The 2010 A/ W Job Hunt

I spent the first two years at The Bank looking for a way out, but a desirable one came there none (maintenance stock analyst near Heathrow?). At the start of 2009 a number of the agents I trust advised me to hunker down and ride out the recession. I did and they were right: my phone barely rang many of the stories I heard involved people taking new jobs that vanished two months later in a re-organisation.

My phone started to ring a month or so ago and it seems the market has picked up. So after the un-necessarily emotional couple of weeks I've hinted at, I wrote an update mail, assembled the "Agents" mailing list and hit Send. Within minutes the "Undeliverable" messages came back, and a day later the "Postmaster has given up trying to send" messages came. You use those to clean up your contact list.

I was thinking of applying for the supervisory role I've mentioned before. Right up to the point where the new manager told Jack he wasn't going to be considered for the grade two job (Jack's a grade one) , which in everyone else's eyes would be a deserved promotion for Jack, who is an all round Good Guy and knows both sides of the data-world we live in. He also said that if Jack wanted to apply for other jobs in The Bank, he would give Jack his full support - not that he was trying to get rid of him... This is the kind of manager who uses performance gradings to communicate his personal approval of your behaviour and what you'ver done for him lately. I am not going to justify his decisions to my staff when I don't agree. ("Fred felt that your behaviours / performance wasn't quite..."). I couldn't work as a line manager for the guy. That decision just made itself. And starting the job hunt has given me a sense of options that I haven't had for a long while. I feel so much calmer now.

Job hunts are different for different professions and people: a pricing analyst / manager has a very different experience from a credit control assistant. Above two-levels-below-the-Boardroom, you don't really go looking for jobs as mere mortals do. The headhunters call you. If you call them, they will be pleasant and put you on file, but until they get an assignment that matches you, there is nothing they can do. Senior guys and gals can spend a long time waiting for an opening. Many specialists turn out to have a simple plan. A friend of mine is a technical writer: the first time he was laid off in a re-organisation, his manager told him to register with agencies X, Y and Z, as they were the specialists in technical writers. Don't bother with the others, she said. He did what she suggested and it worked out pretty well. Sadly, there are no specialist agencies for pricing guys.

Make Tools, Not Quick-Fixes

Faced with a new task and an eight-hour deadline, do you: a) spend seven and a half hours building a tool to do the job and thirty minutes using it to deliver the result, or b) spend all eight hours working up something that does the trick but can't be re-used?

If you answered a) you are probably an engineer at heart, whereas b) is what everyone else does.

I once spent four days automating a large spreadsheet we used for a weekly report: it had twenty sheets and thirty pivot tables fed from separate SQL queries on a mainframe database. Most of the time was spent on the Query and Pivot Table object models, where the lack of a decent manual had me going round in circles. The report took me about forty-fifty minutes each week to do manually. Over fifty weeks, that's about the same number of hours I spent on the automation. Why bother? Because I learned a lot of new stuff and got practice on the Excel object model (I'm an Access whiz); anyone else could do the report when I was on holiday; I could produce the report faster and more accurately each week, which was what the boss wanted.

One way people make progress is by making tools so they can do in an hour what used to take all day. That way, they have the rest of the day to do something else. And a "tool" is anything that helps you do the job: it might be a piece of software, but it might be a report, your mobile phone, or indeed something you buy in the hardware or kitchen store.

A good tool should be: intuitively obvious to the person who might use it; robust; easy to maintain and modify; and let people do the job in less time and with less effort than they it did before.

Never use IT departments and outside contractors to develop tools for you: what they produce will fail all those tests. And it will cost a fortune.

Little-Known London Institutions: Goodenough College

I was passing a few moments before going to see Winter's Bone at the Renoir cinema the other Tuesday and wandered round the area to the east of the Brunswick Centre - not something I do very often as east of the Kingsway is still marked "Here be dragons" on my psychic map of London. Passing by Coram's Fields with its social-services paranoia sign...

and found myself passing somewhere that looks like this....

... and is called Goodenough College. Which is not a college in the sense that they do lectures and exams, but a hall of residence / hotel for postgraduate students registered on a full-time course in London. Rent is £143 a week for a single room and £238 a week for a 1-bed flat. Which for the somewhere on the doorstep of most of the University of London and within walking distance of anywhere you might want to go except Chelsea and Kensington, is pretty fair. It looks like they have a selection process that skews towards the cool and pretty, but then, wouldn't you? Until that day I had never heard of the place.

Nor had I ever heard of or passed through St George's Gardens, but it looks pretty enough...

... even of you do approach it through some raised coffins.

Crossing A Bridge In Amsterdam

I had the first one-to-one with the new manager last week. Over the next three months he'd like me to train the FNGs, and in the next nine months, work on the integration project. I could hear myself reacting: "nine months! No way nine more months of this s..t." I didn't say that out loud. When we talked about my grade issue - I'm in a lower-graded job and my salary protection runs out in another eighteen months - he said "oh eighteen months is long enough to position you for a Grade Four". There was something automatic about the way he said it that I didn't like: it came across as "Oh eighteen months, great, I don't have to think about it now". We talked a role that's opened up because my supervisor has just put her notice in - with nowhere to go. (So that's job to apply for - it's so easy the current incumbent couldn't take a year.) I've been thinking about whether I'd want that job - it's why I've been going on the courses. He said he'd be happy if I applied, but I would need to be "more corporate".

What's my as yet un-communicated decision? Well, here's a clue. Remember me? The ACoA? Guaranteed to get involved with the wrong people the wrong way? I can't get involved with managing people and I don't want to be involved with solving organisational dysfunctions or people's professional and career problems. It's as bad for me as a bag of Minstrels or a double whiskey. And running a group of junior analysts, half of whom will be new and half have too much history with a string of botched re-organisations, would not be fun. Especially as I know one wants to leave, taking a ton of knowledge with him. I can't do their kind of corporate. I don't want to work The Bank's dysfunctional freaking bureaucracy. And I don't want to supervise a bunch of people who are just producing regular reports until they get so bored they leave after at most two years. (That was the plan, but in this market they might be stuck there a lot longer.)

No. I'm better off personally if I stay working with data and computers and learning stuff. So maybe I can get back into pricing or maybe I stay in MI - SAS / SQL bashing - but with added value. To justify the salary. I'm at whatever they call this stage of my life - the bit where you're not at the top and you're in your fifties. I'm not looking for a career - I'm looking for an income.

A couple of years ago, I was walking through Amsterdam with my friend. We were crossing one of the canal bridges and an open boat passed underneath, with half-a-dozen medical students celebrating. I felt a wave of relief at the sight: it wasn't my world anymore. It was theirs. I'm not responsible for how the world turns out now - they are. My responsibility is to stay employed and build up some savings for when I can't work anymore. That's not a trivial task in today's world. And that's where I am.

I keep forgetting that moment. And I need to remember it.

Paramedics and Pretty Women

A week last Saturday I had a nasty case of food poisoning. It wasn't what I thought was happening when I was drenched in sweat, panicking, barely able to think and thought I'd passed out for a short moment. I called the emergency services and then my sister. I was hyperventilating, sweating, trying bawl my eyes out and doubling over in agony. The quick response paramedic was round in what felt like a shot - they very often park within a mile of where I live. He started to calm down my breathing and took a pulse. The ambulance arrived fairly shortly afterwards. They hooked me up to a machine that didn't quite go 'ping', took pulse, blood sugar and blood pressure and then I went upstairs and threw up, which I do very noisily. After which I started to calm down. Quite properly they decided it was food poisoning. I'm not so sure. I know what happens when I get food poisoning: it's not pleasant, it lasts for twelve hours or more and takes me a couple of days to recover from. This wasn't like that. One of the paramedics suggested a "panic attack" - which felt a little more like it to me. I'm fifty-six years old - when I dialled 999, I thought it was a heart attack. My sister arrived, was tremendously calm and after the paramedics had packed up, we went to the Heart of Hounslow walk-in centre, where the paramedics had made an appointment for me (you can't but they can). The doctor looked at the charts from the paramedics machines, prodded my stomach and pronounced me healthy if shaken. That's the catch: I have the resting blood pressure and pulse of someone about half my age. I always give good pulse and pressure.

I had a ticket for Alvin Ailey and I decided that sitting around at home "resting" would probably make me feel worse, so I went up to Sadlers Wells straight from the walk-in centre. I knew I was recovering when I had an inner message saying "fries with lots of salt and a Coke at the Mediterranean Canteen": you actually need salt and sugar to help stabilise after a food poisoning episode. And if I'd felt any better, I would have asked the very attractive woman who sat two seats to my left, and with whom I had a conversation on the 391 back to Waterloo (that's right, she chose to sit next to me), for her a date. She had trained with the Ballet Rambert, wanted to dance classical but was told she "should try contemporary", took pictures of the gargoyles on the walls of the Royal Courts of Justice, lives near Hampton Court, had an MBA, no wedding band and was thinking about working in something environmental. Did I mention the bit where she had great legs and a really attractive, sexy face? Okay, I just did. But I wasn't feeling at my best, and she had a headache from the aircon in the theatre. Damn. The one mistake I made was not to offer my name mid-way through the conversation. I'm not good at that.

The attack wasn't about food. Maybe one of the eggs was dodgy, but I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure it was about the whole work situation. I know what I need to concentrate on, which is finding another job in the West End that lets me see movies in Russell Square at six in the evening. As I'm about to do now. I need to concentrate on getting one of my plays produced. And if I can get a date with someone as attractive as the lady from Sadlers Wells Saturday, that would be good as well. I can't let myself get involved with the "stuff" at work - especially with other people's emotions and dramas. It's not good for me.

Why We Have Poor Cinema

There's an article in this weekend's FT by Peter Aspden about the British films in the London Film Festival. He doesn't think much of them: "Kiera Knightly floating ethereally on a  hot day in a boarding school; Colin Firth palying a stammering King, under the watchful eye of Helena Bonham Carter; some unattractive Mike Leigh characters indulging in bitter-sweet conversation; some unattractive Ken Loach characters swearing profusely and threatening to beat the life out of each other...British films...have nothing to do with the concerns of ordinary people." So far, so much am I in agreement. However, it turns out that it's my fault. "...this is less the fault of British film-makers than Britain itself....of the chino-wearing, frappuccino-drinking Britain of today... Do current economic and social trends make for great cinema? We are a culture besotted by reality shows, celebrities, sport, property prices..."

In other words, British cinema is poor because the English are shallow and crass. It's interesting that when he has to name some great films, he has to go back to the 1940's and 50's. Brief Encounter at that - a film which is so clearly a metaphor for the problems of the love that dare not speak its name that I'm always amazed anyone thinks it's about straight people. More recently, what about Local Hero, Heavenly Pursuits, Gregory's Girl, Unrelated, Movern Caller, Genova, Love Actually, Croupier, Close My Eyes, Truly Madly Deeply, Land Girls, The Ploughman's Lunch, Rag Tale, Strong Language, ...... ? All of these are wonderful films mostly with fairly believable, if rather well-paid,  middle-class characters and all more recent that 1945.

The problem with the crass-culture-makes-for-crass-movies thesis is that much the same could be said about the French, but no-one is as rude about French cinema. Ah. There's the thing. L'Exception Culturelle. The subsidy and encouragement by the French Government for movies.

Someone green-lights these costume dramas and underclass horrors (Eden Lake anyone?), someone fund them and people (desperate for work) agree to appear in them. Someone writes them, and other people produce and direct them. Costume dramas are the one genre England can export - Four Weddings and a Funeral is a contemporary costume drama. Movies are a business and costumes are a good bet. Underclass horrors I have no idea about, but then I don't see the attraction of football either. British films are poor because people knowingly sign up to make poor films, not because I have a take-away cappuccino from Caffe Nero of a working morning.

Writing about the contemporary world is far more demanding than it used to be, because our world is far more complicated and a lot less economically attractive. Maybe people don't want to see films about contemporary concerns because they live with the threat of unemployment, a constipated job market, increasing taxes, declining real incomes, ever-shabbier public spaces and ever-less satisfying personal relationships (because everyone's working in spirit-sapping jobs) and are surrounded by fantasy-land stories of individual strike-it-lucky successes (hello National Lottery) and vacuous self-help (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People anyone?).

Robert McKee points out that a writer must have an understanding of the politics and economics of the world of their story. How a writer is supposed to have that when politicians, economists, bankers and academics so clearly have no grasp of it at all, well, I'm not so sure. That doesn't excuse Kidulthood - nothing could - and nor am I suggesting that the British Government should subsidise movies. But it isn't my fault that poor movies get made - I don't go to see them (except Eden Lake on DVD, which I bitterly regret ever passing in front of my eyes).

London Breakfasts

The first couple of weeks in September, the weather was fine and I was waking up at 05:45 every morning. So a few times I caught the 06:45 into town and tried a few places for an old-fashioned English breakfast. This was Coti Pierre on Rathbone place...

All the breakfasts cost between £5 and £8 and taste more or less the same. You're not getting high quality at that price, but it's filling. Far more important is the atmosphere. This doesn't cut it...

I was the only customer. This wasn't as dismal as Patissiere Valerie in Covent Garden at quarter to eight, where they were still taking delivery of the day's supplies. So another place was here...

... on Leicester Square. There were a few people inside and a little more activity. The breakfast looked like this...

but the butter was slightly rancid. It's a little thing like that puts you off going back to a place. Then there were kippers at the Soho Townhouse, which were as good as you would think and as expensive. I was the first through the door, but by eight there were low-key business breakfasts going on. A treat like that is a definite boost for the well-being. And then there was here...

... which was the best quality full English (not at the Soho Townhouse) and it looked like this....

You need to sit outside at Bar Italia, because the counter inside is too narrow and high to eat at. Next to me were a group of firemen who were going to a colleague's retirement parade - they still parade people out in the fire service?

London is a slightly saner town at that time - there are enough people on the streets to make it look like it's inhabited and a working place, but not the blank-faced rushing crowds that there are at eight-thirty.  The people walk slower and are more relaxed: it feels more like a European town.