So in the last three months we have seen:
One company of stockbrokers, who did not communicate with each other and ruined five people’s lives because one partner thought they were recruiting and one partner did not. Even after this they went on to ruin the lives of several accountants before I stopped them.
One company who recruited a national workforce and dissolved less than a fortnight later without telling anyone.
One company who pay minimum wage on the basis of getting a full year’s charity donations from the charities they raise funds for. They were actually the best ones.
A company who run by overcharging for house upgrades. I have seen this business model before, so it is interesting seeing it from within. Frighteningly, it is not illegal to overcharge for house upgrades so shop around when thinking of investing in technology for the home.
A company, owned by a woman but run by boys and wives, who unsurprisingly cannot see that their entire ethos is now boy centred, to the point that their pitch is ineffective when delivered by a woman. I was invited to a charming party involving watching Cash in the Attic whilst in my underwear, however.
A company who are unable to communicate because they are related. There are a lot of those around, so this is no great surprise. I no longer support this company.
Yesterday I took a recruiter to task because he refused to put me forward for a role with the heavenly scent of career. I am not to be put forward for this because I have too much experience and should have stayed in a dull job with no prospects for several years, apparently. Today I had the same experience from a female recruiter, who refused to put me forward for a job I was interviewed for by the same company ten years ago.
Let me tell you about people who stay in the same job for several years. They are unadaptable, inflexible and their brains become stagnant. Their envy becomes so palpable that they become dishonest, and they become ill because they are so bored. These are the people favoured by recruitment agents. It is a model that is out of date, and yet it is young recruiters who still perpetuate this aged model because they are trained to. Earning a living is not to be respected at all.
Then we have the woman who had me jump through numerous obstacles to make it to the interview with the full intention of making sure I did not get the job and then gracing me with her entirely useless career advice. She apparently thought I was much younger than I actually am, so I am sorry to say she was given the shock of her life, which the company is now also delivering to her at considerable length.
Anyway I will now be working for a different company in a different industry, which fortunately I had the forsight to also invest time in. Next month I will be in talks with a much larger company for a much bigger job. I also have a couple of contracts coming up which may be quite interesting and am still messing about with City of London opportunities, even after the last disaster.
Much of having integrity in the workplace is knowing whether to take what you are doing seriously. Sometimes you try taking it seriously and then discover they weren’t, so you were wasting your time. I have been blessed with the priority of knowledge over wealth, so I find this less tedious than most people would, but to be brutally honest, I am surprised more women don’t become arsonists in their dotage. For me, the workplace is far more sexist now than it was thirty years ago.
Several companies I have had the misfortune to investigate over the last six years have had literal wall to wall white male junior management. A Muslim lady I was working with and I joked about it. The first day we were there, I turned around and observed that there was no point in my being there, to which she immediately laughed and said ‘try being Muslim as well’
When you point this out to them, they act as if nobody has noticed. Of course they have, they created it by promoting only each other, and the company then neglected the issue by not delivering effective bias training.
Little Shiva was another case in point. As an Indian national, Hindu male, he was still at an automatic advantage compared to me, and I have considerably more experience than he had. Then consider his position. As a team manager on his probably 250/300 a day, he in turn was at a disadvantage compared to his thick-as-pigshit gym bunny friend who was white, racist and English, who was on 700 a day for a not very labour intensive analysis and management role.
Therefore, all diversity has done is push working women further down the slagheap. Boys will still favour boys, women considerably below them as disposable staff unless they can cosy up to the higher ups, who got there by some mysterious process of ass kissing I cannot identify with.
I cannot say that it is at the feet of men exclusively. The unpleasant woman mentioned above started haranguing me about my lack of children and husband mid interview, and that was not the first time I had had this happen at interviews. I eventually had to tell Barclays bank to stop bothering me because they pestered me with endless timewasting interviews with women just like her.
Nothing is more frightening to any of these people than an ambitious, career focussed woman with a brain. They must be stopped. They must be excluded. In no way should their work be rewarded because standards might go up.
How terrifying for them. I am not impressed.
