Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Part 42

The skateboard graveyard on the downstream southside pontoon of Hungerford Bridge; Anna in front of the Lloyds Insurance Building during a fam trip to the new offices - sometimes I wish I was twenty years younger; yes, cup cakes at the office, we know how to live large (and very tasty too); two views of the crowds Tuesday evening at Piccadilly Circus, when it was really hot and I was finishing a two-scoop ice-cream from Scoop after my SCS class and before descending into the tube; the Cycling Horde on the north side of Waterloo Bridge waiting for the green light; what happens to your Silhouettes when they fall out of your bag and you don't notice for a couple of hours in the meantime a car ran over them.

It's Too Quiet In Here

A few weeks ago, our CEO announced that 15,000 jobs would be "saved" over the next three years. Not from the poor bloody infantry in the branches and telephone offices. There were promises to leave the infantry alone and noises about "reducing layers of management" instead. Even in an organisation which hands out "manager" titles too easily, 15,000 is a big chunk: someone worked it out as 1 in 4. During the internal announcement, they mentioned en passant that The Bank hires 12,000 people a year, so a hiring freeze would do the trick. Maybe it does, but it doesn't hire 12,000 managers a year.

And if anyone is worried, they aren't showing it. There are no rumours, except that we should be hearing something in the next couple of weeks, and that the Director-level people know what's happening. There have been no mysterious project groups or secondments and if the angels of death from HR have been flying (they were roosting in senior managers' offices every day during the last re-organisation) it's been at night. Nothing. Which could mean everything (no change, just a recruitment freeze) or nothing (the evaluation and redundanc... err... rationalisation process will be announced).

Because of size of the company and the numbers involved, an actual cull would need minimum 30-day notice for At-Risk letters and a public process to get rid of people. This deflates morale faster than a pin in a balloon, and they did it to us a couple of years ago. The feeling is that with a major IT integration due to happen in the next month, management don't need us distracted by re-applying for jobs within the company, looking outside and generally feeling like crap. They don't need us feeling like that, but they might be willing to live with it.

I'm guessing everyone is thinking that it will be everyone else. A large number of people have been working full-time on integrating The Other Bank into The Bank, and yet the business has carried on. Those people are wondering if they aren't rather disposable. My bit of The Bank went through a blood-bath (sorry, rationalisation) a couple of years ago, when they really did get rid of a bunch of... less-performing... expensive middle managers. (And I got stuffed.) Other bits of The Bank dodged that, so many people in my bit think the axe will fall elsewhere. Everyone is hoping that Operational Risk will vanish in a puff of smoke to some central office, never to be seen again.

The City, of course, is expecting 15,000 pulses to be stopped. The internal announcements made it sound like it would be 15,000 positions, a decent proportion of which are already un-filled already, so what we were looking at is a hiring freeze. I don't think so.

Earlier this year, the new CEO held a meeting in Birmingham of all the managers and head office folk involved in the businesses. It took the largest conference hall in the NEC and the trains to and from London in the morning and evening were rammed. I'm guessing he took one look at the assembled crowd and said to himself "We do NOT need this many f....g people to run a frigging bank".

I think we're going to get a really nasty shock.

Moving to Ubuntu 11:04

Over the weekend I moved my Asus netbook to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. It still has Windows 7 Starter and I won't be getting rid of that, but I've long wanted to make the move to Linux, and now may be the time.

The install of Ubuntu was easy: go to website, download Wubi, an installation program that runs under Windows, let Wubi do its thing and when the computer re-starts, choose Ubuntu from the Grub menu. First time around, it takes a while, and it's a short on feedback. At one point I was clicking and hitting keys at random because the damn thing wasn't saying or doing anything but seemed to be very busy.

Just after the Desktop comes up, it prompted me, from something that looks identical to the OS X wireless network symbol, to join a wireless network and when supplied with passwords did so with no fuss. The previous times I've tried installing Ubuntu, it didn't want to know about my wireless network, for all that I followed the instructions for ndiswrapper. I used to say that I would go over to Ubuntu when it "just did" wireless networking, and now it does.

I need Open Office, Chrome, Evernote, a music player and Dropbox. Chrome and Dropbox come in .deb files for Ubuntu and the install is, well, automatic but not very polished. Clicking on a righteously constituted .deb directory should start up Ubuntu Software Centre, which should take care of the process on its own. Its progress bar gets a little way across and vanishes, only to re-appear almost done a while later, and the whole computer just stopped responding while the install was going on.

Installing Open Office had me looking for advice on the web (at a site called OMG! Ubuntu) and using Terminal. It turns out that you have to install a program to convert something in the Open Office files from one format to another, and another program to run that other formatted file. Once you've done that the Open Office Installer runs just as fast, if not faster, than it does on Windows 7. You would think a company with Oracle's resources would have built a slick install routine.

Evernote is not available for Linux, but an intrepid and seemingly lone developer out there as developed Nevernote, a clone with all the functionality a text-basher like me needs. The Ubuntu Software Centre told me off for trying to install a package that was missing some hash constant-sounding thingy, but let me carry on anyone. Feeding my username and password into Nevernote, pressing Sync and waiting about three minutes got me my notes.

There's a version of the OS X Dock on the left-hand side of the screen, and I put my programs onto it while taking off Libre Office and other stuff I don't want.

I had to faff around the filesystem a bit before locating the NTFS directories and more importantly the iTunes directory for my music files. Ubuntu makes Banshee the default player, and it looks like an early iTunes. It will also recognise any AAC / MP3 files you have already in your iTunes directory and import them to its catalogue, so there was no need to re-load my music. It even found a lot of the album art.

You need to remember.... CaSe SENsitiVe!! Linux is, while Windows isn't. This matters when you are in the Terminal or for directory paths, but doesn't seem so important in the GUI.

The rest is about getting every little thing working the way I want: things like mouse speed, scrolling, appearance, default programs and the like. That takes a while.

I did all this without having RTFM, or indeed any FM, on Ubuntu. I suspect that I'll be getting one of the manuals on 11.04 and learning some more stuff.

Ubuntu / Linux developers need to polish the install routine. Regular folk like me who use computers to Do Real-World Stuff (as opposed to Doing Computer Stuff) do not want to get involved with the operating system. We want our software. Installation has to be as simple and as full of feedback as it is on Windows or as seemingly instant as it is in OS X.

However, I'm looking forward to the experiment. What would it take for me to abandon Windows on the Asus? If Irfan Skiljan would release his peerless IrfanView program for Linux, that would be it.

Manufacturing Depression (2): The Existential Significance (Or Not) of Depression

Greenberg has many problems with the depression industry: one is that the drugs don't work on the majority of patients (he says that 70% of patients prescribed anti-depressants stop the course in the first month because of the side-effects - of which one is a loss of interest in or ability to perform sex); another is that the idea that depression is mere chemistry and says nothing about the world one is living in or the way one lives in it, robs our emotions of meaning.

I'm glad to read a professional saying that the drugs don't work and I'm not going to quibble. If it takes a large-scale PR campaign (only OTC medicines can be advertised in the UK), biased "research", confidentiality clauses, a huge sales force and all the other tricks to shift the stuff, that's because the companies know that word-of-mouth, BBC documentaries, not to mention the consumer-created websites, are going to be telling a different story. Potions with names ending in 'statin', 'formin' and anti-depressants are being hyped. Nobody needed to hype Miltown in the 1960's or Valium in the 1970's: both were taken recreationally. Indeed, according to Greenberg, word-of-mouth loved Miltown so much it got banned: it was being used as just another high.

The thing about disease and meaning is a little trickier. Cholera is a disease and it is mere chemistry, and it told the Victorians (eventually) that the water was infected and they needed to get some main sewage and a clean water supply going. They could have decreed that there was nothing wrong with the water, and blamed the patients or looked for something to cure the sufferers. Blaming the patients is always good when the no-one has a clue about the problem or a cure - fixing the patients makes sense when an actual solution would be a tough sell to funding agencies. When someone gets a disease that makes a mess of them it always says two things: there's something out there, this patient is susceptible to it, and that person seems to be immune to it. (There are a few people who seem to be able to shrug off HIV, don't forget.) After that, it's a matter of economics: is it cheaper for the taxpayer to solve the problem or to solve the patients? You can ask another question as well: is there more profit in solving the problem or solving the patients? What's profitable for Big Pharma may not be so cheap for the tax-payer.

What I'm not so sure about is that depression is always existentially meaningful. Not if we mean serious will-sapping depression anyway, rather than the depression-lite that Greenberg rightly points out is passed off as a disease.

A little diversion into some autobiography. As yet another relationship was falling apart in the 1980's, one of her final shots was the suggestion that I might be or was "clinically depressed". She was a PR who specialised in, you guessed, pharmaceuticals, but this was in the pre-Prozac days. I was a great many things back then (jerk, prick, asshole, bad-mannered, lacking self-confidence, incapable of doing fun, relationships or making good career judgements, and sophomore alcoholic to boot) but no matter how low I felt, I was never depressed. Every frakkin' day I woke up and ground it out, through insomnia that would have sent you begging for sleeping pills, through emotional upsets that left me hyperventilating, through painful physical loneliness and endless emotional puzzlement, and every day I showed up, ready to fight and fuck, however badly I might do it. Duvet days are for the weak, and pills for the pathetic. A long-term AA colleague is a pill-head more than a drunk, and while we have much in common, our diseases are different. The defiant alcoholic in me could never let himself lie down on the couch and fade away - unless it was to sleep off a drunk. I had all the symptoms of depression but not the disease. And under the DSM-IV rules, a doctor should have hesitated to diagnose me as depressed because I had a drink problem and DSM-IV prefers to deal with the substance abuse first. Which is what I did, and I felt better about myself and the world in early recovery than I ever did when drinking.

This experience makes me believe that there are genuinely depressed people, who have an anomalous body chemistry, and will eventually be helped to feel like a normal person when Big Pharma starts making drugs that don't make you want to kill yourself or feel like you're a stranger in your own body. The rest of the world just have lives that suck, either because they aren't living right (as I wasn't) or because the objective circumstances of their lives actually objectively suck. Starting the day by standing on a cramped train, having a bullying or incompetent supervisor, inadequate tools to do their job, a wife who can't cook and uses sex for reward-and-punishment, a couple of kids who ooze resentment and demands for money, the ever-looming threat of redundancy, debts, a car that needs fixing and to make it all worse, an endless stream of fatuous preaching about how they should be "eating less and exercising more" and stories about how this or that nebbesh turned their life around by doing something one-off and unrepeatable. Anyone who can bear that with good cheer is delusional, and most people aren't.

Most people whose lives suck aren't depressed. They have existentially meaningful emotions and states such as: hungover, withdrawn, sulky, snappy, irritable, resentful, aggressive, passive, resigned, lacking energy, unable to get to sleep, waking up too early, lack of enthusiasm and a hundred other things no two of which add up to an attractive personality. These are meaningful because they have specific causes, even if the sufferer doesn't know what yet. It's this stuff that should be treated in Dr Greenberg's therapy room and should not be eased by drugs. What most people whose lives suck need is a different life: a change of job, wife, children, salary, neighbourhood, sex life, friends, acquaintances, hobbies, sports and pastimes. Their problem is that there are no jobs to go to, divorces favour the wife, they can't dump the kids because they are not a "deadbeat dad", the employer isn't giving out pay rises and hasn't for the last three years, and between the job, the commute and the chores, there are about eight hours a week left in which to have a life.

This doesn't make for someone who works and plays well with others. Employers want malleable, can-do, don't-mind peons; mothers-of-two want husbands with jobs, who pay the bills, don't make un-natural demands (like sex), aren't going to leave and don't need worked around or managed; friends and acquaintances would rather have cheerful companions than glum ones. I'm with Greenberg that Western post-modern capitalist economies are great at producing lives that suck. But one look at the inspirational literature and snake-oil of the past will convince you that most people's lives have always sucked. Big Pharma isn't producing anti-depressants because it helps the machinery of post-modern capitalism. It's one thing for Juan Trippe, President of Pan Am to be sitting next William Allen, the President of Boeing, and say that if Boeing could build a 400-seater he would buy enough to make it worthwhile, as it would bring international air travel to the masses who could afford the cost of a seat on a Jumbo but not a 707. (That conversation actually happened). It would be another entirely for the CEO of (say) AIG to say to the CEO of AstraZeneca "If you can make a pill that turns my workers into docile worker bees, I'll make sure it gets funded by our medical insurance arm. And I think I speak for all the other guys as well." That conversation is never going to happen.

Big Pharma does produce serious psychotic-grade anti-depressants. The market is small and the drugs are so awful no-one can buy or sell them in the cafes in and around big hospitals that are the scene of the secondary market in prescription drugs. Big Pharma is not going to get rich making drugs to deal with actual medical conditions. Big Pharma is producing anti-depressants because ordinary people want to get out of it and always have. They may call it "taking the edge off", but it's the same thing. It's a nice side-effect of contemporary anti-depressants that they make people more accepting, malleable and prepared to accept the stuff that "life" in the guise of the HR Department, the wife's lawyer and the train company throw at them. There's no doubt it helps with the acceptability of these drugs that people on them put up with a crappy supervisor rather than suddenly discovering to give him a sound thrashing in a stairwell.

It isn't Big Pharma and existentially-shallow doctors who want to give people drugs to allow them to accept their lives. It's the people who want to take them: what do you think alcohol is? Not all of them, not even most of them. 70% of the people prescribed anti-depressants stop within a month, presumably because they would rather be irritable than sexually impotent. Of course that leaves 30% who carry on, either because they do prefer being impotent to irritable, or because they really are better on the drugs, or because the drugs make them better at dealing with this crazy world. Greenberg would rather that people didn't get out of it, and that they examined and re-evaluated their own lives. That's my preference for myself as well, but it doesn't suit everybody, just as the drugs don't suit everybody. The shocking thing about ordinary people is that no matter what circumstances you drop them into, they will come up feeling happy. Make them rich or poor, take away limbs or lovers, they will turn out happy. Or rather: they will be content with their circumstances and not see them as being worth trying to get the Fifth International started. And if their circumstances are so bad their natural happy-equilibrium mechanism breaks down, then they will look for pills and potions to help it back. Ordinary people don't do living examined lives. I don't know what they do do, and I hope I never find out.

What's really scary is that one day there may be anti-depressants without nasty side-effects. Then nobody will stop taking them once they start, and this time the pharmaceutical Calvinists (as Greenberg calls them) won't be able to ban it. They didn't ban Viagra, and that's only taken for one reason.

Manufacturing Depression (1): Thoughts on The Book of Job

I've been fascinated by the story of Job for a long while, even reading some commentaries from the theology section in the University of London Library back in the day. There are many interpretations of the story, in nearly all of which the interpreter forgets that it's God's fault Job has lost everything and gained a skin covered by sores, and blames the old man for his bad luck and miserable mood. These interpretations suggest that it's up to Job to accept God, or the world, or something else, so he can quit whining and get better.

Reading Gary Greenberg's Manufacturing Depression sent me back to Job again. Job was a multi-millionaire farmer / landowner whom God allows the Devil to make bankrupt and cover his body with sores. His wife tells him to "curse God and die", which is a little short of wholly supportive. Then three old buddies show up and sit with him. After a while, Job starts to kvetch about how he wishes he had never been born, and what a dreadful place the world is. His friends tell him to stop moaning, that God doesn't do Bad Things and even if the wicked do prosper, it isn't for long. Job tells them they are hardly being sympathetic or helpful. Eventually a kid called Elihu tells Job that he should quit moaning and challenging God to explain himself, because he's an insignificant sinning worm and God is, well, God. At which point God appears, uses Elihu's own phrase about "multiplieth words without knowledge" against him, and informs Job's friends of their utter ignorance of the ways of the world, that they have been talking trash about Him and need to kill some fatted calves for Job by way of apology.

So why would anyone stick this story in their Bible? Well, there's a thing known in the trade as the Problem of Evil, which is roughly that if you are all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful and love the human race, why do you let bad things happen to good people? Ordinary people seem to have an almost genetic need to believe they live in a fair world, where they will be rewarded, or at least left alone, if they behave as they are expected to by the powers-that-be, from God to Revenue and Customs via whoever is running their company this week. This is what a child in a functional family who went to well-run schools would believe, as it would pretty much describe their experience.

By modus tollens, it follows that if you are messed about or left out of the prizes, you have failed to satisfy the Gods or the various Caesars in your life. Bad fortune is your own fault, you have a bad character. The wicked may and do prosper with logical consistency under this regime, but ordinary people treat prospering as a sign you are a good person, though perhaps a little pushy and grabby, because with magnificent circularity, if you were a bad person, you would not be prospering.

If this is your view of the world, then you get to criticise God for letting bad things happen to good people. Now it's one thing for Job to call God to account - he has a legitimate complaint - but the rest of us don't get to, even by disguising it as philosophy. Well, not in any organised religion you know about anyway. Complain about God and the next thing you know, you'll be trying to usurp the Pope or something.

So the scribes of the King James Bible put in a story telling us that God runs the world according to rules we don't understand, that indeed nothing in this world happens without God's permission, and that attempts to understand human affairs in merely human moral terms amount to blasphemy. I think Greenberg is right to say that the happy ending, where Job gets his wealth back and a long life as well, is put there to take some of the bleakness away.

God's argument is all bluster, of course, and worse, it can be modified by anyone in a singular position of power to their own end: how dare you criticise "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap or Carly "Cruella" Fiorina, what do you know of the stresses and strains of being a big-company CEO? It's an argument for the absolute autonomy of Very Powerful Beings from mankind's expectations of Him / Her / Whatever.

But en passant the Book of Job is an argument that, under certain views of the nature of God, the usual explanations of human suffering are not just wrong but utterly misleading. It's also is a hefty chunk of major poetry that expresses better than anything else how it feels to be desperate, dispirited, exhausted and utterly out of faith with the world, and how hollow and pointless it is to talk someone out of that feeling.  Which leads me to the rest of Greenberg's book on depression in another post.

Why I Don't Always Want To Be A "Good Listener"

I overheard someone talking about “conversational narcissism” recently and, of course, Googled it to find out what it might be. It’s a name for the way people hi-jack a conversation you start and make it about themselves. So A starts talking about looking at new cars, and B says “Oh yeah, I was looking at (name fancy car and list high-end requirements)”. What B is supposed to do is talk about A’s search for a new car, not about herself.

The same site had some other articles about being a good conversationalist, so I took a look. Every one of them re-hashed the same old lines of the “it is better to be charmed than charming” variety. According to this line, a good conversationalist is someone who spends their time listening to the other person, prompting with questions and encouraging with non-verbal signals. This advice was given by nineteenth-century grandees to young men who needed to behave properly around nineteenth-century grandees and their numerous female relatives. The grandees and their female relatives had, of course, no interest in the opinions of young people without a station in life and were used to be being humoured as they wittered on about nothing in particular. This was the world where the advice “a good talker listens, not speaks” applies. Last time I looked, this is the twenty-first century and very few of us spend any time with grandees of any kind. And if we did, they would be disinclined to talk to us about anything, because the world has changed a lot since the days of long dinner parties in country houses. The old-school advice only works when there’s a hierarchy that makes one person the designated witterer and the other the designated wittered-to.

Absent the hierarchy, it’s a little trickier. You’re aiming to strike a balance between talking and listening that leaves both of you feeling okay about it. Why? Conversations, like any other human interaction, need to be reciprocally beneficial if you’re going to go on doing them. (That doesn’t mean equal talking, and it might mean you are the fascinated listener to a genuine authority on a subject in which you have an interest. There aren’t so many of those conversations. And don’t get pious and tell me that everyone can be fascinating about something and it’s my job to find out what. It’s as much my conversational partner’s job to try to be interesting to me as it is mine to be interesting to them.) As well as that, the other person may be tired or uninspired and wants you to carry some conversational load. They may find your questions intrusive, or worse, uninformed, and in either case will be gone fairly fast and pretty much forever. Putting them in the position where they do the talking may make them regard you as “hard work” or as someone who doesn’t share or say anything about themselves. Plenty of opportunities to mess up there.

From your side, being on the receiving end of a non-stop talker is okay if they are funny or interesting, but gets pretty tedious if they aren’t. They may be talking to be heard, not to start a discussion, and they don't need you at all, all they need is a nodding dog. That’s listener abuse: they should be paying a therapist, not using you for free. It’s like being at a big corporate meeting where they want to “deliver” a bunch of “messages”: after ten minutes you don’t want to be there and after twenty minutes your soul has shut down. And don't you want to share? Don't you want to be heard? Don't you want to find out that someone likes what you like? Because that's not quite the same thing as discovering that you like what someone else likes. The first is finding out that you can get along with other people. The second is finding that other people are prepared to get along with you. There is a huge difference.

A hefty dose of listener abuse made me give up on “social conversation” for a while. Why? Because I started to vanish. I was there to be an audience for other people, and audiences aren't equals. I wound up feeling alienated from myself. It meant I was with the wrong crowd. AA meetings can feel like that: the same old people bang on about the same old stuff with which I have no identification and I wonder what the hell I'm doing there when I could be, oh, washing my hair or doing press-ups.

So the next time you worry that you may be hi-jacking the conversation, check if feel you’re being treated as a person or an audience. If you think you’re being treated as an audience, then carry on hi-jacking. Or of course, you could make your excuses and leave.

Six Impressions Of A Woman On A Train

The other morning I found myself sitting next to a woman I guessed was in her late thirties / early forties, dressed and accessorised with informal style.

First impression: "married / LTR, confident, satisfied with her life and not badly paid to judge from the quality of the clothes." She wasn't conventionally pretty, but a grown man experienced in the ways on women would know that she was sexy as all hell and just the sort of woman he would want in bed. So I'm thinking: another person whose life is better than mine. God above, they're everywhere.

Then I saw the text she was composing on her smartphone. I know I'm not supposed to look, but I do. What can I say: if you want privacy, don't travel on a commuter train. So. What I saw was along the lines of: "I feel like my right arm is severed without you...we don't have time for cuddles and kisses... we never seem to have time to be together, it would be so nice to live in each other's pockets for a while...that was why the camping holiday was so good, such closeness..."

Second Impression: Huh? Wha? Did someone just pull back the curtain? Is this the real world? Can't be. This is a script note she's sending to the Eastender's writing room? Right? On a smartphone using the number-pad to type at 08:30? Not plausible. This is for real? This seriously sexy woman is pleading for some more body-time with her husband / boyfriend? I can't remember all the words, but at the time I didn't think she was complaining as a prelude to a negotiation. She was expressing hurt. That's why I was struck by it. A woman like her, so together on the outside, is hurting that much? Jesus! What's going on out there?

Third Impression: Camping? I know people do that, but it's suspicious. Decent people stay in hotels. With showers. And room service. And then, composing and sending a text that intimate at 08:30? Well, composing it, maybe, but sending it? That might constitute some kind of stalking. Or harassment. Speaks to possible craziness and imbalance. Don't decent people say these things, face-to-face, rather than by text? I suppose it might be the modern equivalent of the love-letter. And then the whole living-in-each-other's-pockets thing, which might be construed as unhealthily close. Well, for me it would, but I'm a dormant co-dependent. Maybe for civilians, it's okay. And who said the guy was her husband / boyfriend? Maybe she's the affair, hence the lack of time.

Fourth Impression: she moved along the platform with considered pace, rather than the distracted movement I know I do when I'm Having An Emotion. Which makes me wonder if the text wasn't some kind of manipulation. But who comes up with "right arm is severed"? Those are not words I would forget or mis-remember. It's vivid, not the phrase someone writing a manipulation piece would use, unless they were scary cold. Against all my generated reasons for thinking otherwise, I'm going with this being real, but speaking to her being slightly scary.

Fifth Impression: Maybe that's the way she should respond to the situation she's in, rather than tolerating it until she winds up with a bitter and resigned soul, incapable of another relationship for the rest of her life. She can be sincerely expressing pain and setting up a negotiation at the same time. She's giving him advance warning of the end of the relationship if he can't do something to stop the hurt. That would explain the air of purposefulness. It might sound a little manipulative, but what's so noble about staying in a relationship that hurts? Maybe it's what an actual healthy person does.

Sixth Impression: I mentioned she was sexy as all hell? I did didn't I?