Dear Diary (1)

(Okay, I am going to go on about this stuff until I come out of whatever it is... you don't have to read it)

There are times when I don't know how or what I'm feeling. These are not good, because I put on weight. If I weigh too much, my body fat is too high, so my blood sugar levels start to rise. When that happens, I can't think straight, my legs break out into blotchy patches and I get infections in my nose at regular intervals. This does not happen to you, which is why you can afford to be a little vague about how you're feeling. Also, you can get drunk Friday evening and I can't. Going to Meetings helps a little with this stuff, but in the same way that Paracetomol helps with a fever: when the effect wears off, I still have a fever. (You have a hangover.)

I know how I feel about the new office. It sucks. No-one liked it when we arrived, no-one likes now, and the people who have been there for a year still don't like it. Don't mention the blocked toilets, the ineffective aircon, and the fact that it looks like a modern-day workhouse, except with computers and strip lighting. It's run on "Workwise", which I may have ranted about before, which means no-one has assigned desks (not even the top management have assigned offices), and we put our bits and pieces away in lockers at the end of the day. Even in primary school, I had a desk. The essence of Workwise is that we are not supposed to feel like we belong there. Which sounds really... healthy and motivating.

I know how I feel about Shoreditch and the City: the City is an industrial estate and Shoreditch is a grim part of town with some mid-market shops and restaurants. It is not hip and the only thing it's on the edge of is civilisation. I'm going to do some posts on this when the weather gets warm enough to make street photography pleasant and you'll see what I mean. Soho, Covent Garden and the West End are home to me in a way that only central Amsterdam, the Marais / St Germain and the East Village / Upper West Side are. Spitalfields is not even real.

I miss walking through Covent Garden to work. Walking up Archway to get the Central line at Holborn is just about okay, but anywhere east of the Chancery Lane isn't. Walking through the City drains the joy from my soul and I have to use all my concentration to dodge the rushing drones. Anyway, a twenty-minute brisk walk to the office is one thing, a twenty-minute brisk walk to a tube station to take a train to the office is another.

This stuff isn't the mystery problem. Sex, women and relationships aren't the mystery problem either. A problem, sure, but not a mystery. Being the ACoA that I am, I'm missing the drama and dysfunction. The management are making remarkably sensible decisions around my part of the business. I got a good grade in my appraisal. The working environment might be physically shoddy, but in every other regard it's relaxed and professionally casual. Nobody is watching clocks, and it's the quality of your work that matters, not the quantity of your time. (Yes, I know, sounds like heaven.) Sick though it sounds, we ACoA's feel uncomfortable in such circumstances.

(Oh yeah... there's more to come)

Moral Litmus Test

Here is a simple question:

You put your iPhone 4S down on the cafe table and go to the toilet. When you come back, it's been stolen. Is this your fault?

Highlight the space below for the answer.


If you said yes, congratulations. Living in England has stripped you of all sense of moral responsibility and replaced it with the blame-the-victim mentality of the powerless. Secretly, you love bullies, criminals and people who just take what they want; you hate good manners and thoughtfulness. You are a policeman who regards criminals as local features rather than responsible adults, a bank saleswoman who thinks that "caveat emptor" means it's the buyer's fault if they were suckered, the teacher who asks the victim what they did to set off the thug.


The right answer is that it's the thief's fault.

Outsourcing The Dirty Work

There was a very good article in the Guardian last week about Wonga. In case you've been on Mars the last couple of years, Wonga are a payday loan company which, according to who you listen to, has just spent £12m on advertising to make loan sharking look respectable, or so that decent people wouldn't have to go to loan sharks again. A payday loan is generally taken to be less than £500 for less that 30 days. If you have enough credit with your bank and manage your money with even a little sense, you will use your overdraft facility. Payday loans are for people who don't meet those criteria: low-paid, erratically-employed, bad with money or just downright irresponsible.

Personally, I think that the clearing banks - especially those owned in large part by the Government - should be made to extend short-term overdrafts to the low-paid for no charge. Compared to what they lose lending to dodgy Irish property companies and southern European governments, and to what they pay in fines and rebates for mis-selling, the lost interest on a few million quid for ten days is a mere trifle. But that's enough of that.

This is the bit that caught my eye: "The company offices are filled with around 60 mostly young employees, dressed down in internet startup style. There's a personal trainer, employed to take staff running in the park for twice-weekly fitness sessions. A senior team dealing with people who can't pay back their loans are in another basement room ("Don't ask me why Moira has got a Barbie on her desk") but there are a further 100 people in a callcentre in South Africa, charged with ringing people to urge them to repay their loans.Staff say this is a fun place to work. [The CEO's] has a starkly minimalist white office, with white leather sofas, without any papers (everything is digital) or really anything except a bottle of Evian, a bottle of Carex hand sanitising gel, and a huge print of Che Guevara."

The reason the call centre is in South Africa isn't because it's cheaper: there are cheap call centres all over the north of England and Scotland. It's because they want the dirty work done as far away from the shiny front offices as possible. If the sixty mostly young employees had to hear the one hundred debt chasers in action, it would not be a fun place to work for more than a week. It would be painfully obvious what the real work was, and who the customer really is. Wonga seem to be in a state of chronic hypocrisy about who borrows from them. 

I don't like outsourcing. It exports jobs and imports poverty in the form of low wages. It's a fact of business life, and it's not clear that Western economies have the capital to reconstruct China's manufacturing capability back home. Manufacturing may be a lost cause for that reason, but service jobs should be kept in the UK. Outsourcing your dirty work is doubly nasty.

I've had a couple of calls from agents looking for an analyst to work at payday loan companies: the Yanks have read the smoke signals and are setting up over here. I had to think for a night before I could get my personal feelings straight. I can't make a good living from selling to poor people. I'm comfortable fleecing the rich (I don't deal with the rich, but I would be if I was), but not the poor. Fleecing the poor is what governments make Revenue and Customs do, it's what the Welfare State does. Bad company.

This Year's Challenge?

In my first couple of years at The Bank I was always feeling as if there was six month's work for me and then I would be out, as the job would be done. My manager at the time told me that it didn't matter: exactly what we did would simply change, but there would always be work. He lacked the re-assuring bedside manner to deliver the message with conviction, but it's turned out to be very true. In the last three years, I've moved from pricing implementation, to reporting-centered MI, to projects intended to fill in some large gaps left by the IT and data people, to insight analysis, and my latest incarnation is now apprarantly as a product manager. No change in job titles, but some quite real changes in function. The sail of my job description swings with the organisational and political winds.

A little bit of background. When I started working at The Bank, it was dominated by the retail sales function, along with every other financial services company for the last thirty years, which is why the FSA is fining them now over insurance and will be fining them later over Added Value Accounts. Specialist functions such as pricing and product development trembled at the thought that what they had done might have reduced sales. (The same sales the FSA are saying shouldn't have been made.) There was no room for creative thinking about products or promotions: all anyone wanted was a edge on stuffing more down the customers' throats.

It took a change of top management to see that maybe there might be a better way of running things, and sometime last year, product management was duly granted a divorce from sales. It's taken a while for the management to work out what that means for how and what they contribute. The result is that I have become a product development guy with a sideline in insight-focused MI. No more regular reporting, no more projects to make up for the shortcomings of the IT function. A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of absent-minded doodling in a meeting followed by Powerpointing the next afternoon, I put together a product outline that people think is a neat idea and needs developing. By me. It's dawning on me that I should be thinking about spending much of the rest of this year developing and shepherding through the NPD process (pretend The Bank really has something that deserves the name for the moment). Which means I have to look like I'm actually a part of what happens there, and I'm not sure I want to be that. Because what has happened there has attracted a lot of attention from the regulators. Do I really believe it's a different organisation? Has Daddy really quit drinking?

The change in priorities is probably a good thing, because I'm getting tired of working round the limitations of The Bank's IT and data capabilities. It's time other people developed some serious chops, or were hired to provide some. If there was some cool software to be used, or a new language to be learned, I might feel more reluctance, but our three-year-old Chinese laptops use Windows XP SP4 and Office 2007. We don't have access to a real programming language - thought VBA deserves less sneers than it gets. So I'm ready to move on. It's very probably this year's challenge.

Keep Feeling Fascination

I buy fashion magazines and I have done ever since forever. Not obessively, but more frequently than the average Aston Villa supporter. I'm not interested in women's fashion. If I was, I would read Vogue, and I don't, exactly because it really is all about the frocks. When I say fashion magazines, I mean i-D, Ten, Pop, Dazed, Dansk, Zoo and the like. Not all of them every month, but at least one of them.

I like looking at the girls. Editorial fashion models are not, however, the kind of girls boys are supposed to like looking at. From time to time I've wondered about that, but not so I'm worried about it. It took reading Ashley Mears' excellent book Pricing Beauty to let me understand what was going on. Editorial models are not chosen to be generically good looking: they are chosen because they have The Look. It's about individuality, personality, a touch of fierce, and being on the edges of mainstream ideas of attractive and good-looking. Editorial models are about being walking modern art. (I don't find Generic Catwalk Girl any more attractive than you do.)

'Fit' and 'hot' are for catalogues, calenders, retailer websites, mass-market companies, Yoga and health magazines. If you want to be hit in the eyeball by the difference, go into one of the Soho fashion newsagents: look at the girls on the front of the edgy magazines and then at the yoga and health magazine covers. The Yoga Fit women look pleasant, and trim, and bland - like someone else's wife. The editorial models look as if they are going to be Trouble and Wilful and occasional Amazing Sex. That's The (Editorial) Look.

In real life there's a thing called The Look as well: for me, it's about sex and fascination. I don't mean a bubbly Mark One Fit Girl - though they are perfectly good company. I mean whatever it is that makes me look twice, and then again, and then maybe cross the line to creepy old man (or perhaps "Oh my god, that's the first time a man's looked at me like that for six months"). There's no formula for that Look, and you and I would very possibly disagree on a given example.

I enjoy the sight of a Yummy Mummy, a Mark One Fit Girl, or an NSNF (Nice Smile, Nice Figure), but they don't make my pulse skip a beat and remind me that my life is missing something. They don't make me think of hotel rooms, damp sheets and doing it just one more time just because. It's the girls and women with That Certain Something who make me feel the emptiness of my evenings. It's the women with a look, who reward being gazed at, who fascinate me, it's those women who make feel the empty evening that waits for me every day. As well as being an addict and alcoholic, I'm an aesthete, and for me a woman is both a person and an art object.

Days can go by, even weeks, and in the limited commuter-groove life I lead I never see one woman with The Look(s), except in magazines or on the Internet. And in real life, I know she's a person, with hang-ups, baggage, attitudes, bad experiences and that make it impossible for someone to maintain a stable, long-term, ring-signalled relationship. The same for me, of course, and it makes both of us wonder if whatever good times there might be will be worth the effort and the bad times that surely will be.

(Both pictures in Spring 2012 Tank Magazine.)

Heartbeats / Can't Find My Way Home: Songs That Get You From The Start

The other day I put the Blind Faith album on my Nano. I hadn't listened to it for many years, and it came over my Bose earphones straight out of my schooldays. Blind Faith was Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood and Rick Gretsch, and they were the first "supergroup" (the other was a band called Humble Pie, but they never really convinced me). One track, Can't Find My Way Home, took me off to another place entirely, which given that I was commuting to work at the time was a major feat. 

Here is the original album version...

 For some reason I thought of Jose Gonzales' version of Heartbeats...

 

Both songs are acoustic and have similar structures, with multiple repeats at the middle eight, and their lyrics barely make sense in an evocative way. Heartbeats is a strong song, as shown by the number of people who have covered it already and the beating it can take at their hands.

Heartbeats is about, well, what, exactly? "One night to push and scream / And then relief" could be about childbirth, and the song could be about the parents coming together only for the birth and then splitting "We had a promise made / Four hands and then away". I'll go with it being a hectic and heady one-night stand between two people who are attracted to each other, couldn't be in a relationship, are confused about why they are there and need to "speed up truth" to resolve what they are feeling. I'm guessing something like this is what most people think it's about if they don't think about what it's about.

The lyrics of Can't Find My Way Home sound like a man asking a woman to stop being a distant princess and let herself get into a relationship with him. But I wonder if it isn't actually about someone on drugs: the throne being the distance a drug user gets from the real world, and quitting drugs being "leave your body alone". Again, I'll go with the love lyrics. The song, the whole thing, is a musical evocation of what it is to be "near the end and I just ain't got the time / And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home". The guitar tune, chords and Winwood's scat singing then become an essential part of the song. 

Which as I write this, I realise is also true about Heartbeats. Seriously. Play any version on You Tube - except the Knife's - and those opening chords and tune get you at the start. It's what these two songs have in common and so few songs do. Enjoy both.

My Ideal Philosophy Degree: What Makes a Philosopher?

Every now and then, I've tried to design my ideal philosophy degree. There would be a fair chunk of history, and not just the history of philosophy, but some economic, military, social and scientific history as well. If you don't know anything about seventeenth-century England, you won't get the context of all those debates about duty, obligations and virtue that the moralists had. Under post-modern capitalism those ideas are more or less a joke, but when the King can demand that you put a chunk of your money and people at risk in his latest idea for a war, and it's your duty to do so because he's the King and you swore an oath, then the idea of obligation and duty becomes very meaningful. As well as costly. And of course the debate was conducted in the abstract, because if they had named the issue openly, it would have been treason.

My ideal course would have a lot of history because that was the bit I didn't appreciate and missed when I studied the subject - and perhaps 'studied' implies rather more reading than I did. The students on my course should come away with  a party trick: some obscure - to the general public - school or philosopher that they can impress dinner-party guests and strangers forevermore. And they should have been put in the way of reading as many of the classics as we can expect an undergraduate to read - that's part of the bit where they get an education.

Which leaves the bit where they get an idea about what being a philosopher is about. Most of the people in philosophy departments are teachers and scholars. At some point, they decided they liked the academic life, they could network effectively in it, could work the system and also seemed to be quite good at understanding what Leibniz, or Roger Bacon, or Heidegger or whoever, was going on about. So they became scholars of that thinker. Others find they like a certain branch of the subject and enjoy the compare-and-contrast involved in teaching the thoughts of the creative philosophers. They have jobs in philosophy departments but they aren't necessarily philosophers.

What makes a philosopher is an attitude of informed scepticism, a distrust of authority and all its works and pronouncements, a respect for logical consistency and conceptual coherence (the philosopher's version of having a sense of style), the desire and ability to see the world more clearly than others do, and a desire to understand some part of the world on their own terms - or in the grand manner of Aristotle and Hegel, all of the world. Since the world is more complicated now that it was, and since there are more people and organisations making more self-interested and dubious claims than there ever were, and there are more branches of empirical knowledge and theoretical speculation than ever before, this is a larger task than it used to be, and takes a lot more background knowledge.

One starting point is the ability to identify bogus arguments and all the tricks of informal argument and presentation. Another is to have a guided tour round the follies and promotions (in the evil eighteenth-century sense of the word) of the past - you may rightly suspect a reference to Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds coming, and there it was. A couple of case-studies of the irrational behaviour of authority - the Lille-Reed affair, satanic ritual abuse, recovered memory - wouldn't go amiss, as would a brisk description of street con-tricks and Wall Street Ponzi schemes. I would want my students to feel confident enough to conclude that if, after careful examination and diligent enquiry into whatever it is, it still doesn't make sense, then it's a trick, an illusion, or just plain downright craziness.   

I've always thought that there should be three compulsory courses that run for the first two years: 1) The History of Philosophy and its Worldly Context, 2) Logic, Rhetoric and Epistemology, and 3) Law, Morality and Politics. Now I would add in the second year, 4) The Sceptical Citizen: Data, Statistics and Common Sense. The third year would have two projects: one would be an extended essay on the student's chosen party trick, and the second would be the examination of some recent scam, hype or madness. There are, after all, enough of them.