you do what's important to you first; Habit Four, that you should stick to your true feelings and commitments, express your ideas with courage and believe there is plenty for everybody; Habit Five suggests you should listen to what people say before rushing in to say your piece; Habit Six that you value the differences between people so you can co-operate with others who can do things you can't; and Habit Seven suggests you should exercise, eat well, keep learning, make meaningful friendships and practice meditation or some other spiritual discipline. You can guess there is a noticeable lack of statistical tables contrasting the surveyed behaviour of "effective" people with that of "ineffective" people. It isn't that kind of book. It's a guru book. It's sold in the gajillions, but nobody knows how many of those copies were abandoned fifty pages in and turned to good use as a door-stop (it's a big book).

There are four rules for pseudo-guru advice. It should be unqualified in scope and apple-pie in content, so you're not likely to suffer prima facie disagreement; it should be something people don't do naturally or can't do easily, so we can get some good guilt trips going; it must have no political consequences; and it should not be an analytical discussion of the ideas involved, let alone refer to actual psychological research (therapies and advice come out as mostly ineffective when researched). One of the rules must be that you are responsible for the state of your life and for changing it. In self-help literature, the economy and politics is random like the weather. It wasn't Wal-Mart that put your Mom-and-Pop store out of business, it was your own damn inability to adapt to the times. Gurus never say "get on your bike" but only because their editor told them it would make them look unsympathetic. This responsibility thing is a huge subject that I will discuss elsewhere.

So let's get to the advice. Of course we should eat well, exercise, meditate and develop our minds and relationships. Good luck doing that when you work on an industrial estate an hour's drive from home where the only food is supplied by a sandwich van and there is nothing but grey delapidation all round. And when you get back, the kids want to play, your spouse needs attention and you have to get to bed by half-past ten to get eight hour's sleep before waking up at half-past six. Weekends? By the time you've gone shopping, entertained the kids, washed, ironed, housekept and slumped... you know the score. Here's the thing: instead of blaming the organisation of post-modern capitalism, you blame yourself. Neat huh?

An effective person only listens to someone whose co-operation they need, and they are only listening for the buying signals. The rest of the time, they no more listen than the rest of us. We don't need to. Most people state their views not for discussion but for expression. They don't mind what's called "an exchange of views" and a lot of perfectly good conversation is just that. When someone is angry with you? They don't want you to engage with what they say, they want you to witness their anger and be contrite. What matters is the tone, not the words. If you pull that reflective listening schtick on them, they will throw things at you and you will deserve every bruise.

Guru advice is often willfully naive. For instance, most people don't fret about things outside their Circle of Influence because they are silly and ineffective. They do it to sound as if they are involved in the Great Issues of Our Time ("Think Global, Act Local" is worthy of an advertising agency and was probably devised by one. It gives an entirely specious significance to acts that are utterly insignificant. It's right up there with "The Personal Is The Political", which gave feminist significance to every little fight a wife picked with her husband.) Or more sadly, they do it as a displacement activity, because they have no real opportunities to get involved in anything significant. (We're back to that thirteen-hour work day and those lost weekends again.) A few people do fret about stuff they can't affect and not for show or displacement, and they do need to see a therapist. They are also the very last people who would and they certainly won't read self-help books. Besides, every activist started off fretting about something that was only in their Circle of Concern, until they decided to get active and extend their Circle of Influence to include the cause.

While we're on naivety, as for believing there is enough for everyone? Because we live on a finite planet, the amount of anything is limited. There's an amount of "everyone" which is too many for any given resource (other than World Peace). So if you really want to think that there's enough to go around, what you're really thinking is that there's a manageable amount of competition for the available resource. That doesn't have quite the same spiritual ring to it.

A "plan for success"? This assumes that you have by now found out what you want to do with your life, that it is legal and moral and that you can make a living doing it. None of this is guaranteed. Very few people make money doing what I want to do, so I have to have a day job. In post-modern capitalism, your "plan for success" is going to be more a "plan for adaptation" as house prices whistle skywards beyond your ability to raise the funds, your employer makes you redundant, your sex life dries up because being out of work is such a turn-on... you know the score. None of that matters. If you don't have a home of your own, it's your fault, I mean, it's for you to take action. You can do it, Little Engine.

The reason the gurus get away with this stuff is that we want to believe them. They don't need to put in the qualifications to their advice, because they know we will do it for them. They don't need to deal with the political and economic issues because we don't want to either: we want to be told that it's our responsibility because we'd rather be lazy and spiritually weak than economically and politically powerless. I might almost suggest that most self-help books are bought - or at least read all the way through - by people who want reasons to blame themselves for their failure. Because the alternative is to take political action, and no-one, not even The Invisible Committee, knows what that looks like.

Besides, from my experience, highly effective people have the following traits: 1) lots of energy; 2) not dealing with people and things that don't advance their cause; 3) a do-able plan and the resources to carry it put; 4) a product or service that meets a need; 5) either actual justified confidence or the ability to blag others into believing they can do it; 6) nothing to lose and 7) a neurotic need to achieve and succeed. Achievement takes special efforts. There are no well-balanced millionaires, creative artists and scientists, political activists, award-winning sports(wo)men, war-winning generals, Special Forces operatives, CEOs or elected politicians. And if the guru tells you that those things aren't a measure of effectiveness, they really are moving the goalposts.