Once again...
Forgive me blog, for I have been a worthless yet busy worm. It has been 3 days since my last post. Which is not that bad actually so I'll skip the flagellation and Hail Maries
I've neglected to blog a few amusing circumstances, I'll endeavour to recall them to the best of my ability. You'll understand of course if there's a slight spin on my yarn.
First of all, to the Scotch Piss Artisté. Thanks for the Tom o' Shanter exerpt, but we've been through this before. A few months ago you sent me on a worthwhile voyage of discovery into the works of Rabby Burns. A reminder is always good however, I'll hone up on my Rabby and finish the bottles of Laphroaig and Balvenie in preparation for our next meeting.
I sit by the dim light of my desk lamp. I've just got back from a fulfilling day at work (another day, another Pound, Sterling). Johnny Cash tells me that he harldy ever sings beer, drinking songs. Homer would say It's funny cos it's true
Several days have passed since I drafted the above.
Last week I attended an orientation course for work. It took two very long days to brainwash us all and suitably assimilate us into the organisational culture. Honestly, it’s so American. The orientation was lead by an Italian midget, the most enthusiastic I have ever met. There were lectures on the history of the company, the organisational structure, the market indicators and every other reason to cram in as much Transglobal new-age corporate jargon as possible. Experiences like that bring out the italicist in me, which is not a good thing. Italics is something horror writers are into, they belong together, like red-hot pokers and eyeballs.
I could deal with the lectures and talks that provided me with a clear picture of who I now worked for. There were serious undercurrents, that at most times weren’t undercurrents but blazoned flashing neon messages and conditions. All that was missing were the match sticks keeping my eyes open and the iron maiden.
At times I felt sorry for the other folks who had two ears to absorb the treatment. I wonder if I was less susceptible to the bashing because I’m deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other. All those late nights drinking beer, having a puff and watching bid-up TV have given me the ability to switch off to the point where I amaze even myself. Garbage in, Garbage out. I have developed a new level of selective hearing; basically anything I don’t want to hear is blocked out, like spam, only server-side. I have an abstract layer of hearing that acts independently of my consciousness, a pre-cog form of anti-virus or encapsulation, TV adds, lectures by midgets who live for their own human resources jobs, and anything my abstraction layer knows is not good for me is blotted out.
RM –RF *.*
There were a few instances that were particularly excruciating. You could tell what kind of self-help/motivational book she was reading at the time. There is a type of person who is devoid of the ability to think for themselves. They rely heavily on the works of others for instruction on how to work, eat, sleep, believe, be, fuck, dress, talk and motivate themselves and others to be busy, happy workers .
My fellow prisoners, many of whom were well seasoned Eurocrats with shining careers in long established, market leading companies in top positions like Business Developers for Oracle were also subject to this excruciating and totally unnecessary array of à la book activities.
At one stage she made us all stand up and form a circle. She disappeared behind a partition and resurfaced with a hula-hoop. We had to hold hands, the thought of which still makes me squirm as this kind of thing is just not on. I had to hold hands with men, now I’m not homophobic like my father, but I think holding another man’s hand, or even a woman’s hand is not acceptable social behaviour. I am already fast developing a well thought out Obsessive Compulsive Disorder where my challenge in the morning is to get to work without touching anything. The moment the bus driver jerks the bus and forces me to grab on to any handle, game over – busses especially are the collapsing and sweaty lungs of hell, hell being the department of home affairs in Pretoria. The first thing I do when I get to work is wash and there’s nothing like the smell of chemicals on my hands throughout the day. My hands flaming red from the near boiling water I soak them in. You touch my mouse, it gets the disinfectant wipe. So there I am, being forced to hold another man’s hand and all I can think of is ’does he wash?’ Let me tell you something, 90% of men do not wash their hands, the filthiest things on earth are people and their hands. I won’t get side-tracked, this is another post for another time.
So there we were in our sweaty little circle of grubby humans, not allowed to break the chain and we had to get the hula-hoop to travel the circle. I can’t believe that this 20 something Italian midget high on motivation and team spirit (how many times do I have to tell people, there is no ’I’ in ‘Team’) has us all jumping through a hoop.
I complained. Now one thing I’ll take from my former employer and manager are the words uttered to me one day. I was taken aside after apparently making the girls in the coffee shop cry because I deemed the coffee was too expensive, and told something to the effect of ‘You may not express your opinion in the verbose manner that you do in an open plan office’ – so I waited for the response forms to come along before I lambasted her with a couple of truths. I told her that this was demeaning and inappropriate and that to certain, evidently more tactful cultures this was insulting. There are connotations. Circus animals jump through hoops. ‘To put through the hoop’ is a old sailors term where sailors at the bottom of the food chain were forced to sling their hammocks, or sling their hoops elsewhere. It has all sorts of nasty connotations. We are professionals, not dogs.
And so the torture endured. One blatantly obvious statement after the next. We were all being given a two day lecture on what success is, on what motivation is, on how to work effectively – all of this by a Mediterranean kipper who was probably in her first job after University. I was sat there with guys who had been through several careers, were high-flying Business Developers, managers, hirers, firers. They had probably put more gummy bears through the fucking hoop than she’d had, hot dinners. She asked question after question and expected a reply, expected feedback. Every question was an obvious statement, she was a master of the obvious but didn’t see it that way. She saw herself as enlightened, as someone who had the inside track, the inside information. She didn’t realise as she tried to elicit a response from us that our blank stares where being backed by strong urges to see her hanging from the joists.
By the second day I tried to combat her by responding to her obvious statements, I wanted to see if I could put some shovel into her programme, get her moving on a bit. She would ask questions like ’Why is it important to learn?’ and then sit in an uncomfortable silence for minutes, refusing to let it go, refusing to believe that any one of us could stand up and wipe our arses with her CV and teach her a thing or two about life and work and that life is a learning process, that you never stop learning. I belted out that if you stopped learning, you might as well die, hoping that the mention of death might dampen the situation. My efforts to curb her enthusiasm only proved to spur her on, ’Good, good, you might die, that’s great, yes, you might die…’ and so it went on and the thought of it still makes me want to projectile vomit.
She made sure that she kept us all there for as long as possible, she had the power and she was going to exercise everything she learned the night before on us. It was painful but we survived. We also had something to laugh about, and we still do. I don't need a lecture on motivation or how to work effectively. You don't need to make any attempt to augment my attitude or personality. I got hired because I'm the fucking man with the skills to do the job, I endured three fucking interviews so if my personality is not compatible with the company's 'culture' then I suggest you fire middle-management. Stepford wives and any similar utopian, arcadian image is bullshit. I work for money, I want money, the company 'culture' and ultimate ambition is to make money, not stand around holding hands and expressing our deepest love and respect for each other - no profit, no company - get with the programme. The fact that I just left my last job where they had a nap room, a massage team and enough time to go shopping in the west-end for however many hours I choose means that I am prepared to remove myself from my comfort zone and accept new challenges. I am motivated and ambitious. There is no need to remind me of that.
Writing about it is exhausting and now that it’s had its face torn off I can stop.