Career Development

At my age? I'm supposed to be waiting out the years until I can collect my pension. Yet my manager talks about "development opportunities" for me, and he means the political / people / organisational stuff that would make me promotable. Within the context of The Bank, I'm not interested: I don't want to spend my days in meetings, as everyone at the grade above mine does. They can't decide anything, they have no sign-off authority, they have no teams or resources to dispose - so I have no idea what they do in those meetings. I have no desire to do what passes for "management" at The Bank.

Can I honestly go on at The Bank until I retire? Not if they carry on short-changing us with 3%-5% real pay cuts. I'll be a poor man if I do. Promotion doesn't get me out of that either: on promotion, you get a 5% pay rise, no better than a "developing" rating at your next appraisal which means an even smaller bonus, and no pay rise, since you just got one. You're actually better off not getting a promotion. It has ever been thus.

I'm ambivalent about the quality of the projects and challenges that we get. The section I'm in is basically about producing posters. We don't develop real products and services - we don't have the budget to make software changes, and even if we did, we don't have the priority. No-one ever got fired for telling our product to go take a running jump. Morale is low, and what's worse is the senior management have no idea why. Start with why The Bank can't be bothered to pay the FM company enough to clean the toilets properly. It's actually worse at other banks and insurance companies. 

I used to think my medium-term need was to save as much money as possible for my retirement. Pensions are a joke, so at this stage, I'm talking cash. My short-term need is to make my life as bearable as possible to make enough money to save. At my age, there is no long-term.

Yet I'm pretty sure I'll be working until the day I die - which I hope won't be much past sixty-five. Insh'allah. In which case, why do I need to save? Because I don't think I'll be able to earn a decent living after sixty-five. Except everything I know about knowledge workers and working says that as long as I keep up, I will be able to. The competition just isn't that good - not in this country. As long as no-one has a prejudice about hiring sixty-eight year old contractors - which they won't. Not in 2022.

If all that is true, then the one thing I need to be working on is my technical skills. There's precious little opportunity to do that at The Bank, except for SAS - which I don't like and doesn't have a free version to learn on. To be honest, four months of hard slog would put me up in the top five per cent, and that gets me to Christmas. Even if I went flat-out on a job hunt, I wouldn't get anything by then (it's mid-July now). 

The next thing I need to be working on is getting some kind of client base, or a relationship with the recruiters and agencies. While SAS is sellable, it's a production tool for big companies or a handful of specialised data agencies, which means a Bank-like environment again. That's what I'd like to avoid. The question is where? 

Where do I want to work? It's probably going to be small(er). It's going to be in the West End for preference, but within the Circle Line will do. It's going to have an interesting product that I would actually use. It's going to use some interesting tech. It's going to need what I can bring, which is no-nonsense insight and decent analysis->synthesis->presentation skills. These will make them money and help them design better products, and market those more effectively. I am really good at making money by processing and interpreting data better than other people at other companies - but I have no interest in trying to get the attention of an indifferent bureaucracy. So if you're a big company floating on heritage cash flows, depending on brutal sales techniques to shovel in the new business (and that's a lot of big companies), then we should pass on each other.

The next question is: who's hiring that fits that bill, how do I find them and how do I get there? Goody. My three least favourite questions.

Inventory and Wishes

I have been on occasion full of self-pitying regret that I never had a wife, children, and a five-bedroom house in Barnes. Usually when I was drunk or hungover. Like any young man, in my twenties, I felt the pain of waking up alone again and hungover on Sunday morning, and thought I was weak, useless and failing, failing failing, because I hadn't pulled Saturday night. I never had an affable, easy social life and a commercially-valuable network of acquaintances. I could never "commit". When I was sober and nothing was going wrong at work, I didn't feel those things. Since I was hungover and depressed a lot, I spent many years wishing I was leading another life, and indeed was a different person. Of course I did: I was in psychological pain and I needed a way out and I thought that was it. There is no right way out of that kind of pain: just different ways that leave differing residual aches and have differing costs. 

I stumbled onto Twelve-Step Recovery, and that worked for the alcohol-related stuff. It took me a long time to embrace my inner ACoA, and a while after that to accept that some of the damage is irreparable: I was okay that as a drunk I couldn't drink again, and would get bored around drinkers pretty quickly; I was less willing to get that an ACoA can't do intimacy, fun and all that other Normal stuff, and that attempts to do so lead to irritation, boredom or toxic shock. You can see us in the crowd during any fire drill: everyone else is talking in groups, while we are zoned out, surrounded by totally alien behaviour. At some point I must have accepted my condition - at which point, of course, it stops being "my condition" and becomes "me". What me?

I'm still employed, and I work with a bunch of smart young people who keep me sharp. I do a combination of weight training, spinning, running, swimming and yoga every week. My blood-sugar, blood-pressure, pulse and general physical condition is top five percent for my age. I'm still learning new stuff at my day job, and reading hefty tomes of philosophy and mathematics for stimulation. I cook my own food, clean my own house, iron my own shirts and run my own affairs. 

I have no pension worth a damn, and I've been through some nasty periods of unemployment. I'm a recovering alcoholic - but you're the one with the hangovers. I'm an ACoA, and so I don't have to get bent out of shape about "not being intimate" or "sharing my life" with anyone, because that is toxic for me. My testosterone levels are down from when I used to look at girls and think they were magic, so now when I look at women most of them look like more work than they may be worth.

I have a little bit in common with a lot of people, which means I can make light social conversation with a lot of people. I do not have enough in common with anyone to make them want to go any further. I steer clear of screw-ups, and sensible people steer clear of me, so I don't actually hang out with anybody except a couple of people from my distant past.

So much for the inventory.

What am I really missing? I could list all sorts of things here, from the virtuous (intimacy, friends) to the slightly silly (fame, wealth, beautiful lovers), but you and I know I would be lying. We know what I'm really missing.

I'm missing getting high, whether it's on sex, booze, conversation, music, scenic panoramas, art or anything else that does the trick. The Rules say I can't get high any more, that I have to find satisfaction through service, being a "worker amongst workers" and all that good stuff. I'm missing the sick emotions that come with fake drama (real drama isn't accompanied by emotions, but adrenaline and action). The Rules say I can't do that any more either and I follow them because those emotions are caused by crazy people and I don't want those in my life any more. 

What would I like? I mean, aside from a flat in Soho, the Marais and the Centre of Amsterdam? And the work that paid enough to support all that. And being able to speak French and Dutch. So there's that fantasy.

What I don't want to feel "content". I don't want to feel "at peace with myself". I don't want to be "comfortable in my own skin". Those are not real emotions, but absences. Spiritual Vallium. I'm not allowed mood-altering chemicals.

I'd like one day I didn't have to invent from zero, that wasn't made up of to-do tasks, that I didn't feel was in some deep sense optional. I'd like to wake up feeling rested, and go to bed feeling tired. I'd like to feel sated after a meal and calm enough to be able to read for a couple of hours without breaking off to clean something or make a snack. I'd like to feel that there wasn't always something I have to do next and somewhere I have to be after here. I'd like to feel that it was more than nice meeting you, and that we might meet again. I'd like to be able to point to something and say "I did that". 

So that's what I have to make come true.

Hanworth Air Park - August Evening

I have an odd covenant in my freehold: I'm not allowed to erect any structure over fifty feet in height on my property. This may be to prevent any of us out-doing the local, very old (Hanworth is in the Domesday Book) Church, but it may also be because the original London Airport is a couple of hundred yards from my front door. Amelia Erhardt is supposed to have landed in Hanworth Air Park, as did the Graf Zeppelin, and in the 1930's it was, apparently notorious for aerial tea parties, pageants and races. Not so much now. Actually, never. The last flight was sometime in 1955. On a good summer evening, it looks like this...

Personal Journey 2006 - 2011

One morning during a short break in Tenerife, I decided to drive up the road on the south side of Mount Tiede. It's one of those narrow, windy, steep roads, the sort with no safety rails, tight corners and steep drops. For a while I was okay, stopping a couple of times to look at the view. I was even enjoying the challenge of all those twists and turns. Then, quite suddenly, I lost my nerve. Two-thirds of the way up. I couldn't go on. I wanted to get out of the car and walk away or have someone else drive. Except of course, I couldn't. I had to go on driving up to the top and go back down again, even though I could feel the fear in my stomach and saw horrible accidents at every corner. My body carried on where my soul and mind had given up, and I have no idea how I made it up the last third of that mountain road. 

That's what it was like when I spent most of 2006 looking for a job, being told that I gave good interview and was going about my search in the right way, not to be worried, something will come along... After a while, my hope ran out, leaving an outward physical reflex of confidence, and habits picked up from years of job-hunting. My body carried on when my soul had long since given up. 

When in February 2007, I joined The Bank, I was in a bigger psychological mess than I knew. I was scared, vulnerable, weak and utterly bereft of self-confidence. I was surviving on habit. Of course, the bully who ran the section I joined saw it and laid right in. He did it to everyone in the team, and they were more robust younger men. We took it for eighteen more months until he moved on. His replacement was another weakling who basically marched to the first guy's orders.

I stopped going to the local gym at the same time, as I had been getting bored, tired and lacking all enthusiasm for exercise. What I didn't know was that my blood sugar would shortly go from 4-5 micro units per millivolume, which is fine, to around 8-9 mmol/L, which while not life-threatening, caused me to get blotchy, itchy legs, a string of nasal infections (which are taken seriously by medics, and for which I became really well-known at the Soho Walk-In Centre) over a two-year period, and I swear my brain didn't function quite right. The fact that my slot in the office was gloomy, the boss was an insecure bully, and I couldn't see that my job would last past the next three months, did not help. Plus adapting to the weird world of retail banking takes much more time than you would think. I weighed 103 kgs, too much of it was fat, and I snored badly. My girlfriend had stopped sleeping over because I was snoring, and I went for an operation to treat that. Amongst other things, they scar your upper palate so it toughens: it's not life-threatening, but it is painful for a couple of weeks. It didn't make enough of a difference for the girlfriend.

In autumn of 2008 I broke up the only long-term relationship I've ever had: ten years or so. We had reached that point where we were functioning better apart than we were when we were together. We were snapping at each other and not having any fun. The last holiday we had taken, to Sicily, was a mitigated disappointment: September is always glorious in Sicily except when it isn't, and that was when we went. We had simply been through too many bad times together. we weren't fun anymore, and we were dragging each other down.

At the start of 2009 The Bank merged with the Very Broke Bank That Used To Be A Building Society Before The Other Scottish Bank Bought It. The Bank spent more than six months re-organising itself, starting from the top down, and it was no fun spending six months thinking that I was going to get the chop: I took no holidays, to build up the size of the redundancy payment. I didn't get the chop but I did get put into a lower-graded job, with three years to get myself rehabilitated before they cut my salary and conditions back to match the grade. For about eighteen months there was a general state of unhappiness, upset, disillusion, change, settling-in and experimentation as the new management found its way around. Nobody can remember doing anything much significant in that time - except that's when I did something in three months that apparently would have taken the lesser mortals of Accenture £1m and 3,000 man-hours to do. And I kept up with my e-mails while doing it. I was going to Chester every week, and one of those weeks spent a day in hospital with a grossly infected eye and face.

Outside work I went on a carb-free, chocolate-free, reduced-sugar diet that lost me 15kgs (down to 88 kgs) in about four months. At 88kgs sometime in the summer, I was experiencing serious constipation, so I ate more bulky food and my weight settled around 91kgs. The nasal infections stopped. My head cleared up. My mood improved. But not before I was put on an "improvement plan" at work at the start of the year, and then re-organised into a lower-grade job in summer as a result of The Merger. (Not quite as bad as it sounds: at The Bank anyone to whom that happens keeps their existing pay and conditions for about three years, giving them ample chance to get their grade back.) All my Bro's went off in different directions across the organisation, and I had a new manager. Which was actually the best thing that happened to me, even if it took a while before I could recover enough to be an asset to him.

2010. Not a day went by that I didn't think of my down-graded status. I did my job. The entire company was in turmoil, new recruits were joining every month, and very few people really knew their way around. I just did shit I thought needed doing, and that turned out to be exactly what my new manager wanted his people to do. So I started to work my way back again. I was helpful to the new guys, and that's not as common as one might think, and I got my grade back in the autumn. But by the autumn, my weight was back up to 95 kilos and I was feeling the strain of trying to control my eating. Remember, I don't drink and I don't smoke, and the only thing between me and raw emotion is chocolate, milk shakes and custard doughnuts. So I enrolled at The Third Space, and over the next few months lost a lot of unsightliness around the waistline.

2011 was the year I got the infection on my skull I thought might be cancer. It was the year I turned into a guru at work, and got a half-decent bonus. In the gym, I made it to passing the US Army standards for guys of fifty. This completed my journey from unemployed in 2006 to well-regarded at work, better paid than ninety percent of British taxpayers, and with as secure a job as any wage slave is ever going to have. I should have been on top of the world, but instead I could barely breathe: just before Christmas 2011, one evening I started on my two-mile treadmill run, and collapsed breathless after 500 metres. It was also the last year I took any "proper holidays". I went to the Algarve, Pembroke, and Biarritz via days in Paris either side. I brought a heatwave with me to all of them. And I was… not lonely, but exhausted from having to keep myself busy and occupied for the sixteen hours a day I'm usually awake. I talked to no-one who wasn't staff, except in the Algarve where I spent a couple of hours talking with a German girl who painted churches and who was driving round Europe with her dog and sleeping in the car. The people who ran the restaurant at that beach thought we were so cute. I was damn nearly in tears one of those lunchtimes on the Algarve. Dinner at Chez Phillipe in Biarritz was amazing. Then The Bank moved us from Covent Garden to Bishopsgate. We still don't like it. 2011 was The Year of Spinning, Running, Yoga and Pilates. 

2012. The year I was coughing for months and my legs packed up. Don't let's talk about 2012. I don't want a repeat. I got a lot of massage and osteopathy. Almost as much as I did on my damn arms at the start of 2013. 

I didn't mention the building work I had done on the house in 2007, where I had to fire one set of builders and find someone else to finish the job. The place now looks finished - except for the cupboard under the stairs, and I really should replace the kitchen. I've had three cars in that period: a Ka that got written off when a drunk shunted me in Twickenham, a Clio that got flooded by the river at Richmond because I didn't know it was a super-tide Sunday, and the Punto I have now. All of them second-hand and all paid for cash.

(Edited 27/1/2023 from two posts)

St James' Park, Sunday Bank Holiday

I was out of the house by 08:05 and on the District Line to town by about 08:30. It was just after 09:00 on Sunday morning that I walked past the Ministry of Justice (do the other Ministries call it "MiniJust", I wonder?) and into St James' Park. I love central London early in the morning, before all the crowds get there: there's this whole huge city I have to myself. Anyway, this is what St James' Looks like, or at least the Western part, as the eastern part was closed off for the Olympics.

Buckingham Palace at the west end, the London Eye and Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the east end (that's why it's the "mysterious east", because no-one knows what they do there). Is the topiary crown inspired by Jeff Koons' Puppy?

The rest of the day was breakfast, gym, a movie at the Curzon Mayfair, a very late lunch and a public transport amble back home. Felt like I was on holiday all the way through - even in the Abs class.

Vauxhall Station, London, In The Dusk

Those who play in central London - well, all right, stay up there late after work - but live in the far reaches of Zone 6 become familiar with Vauxhall Station. It's a lot quicker to get to from all over the West End and Chelsington than Waterloo, and gives you an extra three minutes from the departure time at Waterloo. Those of you who travel by train will appreciate that three minutes is, in the words of Tony d"Amato "a lifetime away" from missing a train and standing around for twenty minutes for the next one. It's the Victoria Line that makes it so.

Anyway, it's August, hot, humid and still light in the evening, and I was on Vauxhall station Tuesday evening for reasons I may explain later. It looked like this..

Brand Control to Major Tom

I have just discovered that somewhere inside the Marketing department of The Bank is a person, or perhaps a whole department, who approves use of The Bank’s brands and logos in third-party applications. If they say NO, it might actually stop an entire project.

Some things a company can’t win. Given a fuss about an unauthorised use of the company’s logos, you can almost hear the snarks asking “Don’t you have control over who and when and why your logos get used? How difficult is that?” Then you have “You mean an entire £1m project was stopped dead for six weeks until it was pointless by a bunch of bureaucrats who weren’t convinced it was a proper use of the logos? What stupid bureaucracy.”  

There’s no middle way. There might seem to be, but there isn’t: any rule you make will always have some circumstance in which its opposite should have been applied, and by Sod’s Law, that will be the circumstance that happens.

I’ve always thought the bureaucrat-guaradians should have the role of explaining their reservations, but the ultimate decision must always rest with the project sponsor. And he/she can’t get out of that responsibility by referrring to the bureaucrats’s worries, but nor will they get into trouble if they go against the bureaucratic judgement and then it goes wrong for exactly those worries. Otherwise you send a “nobody ever got fired for going along with the bureaucrats” signal, and guess what your company turns into?