So, Bawbag has evidently taken some time off his travels, haven’t had any telling hits in the last day or two.

He is probably being waited on hand and foot in some enclave, given the countries he appears to be visiting. It remains fascinating to me how his priorities work.

Had an interview today, have another two tomorrow, still at work so far, taking next week off to complete some work for Christmas, hopefully, but not bothered again about bringing new stuff out at Christmas given that I cannot advertise it the way I want to. Still pondering how to rework it and building a new film budget. I am thinking in a more documentary way about it at the moment, but I just don’t feel that serious anymore and tbh my odd feelings for Wolfe revealed that entertainment is a whole lot more effective than education these days.  People are more interested in being stupid and judgy. You might as well, like Madonna, just make use of that if you want to get some attention for your topic.

Just finished a new coat, which will be getting some further embellishment before being revealed to the world.

The main job I am up for pays a few thousand more a year, I will not be hugely upset if it is a no as it involves peopling, but I outgunned two and a half thousand people to get to this point, so yay for me, I guess. I will survive regardless, given that even the most mind numbing job I have in my inbox pays very well with a low pound.

I would have liked to so something reasonably fulfilling at some point in my life, it is so boring being stuck in groundhog day year after year.

Don’t think I am going to gain any satisfaction at all from employment anytime soon.

Ina

So I really loved my job.  It was the first time I had liked a job in ages, and it was because I was dealing mainly with professionals and a more polite generation.

However it is now time to quit.  Why?

Well for one thing, as usual I wasn’t wanted there.  The person that did not want me there probably thinks he is unique.  He is about as far from unique as Little Shiva was, which is not at all. Men are insecure little piggies with nothing in their heads and no understanding of what single females have to do to get the bills paid.

One company I was unfortunate enough to work for had two lazy golfers employing me at minimum wage to complete their deadlines whilst they took their kids to school.  They used to stand in the office openly complaining at female staff, who were actually running the company despite being administrators, getting even the most modest pay rise.

I have no idea what irked this trainer so, probably he is just an insecure little man who has little under his control so he thought he would take it out on me.

I survived a year of this, but quit on Friday and am now working out my notice.  I had three job offers today alone, so I am not particularly concerned about this.

I could write a blog just about work, I have seen so many crap people and crap companies.

This time, an outsourcer had successfully negotiated with a large financial entity to reduce their staff costs and was rapidly employing people to replace the staff they were getting rid of, who had been in the job for years, were very knowledgable but unfortunately had decent wages so they had to go, obviously.

So now the same large financial entity has a phone system that doesn’t work, staff that do not know the topic and who are told that they have failed every month.  I was no exception to this, I don’t think I have had a single month in the last year that I have not been told that I am a failure. He likes to pile on the failure too, so things that other staff would be told were minor are absolutely huge when it is my error.

Things like turning up at work, being vaguely pleasant to the customers, showing any willingness at all to find out things you don’t know don’t matter.  Getting an initial out of place is the same type of failure as giving incorrect information, so the way you are rated is entirely skewed, and there is no progress, because nobody with any sense stays in that situation for very long.

I could literally have earned more in 20 hours a week over the last year than I did full time, because I wanted to know about the topic, but have found over time that I am not learning very much apart from how not to encourage people to get better at the job and how I really cannot be bothered pretending to be a peer of someone less than half my age that could not care less about anything apart from being nice to superiors in place of knowing anything about the job.

Today alone I ignored two mistakes from other people, because why should they lose their job just because I am leaving and very pissed off? This is not a healthy or positive way to do anything.

I went as far as suggesting they put someone capable of creating a structured training programme in place, but decided that I really didn’t want to contribute to this any more.  It wasn’t doing anything for me, so why should I do anything for it?

Very telling was the fact that a drunken misogynist who did not turn up for training got a permanent job quite a while before I did on the grounds that this trainer liked him.  This left me very pissed off even before the year started.  Now that I have handed in my notice, I am free not to care at all and am likely to be taking some time off shortly rather than put myself at further risk from this job.

Again I was not alone in being hated and discriminated against, evidently this person was also a racist, because a Pakistani and an Indian were rejected before me in the rejection queue.

I am tired of bad companies, bad policy and bad management.

What’s the point of caring, when nobody else does?

T 

The

Learning a job on a fast track career path when very young is fast and furious, especially when you work 20 hours a day.  It took less than two years to batter the bad habits out of me as a chef.

This is because, as a high pressure job, you have to learn really fast how to get the best out of people you would not even talk to in any other situation.  I used to say that catering should be like national service, since you learn about prioritisation, teamwork, forward planning etc very quickly.

Offices, by comparison, seem to foster a malignancy that is almost tangible at times, to the point that home workers are said to be some of the most experienced and highly qualified office workers you can get.  One outsourcing company, whose name I unfortunately forgot, cited the statistics and it was quite staggering.

These homeworkers saw the light.

As someone who has done a very wide variety of jobs, 80 hours of something you enjoy is a lot easier than 35 hours of something that sucks your soul.

I wrote and removed a post on the art of management when I first met Little Shiva.  It became apparent in the following weeks that he probably didn’t understand a word of it.  He was being dictated to by a person with a fairly advanced disorder, however, and given the stature of this person, I am not surprised that I was not to be listened to.

A good manager empowers their staff rather than intimidating them into doing things out of fear.  This is very basic.  In order to do your job well you are supposed to take things like retraining and staff turnover into account.

It is also your job as a manager to make yourself dispensable, that is to say, to ensure that if you have to be somewhere else, the work is getting done.  This means that throughout your day, you should be ensuring that your team are aware of the tasks required and doing them without prompting.

A manager’s function is to be a buffer between staff and senior management, not to generate friction.  This means as a functional adult, you should be prepared to mediate between staff and to deal with your own problems.

In a banking situation, of course, you have the complication of the bank.  Any relationship in a bank is between you, the bank and then the person.  This, however, does not negate your responsibility to communicate with your staff.  In fact, you should be making sure that everyone understands that their relationship is also with the bank before anyone else.  It is a basic principle of risk management.

In the event that you are hiring, you should have received some bias training.  Most of the major banks provide this, although I have been discriminated against because of my previous experience as a carer, because I am female and likely to procreate, because I am too interesting twice now – the first time I was told that the bank did not need cultural change (I had not mentioned any plans to single-handedly change an international bank, this was apparently a charisma issue)  because I am creative (this time I was chased by a woman screaming), and finally because I am not a mother.  At this point I made a complaint, knowing full well that the only likely response was that the bank would repeat the same rubbish that their demotivated interviewer had made up.

Because my first career was as a chef, I find it extremely easy to prioritise tasks as back burner or front burner items.  It is a very simple analogy and a question of time-management.

The most difficult thing about offices generally, however, is that people in a seated position are vindictive and lazy after quite a short time.  Cliques form, and self-interest creates deep suspicion if you express any interest in work whatsoever.  This is something I have found extremely boring over the years.  Nobody wants to deal with enthusiasm, nor do they understand why their assumptions about you are wrong.  They just invent something else to bitch about.

So, if your office staff turnover is high, and your staff look miserable, replace the manager, because they are not doing the job effectively.  Employ someone with some leadership capacity that actually likes working, not someone that looks like you.  That would be a first.

Today it has been intimated to me that I am now to offer mentoring services to business.

I am sure the recipients of my advice will be immensely surprised to speak to someone who has actually run a business, given that such advice is usually given by people who have never run a business in their lives.  I am also hoping to be working with seniors fairly soon, in a more social capacity, but I have not heard back yet.

I am also going to be renegotiating with a couple of people I work with at present, as I am not interested in wasting my time pretending to be something I’m not to please anyone any more.  Some things are worth doing and some are not.

I do not see why I should tolerate being on the receiving end of bad management any more when I am considerably more capable than they are.

Bumped into lovely effusive man last night.  I must go and interfere with his cafe.

Well we now have a nice overview of American Venture Capitalism, which has been fun over the last few weeks.

For those who don’t understand Venture Capitalism, it takes a number of forms. Cliff Richards is actually a super-scale VC in the UK.  If you want three million or so for a few days to double it, he is your man.

Venture Capitalists are a little bit like high end backgammon players, which naturally takes my fancy, having been around a bit.  High end backgammon players, however, are usually a bit better at statistics.

Taking the Cannabis industry as an example, I have managed to get the views of three VCs on it. They are significantly different.

VC1 is an investor.  He/she thinks that the progressive legalisation for recreational use is a sign that the world is becoming tolerant of the industry in general, and has invested over half of the current financial holdings in one of the main three players.

VC2 is taking a more cautious view, and is anxiously watching to see how many states are planning to allow it for medicinal use, presumably hoping that big pharma takes it on.  It is doubtful that this is going to happen all that soon, since unlike most pharmaceuticals CBD actually helps.

VC3 is my favourite.  VC3 sees the vastly overvalued stocks and goes and has a look at the ‘big’ players in Canada.  VC3 notices that a $45 million dollar company is, in fact, a medium sized shed in a country with poor weather, and realises that investing in Canadian pot is the most crazy investment strategy since the dot com boom. He also notes that the market for medicinal and recreational cannabis is about a tenth of the investments made, and so there is an enormous bubble which is likely to burst.  I rather like VC3.

I am aware of at least two of the ‘big’ Canadian players, and whilst they are very nice chaps, they are unlikely to be creating a vast operation in Canada, given that it is far cheaper to grow pot elsewhere.  It is also unlikely that recreational cannabis is likely to become widespread due to problems with monitoring blood levels of THC. Unlike alcohol, you cannot simply look at a blood test and tell whether someone is high or not.

Also, there were significant interests in banning all hemp products from other industries, since it is very useful.  Thus we can see some parallels with the oil industry and electric cars.  We aren’t going to see a lot of progress with moving on from using oil when oil is still plentiful and in the hands of people who are already very rich.

So, basically when you see a nice clean-cut venture capitalist telling you about their mammoth successes, bear in mind that they are probably investing in literally hundreds of companies on the basis that maybe three of them pay off.  It is a high risk, and sporadically high reward business.

A good VC will tell you that investing ten million in a guy that makes great toast, for example, is self-fulfilling because that ten million will get the guy sufficient exposure and resources to scale his toast making to the point where his business pays off, at least until he pays the interest on the ten million.  If your VC tells you this upfront, however, it is still a good idea to make sure you have evaluated the toast.