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JulesRants
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Welcome to MY World
The thing is, I've never done this before. Well, not in a blog, anyway.
I've ranted and bitched and moaned about the petty irritations of life
before. Exhaustively.
And, I've cheered and clapped and patted myself on the back at the
(equally petty) triumphs of life, too. Though just lately, there hasn't
been much cause to do any of that.
Before I launch into the full-on whining and complaining I intend to
vomit forth onto the hallowed pages of 20six, I want to go on record
that:
I am perfectly well aware that I have a lot to be grateful for. I am not sick, disabled, decrepit or diseased. I have a roof over my head and I have good friends I trust. I know where the next meal is coming from (if not the next car).
The rest of my blogs should all be read (and, let's hope, written) with the assumption of all these uneqivocally good things will continue.
So, I want no comments to the effect that I should not be so grumpy and should instead be thankful for the good things in life. I am, but
mooning about with a big silly grin is only going to happen when at least some of the multiple off-pissers in my life have turned into
up-lifters.
Anyone who doesn't like that can take their rose-tinted contact lenses
back to Vision Express. I don't want them anywhere near me.
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15.11.05 18:10
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Gogin and Form
Why, oh why, do my cack-handed fingers invariably spell "going" as "gogin" when I'm typing?
And why does every single sodding attempt to type "from" end up as
"form"? At least the "gogin" twattery gets picked up by spell-checkers,
but this one often slips by. It's most annoying.
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15.11.05 18:14
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Unemployment sucks. It really does.
This
isn't the first time I've been out of work. Back in the days of the
blessed Margaret (may she rot in hell, and soon), the dole was
dispiriting enough, but you could study part time to gain better
qualifications without jeopardising your benefit money. I got into
university doing that.
When I left uni (or poly, as mine was then) I was back on the dole for a while until I could find a job.
The first one I took lasted seven or eight months; it was in sales,
back in the days of mis-selling and commission-only representatives -
the link is causal, I think. Back in the jobless queue for a month or
two, and then into a junior-level McJob, as a temp covering for
maternity leave. I stayed with the company for almost twelve years,
moving up the greasy pole to the (periodically) sunny uplands on the
borders between junior and middle management. Picking up good general
business skills along the way, in marketing and distribution, I ended
up working as a project manager, which I enjoyed more than anything
else I've done, before or since.
Then, in Autumn 2002, I got made redundant. Which was an unpleasant
surprise, but I got an excellent severance package, which allowed me to
take the best part of a year off, do some travelling, and generally
think about what I wanted to do next. For good or ill, none of the
other options I looked into (including the law, and acting) really
fired me up. The prospect of starting again at the bottom of something,
with no guarantee I'd be any good at it, didn't fill me with joy.
Instead, I decided I'd stick with what I'd been doing, because I knew I
was good at it and that I enjoyed it.
So I started looking. The first job that interviewed me was another
sales job. In a fit of blindness, mostly brought on by the dwindling
size of my bank account, I took a sales job with a new start-up. They
were selling vehicle traffic equipment to hauliers. It was technically
very advanced kit, but expensive and a late entrant into the market.
The telemarketing campaign my boss had gambled on to give the three
area reps the leads to get us started died on it's arse. This
depressingly usual tale of over-promise, under-delivery meant that
within the first three weeks, the high-level, consultative selling role
I'd signed up for (and, to be fair to my boss, been signed up for)
disappeared into the morass of 'hit the phones, boys' cold calling. I
am no good at all at this, largely because I hate doing it.
I staggered on for another couple of weeks, but after that it was
mutually clear to my boss & me that the job was unsuppportable from
a cost perpective (the paltry direct sales we were generating weren't
enough to justify three reps) and temperamentally unsuitable for me ( I
hated every second of it, and couldn't see why I needed to drive 40
miles to sit in an office and make phone calls when I had a perfectly
good phone at home). So we agreed I'd leave. As it was within the
probationary period, we agreed that no balme would be attributed either
way - it was just bad luck.
Aside After I left, within
three months they gave up on direct sales altogether, and concentrated
on finding third-party agents (mostly vehicle retailers). I felt a bit
better finding out that, as it meant maybe I wasn't quite the dreadful
salesman I imagined myself to be - clearly nobody else could sell the
kit either. I felt even better six months after that when I found out
that they'd folded their active UK operations altogether, instead being
bought out by their suppliers and passively manageing their existing
customer base. Like I said, too expensive, and late market entrants.
Bad luck all right - all the way to the Job Centre. These days, of
course, the dole goes under the guise of "Jobseekers' Allowance" (even
the DWP don't seem to know where to put the apostrophe consistently),
and anything you do that cuts the time you might be available for work
(e.g. training, study) is excluded from your claim. Top incentivisation
idea, Tony, you Tory Boy monkey!
Another few months of this - Christmas skint is SUCH a heartwarming
experience, I don't think - then the following January I got a call out
of the blue asking if I wanted to take an interim job. It was as a
Customer Services Manager, so not what I was trying to get back into,
but it was a guaranteed three months of work (and money) which I badly
needed, so I went along. They offered me the job on the spot, and I
started the following week.
It was a good little business, and I liked the people, and they seemed
to like me (and respect my skills & experience), so I applied for
the permanent CSM job. After the interviews, they brought me in and
told me that no, I didn't get the permanent job. Other candidates has
skills that better fit the blah blah blah. I was sat trying to keep
from growling, and suddenly they sprang into '...but we like what
you've been doing, and we want to keep you in the business, so we're
going to offer you a newly created role in project management for more
money'. Finally, a genuinely lucky break!
to be continued...
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16.11.05 11:54
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So
George Best is dead. His family and friends are quite naturally in
mourning. He was a brilliantly gifted footballer, who helped his then
club, Manchester United, win the European Cup for the first time. Did
he do anything at all of consequence other than that? Nope. Northern
Ireland didn't qualify for the World Cup during his playing days, did
they? Let alone win it.
He didn't set any particular example as a role model, unless unchecked
debauchery and self-defilement is something to aspire to.
He was an alcoholic - a terrible, incurable disease. Sufferers
deserve sympathy and support. But do they deserve unfettered press
sympathy and support? All those tabloids that George helped sell,
either by drinking himself stupid in front of a long lens, or selling
his "story" about his terrible life (in return for large sums of money
to buy more booze with). What did they do to help poor sufferers of
alcoholism?
When George would get pissed and smack his then wife / girlfriend
around, where were the press campaigns for an improved network of
refuges for battered women? When he shagged anything with a pulse
behind his current partners back because, drink-sodden though he may
have been, he still had charm and the remnants of some good looks,
where were the cries for fidelity, loyalty, safe sex, etc. that
ordinary Brits get pummeled with whenever they dare to sleep around? How come Best was given tabloid permission to treat all around him like shit?
Oh, he was an alcoholic. That's okay then.
But, hang on - maybe the suburban wife-beaters that get villified
routinely are alcoholics too? Even if they are, does that excuse their
behaviour? Er - NOPE.
Best wasn't just an incurable alcoholic. He was UNREPENTANT about it.
He'd make jokes about how much he drank or how many women he slept
with. His media image was "loveable rogue", and now he's dead the
instinct for immediate sainthood that the British seem obsessed by
these days kicked in, and we're only allowed to think of the "loveable"
part.
Sorry, but the whole thing sucks. He was no saint, and he wasn't
someone to be held up as a hero to anyone - even in the soccer world,
he pretty much squandered his talent in favour of booze and women. It's
not big, and it's not clever.
What REALLY pisses me off though is the whole, Diana-esque media tone
that says "THIS is how you are supposed to feel about George Best's /
Diana's / The Queen Mother's death, and if you don't you are not ONE OF
US".
Well, fuck that. If you're sentimental enough to break down into months
of mourning for some rich famous person whose life touched yours only
in your own imagination then I don't want to be one of you. I think I
find such people rather pitiable and contemptible, frankly. If you are
the sort of person who leaves bunches of flowers outside the houses of
dead people you don't know, it's you I'm talking about.
And anyway, when did THAT start happening?? These days you can't travel
more than 50 miles wihtout passing at least two bedraggled bouquets
tied to a lamppost or hedge where someone died in a road accident. I
drove past Buckingham Palace after Diana died, and there was a
fifty-foot-high mound of rotting vegetation that was stank out the
whole of The Mall. This was supposed to be some kind of 'tribute' to a
'much-loved' public figure (who'd been a public laughing stock only
weeks before her death).
What this whole rambling grumble boils down to is that I really resent
being told how I am suposed to feel abot something. I think the media
and the press are there to give people information and then let THEM
work out how they feel about it, rather than give them little or no
information and just TELL us how we should feel.
This is a new thing in Britain - twenty years ago it was unheard of.
The old stiff upper lip archetype was long past its usefulness, but the
new one, where wearing one's heart on one's sleeve isn't only
acceptable, but practically com-fucking-pulsory... that's just silly,
and I refuse to buy into it.
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27.11.05 19:07
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Unemployment sucks - part 2
Ok, where was I....
Oh yes. The new project job. Well, the first thing to say is that I was
roped into a pre-existing enterpirse system implementation, so straight
away I was missing out on the system selection and planning phases. I
say that, but it was immediately apparent that not very much in the way
of planning had actually taken place at all.
The trouble was, a condition of my working on this project was that I
had to keep running the custoemr services team until the new CSM
started, and she had to give 3 months' notice. So, having started my
new job at the beginning of April, I could only devote perhaps a day a
week to it until July.
And nobody else, apart from me, was devoted to the project full time,
even when I did start working on it. In April, I'd taken a look at the
project status, and it was immediately obvious to me that the planned
start date of June/July was laughably optimistic, given that nobody had
done any actual work yet. I lobbied the board to postpone to something
more realistic - I angled for November 04, leaving time of
contingencies.
They wouldn't wear it, because - get this - the original project team
had already postponed the planned completion date THREE TIMES from it's
original date of December 03 to get to July 04, all before I'd even
joined the business.
Part of the problem was that the board had directed the project team to
carry out a formal business process review at the same time as the
systems implementation, a classic mistake, IMO. It's like trying to
paint a house at the same time as you're building it - possible, but
the end result usuall requires lots of repainting and rebuilding as you
go along, it takes far too long, and nobody has the faintest idea what
it will look like until it's finished.
I wasn't even the formal project manager. The guy who was, the
financial controller (and later the Financial Director) was a good guy
who knew his finance onions, but had pretty much zero experience of
project leadership. He was also new in the business, like me, but with
a background in an entirely different business type (where I at least
had some distribution knowledge). So he (and, to a lesser extent, I)
both had to take our detailed understanding of the business processes
we'd be trying to automate from a woman who'd been in the business for
a long time, and had worked on the original systems implementation team
that put the legacy system in place.
She was old-school middle management - the sort of person who's
immediate reaction to any suggested improvement was "we can't do that
because...". To be fair, this was the general culture of the business,
which the finance guy and I both found enormously frustrating. So this
woman wasn't being unusually awkward. And also, she was right in
principle about 50% of the time.
Another 30% of the time she was right in practice, but wrong in
principle. Usually this was because the system, while right in
principle, had to be fudged to match the existing business process.
Such processes had evolved to meet a particular business need lost in
the mists of time, but were now only there because of hallowed
tradition. We could try to update the business process, and implement a
new system off-the-peg to match it, but god knows how much time and
disruption that would have taken. Given the board's stony-faced
insistence that everything had to be in place for October, and the
decision they'd taken a year or so before to buy a particular IT
system, we had to grin and change nothing, further entrenching a duff
business process for the expediency of meeting the timeline and the
(frankly counter-productive) idea of doing process review and systems
implementation simultaneously.
The other 20% of the time, the woman was just plain wrong. But, true to
business culture, it was impossible for her (or anyone else) in the
business to admit that their way of doing things was not the best
possible method. Right at the start, when I was offered the job, I'd
said that culture change in a business usually takes about seven years.
He was sure that only applied to big mega businesses, and a tiny little
minnow like this business, with fewer than 100 employees, would take
more like seven months. It certainly needed to, he'd imply.
Trouble is, staff turnover was minute. This is a plus, but it doesn't
indicate a lot of fresh ideas. The average service, including me, the
new finance guy, the MD himself (who'd been in place less than six
months, having been a marketing manager & director elsewhere) and
the new CSM (when she started) was still over ten years. These were not people used to flexibility or responsiveness.
To cut an already long story even shorter, the project kind of
staggered in just about on time, except for some of the work we'd
contracted out externally. We'd been hit by illness in some of the key
players, but we pulled the time back (mostly by me, the finance guy,
and the naysayer woman working silly hours). All the areas that
over-ran were those that needed extensive testing, which the board's
timetable simply hadn't allowed for. It was all finished and buttoned
down and robust, along with all the user training (which I'd overseen
to large extent) by - guess what, mid-November 04 (two weeks ahead of
when I'd originally suggested we aim for).
Despite the glitches, the implementation was largely seen as a success
- none of the things that had gone wrong threatened the go-live; it was
all tidying up loose ends, really.
We'd parked a lot of the system functionality development we'd
originally hoped for to hit the deadline, so what we delivered was
pretty much an updated version of the legacy system. Given that the
original decision to upgrade was driven by the withdrawal of software
support for the legacy system (yes, it was that old) this did meet the
original business requirement to allow operations to continue, but it
didn't FEEL like we'd achieved very much.
I guess it must have been like working on the teams trying to mitigate
the effects of the Millennium Bug back in the late 90s. You put in a
load of work to combat a massively hyped problem, and the measure of
success for your efforts is that nobody in the wider world so much as
notices anything different. Ho hum.
But all this work was merely phase 1. All along, the plan had been to
get the updated software version in place, and then do some genuinely
new stuff (for this business) by moving the warehouse to handheld
devices, barcode scanners, and automated inventory systems. This was a
bigger project than phase 1, in as much as not only was a new system
coming in, but businesses processes would HAVE to change. and it was
all mine. When I'd been offered the job, the idea was that I'd work on
phase 1 as a project resource, to get to know the business and its
systems, and then manage phase 2 from start to finish.
I had some big ideas, and I was looking forward to it. After the
clean-up from phase 1, I was pushing to sit down with the board to kick
off phase 2. I estimated the project would take a good year, with two
months solid planning to get it moving, and I wanted approval to get
things moving (for example, me going off site to work with the software
suppliers so I got to know the system inside out; buying some sample
handsets to do some proper testing; etc.).
My boss, who had been the FD until the guy I'd worked with on phase 1
was promoted, but was now Operations Director, backpedalled like mad.
Which gave me a sinking feeling.
You see, all along, the business was owned by venture capitalists.
They'd financed a management buy-out three or four years before, which
had gone sour. The then MD, and some other senior managers, had been
given the heave-ho, and some of the VC's own people had been put in
place to knock things into shape. One of whom was my boss.
This had turned the business around, and the year I joined was to
become the second full year of trading in profit. The VC (naturally
enough) wanted to make back some of the money they'd lost, so all the
time I was there I knew that, if the right offer came along, the
business might be bought out, possibly by someone who already had their
own project managers.
All through November 2004, one of the offices at the fornt of the
building was being camped in by 'strangers'. My old employers in
newspaper wholesaling had been on the market for a while, so I knew
perfectly well these were accountants being employed either by the VC
people in preparation for a sale, or by a prospective buyer for the
same purpose.
So, after a week or two of prevarication postponing the kick-off
meeting for phase 2, it came as no big surprise that my boss told me
that I was going to be laid off. The business couldn't tie a possible
new owner down to a possible £0.5m investment (the likely minimum cost
of the warehouse system implementation) - they might have their own
system (or just be cheapskates). Also, we'd had trouble with the
software provider (whose consultants had been largely incompetant) and
the board wanted time to reconsider who they would go with for phase 2,
if anyone. This second reason was of course a crap one for getting rid
of me - they'd need somebody to do the comparision and cost-benefit
work and I was better qualified than anyone else they had.
But there was no arguing - they'd already decided I had to go. Only
eight months after they'd put me onto a permanent senior management
contract and given me a pay rise. This last point makes me think that
there was no evidence of malice in their decision, but plenty of
evidence that they didn't have much clue what to do next, after sending
all the manufacturing to the Far East (which is how they'd managed to
start making money again).
And, they'd ALSO laid off the woman they'd brought in as Customer
Services Manager, only FIVE months after she'd started. As she was also
on the senior management contract, they had to pay her three month's
wages just like they did me.
Silly buggers.
I had some paid leave they I hadn't taken, so while my last day working
there was in the first week of December, I didn't actually come off
their books until 20 December. This was a good thing in my book, as it
meant I had an extra two weeks to polish up my CV (resume for US
readers) and look for a new job.
I registered with every job agency I could think of, mainly on the
internet, and rang them all to badger them. I got an encouraging number
of phone calls in the first week or so, then it tailed off, which
wasn't at all worrying (at the time) because it was just before
Christmas, and very few companies recruit anyone to start permanent
roles in December.
This was December 2004.
I had a good few grand in the bank, which would tide me over until I
found work and (with any luck) I'd still have most of it left once I
actually started somewhere.
How naive of me... of which more later.
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28.11.05 17:42
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JulesRants
