THE SILENT TONGUE

3.45pm, Tuesday, February 16, 2016.

I am called to a meeting with my manager who informs me that my position with the company has been made redundant. Some aspects of my work shall be outsourced, others taken on by remaining employees (of which there aren’t really that many left).

“Oh. Okay”. I reply, flatly.

I am provided with a “Deed of Release” which sets out the terms of my redundancy. I sign it.

By 4.30pm, I have left the office, walked home, and sit at the local pub, reading the days’ papers and drinking a Peroni.

Ten years and seven months. It’s over.

“Fucking brilliant!”, I text a few friends.

Then I think, “Shit, I have to move. Pack, clean, move. Organise things.

“Shit”, I think, “I’ll have to buy a computer”.

I’m still getting around to that.

Having never been unemployed before over 40 years of work, getting out of the habit is strange. There has always been somewhere to go, and things to be done, even if they were loathsome.

So.

That’s where I’ve been these past several weeks.

Sitting on the couch mostly. Thinking. Or, to put it more aptly, procrastinating.

Procrastinating about thinking. And so on.

In other news, it seems the country has come to realise that our “new” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has turned out a rather gammy little squib.

Aw, shucks.

FIFTEEN MINUTES

I understand there is a thoroughfare in Sydney, a road, a brief stretch of vehicular track upon which, if one chooses to travel along it, allows fair commuters of that fine city to spare themselves the Lovecraftian horrors and unrelieve’d tedium of the fifteen minutes precious, irreplaceable time otherwise wasted in transit had they chosen to go the rat-run instead.

For this “privilege”, our fair commuters are charged a fee of five dollars and some change – each way – and I wonder whether I live in a bloody country full of fucking idiots; that I have taken craps which have lasted fifteen minutes, and that fifteen minutes is not a significant amount of time in any circumstance unless that circumstance involves rushing your wife to the hospital because she’s about to give birth to triplets on the back seat, “TAKE MY FIVE BUCKS! NOW!!”, but in any other circumstance, paying five bucks for fifteen minutes of time sounds like either (a) an offer from a very unfussy streetwalker having a post-clearance Christmas sale, or (b) a VERY BIG CON of the highest order.

You decide.

I wonder how we, as a civilisation, have come to this, where such things as these are presented to us as if they were gifts to be savoured, blessings bestowed and showered upon us, favours granted, for our benefit and ours alone, and do I live in a bloody country full of fucking idiots for buying this shit, for allowing them to be sold it, to be time and time again gulled and shamelessly cozened into thinking this brand of bunco and others like it, these rackets, these weasel songs of numbing-to-the-senses spin ‘n’ sting, spruiked and shilled by flimflam men and women of no repute but their own, of no worth, of no substance, of naught to anything beyond a brazen talent to conjure, and conjure again, ways and means by which they can help themselves to our money for the provision of the illusion of something that is really nothing and not worth two-fifths of fuck-all.

“But you save FIFTEEN MINUTES!”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with it, put it in a fucking BANK? Is there a BANK for that? A TIME BANK? Does the “extra time” pay out on my deathbed with special features, free spins, a jackpot and a lap-dance? IT’S FIFTEEN MINUTES, you pack of thieving scumbags, I’m keeping my five bucks, I’m going the long way, you don’t like it, you can FUCK OFF!”

A “service fee”, a “levy”, a “toll”. An “administration fee”. A “processing” charge.

These things are all that shall speak to the legacy of those who gave them to us, the white-shirt, blue tie cognoscenti of the corporate/managerialist classes, blank of face and dull in speech, absent and anonymous of character, chaotic in morals, banal in taste, insubstantial in every facet of their being; that’s their light in that nondescript office building, burning late and long into the night, where the big things are rarely, if ever managed at all, only little things, where everything is an optional extra, and the small stuff sweats a high tide 24/7, sweats an ocean, and it’s all a feller can do just to keep treading water to keep hisself from drownin’ in it all.

“What do you do for a living, Daddy?”, asks the child of The Administrator.

“I’m … er … I’m … in management”.

“Yes, but what do you do? Like, Tommy’s dad is a truckdriver, Sam’s dad is a builder, and Mitchell’s dad is a ‘lectrician, what do you do?”

“I’m an Adm – … I’m a, um, I do. Um. Ah. I … You’re too young to understand. Why don’t you go ask your mother?”

The tragedy of this?

We’re stuck with it.

We’re stuck with them.

The errand boys of big business, the clerks from central casting, the gormless goons on high in Head Office.

Their numbers are legion, far greater than ours now, those of us who choose to actually work for a living.

Always looking for an angle. A way in to where you already are, where you’ve already been, there’s always a way in, and they’ll always find it, and each and every time they do, they’ll find a way to charge you fifty bucks to use the key you already have to get the fuck out of the house you already own, and then they’ll have you send them a “Thank You” note for their troubles.

It’s nothing personal. Just business.

“BUT, BUT, WHAT IS THE WORK YOU DO, DADDY?!?, implores the child again, crying now, red-faced,  in confused frustration.

Daddy knows the “work” he does is no “work” at all, no type of work fit for a “man”, nor woman neither, no.

So Daddy steals downstairs one night, late, and without a sound.

He puts the barrel to his eyeball, then he fires off a round.

“What did your dad do for a living? Before this happened.”

“I dunno. Office stuff. I dunno. There’s this guy who writes this blog in Australia reckons people like my dad are just a pack of thieving scumbags”.

“Are they?”

“I dunno. Ask me mum … I dunno.”

TONGUES AWAY

Having just done about 6 months work in the space of 2 months, Tongues is a little buggered and worn out, and will be taking a 10 day internet-free break.

I may even write some new stuff while I am away.

Or I may just drink a lot of beer, and get some sleep.

Nobody’s perfect.

NOT DEAD, ONLY RESTING

It is end of financial year here at Global Corps Inc.©™, and so I do currently find myself in a swampy swamp of mucky spreadsheets, reconciliations, and stupid questions from cockwalloping fudpuckers who keep fucking things up for everybody else, and making my life a hazy haze of enduring confusions, ill vapours and frenzied fevres of the mind.

“How did that error work out, Ross?”, asks the Manager.

“We fixed it”, I say.

“It’s fixed?”

“Yes. We fixed it. We’re fixers. We fix things”, I say, giving myself a fit of the giggles.

“What?”, asks the Manager.

“Never mind”, I say.

This mob wouldn’t know if Groucho Marx were up them sideways with a feather duster. They’d probably think “The Dead Parrot Sketch” was a customer service training video and take notes.

Normal service shall resume shortly.

Do stay tuned.

MOTHERF#CKERS

The early 90’s, I worked for a market research company, part time, four hour shifts, nights, Saturdays, Sundays, and I did it purely for the extra cash, my “regular” job paid crap money, and I was jack of having fuck all.

We would ring people and ask their opinion of various products, or perhaps services they had used. Qantas was a client, so was Ansett. Understand this – Nobody in their right mind would willingly volunteer to spend a Sunday sitting on their arse in a fucking cubicle ringing one person after another after another, asking the same damn questions each time, and listen to some dreary knobhead whine about the fucking food they were served or the lack of legroom on their Brisbane to Cairns flight, such hardship men were not expected to endure, and so they would often share their travails, their tales of woe, and you would be obliged to listen. A little incentive helped in this respect, and that incentive was the penalty rate on offer, maybe double-time, maybe time and a half, I can’t recall exactly, but the couple hundred bucks extra I was earning each week came in very handy at the time, I can certainly recall that.

After about a year, I ditched it, it was driving me up the wall. Not exactly enthralling type of work, not something you’d think to yourself, “Gee, I’d like to do this forever and forever and forever”, not something that would ever strike you as a pathway to a career, but good enough to persevere with for a time to get you through a rough patch, maybe pay some expenses, some bills, do a few things.

I see young men and women working behind the bar of my local pub nights and weekends, the bottleshop counter, and often they’ll have a textbook open beside them, something to pore over during down times if they’re lucky enough to get any, and take it from me as I am in a position to know, those things are fucking expensive. A little extra cash can go to some very good use.

But no.

A little extra is a little too much in this day and age, say some, far too much to be dealt with, and so, some VERY CONCERNED citizens, Employers of Note, Great Men and Grand Women of Stature, Giants of Industry, Captains of Endeavour, Hard-Workin’ Hard-Dick MEN, Battle-Scarred salts of this, our Savage Earth, have gathered together, have reached out to their brethren, have raised their fists to the skies, and have shouted to the world, “THIS IS TOO BIG TO IGNORE!”

The “this” of course, is penalty rates.

“We’re sorry that we’re closed today”, they opine. “We’d like to be open to serve you”, they lament.

“We’d like to give local people jobs”, they sob, on their palms the stigmata of selfless sacrifice, the Wounds of Christ, their blood our water, our wine, and bled for our sustenance, and ours alone.

“BUT THE PENALTY RATES ARE TOO HIGH!”, they howl, their pain the sad, sickening sounds of desperately wounded animals felled by far more savage beasts than they.

“Tell Canberra something has to change”, they conclude, oh

so,

so,

so,

forlornly.

If I were a violent man, I could imagine myself happily throwing rocks through the shopfront windows of any business that would display such a thing.

But I am not a violent man.

This bell has been rung before …

“Celebrity chef George Calombaris has entered the industrial relations debate, slamming penalty rates faced by restaurateurs under the federal government’s Fair Work Act as uneconomical.

Calombaris, who stars in the high-rating MasterChef TV show, has complained about the rates he will have to pay staff at his new Melbourne pasta bar, due to open this month, claiming it’s up to $40 an hour per worker on Sundays.

“The problem is that wages on public holidays and weekend greatly exceed the opportunity for profit.””

And …

“[Luke] Mangan, who has built an $80 million food empire, also admitted his business was forced to employ more than 20 per cent of its chefs and waiters from overseas on 457 work visas due to a shortage of homegrown talent.

Mr Mangan, who operates restaurants in Singapore, Tokyo, Jakarta and the Maldives, said Australia’s high penalty rates were forcing many businesses, including his Sydney restaurant Glass, to close on public holidays.”

Our Prime Minister too, has had his own struggles …

““If you don’t want to work on a weekend, fair enough don’t work on a weekend. But if you do want to work on a weekend, and lots of people, particularly students, particularly young people, want to work on a weekend, you want the places to be open to provide jobs,” [Tony Abbott] said, pointing out that the hotel he uses in Melbourne closed its restaurant on Sunday night because it couldn’t afford to pay penalty rates and that he had found it difficult to find a bottle shop open over Easter for the same reason.

“I don’t begrudge people the money … but in the end there is a balance that has to be struck here and my preference will always be in favour of more jobs,” he said.”

It is admirable of our Prime Testicle not to “begrudge” these young folk the money they require in order to live, an honourable sentiment indeed, yet perhaps Mr. Abbott should be made aware that it is not just the young, not just students, but a colourful multitude of others, of all ages, of all qualifications and experience, who may well say things such as this, “Mum, there’s a couple Sunday shifts coming up, and I need the extra money, can you look after the kids those days?”, or the nurse who’s picked up a week’s worth or graveyard shifts, her husband’s job went offshore a couple months back, and he can’t get a look-in for a new one, and they NEED THE FUCKING MONEY IN ORDER TO LIVE.

It’s not “extra”. It makes it “enough”.

That is what makes people do it.

Here is Luke “Mr. 80 Million” Mangan again …

“In our age group, we just did anything, worked anywhere to get where we wanted to go,’’ he told The Saturday Telegraph. “Today I get apprentices’ mums calling and saying about Little Johnny, ‘you’re working him 50 hours a week’.

“My mum and dad would drop me off at the train station and make darn sure I worked 50 hours a week — work that out.’’

… Such fond, faded and sepia-toned memories of simpler times, when a man knew the value of a penny, and children would race billy-carts made from orange crates up and down the back lanes of inner suburbia on weekends or after school, and a boy was taught to work hard, taught the meaning of hard work, harder than any boy had ever worked before, for they be a whuppin’ in the offing he don’t, a hard-scrabble, scratching and scraping life, but the kids today …

They expect, that if you are going to ask them to work for 50 hours a week, you will fucking well pay them for it, and if you are not prepared to do that, then do the FUCKING WORK YOURSELF.

They expect, that if you are going to ask them to work till 12.00pm on a Sunday evening, they will be appropriately recompensed for working such unsociable hours, the hours that keep them away from their partners or their children, away from their friends, the hours they will work simply because, and for no reason other, that they NEED THE FUCKING MONEY IN ORDER TO LIVE, and maybe you could throw in a CabCharge voucher as well so they can get home without being bashed or raped on the way by some lunatic cunt.

If you are going to start a business, you are expected to comply with certain rules and regulations, especially if you are employing other people, and if you did enter into your business unaware that it’s nature would require you to pay your employees penalty rates for irregular hours, then you are a wanking twat and your business deserves to fail. You knew the rules when you entered the game. You don’t enter the game and decide you need some new rules simply because the existing ones no longer suit your sucking greed.

I do not expect this campaign against penalty rates from the folk of “Chambers Across Australia” to resonate particularly well with the average member of the wage-earning public, but one can never be too sure how such things may pan out given we have a federal government who seem pathologically obsessed in doing anything and everything within their power to fuck with people’s lives, whether it be through health, education, welfare or work.

A new underclass, they are the Morlocks, and we are the Eloi.

However … as the recently made redundant former Premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman did find out, in one very brief term of office, if, upon ascending to office, one of your first actions – in the name of fiscal purity – is to sack 40,000 public servants, you lose 40,000 votes.

If each of those 40,000 have one or more relatives, dependents or close friends negatively affected by this action, you lose double that, maybe 100,000, maybe more.

Do you really, seriously, want to fuck with the viability of so many other people’s livelihoods?

Be careful what you wish for, boys.

That night nurse may suddenly find herself all out of painkillers just when you need them most.

EFFICIENCIES

The Company has a Vision.

A Global Vision.

One World. One Way. One Company.

REICH!

To this end, over the last couple years, the Company has been engaged in a series of “restructures”, to streamline processes and procedures and systems – addressing “cost efficiencies”, they call them – so that the Company may better serve its key “clients” and “shareholders”, etcetera and so on and so forth.

You know the drill.

A decision was recently made, for example, to outsource and centralise the Company’s network and desktop support services.

To India.

New Delhi, to be precise.

Where, once upon a time, some odd error message popped up on my screen, or I could not access a particular application or whatnot, I would wander across the hall to the office that held our local support people and I would say, “Hey James, do you know why X is happening when I try to do Y?”, and James (for that was his name) would say, “Give me a minute and I’ll come over to have a look”.

And then he would come over to “have a look” and, ten or fifteen minutes later, he would say, “Okay, that’s fixed”, and it would be, and I would say, “Thanks James, you’re a star” (for he was), and I would then carry on with my work.

Last week, as I was trying to do Y and X kept happening, I emailed details of this problem, complete with screenshots, to our new “support” people. Our “support” people in India. Or New Delhi, to be precise.

A couple hours later, my phone rang …

“Ross Sharp”, I answer.

“Ros? It (indecipherable) from (indecipherable) which (indecipherable) (indecipherable)” comes a faint and faraway sounding voice.

“What?”, I say. “Um … what?”

“You have (indecipherable) issue (indecipherable) (indecipherable) java (indecipherable) logon please?”

“Um? What do you want?”, I ask.

The reply is the same. Indecipherable. However, I glean from the words “java” and “logon” that perhaps I am dealing with our new “helpdesk” people.

In India.

New Delhi, to be precise.

Yes. Yes I am.

“Can you (indecipherable) (indecipherable) (indecipherable) sign in (indecipherable) Lync?”, I am asked.

“What?”, I ask.

Their reply is the same, and I am becoming irritated with myself for being unable to understand what the blazes they are saying. However, I latch onto the words “sign in” and “Lync”, and realise they are asking me to activate our instant messaging software so that they may remotely view and take control of my desktop.

Clever me.

I do this.

They take control of my desktop.

For the next ten minutes, there is silence on the phone, and I watch as they move a cursor around the screen, doing nothing with it, just moving it around. I have a few browser windows open, one for Facebook and another for The Guardian Australia. They click on them, one at a time, and nothing further happens for a few minutes.

I ask “What are you trying to do?”. There is silence. The cursor moves around the desktop.

“Tell me what you’re trying to do, and I’ll do it”, I offer. There is silence. The cursor continues to roam.

“How much longer will you be?”, I ask.

“We (indecipherable) (indecipherable) minute.”

I have been on this call for twenty minutes now.

The cursor moves. It does nothing else. It just moves, hither and thither. It is a wildebeest, a pointy, pixelated wildebeest, migrating from one corner of the screen to the next. This is all gnu to me.*

I have been on this call for twenty-seven minutes now. I am becoming agitated and irritable.

“What are you trying to do?”, I ask once more, exasperated.

“Just (indecipherable) (indecipherable) (indecipherable) (indecipherable) more.”

“I have to leave”, I say. “I have to leave soon.”

The moving cursor moves.

“No, no”, I say at last. “I have to leave. I have to leave now. Now”.

“Oh, we (indecipherable)”.

“I am leaving now, do you understand? Now”.

I take back control of my desktop, disconnect the messaging application, and hang up the phone.

The call lasted thirty-four minutes.

Nothing happened.

Efficiencies.

Not quite.

.

.

*Sorry.

LEANING

Some weeks back, I find myself thinking …

… “Wait. Wait!”, I think.

I am fifty-five and a half years old. I have worked from the age of seventeen.

I have no children. I have no mortgage.

I have, compared to some, a “manageable” credit card debt. Nathan Tinkler I am not.

I think …

“I’ll be sixty in four and a half years” …

… “FUCK THIS FOR A BOX OF BUSTED CHEESE CRACKERS, I’M FUCKING RETIRING AT 60!”

I shall take my superannuation – all of it – and I shall spend it. All of it. On luxury cruises, and shiny, shiny baubles, and exotic spices from far-off lands and gourmet meals and a multitude of fripperies too numerous to mention, too numerous to imagine.

Oh, the humanity!

“Yes. Yes”, I think to myself …

And then …

And then …

I shall go on the aged pension at 65, and become an ”ageing burden on the economy”.  I shall become an “ageing burden on the healthcare system”. I shall become a “drain on the taxpayer’s purse”.

No longer a “lifter” shall I be, but a “leaner”.

Poor economy. Poor taxpayer. Poor healthcare system.

“Leaning. Leaning.  Safe and secure from all alarms.
Leaning. Leaning. Leaning on the everlasting arms.

What a fellowship, what a joy divine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms;
What a blessedness, what a peace is mine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.”

THE CON PLAYS ON, LOUDER THAN EVER BEFORE

Originally posted as “The Con” September 26, 2012, and now, given our new government and its recent budgetary declaration of war on the unemployed, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, the poor, the homeless and any other Australian whose life and lifestyle fits not the Abbott vision of a New Australian Master Race of the Rich, more pertinent than ever …

My father, now 84, spent the last half dozen or so years of his working life moving from employment to unemployment and back again, and then back again, until for the last two or three, it was a welfare cheque every fortnight until he became eligible for the aged pension.

A signwriter and commercial artist who began practising his skills in the 1940’s, he had never been accustomed to unemployment in his life until that time, rising at five or six every morning to be at the factory by seven, grabbing any overtime available, nights, weekends, for the extra cash to throw at the mortgage, put a little money away for the future.

The nature of his work, the industry he was a part of for forty years, began to change in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, became more and more automated, and brushes and paints gave way to pixels, and he found himself, in his late fifties, a man both out of his time and rapidly running out of relevance to the world.

The factories became smaller, the offices became larger, and the traditionalists, the artists, just got older and more expensive to keep, so they were always the first to go.

This was a man who struggled to operate a television remote control – brushes and easels and paints were the tools of his trade, pencils and charcoal, his hands, his eyes – these new machines that were taking his work confounded his senses, made no sense at all.

“It’s not as if I’ve forgotten how to hold a brush.”

Work hard, work harder, reap the benefits of your labours from the ditch you were told to dig, then die in it …

The con.

… and everything will take care of itself.

The bleat of the shill plays on while you’re the pebble in the eggcup shuffle of working life.

The scam a simple-minded mantra they slap into you from the time you can walk.

Until …

Ten years. Twenty. Thirty. Forty.

…. Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they’re done. 

They forget you, you forget yourself.

For them, it’s an easy slip into the lazy comic cliché, feet up, television all day, drinking beer, send “A Current Affair” around to do a story, all these louche louts living it large, we’re out here working our arses off, and what do you do?

“We’ve been told not to talk to reporters.”

“Twenty two years from 5.30am to 4.30pm, two jobs, two locations, overtime, on call, no extra pay, now I’m not good enough.”

…. Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they’re done.

Go.

We’ll talk later …

… about “getting people off welfare and back into work”. About “encouraging employers to take on more mature workers”, and “incentives” for doing so …

… about “single mothers”, two words which, when conjoined, appear to conjure an abomination in the minds of many; there’s always something needs be “done” about “single mothers”, but leaving them be is never one of them …

When all is said and done …

We’ll give you a pamphlet, you can call this number, press one, hold please.

Sorry for your loss.

It hurts us too.

Government can no longer afford to be government, you get a ticket and a queue, a slap upside the head, and a “heal thyself”.

We’re cutting our numbers and we’re trimming our fat, all the better to serve you. Tightening the belt and pulling our weight.

“Takin’ up the slack here, Boss!”

Work fourteen, paid for eight, how many years is it now and fourteen nervous breakdowns later you put a bullet through the top of your head when the pills stop working and the kids won’t shut up.

“I still have my work bag in the cupboard. I haven’t emptied it yet, it has all the things in it that I used to take to work. I said that I wouldn’t clear it until five years. I suppose I’ll clear it in the next few weeks or so. I have finally realised that it is over.”

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

TONGUES IS UNWELL

And will be unavailable and incommunicado until further notice.

Sick leave. Indefinite. Nothing life-threatening.

Feel free to  talk among yourselves.

WEASELS RIPPED MY EMAIL

I have just received an email which contains these phrases, acronyms, and words …

WCM.
WGT.
Granular.
Innovative, transformational.
Leverage best practices.
Maximize scale.
Optimum efficiency.
KPIs.
Smart Content triangle.
Data enrichment.
(Insert name) will champion this activity as VP, Operations
WCM, WGT Content Technology.
Milestones.
GR, PD, VP.
RCT, ECT, PLCT.
Solidifying our near-term objectives.
Cutting-edge, market-leading products and services.
Crack the Smart Content nut.
Delight our customers.
Content Strategy Framework.
Smart Content roadmap.
Smart Content journey.
Competitive intelligence.
Content-enabled services.
Smart Content journey.
Robust roadmap.
Art of the possible.
Smart Content constituents.
Our “game plan” for Smart Content.

“Are you sure you want to permanently delete this?”

Yes.

PAIN POINTS

I, and about a dozen others, have been asked to participate in a spot of “training”, a two day spot of training about a particular “system” of “process evaluation methodology”.

This training, we are told, will strengthen our ability to manage and improve the quality of our, and our Global Corp’s, continuing performance and aid us in identifying techniques for “maximising efficiency gains”.

This “system” is called Lean Six Sigma.

According to the blurb on the back of the “Lean Six Sigma for Dummies” book – yes, there is one – this system will help “unclog your pipes” which apparently means “tackling bottlenecks in your processes”, and not what you may be thinking.

We have been asked to identify “pain points” we may currently grapple with in our daily toils to which we might apply this “methodology”, to which I feel very much like responding “Turning the fuck up every day to listen to this bullshit” …

… This morning, for example, a fluorescent light above my desk began to flicker, and I told the person to whom one is supposed to tell such things that a fluorescent light above my desk was beginning to flicker, and was told I should “log” a “service request”, which involves sending an email via a “Service Desk” application and writing, “There’s a fluorescent light above my desk that is beginning to flicker.”

This done, you receive an automated response from the “Service Desk” application informing you that the service request you just sent has been received.

Which is what is supposed to happen when you hit the “Send” button, so it’s nice to know that it works.

A short time thereafter, another automated email from the “Service Desk” arrives to let you know that your request has been assigned to a person, a human being no less, and that this human being will deal with your request as soon as they deal with it, at a time yet to be determined, a later time, a future time, perhaps far flung, perhaps nigh, but a time nevertheless of dusky mystique, of mist and of magic, and big gnarly trees with little elves in them.

Your time magically arrives (as time always does), bringing with it a human being (no less) who then proceeds to step upon a small step-ladder (for dancing upon step-ladders is unseemly and may lead to fornications), take the flickering fluorescent light out, put a new one in, fold up the ladder, and say, “There you go”, to which I say, “Thanks for that”, which is what Macbeth said to Banquo’s murderers after they’d killed him, don’t you know.

Then another email from the “Service Desk” arrives a little later to let you know that your service request has been attended to, just in case you were asleep at the time and missed all the excitement.

Another email arrives a little after that to inform you that your “issue” has been “resolved” and is now “closed”, so you may now change the case name from red to blue on the whiteboard in the squad room, and go to Munch’s bar for a knees-up with some of the fellas in celebration.

You could have just walked down the corridor  and across the aisle to ask the guy who replaces the lights to replace yours if and when he has a moment.

You could have, once upon a distant time, just grabbed a replacement tube, climbed up on your desk, and changed it yourself …

… although today you’d probably be spotted by a Workplace Health and Safety Officer and given a stern talking to about the deadly perils of desk-climbing …

You cannot do these things anymore.

You can no longer simply do a thing in order to get it done.

It appears to defeat the purpose of doing it.

The purpose now is the process, and not the result.

The process now has a map. It has a value stream. It has a timeline. It has inputs, outputs, check sheets, control charts, scatter plots and Pareto diagrams.

It has methodology. It’s been evaluated, measured, mined, reviewed, revised and specially formulated to deliver the maximum of one thing with a minimum of some other thing.

It’s been approved by Senior Executive Management across the globe and enthusiastically endorsed by Leading Business Celebrities too numerous to mention.

People make a living thinking this shit up. Thinking up bullshit for other people to do …

… and they all go quietly crazy trying to do it, trying to understand why they’re doing it, and what exactly is it they’re doing, and then they end up drinking too much, or taking pills, or spending their weekends smoking pot and listening to old King Crimson albums, eating Chinese takeaway because they’re too fucking munted to fix their own grub anymore …

“Pain points”?

WHO PUT THE DICKHEADS IN CHARGE?

NUMBER 27

62 years old, 27 years with the company and his skills are no longer relevant, no longer needed, he is leaving now, he is going away and saying goodbye.

There’ll be a package, a payment. Sincere regrets. But the changing nature of this, of that, cost efficiencies here, and there, technology, and so on and so forth, we’re very sorry, thanks for everything, your hard work, your life, thank you so much and all the best with what’s left.

I go to say farewell, shake his hand, and he hangs onto it momentarily, and shakes it again, reluctant to let go, his eyes look faraway and filmed with memories, he talks of how it was, all the overtime they used to do, nights and weekends, not all that many years ago, and he talks of how it is now, the changes, the restructures, it’s all gone to hell, he says, not it like it used to be.

Yes, they were the “good old days” alright, until they sucked the fun out of it, the colour..

“Any plans?”, I ask.

“Oh. I don’t know”, he says. “Maybe I’ll just get a job at Bunnings for a few years. I don’t know.”

“Bunnings?”

“They hire older workers. At least I’m told.”

There are two others, one with 24 years up, one with 20, and they’ve all known for a few months, there are no more surprises, yet Number 27 looks somehow diminished, small, frail, and there’s little emotion in his words as he speaks, no anger, just a hint of bewilderment, of confusion, of loss, as if he has already resigned himself to a life of shadows in a land of ghosts, marking time, just marking it, making it go away, just making it go away.

I walk back to my desk.

“That was sad”, I say to my offsider.

I am left with the feeling that Number 27 will not find it easy, and that he will hurt.

Birth.

School.

Work.

Death.

The long con plays on. It grabs us from the start, it pisses on us at the finish, a life cycle of little murders and a new death every day.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Appending this article from MacroBusiness on the “Rise of the bullshit job” is this comment …

Gunnamatta says: August 22, 2013 at 2:42 pm

Its all bullshit when you think about it.

I came out of the Federal court years ago with another young lawyer and we looked at each other and said ‘this is all bullshit isnt it?’

He did the honorable thing and took off into 50 acres of Tarkine Wildrness chowing down on mung beans for twenty years. I just opted for different bullshit.

I ditched law for industrial relations and sorting out agreements and intractable issues for some of the largest employers around. The issues that invariably drew the most heat were the ones I had earmarked as ‘bullshit’ and it didnt matter whether it was the Union side or management side there was always loads of ‘bullshit’ in the equation. Chat with line managers and most often they wanted to chat about ‘bullshit’ the ordinary mug punters would want to bring up issues too, or union officials, and they were all ‘bullshit’.

More than once I was offered some very good gigs but always held off with a little man in the back of my head saying ‘this is bullshit’

One day after resolving some particularly gnarly issues for one outfit involving a psychologist I shared a beer with him and basically downloaded my thought that it was all ‘bullshit’ – he told me he thought it was nearly all bullshit but that I should drop what I was doing and go and see if there was anything out there I thought wasnt bullshit.

I ended up working in TV business news media and print media (mainly bullshit) in Europe and the mid east and working offside for finance and investment types making sure their bullshit is tailored to the bullshitees (as we used to refer to them).

Eventually I come back to Australia and find a whole society sucking up ‘bullshit’ every time it turns on the TV or radio, opens up a paper. Then I look at politics and think to myself ‘those men (and women) are talking bullshit’

For sure the powers that be have cottoned on to the fact that idle thinking types represent a danger. Their response has been to either make sure the populace is dumbed down or to make sure they are so deeply in hock that they will put up with loads of ‘bullshit’ just to service the debt. Uncle Rupert has cottoned on to the fact that if you spread the ‘bullshit’ far enough then everyone thinks it is normal.

Of course we have bullshit jobs.

Its Bullshit. Bullshit everywhere. Bullshit in the home straight by 8 lengths. Bullshit bowling a marathon spell from the Members and and Bullshit carving up the opposition with hard ball gets in the middle.

Management is bullshit, strategy is bullshit, 95% of the people you will ever meet are bullshit in the context in which you will meet them.

The one thing I will be explaining to my son and daughter is the view it is all bullshit, and why I have bent over backwards to avoid immersing them in it, to give them an out from the bullshit should they want it, in circumstances where they dont have to pay a bullshit ransom to some rent seeking bullshitter who think is they have a right to impose a bullshit tithe on others.

A bullshit free world. That is something to dream about.

I wish I’d written that.

NOT DEAD. YET

Seven months of frantic activity …

… leading to four weeks of twelve to fourteen hour days, seven days a week to meet an end of March deadline.

Deadline met. Bonus earnt.

That’s what I’ve been doing.

In the meantime, I understand from the headlines that have been screaming at me the last few months that our beloved country (cry) is in dire peril.

Again.

I’m trying to work up some interest in all this dysfunction, but the anti-anxiety medication I’ve been taking the last couple months is working so well, I no longer give a flying fuck about anything or anybody.

“And the difference to your normal self is what, Ross?”, you may well ask.

That I no longer give a flying fuck about not giving a flying fuck.

Normal services shall resume shortly.

In the meantime, for some fine examples of dinkum Aussie character, check out this site.

Then come back, watch this and calm down …

A WINDOW TO THIS WORLD

“We need two boxes of window-faced envelopes. Can you place an order please?”, she tells the stationery clerk.

“What do you need them for?”, comes the response.

“Origami.”

“ ? ”

“Mail.”

” … Are there other envelopes you could use? Old ones? Plain-faced? We have plenty of plain-faced.”

“No, we need window-faced.”

“Because we have cost contingencies to consider bef – ”

“Listen to me”, she says, “I am not going to type up labels for paperwork that already has an address on it and has been designed to fit in window-faced, understand?”

“I’ll have to ch – “

“Listen to me”, she says again, “The difference in cost of window-faced to plain-faced is probably a half-dozen bucks or so, yes? I get paid thirty-five dollars an hour. I can spend one hundred and five dollars of the company’s money to sit on my arse and type labels so the company can save twelve bucks on a couple boxes of envelopes? Are you familiar with arithmetic? Does that make sense to you? Do we have a fight now, shall we have an argument?”

“I – “

“Order. The fucking. Envelopes. Today. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

These …

… the days of our lives.

Oh, Death …

WE NEED MORE SWEAR WORDS

9.47 a.m.

The phone, it rings.

“Ross, are you in this meeting?”, the manager asks.

“What meeting?” I ask. “Wait, let me … I’ve got a meeting at 11.30. I’ve got a meeting two hours tomorrow, 9.30.”

“They moved it to today. Now.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I. Neither did Warwick. We just found out.”

“Are we still having the 11.30?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll be right up.”

And so begins our teleconference, and so begins our day, a meeting spanning four different time zones, each time zone comprising three or four people, all speaking in a variety of accents, and every few minutes someone will interrupt proceedings to ask, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that, can you say that again please?”

And two and one half hours later, and still in this first meeting, with the second meeting thought best left to another day (that decision taking at least fifteen minutes of this meeting to arrive at), I shake my head forlornly (again), my stomach barks at me, and I hear someone from somewhere on the eastern coast of the United States ask “Ross, do you have that email now?”

“I’m not at my desk”, I reply.

“Oh. Where are you?”, they ask, sounding surprised.

“I’m in the meeting room”, I say. “In a meeting.”

“Oh. I thought you had a computer with you”, they say.

“No. My computer’s at my desk. That’s why they call it a desktop computer”, I say.

The manager smiles, and Warwick chuckles quietly to himself and three hours later, a document of intent has been “signed off” on, this document of intent comprising a number of statements stating something needs be done about a thing and someone needs do it, and at some point in the future, a meeting shall be arranged to decide just how many more meetings may be required to decide precisely who, why and what shall be done, and if the doing of any of it is even remotely feasible.

“Shall I schedule a meeting for Friday?”, asks someone from somewhere in the United Kingdom.

“Fine”, we all chorus in response.

“The best we can … look, for you guys in Australia, I hate to do this, but given the time differences, the best I think we can manage your end  is 9.30 Friday night. Can we all do that?”

“ … ”

“Guys? Can we all …? I think we’ve made a lot of progress today”, they say.

“ … ”

“Guys?”

“ … ”

Swear words.

We need more swear words.

The ones we’ve got now are shit.

THAT’S LIFE

When you leave high school, you need to put a little thought into where your talents and interests in life lie and what you’d really like to do with them.

Otherwise, you may find yourself sitting at a desk in a concrete box thirty years later with a 25,000 row spreadsheet in front of you, still twelve years from retirement, and wondering where the fuck it all went wrong.

For what once may have seemed an easy prize to grab in our uncaring and callow youth, an uncomplicated series of simple games, will gradually, over years, reveal itself as nothing more than a faded, gaudy bauble, a tin-foil cup studded with cracked plastic rubies abandoned in a muddy tributary choked with gape-mouthed carp.

And that’s when you find yourself thinking, “How the fuck did I wind up doing this shit for a living? ”

Which is my final thought for 2012.

And I expect it will be my first for 2013. Merry Christmas.

I guess.

.
On a lighter  note, that guy there? Was born 97 years ago today. And no-one, no-one, will ever come close to him.

WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK

“Why is everybody smiling?”, thinks Unfriendlyman as he walks to the railway station. “Is my fly undone?”

It is not. 

As he walks down the steps to the platform, he thinks of the morning that awaits him.

“One more email from that woman today, I’m going to fly down to Melbourne and stab her in the eyeball with a chopstick”, he brainsnaps.

The train arrives, and Unfriendlyman boards.

There it sits, an insensate mass of black-clad blubber, another one, earbuds firmly in place and oblivious to the world, poking at tiny buttons on a shiny rectangle with fingers like clubs, her face a sweaty and disheveled pudding of childlike absorption, and all around her a dozen people stand, and there she sits.

With her bag on the seat next to her.

“A seat is not a luggage rack”, thinks Unfriendlyman, looking down at the thing.

“A SEAT IS NOT A LUGGAGE RACK!”, he thinks again, attempting to gather the perfect storm of his unfriendliness to hurl at the sluggish consciousness of this sloth, a bolt of super sourness to jolt her into an awareness of her surrounds, maybe even fling her down the length of the carriage in an enjoyably unfriendly fashion.

Nothing.

“Probably that third glass of wine I had last night”, he muses. “Or the sixth … seventh. Maybe it’s a diet thing …”

He lets the matter slip, secure in the karma that will no doubt come to slap her full of forty cream donuts a day for a year until she drops dead of a heart attack at 22 on her first visit to a Jenny Craig.

He alights at his stop, begins the dreary trudge to a dreary office in a dreary building full of dreary people doing dreary things and pretending to care.

He doesn’t. Care, that is.

Why, just this last week past, he was invited to a meeting to discuss the development and implementation of a new system for the company, a “new” system that had been in development for so long, it is to “new” what Pong is to Grand Theft Auto, and he had no hesitation in letting everyone know precisely how he felt about this state of affairs and the people responsible for it  …

“I wouldn’t trust your mob to put a battery in a fire alarm without sending 30,000 emails about it first, and then blowing up the building.”

“You need to have faith sometimes, Unfriendlyman.”

“Sometimes evidence is better. Frank. I don’t know what “faith” is. Leprechauns and fairy dust far as I’m concerned. Based on the “evidence” so far, least as far as these last half-dozen years are concerned, we could give your people the plans and materials to build a spaceship to fucking Saturn, you’d give us a crystal radio and a Viewmaster and tell us if we looked hard enough, we’d find aliens.”

“There are not that many commercial solutions available for this type of project, Unfriendlyman.”

“If by not many, you mean hundreds, no there aren’t. There are about a dozen. They all work. They work because they were built by people who know how to make them work. Intelligent people. With talent and skills. Your man’s effort is a clunky collage of inflexible crapware that’s got more bugs in it than a Dubbo cow paddock. It’s 2012. This shit you’ve cobbled together is 1987 … Look, I’m all in favour of providing the simple with meaningful employment, but maybe you should have them lick envelopes in the mail room instead of programming our fucking systems.”

“That’s not very helpful, Unfriendlyman.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise to me when I’m being rude.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ve lost my train of thought now.”

“Sorry.”

“What?”

“Sorry.”

“ … ”

They’re tricky, friendly people.

It’s the softly-spoken, unfailingly polite ones. The ones who are always there with a helping hand, or a kind word. The ones who sincerely enquire after your health if you’ve been ill, or wish you a happy birthday, or ask about your weekend.

They wish you a merry Christmas, some of them, and put chocolates on your desk, sometimes little chocolate eggs at Easter. Once, somebody gave him a bottle of wine, and it took every shred of his self-control to stop him from smashing it against a wall, and then glassing the bastard who had been so foolishly unthinking as to offer it.

“It’s not easy being Unfriendlyman in a world of smiling, hollow-souled psychotics”, he thinks.

An email arrives from the company’s Social Committee …

“We’re very excited to announce our very first “Bring Your Kids To Work Day”!”, it shrieks and continues, “If you’d like to volunteer to help with the event, as a tour guide, buddy, or general helper, please let us know! We’re looking forward to a fun-filled day!”

“I don’t know what to do anymore. Except maybe die”, he thinks, and then he screams inside, silently, despairingly, hopelessly, “YOU’RE TEARING ME APART!”

Is this the end of Unfriendlyman?

UNFRIENDLYMAN IS WORKING

“I thought you already knew about the changes to the royalty payable on these.”

“No. How would we know that? You have to let us know. So we can set it up and pay the right amounts to the right people when it’s due them. If there’s a change to the contract, to the rate, what we’re supposed to pay them, you have to let us in on it. That’s why we’re called the “Royalty Department” and not the “I Can Read Your Mind and Pull a Fucking Rabbit Out of My Fucking Hat Department”.”

THE CON

My father, now 84, spent the last half dozen or so years of his working life moving from employment to unemployment and back again, and then back again, until for the last two or three, it was a welfare cheque every fortnight until he became eligible for the aged pension.

A signwriter and commercial artist who began practising his skills in the 1940’s, he had never been accustomed to unemployment in his life until that time, rising at five or six every morning to be at the factory by seven, grabbing any overtime available, nights, weekends, for the extra cash to throw at the mortgage, put a little money away for the future.

The nature of his work, the industry he was a part of for forty years, began to change in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, became more and more automated, and brushes and paints gave way to pixels, and he found himself, in his late fifties, a man both out of his time and rapidly running out of relevance to the world.

The factories became smaller, the offices became larger, and the traditionalists, the artists, just got older and more expensive to keep, so they were always the first to go.

This was a man who struggled to operate a television remote control – brushes and easels and paints were the tools of his trade, pencils and charcoal, his hands, his eyes – these new machines that were taking his work confounded his senses, made no sense at all.

“It’s not as if I’ve forgotten how to hold a brush.”

Work hard, work harder, reap the benefits of your labours from the ditch you were told to dig, then die in it …

The con.

… and everything will take care of itself.

The bleat of the shill plays on while you’re the pebble in the eggcup shuffle of working life.

The scam a simple-minded mantra they slap into you from the time you can walk.

Until …

Ten years. Twenty. Thirty. Forty.

…. Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they’re done. 

They forget you, you forget yourself.

For them, it’s an easy slip into the lazy comic cliché, feet up, television all day, drinking beer, send “A Current Affair” around to do a story, all these louche louts living it large, we’re out here working our arses off, and what do you do?

“We’ve been told not to talk to reporters.”

“Twenty two years from 5.30am to 4.30pm, two jobs, two locations, overtime, on call, no extra pay, now I’m not good enough.”

…. Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they’re done.

Go.

We’ll talk later …

… about “getting people off welfare and back into work”. About “encouraging employers to take on more mature workers”, and “incentives” for doing so …

… about “single mothers”, two words which, when conjoined, appear to conjure an abomination in the minds of many; there’s always something needs be “done” about “single mothers”, but leaving them be is never one of them …

When all is said and done …

We’ll give you a pamphlet, you can call this number, press one, hold please.

Sorry for your loss.

It hurts us too.

Government can no longer afford to be government, you get a ticket and a queue, a slap upside the head, and a “heal thyself”.

We’re cutting our numbers and we’re trimming our fat, all the better to serve you. Tightening the belt and pulling our weight.

“Takin’ up the slack here, Boss!”

Work fourteen, paid for eight, how many years is it now and fourteen nervous breakdowns later you put a bullet through the top of your head when the pills stop working and the kids won’t shut up.

“I still have my work bag in the cupboard. I haven’t emptied it yet, it has all the things in it that I used to take to work. I said that I wouldn’t clear it until five years. I suppose I’ll clear it in the next few weeks or so. I have finally realised that it is over.”

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?