mr resourceful

kitty-smitten / taking things personally

Minnie (above) has been with us for a couple of weeks and has eaten most of the house.  Seven-week-old Mary joined us yesterday to help finish the job.  She spent the car journey home in my jumper (Lady Resourceful was driving), occasionally coming out to cling to my face, a la Alien.  It made a noteworthy spectacle for passers-by.  We got home and introduced Mary to Minnie - now a nine-week-old jungle cat who likes to hide under things and jump out at you - and spent the rest of the evening watching them through splayed fingers, wincing.

Essentially, Minnie hates the tiny, docile Mary and wants to murder her, preferably via some manoeuvre involving descending from above.  Mary - a docile midget from a large litter - assumes that Minnie is her new mother.  Thanks to this mental association, we have a fascinating situation in which a powerless fluffball has been slowly eroding the combative willpower of a disgruntled hunter-killer.  All within their first evening of acquaintance.

It's not just cats.  All human relationships involve these kind of hidden mental associations.  By the time we get to adulthood, it is impossible for any of us to assess the behaviour of any other human being with anything approaching objectivity.  Each of our relationships affect all the others.  Yet we persist in taking other people's behaviour towards us personally.

One of the effects of sites like LinkedIn and Facebook is that they concretise the idea that our relationships are embedded in networks.  Kind of like webs.  Static patterns you could map out with a pencil and paper. 

One evening with Minnie and Mary has made me wonder whether our relationships aren't so much like networks as like bumper car circuits.  How you deal with the person in front of you often has a great deal to do with who’s just nudged your rear-bumper (in a manner of speaking).  We bring to each encounter a host of blind-side hit-and-runs.

Remember that, next time you're at a job interview and the interviewer hisses at you and shows claws and climbs on a filing cabinet and jumps on you.  Things are never personal in the straightforward way we think they are.  Not with kittens, not with us.

on getting £100,000 p/a in housing benefits: some thoughts

Interesting discussion on Radio 4.  Some woman from some group was annoyed about the proposed cuts to housing benefits.  The presenter drew her attention to the hundred families in the UK who are getting more than £100,000 per year in housing benefit, and asked if she thought it completely doolally that such sums were being ripped from your bank account (he mentioned you by name) and handed to people who don't fancy working, thanks very much. 

Her responses:

1. You shouldn't base a policy on something that affects only 100 households in Britain.

2. If you cut those people's benefits, they might not be able to have more children without moving somewhere less salubrious, and that would contravene their human rights.

Some knee-jerk responses:

1. 100 households getting over £100,000 equals £1 million.  Yikes!

2. Ever hear of a bell-curve?  Those 100 families are at one end.  Yikes multiplied!

3. I thought benefits were meant to provide either temporary help for people between jobs, or help those most vulnerable members of society who can't meet their own needs? 

Incidentally, a friend of mine and Lady Resourceful's was telling us last weekend how he didn't want to have children unless he could support them himself.  It's not just a pride thing; he believes that children need parent who model industriousness.  He has a full-time job as a software developer now, but he struggled for a long time to find an employer willing to look past the fact that he has cerebral palsy.

4. Regarding those not-so-salubrious areas that you can't ask the benefits families to move to: I'm sure the many hardworking parents presently living in those not-so-salubrious areas would welcome the human right to take their children, give up work and live in, say, Kew at the taxpayer's expense.  But if living in Kew for free is a human right, it is merited by virtue of being human, and should be extended to all humans.  Otherwise you are classifying those who work as non-human.

If you're on benefits and you're having so many children that you need to move to ever bigger houses, the choice should be between getting a job so you can afford the bigger house, or moving to a more affordable area.  Why?  Because otherwise you're penalising working people for working -  an unsustainable policy that will eventually saw off the very branch on which it sits.

5. What about the human rights of the children of these families to grow up with parents who are positive role models?

6. What about the human right of people to be expected to work?  There's a sense of purpose that comes from contributing your skills to support yourself and your family (not to mention add to the taxes that pay for services on which you yourself rely), and disincentivising people from working has a horribly alienating effect on folks.  Of course, we may find it hard to pity those poor alienated people who are raking in £100k a year, but in a very real sense the state is refusing to count these people as citizens.

The Radio 4 interviewer didn't raise any of these points.

We need a culture that cares for the vulnerable, celebrates hard work, and makes the world of work a place of opportunity and fulfilment.  Lavish benefits are pay-offs; it's easier to keep some people infantalised and dependent than encourage them to find a worthwhile place in the society to which they belong.  The fact that it masquerades as care makes it all the more ugly.

the big bad budget: some thoughts

My first thought is that hoiking VAT up to 20% is a great way to get us all spending money like Donald Trump before the VAT goes up.

As for not raising the tax on booze and cigarettes - that seems to me to be a misstep.  Don't get me wrong - I'm as proud as the next guy of our culture of drinking until your eyes bleed and being sick on your shoes and then crashing through someone's garden fence and waking up on a stranger's lawn draped over a space hopper.  And it's true that increasing duty on booze and fags would punish low income folks who have just as much right to spend their family grocery budget on B&H and Strongbow as anyone else.  But I think the budget should have balanced the rights of low income folks to drink booze and smoke cigarettes with the rights of other low income families who want to buy their children stuff like, you know, books.

Go forth and spend, friends, while you still can.

Coming up: a rant about housing benefits.

 

who i'm voting for

 

Election Day, hurrah. 

I want a small government, and I would like to see the back of Labour, thanks very much.  Which leaves me only one option, really. 

We all know that politicians are grasping shysters.  But there's something worse than a political party composed of grasping shysters.  It's a party of grasping shysters that encourages us to be grasping shysters, by trying to mother us into supporting them.  That seems to be Labour's approach: infantalise us, keep us dependent, then tell us we'll come unstuck without them. 

I remember when Obama got in, and everyone was talking about the US having a president with moral credibility.  Having a leader with moral credibility is great and all, but a morally credible leader is a liability if we all expect him or her to be morally credible on our behalf.  Politicians aren't there to make everything right for us; they're supposed to safeguard our efforts to do it for ourselves.  I want to see someone in power who at least understands this in principle.

It's been entertaining, seeing a third horse pull level with the leaders, but I'm not particularly impressed by the Lib Dems, and I'm too Euro-wary to Clegg it.

I'd quite like to get free of our Euro entanglements, but UKIP want to ramp up military spending to a level that makes Kaiser Wilhelm look like George from Rainbow (see picture above - wait, you didn't think that the picture was meant to represent the three main candidates, did you?  Shame on you!). 

So, blue it is.  But I still think today what I thought yesterday: it doesn't really matter who's in power.  We have more power as consumers than we do as voters.

Election Day, hurrah.

 

paying for rubbish: part one

In the 1930s a chap named Bernard London published a pamphlet about iPods, mobile phones and Pentium PCs.  It didn’t mention them by name.  But it informed the way they’re made, the way they’re marketed, and the way we consume them.

 

It was titled Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence.  Its suggestion was that the beached US economy could be set afloat again if manufacturers started making stuff that didn’t last.

 

Counter-intuitive?  No, sir!  Think it through, cunning reader.  If stuff dies, more stuff needs to be made, and more gets sold.  More manufacturing!  More spending!  More sales!  More crap!

 

‘But what kind of crazy fool consumer would buy into that ethos?  Wouldn’t folks just choose the stuff that lasted longest, thus pushing manufacturers to compete over product-longevity, thus undermining the obsolescence project?‘

 

No, sir!  Not if consumers could be convinced to measure their ultimate worth by their ability to slavishly keep abreast of swift-shifting fashions.  Cue an almighty boom in the advertising industry!

 

Ye gads, it worked!  And to this day, Reader, in six months cycles, the media manages to convince us that everything we presently own is now worthless, and that hanging onto it marks us as knuckle-dragging social cave-dwellers.

 

That mobile phone you were so proud of half a year ago?  Now it’s only marginally cooler than running around the office with your finger through your fly.

 

Of course, after about a year, most of your technology is either incompatible with new applications, or the screen has inexplicably gone blank, or it's gone glacially slow and when you turn it on the internal fan makes a sound like someone pulling a spear out of a lung.  What better excuse to rush wet-lipped back to the shop with handfuls of money you could otherwise use to buy the kids vegetables?

 

Strictly speaking, we’re not consumers any more.  Nothing actually gets consumed; it gets thrown away.  We’re renting stuff, not buying it.  We are, to coin a term, crentmrs.

 

This scampering to keep up with fashion may have helped get the US economy afloat and jetting towards the pacific waters of the 1950s, trailed by the chrome fins of plenty.  Planned obsolescence is not such a force for good nowadays, especially if you’re a Congolese child slave in a tungsten mine, or if you live anywhere near an overflowing land-fill.

 

We have much more power as consumers than we have as, say, voters.  What we do with our money affects the way the world is run.

 

See you tomorrow for a far superior upgrade of this post.

 

 

how to celebrate saint george’s day

 

 

Quick preface to this post:

 

Dear racists,

 

Some of us would like our flag back.  Thanks!  Let me just pop it at the top of this blog/flag post.  There.

 

Right.  To business.

 

Happy St George’s Day, dear reader!  Hope you are celebrating the day of this dragon-spearing Turkish saint in the time honoured fashion, whatever that is. 

 

The sun is shining here in Digbeth, and flags are flying all down the road, and the guy who runs the café downstairs is using a loudspeaker to help people park their cars by shouting directions, and I’ve just walked to town to do some shopping, but I forgot my wallet, so I walked back and sat in the lovely garden of Bradford Court reading The Hobbit.

 

I was thinking about this blog post as I walked to and from town, and here’s what I was thinking:

 

Has it occurred to you, dear reader, that if everyone in this country was like you, England would be paradise?

 

You could walk the streets alone – any streets, at any time – and feel completely safe.

 

You could leave your door unlocked.

 

If you left your wallet or phone in the pub, you could expect to get it back, just as you left it.

 

Nobody would expect a free-ride while others do all the work.

 

People would hold the door open for you.

 

You could expect courtesy and even - gasp! - kindness from strangers.

 

Nobody would hold views that cause them to dislike, oppress, bully or persecute others on the basis of difference.

 

A nation of people like you would bloody well rock.

 

Is it difficult for you to go around being polite and not mugging people or exploiting the poor or agitating myopically for war or littering?

 

Course not; it’s easy.  Anyone can do it.

 

Now, let’s take your wonderful and easy values, dear reader, and decide, from this moment on, to call them ‘Englishness.’

 

“What do you mean?  Englishness is jellied eels and cricket and warm beer and tea and a good tikka massala.’

 

Well, that’s all part of it.  But Englishness is not a stone tablet; it is quicksilver.  Ours is the most fluid of the world’s cultures.  Go and read some Shakespeare this weekend (Happy birthday, Will!) - you can see ancient values being alchemically transmuted before your eyes.

 

Read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, since it’ll be a warm weekend.  It starts with the proposal of an honour-killing, and ends with – well, I won’t give it away.  Read Measure for Measure if you have time, and think of our intolerance of corrupt politicians.

 

The liquid quality of our culture is why have we such an astonishing language and history.  England has been a crushing tyrant and a beacon of nations; it has never been a squib.

 

You and I get to choose what Englishness means.  We get to tell our children ‘To be English is to be…’  Irrespective of what Englishness has ever meant in the past.

 

In other words, we can decide to define Englishness not by what we see with our eyes, but by what it could easily be.  The same forces that made you a nice, helpful, peaceable chap or chappess who reads blogs and can punctuate – those forces radiate from you, dear reader; their beams are the lances that slay the dragons of, um, horribleness, or something.

 

I know, I know.  It seems like pretending, to go around insisting that to be English is to be courteous to a fault, to be generous and helpful, to have a wide-eyed love of culture and people, to have the pride-taking artisan spirit of those dwarves in The Hobbit.

 

Who cares?  Just do it.  It might be contagious.

 

That’s how to celebrate St George’s Day.

 

 

 

arise sir varun / clegg gets pincered

 

 

Forgot to mention: HTS Consultant Varun went to the Home Office and the HO people fell at his feet and wept until he agreed to become a permanent UK resident. 

 

Hoorah!  Our nation is a richer place.  We are celebrating tonight by going out for a curry and some happy-slapping.

 

In other news, I’ve missed the Queen’s birthday (again), and tonight Nick Clegg is going to get pincered by Brown and Cameron over his plans to have us all speaking German* and using monopoly money by 2020.  And too right.  I hope Clegg has a powerful rebuff to their anachronistic guff about renewing our Trident nuclear weaponry, though.

 

Don't have a telly, so let me know how it went.

 

Tschüss for now!

 

* Obviously, if we had a half-decent education system, we’d all speak German anyway.  I’m talking here about the EU.

 

 

Anderes unsinn:

 

See here and here for more on the election debates, and here for a eulogy about Varun.

the coming workplace revolution! (a vague preface)

 

The Boss has just been telling us about some news story concerning how schools are authorising pupils to interview prospective teachers, and the pupils have been making the wannabe teachers sing, X-Factor style, and rejecting those too embarrassed to do so.

O England!  What is become of thee?  

I’d consider moving to France, but I don’t like paying six euros for a small beer glass half filled with froth.

Boire humbug.

And queuing!  Snakes alive, doesn’t anyone in this country know how to queue any more?  The experience of trying to queue at a bus-stop in Birmingham gives me a languishment for skies Italian.  And as for our cinemas -

Last night, after another trip to the cinema ruined by groups of rowdy food-flinging youths, I treated Lady Resourceful to a lengthy critique of our nation, ending with a threat to drag her to live with me on Cape Clear Island, where she grew up minus cinemas (or, indeed, electricity), and about which she oft rhapsodises.

‘It’s changed now,’ she said.  ‘They have indoor toilets.’

‘That’s as modern as I want.’

‘You’d miss all this,’ she said, gesturing.

We weaved through the expedition groups of cinema-goers.  The teenagers standing texting, frowning at their upheld mobile phones in stances that struck me as theatrical (Alas pr Yrk); the couples carrying nachos and drinking cross-eyed through straws.

‘Gomorrah,’ I growled.  ‘Sod ‘em.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Lady Resourceful.  ‘Don't you have a blog on which to broadcast your dissatisfaction with everything?’

She thinks that moaning at her is tantamount to abuse.  Whereas, given my inextensive readership, ranting on my blog is a victimless crime.

Well, here I am.

 

The truth, though, is that now I’m sitting in front of a blank computer and getting ready to rant, it has hit me that ranting is, unfortunately, too easy.

Easiness should make a blogger suspicious.  You harp on about our nation of bone-idle credit addicts and corrupt politicians, and suddenly you’re blathering about the May election -

But the truth is that neither the rantings of the common chap nor (gasp!) the outcome of the election is going to make this country the wondrous place we would like to hand on to our brats young.

What if the common-or-garden* workplace – yours, mine, your neighbour Bob’s, etc. – is where the rejuvenation of our fine nation could and should begin?

What if those of us who are willing and able to work are more powerful than we think?

What if a revolution in the spirit in which we go to work in the mornings (or, indeed, the spirit we adopt when we look for work) could change the country through positive contagion?

What if a (grassroots?) transformation of work culture could help the next generation view working productively to help make your company a world-leader in your chosen industry as something at least as attractive as, say, trying to marry a footballer or get rich through online poker?

What if kindling an old-fashioned artisan spirit in every level of our work (from admin upwards), and actively working to make our work-places lovelier for everyone (including admin clerks), would not only revivify our industries, but transfigure the wider culture, and make each of us jollier?

And, finally, what if I can start doing these things myself, instead of moaning about how kids today all want to be drug dealers and we don’t have any manufacturing base any more and why can’t we make dole-scroungers work in quarries etc.?

Stay tuned.  Red hot practical ideas to follow shortly.

Methinks I will now make tea for everyone.

 

Next:  Son prosecutes mother for locking him out of Facebook.  Has the world gone mad?

 

* Today, very few work-places are in commons or gardens. 

 

Now showing on other screens - Lady Resourceful Quadruple Feature:

 

job hunting and bowling - the startling similarities revealed!

in the bloghouse (or, is blogging wrong?)

a typically male approach to job-hunting

an apology for misleading you with my shoddy career advice

 

 

 

Advert for 'reliable workers' labelled discriminatory by Jobcentre

Someone forwarded me a heartening report from the Telegraph this afternoon.  Here's the gist:

Nicole Mamo, 48, wanted to post an advert for a £5.80-an-hour domestic cleaner on her local Jobcentre Plus website.

The text of the advert ended by stating that any applicants for the post ''must be very reliable and hard-working''.

But when Ms Mamo called the Jobcentre Plus in Thetford, Norfolk, the following day she was told that her advert would not be displayed instore.

A Jobcentre Plus worker claimed that the word ''reliable'' meant they could be sued for discriminating against unreliable workers.

Friends, the net is closing on the likes of Ms Mamo.  But we still have a way to go in the fight against bigotry.  Notice that the Jobcentre turned a blind eye towards Ms Mamo's discrimination against people who aren't cleaners.  And don't get me started on this 'domestic' business.

Apparently Ms Mamo helps supply the NHS with staff.  Who knows how much of OUR TAXES is being spent on hiring people according to frankly fascistic criteria? 

The taxes, that is, of those British people who can even GET a job in a market that discriminates so virulently against people who don't want to work very hard or turn up or observe oppressive hygiene rules.

What kind of hellish master-race of punctual hard-workers would Ms Mamo wish to see populating our NHS?

Today it's cleaners.  Next thing you know, the NHS will be insisting on hiring 'reliable' surgeons and midwives. 

I used to be a teacher.  And I saw first-hand the institutional discrimination that goes on in education.  Luckily our education system has made bold steps to reform those curricula that militate against people who don't know anything about, say, Science, and who would rather not learn anything about, say, Science, preferring instead to hit each other with rulers while the bigoted privileged kids who want to learn about, say, Science, are given valuable lessons in being overlooked by a harrassed teacher.

But I worry that the charmingly useless, dumb-as-dirt illiterates who graduated in droves from my classes aren’t going to find the outside world as lenient as I was, unless they go on the dole or become career criminals, which, now I think of it, is exactly what they would tell me they planned to do, when they weren't daring each other to punch me in the face and run off.  No.  If the likes of Ms ‘Reliable’ Mamo get their way, these kids will never have the opportunity to graduate from doing no work in school to getting paid by a real employer to do no work.

Ours is a progressive nation, Ms Mamo.  The nation of Shakespeare and the Magna Carta and Anjem Choudary.  And the Magna Carta makes it quite clear that equal opportunities means more than just insisting that nobody can be barred from competing for jobs for which they have the necessary aptitude, have gained the necessary experience, and have achieved the necessary qualifications.

The truth, friends, is that every job advert is discriminatory.  Who are employers to stipulate what kind of person you must be in order to heed the siren call of your whims, turn off Holby City, brush the Monster Munch crumbs off your lap, put on some trousers and demand an interview for whatever job takes your drunken fancy?

Who are other candidates to insist that they are better suited to a given job, just because they demonstrate some Victorian commitment to learning the necessary skills, gaining the relevant qualifications, turning up at work rather than staying at home watching children’s television in yesterday’s socks, and doing the work they were hired to do? 

Right, I’m off.  I recently applied to have a title-shot in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and I was turned down on the basis that I lack fighting skills and have bad knees and no physical strength. 

That, friends, is the kind of world we live in.  I’d urge you to write a letters to your MP, but to be honest you can't really count on your MP to do anything.  No work ethic, those politicians.

 

More narkiness:

an apology for misleading you with my shoddy career advice

new employment law: you can't fire employees who believe things

an apology for misleading you with my shoddy career advice

 
Dreadfully, dreadfully sorry.  I got it all wrong.  Worse, I got it all completely upside down.

Lady Resourceful and I were listening to Radio 4 this morning and there was discussion about some bank - I think they're called IBS or RBS - whose honchos are apparently holding the country hostage. 

Specifically, they're threatening to take early retirement and head off to eke out the rest of their days on yachts if the government prevents them from giving their staff Christmas hampers filled with golden statuettes of contorted taxpayers. 

That at least was the gist.  And I scoffed loudly and said, 'Look, this is surely the most easily solved problem of the recession.'

Lady Resourceful sighed, perhaps with pleasure at the idea of one of my insightful and very lengthy speeches.

'The solution, you ask?' I cried, waving a piece of toast.  'Just this, my dear.  Tell those fat cats that they can hand out as many bonuses as they like, as soon as they have reimbursed the public for bailing them out.'

According to Radio 4, though, this is not an option. 

Why?  Because if RBS don't give out millions in bonuses to the nincompoops who messed up the bank in the first place, the nincompoops will all jump ship and go to work for Andrew Sachs, or something.  And that, apparently, could jeopardise our chances of getting our money back from RBS.

'What!' I exclaimed.  'Surely if RBS have money to give to their nincompoops, they have money to give back to us.  And if they're prioritising paying their staff over paying their debt to the public now, then we're clearly never going to see our money.'

Apparently nobody on Radio 4 could see this.

I continued raving, while trying to stop Lady Resourceful from leaving the room.

'But looky here!  If we hadn't given the bank so much money to bail it out, those nincompoops would have had to find new jobs anyway.  Surely the nincompoops aren't now going to insist on reaping millions of pounds while their debt to the tax-paying public goes unpaid?'

Apparently those nincompoops would all be perfectly happy to desert RBS if they didn't get millions of pounds, as well as Christmas jumpers made entirely of material from the shirts off tax-payers' backs.

'Well, let the bankers threaten to leave!' I laughed, clutching my sides  'I don't fancy their chances of getting jobs with this Goldman Sachs establishment.  After all, who would hire a bunch of people who first buggered up a bank through sheer incompetence, then accepted a huge public payout, and then abandoned their employer for not paying them huge bonuses without any thought for the folks who've kept them afloat?'

Apparently, RBS's rivals would happily snap up these nincompoops.

It's a real eye-opener, I tell you, for someone whose work involves helping people get jobs.  I always thought it helped to a) be a good employee and b) show prospective employers that you are a good employee.

Oh, I've heard the argument that the good bankers, the ones who didn't gamble our money away while evincing zero prudential thinking, deserve the financial perks associated with their chosen profession, and that if they don't get them, they'll either walk, leaving only bad bankers to run the bank, or they'll lack any incentive to carry on performing well, and will thus turn, Jekyll-like, into bad bankers themselves.

But surely this (insane) argument highlights the crucial issue here:  

Since when has being a 'good' employee been reconcilable with being the kind of person who is motivated only by money, who lacks any company loyalty whatsoever, and who has no sense of obligation towards the vast bulk of one's customers? 

In my book, and given that a bank is (um) supposed to look after its customers' money, 'good' bankers would be prepared to do without cash windfalls until their debt to the public is paid.  Otherwise, nobody has any reason to call them 'good', except as a joke.

And as for incentivisation - surely a 'good' banker will be motivated enough if you say, 'Come on, guys - let's pay what we owe and then we can get back to clawing in the millions?'  How on earth is that a hard pill to swallow?

Surely a 'good' banker will want to get the debt to the taxpayer settled as soon as possible by contributing energetically to the bank's health, and will accept that any money paid in bonuses before that reimbursement is essentially stolen?

Apparently not.

Reader, I have an apology to make.  I have been advising people to spend job interviews seeking to demonstrate that they are loyal employees whose interests go beyond the purely financial.  I have been wrong.  Apparently nobody cares about that sort of thing any more.

My advice to the government?  Accept those boss' resignations and let decent humans take their place.

My advice to the public?  Don't bank with RBS. 

Related, ish:

new employment law: you can't fire employees who believe things

too much democracy in ireland

scams on linkedin: single mom's teeth drop two dress-sizes thanks to simple pact with satan

in the bloghouse (or, is blogging wrong?)

do you know the people you work with?