business - Ina Disguise

FTAO the Blank company

October 31, 2018 No Comments

The problem is that your staff are so obsessed with boring and mundane gossip about people that they are spending time at work staring at the website.

I think if you are going to implement policy destroying somebody’s career on the basis of supporting contracting companies who basically burn people’s money you should implement it across the company. Fire anybody you find looking at a website, never mind sending personal email or attempting to resolve work situations via normal grown-up conversation.

Therefore, rather than having the nervous wreck that caused the problem in the first place sitting worrying about who his vile sadistic manager spread the website to, the simple solution is to simply get IT to block the website from the server. It is really not a difficult thing to do. Just add it to your blacklist.

In addition the idiot that caused the problem still works for you, and I do not want him to be dragged into further problems. He is still obsessively clicking it, but he at least does it with his own equipment, usually when he is off work.

I have no idea who is in charge of HR, data, internet or contracts management at your bank, nor do I care. The fact is that some inexperienced and piss-poor managers colluded to get somebody fired for a laugh, openly admitted it and you apparently have no problem with it. I certainly don’t condone what they did, but I don’t have to worry about it.

This is however, not the problem here. I just want not to see your tedious staff on my website analytics when they are supposed to be working. With rare exceptions they are a very boring and narrow-minded bunch and it is doubtful that they will get anything out of it other than some tired gossip about something that is not even relevant.

I did nothing wrong, my career is contracting is destroyed and nobody is prepared to take any responsibility for putting things right. That is now your problem, not mine.

I hope this clears up the issue. Blanker, who works for customer assist is at least trying to get the problem solved, although why the legal department should be involved in adding a website address to a blacklist I do not know.

Thank God I don’t have to deal with you any more. I am busy working in the USA, Saudi, India, Australia at the moment, and I can tell you it is a lot more interesting and culturally relevant than your third world policy on how you treat people who work for you.

Ina.

business, motivation

Train your child to bully and lie

October 25, 2018 No Comments

Well, today I learned that the best thing you can teach your children, that is if you actually had the opportunity of having any, is to bully other people and lie.

We celebrate bullies and liars in many ways. Primarily by promoting them.

The Bagel Study, which you are welcome to look up, established this some years ago, when it was shown that people higher up in the company are more likely to steal bagels than people on the ground level.

Therefore, with the benefit of quite considerable experience of being a nice person and having got to the miserable position I am in today, I now advise you to teach your children to lie, steal and bully other people. In this way they will get on well in life, they will be respected at work, and they will get on much better generally.

The fact that they will spit in your face for being old shouldn’t bother you because you will have done your job and the ‘professionals’ that your disgusting offspring pay to get you out of the way can then have a free hand to mistreat you in a care home or hospital. You can be given inappropriate medication, based on the assumptions of stupid people who don’t care about you, probably someone else’s dishonest and bullying child who didn’t quite make the big time in sadism.

When your child bullies people, lies or steals, they are to be praised. This will reflect the promotions they will get later on in life.

And did I mention that they should be male? Yes, please drown your female children, because they are clearly useless and will not even get decent training at work because they aren’t worthwhile. I used to think it was just women of child bearing age, but today we have established that simply being female is sufficient.

On no account should you encourage any type of empathy, because that will get them fired. Any kindness, any willingness to help others, any stopping to assist must be punished.

So, next time your child shows any negativity towards others, make sure that it is potentially violent, spiteful and dishonest negativity, because that is the best thing you can do for them.

business, creativity, motivation

Life Changing Moments

October 21, 2018 No Comments

One of my friends on Facebook is an writer from Australia, and this week he decided to ask about life changing moments.

Out of all the horrible, interesting things that have happened the first thing that sprang to mind was

David Wolfe’s wife blocking me on Facebook.

Now at the time, I was on a knife edge. I was grieving for my father, uncle, 2 cats and my best friend. I had just spent 2 years researching a huge book which morphed several times as I hadn’t written anything with any purpose before, and I wanted to speak to David about the direction and how it could be used to help him.

I live in a different continent but it just so happens that we were born 12 days apart and we are oddly similar facially in photographs, despite me being a small sturdy Scottish person and him being a slight, German-American-Iranian. This was not sufficient however, it was the whacky yet compelling presentation of usually fairly mundane health information that I was interested in.

Anyway, after years of being told how shite I was by my friends, who really just wanted me to be shite because they (probably) still feel that they are shite, I had found over a very careful year dropping in on David’s page every fortnight that we got on very well, apart from sporadic flaming tantrums on both sides, so when I was blocked by a person on his page, I just assumed it was him and was duly devastated.

When I say devastated, I mean completely destroyed. I had just spent 6 weeks working on an incredibly well thought out yet bizarre film about him and Durianrider and I was still waiting to have a conversation about the book I was intently working on instead of wasting my time playing Farmville.

This was 2011 or 12, I forget which. I had got through a horrific family experience and lost about 160lb at the time thanks to him, so I felt I owed him, regardless. It was not until probably two years after this happened that I accepted that I was terribly in love, with a random stranger who just happened to be extremely famous.

Anyway after a few false starts on projects that did not work out, I finally descended into despondency but had sponged up enough of what David had to say to say fuck it, nobody wants to listen to me anyway, I might as well be louder about it. Hence Ina Disguise was born, sometime during the writing of Best Scandal Ever.

The only reason I wrote anything at all was because I could not speak to him, and I thought it had been him that had blocked me as I knew nothing about his wife.

So now, five years after Best Scandal Ever, this has become a pivotal moment in that having been so incredibly damaged by trying to compensate for whatever anybody said was wrong with me, no longer giving a fuck allowed me to finally speak.

Admittedly, I have just done what I felt like doing, when I felt like doing it, because 24 hour care for my mother has always come first and everything else took a second place to that. Now I have the problem of day to day survival, and that has to come first. However, I have put time in every day, whether that is:

15 minutes to write this blog,

half an hour to spam the books to a few million people,

a couple of hours on putting a story together ,

a month of intense sewing to create a handbag

three months of intense work to create a carpet,

18 months to create the resin pieces, due to money

conceptualising new ways of putting out work, although that has been scuppered by my lack of support from other people.

Within a year of putting out any artwork I was in GQ. Tatler and World of Interiors, and I now, after five years and five months have about 80,000 readers.

I do not make money out of this, but I did it on the basis that I could not otherwise ever get the message across to David, and the notion of a subversive marketing strategy that didn’t actually cost anything.

There is far more that I could be doing. I have been quite lazy. I should try some of the other stuff that I have in the armory – for those interested January 2016 entries have a lot of useful links you can try.

There are an awful lot of authors out there who do not understand how the marketing in publishing works, because it is not at all obvious. I have heard some horrific stories about people spending nine years writing a book and then squandering their life savings on trying to make it sell.

This is not how it works any more. As an author, you should regard it far more as being a pop singer. Nobody is going to pay a pop singer they haven’t heard before, and by far the biggest challenge is getting them to notice your name in the first place.

So, although I have not made any money, I probably have more readers than David now. This in itself is not important, this is not the point. The point is that it doesn’t matter who you are or why you do what you do. The important thing is that you do it. I have a friend in Slovenia, an international level political journalist, that is still resisting writing her first book, on the basis that she is concerned about how it is regarded.

“Use a pseudonym and get on with it.” is my response.

The general thinking on online marketing is that you have to get people to see your name nine times before they even read the byline, so focus on that. Wolfe is crazy like a fox, not to put too fine a point on it. I was open enough to figure this before I started the experiment, but not everybody gets the point of Wolfe. He is a complex creature.

By the looks of things, it is time I did some edits and took this more seriously now. To start with, it was a case of spitting the words onto a page next to a name and then throwing it out there. Now I definitely have some attention, it is probably time to up the quality and time somewhat before I even think about money.

For those authors who read me and think how dreadful I am for putting work out free, here is the comparison:

You can spend 3 or 4k per book on marketing on the basis of getting a small proportion of it back, put out only long titles and wait for 30 years or so for someone to notice, or you can accept that nobody knows or cares who you are or what you have to say.

I think my way is better, and it is certainly cheaper and more rewarding.

Discuss.

business, motivation

Stupid People are Nasty

October 20, 2018 No Comments

We finally seem to have gotten rid of Little Shiva.

It was around about the post to his wife this week. I am not sure if he is actually so far gone that he had not previously noticed that she knew about the website in July.

She presumably lied to him. People do, for all sorts of twisted reasons. He certainly never told her about it, her complaint in this regard is in the conversation we had.

I’m sure he was expecting to be rewarded by hoovering up me sounding confused, hurt and increasingly desperate because, after all, he did ensure that an already bad situation was made considerably worse, for no reason at all.

The sadist, I can imagine, regarded this as a form of ‘blooding’. It appears from everything I have witnessed to do with the company involved, that this is how they spend their working day.

I can confirm that they certainly don’t spend it working. The higher up the food chain in banking contracting, the less work you do and the more unpleasant you get to be. I have hundreds of friends doing it, and taken as a collective, I have never seen so many posts complaining of mental illness and the stifling of their careers.

By all accounts, however, Little Shiva had done this before, several times that the people in the office had witnessed. I am probably unusual in that the long term staff actually told me.

His wife seemed to think this was hilarious, to the point of being stupid enough to put it in writing. So, as you can see, brains do not go with the stinking attitude you apparently require in this business. She is a new graduate, with limited experience, so it is only when it is done to her that she will understand that this is not OK.

I however, have had people doing similar things to me for most of my life. In fact, I am doing a job at the moment in which I have no reason to see or speak to anyone and apparently even producing anonymous work has attracted some unwanted attention.

You can take it from this that I am a magnet for people’s bile, and there seems to be no escape from it. I don’t think that there is now an alternative to rising above it, since there is so much of it about.

The problem with being stupid and nasty, is that there is always a bigger, stupider and nastier person to take advantage of it, and if you suffer from these conditions, they inevitably will.

When I started on the contract, the first thing I noticed was that Little Shiva was being dumped with work nobody else wanted and belittled by his extremely small minded sadistic friend. He made a series of blisteringly stupid assumptions about everybody in the office. Somebody somewhere had told him that Africans were stupid, Indians were to be manipulated and women were to be bullied into whatever you wanted to do to them.

You would think that this would be noticed and this guy would be sent to the abattoir that such people usually work in, but no, not in contracting. In contracting the man who creates the pivot table is apparently king, regardless of his ability to actually do the more important and expensive elements of the job.

This is about responsibility. The people in charge of these contracts only understand the paperwork. They do not understand about costings, people, training or anything else, and this is what the company needs to resolve.

As I have said, the previous contracting company that I worked with was not like this at all. Why the company concerned has become so bloated and incompetent is a mystery, however I am now forced to deal with it, so perhaps we can encourage them to understand a bit about really quite basic business.

It is sad yet hilarious to think that these are the very people at the heart of the banking crisis. There is a literal ocean of similar incompetence in the world of banking, all outstandingly well paid, if you can tolerate the waste.

So why is it that stupid people are nasty, in the form of taking your job, killing your mother, spending years of their time twisted up in their beds, getting off on thinking of ways of making your life more miserable?

Wolfe would say it is bad gut bacteria, but I would take that a step further to incorporate their love of self-indulgence. They only think about themselves, and that is a stultifyingly boring thing to do.

business

Why are men like this?

October 18, 2018 No Comments

So today I had a ‘meeting’ with a bunch of people in town.

Not very interesting.

The guy who had been put in charge of this meeting was a drippy 50 something. As we sat in the lobby waiting to go in he greeted everyone but me warmly.

Jesus, not again. I thought.

Sure enough he got to looking at the stuff we had been asked to bring, and immediately started insulting me.

Every time I opened my mouth he interrupted me, smiling continuously throughout.

I was the most qualified and experienced person there, including him.

Now, I do realise that this is the social equivalent of the dick pic, but it doesn’t make it any less tiresome, so let us get something very clear.

There is absolutely no reason why I should be interested, and I certainly don’t feel any compulsion to be interested, so why are you bothering to try and get my attention?

It is really sad that this is what passes for flirting. I have no idea why we chose to give the gender most susceptible to the foibles of their genitals so much power, but really it is a screaming bore.

Life was much easier as a head chef. I used to just point at things and get them to run towards them.

Now I am supposed to want to be liked. I don’t give a shit if you like me, just get on with your boring paperwork and then leave me the fuck alone.

The first thing I learned as a manager was that power always carries the responsibility of taking care of people.

The second thing I learned as a manager was not to care about being liked.

The third thing I learned was how to create a nice safe honest bubble for people to actually function in. I see almost no office management that understands this.

I see people anxious to be liked, anxious to be feared, anxious to be remembered. None of these things matter. Doing the job well and making people feel safe, that matters. Your tiny penis anxiety doesn’t matter at all.

I am hoping to hear some positive news from India in the next few days, if so, I won’t have to deal with this crap any more.

business

Sexism is Alive and Well in Banking Contracting

October 13, 2018 No Comments

So, I decided to make some nice friends today, and have been looking at standards in banking contracting.

I see that other people have far less trouble either securing work or being promoted, despite having less relevant degrees, considerably less experience and less interest in the sector.

So, it seems we have a ‘useless boy network’ issue. I also see from online reviews such as this one, that the problems I encountered are nothing new:

The Ops managers are loathsome cretins. They sack people for fun, walking them out of the office in front of everyone, and have next to no true intelligence outside of creating pivot tables. Complete and utter sociopaths.

Terrible daily rates for Case Handlers (based on the pitiful internal banking systems and poor training)

Lack of support

Terrible Team Leaders who are chosen because they’re ‘yes people.’……

Good people are abused and let go because senior members of the team are threatened by kindness and intelligence.

Advice to Management

Too many managers, not enough sense. They get paid a huge daily rate to gossip and throw people under the bus. A project in London is carrying some serious deadweight across senior management. Stop sacking 20 entry-levels in a day, and start sacking Ops Managers – useless and a drain on company resources.

This is a review from the same project I was working on, for the same company, however this person was situated in London in 2015. This review is publicly available online. It could easily be from the same office I was in.

So, we ask ourselves, given that there seems to be an element of Hurtcore/sociopathy in the very company culture, is there any hope for this industry?

Not if they carry on like this. Anybody who has any sense will walk away. I have been trying to get this mess fixed for four months now. The people who did it took pleasure in it, and the people who should be in a position to fix it are only concerned about themselves.

This is not either healthy or economical, and the sooner companies realise that hiring this ‘consultancy’ company is like handing out a box of matches and a pile of their money the better. The last one I worked for was not like this.

business, creativity, motivation

Wimping out

September 7, 2018 No Comments

Sometimes, you have to know when to quit. My sick friend came for his free therapy again this week and today left before I pushed him out the door. Very wise.

Hundreds of pounds were spent on the Boris filming project. My friend actually invested some of it. The Boris mask took me several weeks to make, and because my friend would prefer that I sit and nurse him, it will now never be used.

Likewise the broadcast camera was a waste of money which I might as well sell, since there is nobody to operate it. I am not sure that my friend realises that this, along with several years of wasted time in other ways – cooking for him for one thing, awaiting graphics for another, has damaged our relationship significantly more than his ocassional bouts of extreme violence ever did.

It is an odd thing to say, I realise, but life is complicated. I am less bothered about his Van Gogh moments than I am with the new apathetic lump he has become.

He also appears to believe that Muslims are all 1)stupid 2)violent and 3)humorless, which is what my current piece of work is about. Neither Boris nor I believe this, so the question is whether muslims want to contribute to this argument.

This idea is most interesting. It is making me think a lot about my Hindu friends in India, who assured me during the Staring Brat episodes that the idea of telling everyone around me that he was married and not bothering to inform me, whilst trying very hard to exert control was entirely normal behaviour. Not only is it not normal behaviour in my frame of reference, it is extremely unfriendly and mean-spirited, so I do not understand it. Why would you try to control somebody when you haven’t bothered to get to know them? Why would you try to take something from someone who is already being nice to you rather than operating on a fair playing field? How does this work in your head? You think it’s clever to damage other people? Do you honestly believe your genitalia is this rare and special?

My tactics, when dealing with the Staring Brat episodes, were guided by my more generous operating principles. I saw something in Staring Brat 2, and it is something nobody else will bother nurturing, so I felt I had to. Whether this is right or wrong, Staring Brat 1 was unlikely to be significantly damaged no matter what I did, Staring Brat 2 however was destroyable, so I didn’t. Instead I presented the case for fixing the over-arching problem so my little Shiva has less scope for being destructive in the future.

This is, however, me assuming that the people I dealt with are playing with the same deck I’m playing with. Usually I find later that they are all corrupt too, but in this case we have positive results so far. I eagerly await the final scoresheet.

I am guilty of having spent several decades in the mistaken belief that everybody else goes through life taking people as they find them and not attempting to second-guess them because I don’t do that, and if I find myself being led down a particular train of thought – eg, Wolfe is eccentric, therefore Wolfe is unscientific and wrong rather than SELLING PRODUCT IN VAST QUANTITIES – I simply question myself until I get to the bottom of it, even if it takes me several years (sorry Wolfe, but you are way ahead of me about some things, money being only one of them)

Having said all that, I left that situation and then immediately saw and fixed another problem. Another two government departments are needling in now, so I am guessing they have similar issues. This is what happens when you replace perfectly good permanent staff with endlessly shifting sands of people with no rights. They get exploited and the standard of work declines.

Sorry Tories, but your methods of doing business suck, and the people making money out of this? Unless you can hire a million oddball people like me to call them to account over shady business practises and exploitative/incompetent staff members, they will never know how many glaring errors are destroying their country as well as their profits.

I do what I do for love. There is only one of me, and it is high time I got rewarded for what I do.

business, motivation

Long Live Ina

August 23, 2018 No Comments

This week, we have a long term local government bullying issue to deal with. I will be doing the deed tomorrow.

Why me? Because it’s there.

In the meantime, select your preferred chat up line:

I did not look at your bottom yesterday.

Your nose is a bit wee

I am partial to a floral shirt

Insert faintly inappropriate yet jocular line here

I do not like your voice

Nothing that I can say is remotely appropriate at this time

I quite like the last one. I may not have to, actually, but it’s amusing to think I might whilst messing with a den of tired complacent bitches.

Stay young, stay fearless. Wear shades.

business, economics, health, motivation

Sticking out from the Crowd

August 16, 2018 3 Comments

First published September 11th 2015

Today’s entry is on an entirely different subject, although I hope readers of the previous entries have given some thought to moving their money.

I had to do a lot of temporary contract work throughout university and afterwards, not only because I was older than everyone else, having had a previous career, but also because my pesky mother point blank refused to go to the doctor to deal with her heart problem and my father already had dementia by that point. I was a late baby.

I could not help noticing that every office that I worked in seemed to contain a den of bitches, male and female, who seemed to regard me as bit of an alien. Being a loner, this did not upset me as much as it might, however I came to believe after a few different offices that there was something seriously wrong with me, which made me retreat into my shell somewhat after having worked extremely hard to scratch my way to the top of my previous male-dominated career.

Employment agencies presented a range of similar problems. The women who decided whether to put you forward for jobs were completely different animals from me, and could not seem to wrap their heads around the idea that someone who had run their own successful businesses had retrained.

This meant that the education that I had spent time and money on was pretty much meaningless in terms of gaining suitable employment from these people, and so I was scuppered on both counts. Nevertheless, I managed in my obsessive, compulsive way to keep myself in work by spending 7am to 11pm looking for jobs whether I needed them or not. This went on for about 6 years.

My last job was as a banking consultant, a job which paid unusually well but involved working 3pm to midnight, six days a week. Not satisfied with the idea that this was a result, I took on another two jobs, one as a government research interviewer, one as a corporate researcher. I viewed this, after the years of gypsy wandering, as the prudent way to go, so at one point I was making calls over breakfast, visiting people in their homes at lunchtime, feeding my father in the hospice, and then racing across the city to the bank to work until midnight.

Since I had always had quite a lot of control over my lot prior to gaining my additional education, it did not occur to me that there were rules associated with working in banks which had not been in place elsewhere. I had had a couple of problems with large companies previously, when I had taken it upon myself to suggest changes which would save the company money and waste. You are not supposed to do this. You are supposed to be so petrified of losing your job that you say nothing even as several hundred, or in one case thousands of pounds per hour are being squandered right in front of you. It was at one of these companies I was jokingly referred to as ‘the economist who hates money.’ I could explain why, but that would be another lengthy story. I would rather be referred to as ‘the geek that hates waste,’ to be honest.

Anyway, back to the bank. I was in a room alongside probably two hundred people, all earning a fairly vast amount of money, ranging from 1000 to 3000GBP per week and doing fairly basic clerical work. As the deadlines were quite tight, I can confirm that it was fairly hard work, however I have worked as hard for minimum wage, if not harder. The problem arose when one of the printers broke down, and the entire room was left to cope with a vast amount of paperwork and only one functional printer. As you can imagine, the queue for this printer became hot and very unpleasant extremely quickly, and so I took it upon myself to go to the project manager and request another printer.

A few minutes after I had done this, the well dressed and obviously well heeled team that I was working in expressed shock that I had done this. Hadn’t I gone to the supervisor? I was not supposed to talk to the manager. I was also comparatively scruffy and regarded as something of an exotic flower in this team, since I did things other than banking for a living. They were impressively shocked.

I don’t mean to sound quite such a grumpy old lady, but since I have been making this same point since I was quite young, it is not strictly an age issue. What on earth has happened to the world? The 1950s working generation were the most economically successful generation in world history. Nobody is ever going to match the achievements in their lifetime. People like my parents had choices, of where to work and how to work, and got respect for what they did that would be scoffed at now, and yet we are less efficient than ever. We pretend that technology has made all things possible, and everything more efficient, and yet in productive terms, and in progressive terms, we have actually declined in efficiency.

The ‘blame’ and ‘yes sir’ culture is what caused the Bernie Maidoff situation in banking. Guys in suits shaking hands with other guys in suits and not actually examining what they were doing. And why oh why has nobody joined the dots about the banking crisis which immediately followed? They talk about the problems with sub-prime lending but nobody dares mention that this happened at exactly the same time as the Maidoff scandal. Far be it from me to point out that the bankers were following orders, and have been made scapegoats to the alleged crisis, but to me the real issue was the cultural issue, of stupid employing stupid and doing business with crooked.

If, like me, you stick out from the crowd. If, like me, you don’t like waste and you don’t believe that your level of oiliness should determine success above your level of actual talent, then do not be ashamed of it. You may never be rich in today’s cultural climate, but perhaps you are made for better things.

business

Amazing

July 21, 2018 No Comments

It never ceases to amaze me how much people think they can take the piss.

I am now taking legal advice.

I do not see why I would tolerate this after all these years. I’ve had enough.

On a lighter note, something weird is happening on a personal level. I have barely thought about Wolfe for three months, which is not so good. and perversely, I look out for SB2 on the website every day, although I at no point claimed to have any depth of feeling for him or particular belief that anything was going to work out. I was just doing my usual distraction tactic because I did not want to think about what happened to my mother. He was delightful to look at, but apparently furious with me when I stopped participating in the hilarious fake flirting. I certainly don’t feel like writing after that repulsive episode.

He is neither a safe nor a particularly nice person on the evidence presented, so I do not plan to bother finding out what he thought he was playing at, since he would not tell the truth anyway. What would be the point?

I, however am a safe and very nice person, so I do not see why I would tolerate a series of stupid little boys trying to drag my name through the mud and causing me any financial difficulty because they thought it would be a laugh to see me terrified enough to presumably want to bonk SB1. That seems to have been the idea anyway.

This is not healthy, nor funny behaviour and I made it entirely clear to the people I spoke to that my aim was to prevent anything like this happening to anybody else. Instead I get yet more stupid little boys thinking they can talk smack to me and I will just roll over and die.

No thanks, I think I come after you all directly. I do not see why I would be held to a different set of rules than the rest of the office. I got several emails inviting me out for drinks in the course of working there, and nobody got fired over that.

Fuck you all very much for being really nasty individuals.

Ina

« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 … 7 Next »