In The Upper Room - Sadler's Wells

Another trip to Sadler's Wells, this time to see the Birmingham Royal Ballet in a three-part programme with very long intervals (I didn't know about the long intervals). The first piece was Kenneth MacMillan's Concerto, which was pretty and pointless in that strange way that modern dance can be. The second was Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, which was fun and sexy. But I was still waiting to be amazed.

The third piece. Twyla Tharp's In The Upper Room. Music by Philip Glass. I'm wondering. This could be painful. It starts.

In three minutes, I'm entranced and it's clear we're in the presence of The Real Thing. The Birmingham dancers were fluid, loose-limbed and scattered around the beat, which gave the whole thing an informal feel - it's clearly notated to an inch of its life, but the dancers made it seem like they were making bits of it up. And I like that improvisatory feel.



The way the dancers seem to solidify as they come through the smoke is slightly magical and the finale will make you shout "Yeah!" If you've ever sat through an evening of rigorous modern dance, thinking "that's a really cool trick, and they are technically brilliant, but where's the fun?", here's your antidote.

Don't Play Interview Battleships

Your skills are there somewhere. Let's see...nope, nothing on A4: how is your department organised? Let's try B7: what do you do in your current job? Maybe H6: tell me about a time you had to respond to a client request quickly. And on it goes. A bunch of questions that make sense if you are already doing what they want you to do for them, but not otherwise.

They don't want to ask straight out if you can do X, Y and Z, because that makes it too easy for you to say Yes with whatever varying degree of truth is involved. To get round that they would have to give you a test, and of course no-one who works there would pass the test. If you did, the chances are you would realise you were working below your abilities in about, oh, a week. And they know that. Tests are fine for commodity code-cutters or people who have to know the official regulations around their jobs, but not for companies hiring non-cookie-cutter jobs.

So they shoot random questions at you and see if you mention any magic words. Recently I was so puzzled by one interviewer's repeated questioning about "what I did" at The Bank, that I eventually cam straight out and said "you want to know what I can do?" And then told him. He fired a quick test at me, which I passed (because I am actually that good). From then on the interview got back on track.

I vowed that the next time someone asked "what do you do at The Bank" I would say "not much of any real interest to you, or to me, which is why I want to work with you. What's interesting to you is that I've picked up skills in (insert relevant stuff here) and some experience of (insert more relevant stuff here). But how I use them at The Bank is more or less irrelevant to what I can do for you." Then go on to talk about their business and my understanding of it.

High Dependency Unit

There are times when I wonder if I really still like music or if it's just a habit. Do I like stuff because I think I should? Given my recent immersion in the symphonic works of Bruckner, Prokofiev and Shostakovich for educational purposes, you can see how I might have that doubt.

So I was having my pass-the-time-between-work-and-a-movie coffee and cake in the Milkbar on Bateman Street, where they play a steady stream of what seem to be New Zealand bands at a volume so you can't ignore it or hear the conversation at the next table. I was tapping away on my Asus and started to think "that's a good guitar sound"... tap, tap, stare, think, tap, tap "that's a really good guitar sound", tap, tap, think, tap "what is this?" So I asked the guys at the counter, who told me it was an New Zealand band called High Dependency Unit and the album was called Metamathics. Which is not on amazon.co.uk, but two others are and I've downloaded both onto my Sony Ericsson C510. When that happens, I know I still really like music and my ear hasn't gone soft.

One of those tracks - Masd - is one of the most beautiful sounds I've heard all year. Sadly it's not available on You Tube, but this is, and you should give it a listen.

The Pursuit of Happiness - Or What The Founding Fathers Really Meant

As every schoolboy knows, the Declaration of Independence says amongst other things that "we hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

As every schoolboy has been told by his tutors and millions of subsequent mavens, "the pursuit of happiness" is a siren calling to wreck the soul on the rocks of futility, an impossible dream and an occupation as futile as finding the end of the rainbow. Happiness, in the Western World, is to be pursued, surely, but is unattainable. Except for the simple-minded, simple-souled or through some adjustments of the soul that would tax the virtue of a Tibetan monk.

Unless you're one of the Founding Fathers. For them the word "pursuit" did not commonly mean '"chase after" but rather "occupation", "work", "calling" or at worst "pastime". They didn't mean "pursuit of happiness" as in the chase after it, but the actual practice, work, occupation or vocation of happiness: doing stuff that you like to do and not wanting to be doing something else at the same time.

Happiness wasn't a state of mind for them, but a mode of engaging in activities. The right they had in mind was not to some kind of chemical or spiritual high or snatched moments of contentment and bliss, but to work and live in a manner that was such that you want to live like that and aren't always haunted by the idea that you could live better. That's what happiness is, and that's what the occupation, work or "pursuit" of it would be. Not to be blissed-out, not to be vacantly un-discontent, but to be actively engaged in the world in a manner that was satisfying to you. And not to be haunted by nightmares of better.

That's an idea of happiness that only a rich man could have, or a philosopher. The rest of the world in 1776, ground down by poverty and bad weather, saw happiness as the absence of misery, hunger, ruined crops, taxes and anything else that made their lives harder. Poor men conceive of happiness as the absence of everything that makes their live hard. Happiness is to be achieved by the acquisition of tools and goods that make life easier or more productive, that shelter from the storm, ease the pain or bring a moment of release and gladness. And that's the stuff that gets chased after, because you can chase after highs and try to cheat the lows for ever and never succeed. The Founding Fathers were not creating a right of existence for John Deere Corp (agricultural machinery) or for Jack Daniels (easing the pain). They were creating a right for you to pass your life productively and in accordance with your best skills and nature.

Just like they did.

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.