More thoughts on the world of work

Wouldn’t assigning volumes of work rather than working hours be a better way of working? You do the work and you get paid the money that the task was considered worth, rather than turning up at an arbitrary time and having to take ‘time off’ for boring things like waiting in for a plumber, coming home early to let in the chimney sweep or taking a car to be serviced.

Ironically, the plumber, chimney sweep and garage all work to the system I aspire to – why don’t we insist that a plumber turns up at 9 and stays till 5.30? Because we have agreed to a price for having the job done, and we don’t need to see them there to believe that they are doing what they need to be doing.

All this is leading me to believe that I am not cut out for a job with working hours – my life is more important to me than money or the illusion of security and I would happily work through the night occasionally in order to be able to take time off when I need it without asking someone’s permission. Do I feel like a responsible adult when I am expected to work on Christmas Eve to satisfy a whim of someone who doesn’t really understand my job? The thing is, even if I did work through the night here, I would still have to explain that to someone to justify then reclaiming that time during the ‘normal working day’.

It’s not even as though there is much security – if I am ill for more than 8 days in a year I can expect to go unpaid for those extra days. It’s a system which I find particularly unappealing given that the sick time is calculated on a calendar year, meaning that in the winter, when you’re most likely to pick up an infection (especially given that it seems to be considered the utmost virtue to come into work when you’re ill here) and have unusually high outgoings over Christmas, you are also most likely to find that you aren’t being paid for any time you take off sick. I cannot work out why people do come in when they’re ill – I assume it’s either a misplaced sense of being irreplaceable, a desire to avoid taking unpaid sick leave in the future, or the wildly mistaken belief that anyone is impressed with your hacking performance in the corner of the office.

Basically, the conclusion I seem to be reaching is that I don’t really like having a proper job. I could easily live with the insecurity of unemployment if I was doing something I liked, and perhaps that realisation is one I have needed to spur me into action. Maybe I should stop writing this blog, and start writing something which could potentially be a source of income which would enable me to pursue the writing of this blog without any guilty feelings that I should be wasting my time doing something more profitable.

So, watch this space – if this is the last entry and you suddenly find that a new witty novelist has broken onto the scene, then assume that the witty novelist is me. Otherwise, I have failed as a witty novelist, and not even been inspired to come back here to bemoan my fate which will mean that the sentiments conveyed above have not been realised.

Dream Snippets

I am standing on a balcony looking down on a row of children dressed in pink rabbit outfits with their own heads showing. Some words seem to make the children glow, and they like it too, so I am trying to say words which will do this, but there is someone on the balcony trying to stop me and another person with the rabbit-children trying to stop them listening to me.

I was involved in some kind of contest with some ‘friends’ who I had never seen before – we were having fun, but I wasn’t really sure what was going on.

Matt from work wanted plain crisps, but only had bacon. He was desperate to swop, so I did.

I was wandering down the road where there was some kind of gay pride thing going on. People were drinking weird stuff out of flower shaped costumes.

‘An ants’ shell

So hard to crack

To Hell! To Hell!’

I found this written on a piece of paper in the drawer of an antique chest which I was looking at. There was an armed robbery going on but I really wanted the chest and the note, so I just carried on as if I hadn’t seen them in the hope that I could just get away without them noticing me.

I gave a guy some fairy lights and he was really pleased and started trying to hug me. The Boy Wonder was there and he was impressed at the good choice of present for this guy, and said he could hug me as he would be pleased to have got fairy lights, so he could understand.

Organising a surprise party

It was the Boy Wonder’s 30^th birthday on Saturday and to mark the occasion I organised him a surprise jam/party, which was fun! Admittedly, doing it so shortly after our wedding was a little stressful, but mostly not being able to tell him what I was doing was very difficult – I kept speaking to people who updated me on news etc, and then couldn’t say anything to the Boy Wonder. But, not content with organising two events marking big occasions this year, in my drunken state on Saturday night I also began the process of planning the next extravaganza – a New Orleans fundraiser in the New Year. I have already recruited our richest friends to provide a venue and possible source of wealthy attendees from amongst their friends (although I have a feeling that my subtlety was slightly lacking when it came to sharing the details in my Bow-laden state!).

So whilst on the one hand I was just pleased that everyone came and nobody ruined the surprise element, the completion of our second successful gathering of the year did give me a sense of satisfaction, marred only by the fact that it was more fun planning things with the Boy Wonder – we are both people who like to picture things as we would like them and then recreate that on a larger scale, which makes the planning much more fun than following a formal path of doing what you should do, or compromising, or the dreaded ‘done thing’.

All of this means that I am already thinking of ways to make the fundraiser work, and I am really excited about the idea of supporting a charity which is so in line with our shared interest. The whole thing is still very much in the ideas stage at the moment, but I am sure it won’t be long before the whole thing is imminent and being as I have just looked it up and found out that Mardi Gras 2009 is on Feb 24^th, I’m already thinking some kind of Mardi Gras theme would be a good basis for the event…

I never realised, but I don’t really like films

Talking to our wee Scottish friend last night I realised that I don’t really like films. I have known problems with actors: I can’t tell the difference between Al Pacino, Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman leading me to be really confused when coming across ‘Meet the Fockers’ as I couldn’t understand why the Dad kept changing clothes. I don’t recognise most actors, so if they have slightly different hair, clothes or accent, I can’t make the connection with the person who I have seen before. But, even apart from the fact that I have no recollection skills, there’s something about the format of films that makes me want to know whether it’s going to be good before I watch it. If something’s not going to be great I want to know, and if it’s not going to be great then I don’t want to waste my time watching it for two and a half hours. When the Boy Wonder wanted to watch ‘Lord of the Rings’ I refused to go to the cinema (although he wasn’t that keen either, what with the hating people, crowds, shops/shopping centres and all) so we ended up watching it on the small screen at home. I didn’t expect to enjoy it, but everyone kept going on about how good it was and I felt quite optimistic when we sat down in front of the gogglebox. However, after an hour (the Boy Wonder claims it was only half an hour) I was beginning to lose the will to live. Fortunately the Boy Wonder was feeling the same, and he was the one who actually called a halt to our watching when he said ‘God this is boring isn’t it?’ to my immense relief. Nothing had happened in that whole time, and I was buggered if I was going to waste any more time on a film which had been spun out not only over three hours, but over three more films apparently for the purposes of leaving huge segments where no plot was required. I would have to be very drunk before I sat in front of that again. But it’s not just really long films, any film which is predictable and has an ending which I can predict from within half an hour riles me. As do films which rely on CGI and impressive special effects rather than plot – I will never understand how people can say ‘The plot was pretty crap, but it was worth seeing for the special effects’ because as far as I’m concerned, you shouldn’t even make a film if you can’t portray scenes properly, so no allowances made for that. And films which don’t adequately explain what’s going on piss me off too – I sat through the whole of Transformers only to discover that the big show down was a fight scene in which it was almost impossible to work out who was good and who was bad. I also hate films where the plot is based on an entirely flawed premise, and they spend so much time not mentioning the huge hole in the storyline that you assume it’s because there’s some kind of brilliant twist only to get to the end and find out that it was just a really poorly thought-out set up for the action, which retrospectively makes no sense if you actually spotted the point at which they deviated from sense. However, I watched Lucky Number Slevin over two years ago, in Canada and really loved it, to the point where I not only remember who was in it, but also what happened, and I would still watch it again. That’s about as good an endorsement as any film has ever had from me, and being as Spinal Tap is the only other film I can think of that falls into that category, that gives some idea of how exacting my standards are. Or possibly just that my interest is only piqued by clever voilence and immature humour - whichever makes me sound deeper.

Another dream – maybe Bow is like cheese?

I drove to Derbyshire and back yesterday, which was not in itself exciting, but it did mean that I went from 11am until about 9pm without eating anything, and then stayed up till 2 consuming Bow with the Boy Wonder and our friend The Gift which may or may not be relevant to the fact that I spend the night dreaming that Saddam Hussein was teasing me with a group of his friends.

Now, when I say teasing, I mean approaching me in the street with a rack of 6 football sized rigid plastic balls with numbers written on them and declaring that we were going to play ‘Which is the most boring number’. The game consisted of one of his cronies hitting each ball (marked with an apparently random number) and the ball breaking to reveal, in order: a banger, a balloon flying towards me, something gooey, a yellow thing which flew out and hit me in the groin, something which I didn’t see and finally a long extendable stick (we’re talking over 20m) with a jumping spider on it. I was talking to the Boy Wonder and telling him how annoying it was, but he was distracted by the fact that he was really impressed with the extendable jumping spider, which was really annoying me.

For some reason, Matt Hill kept coming up to me and trying to hug me, but I wanted to know why Saddam Hussein was following me around just to annoy me so I kept trying to talk to him, but he was just being really smug and, well…annoying, which is not really an adjective I ever thought I would use about the man.

So what does it mean? Well, probably bugger all really, but let’s assume that it was more to do with the tapenade and Bow than some kind of peculiar mental illness for now.

Inflicting your music on the public

Further to my post about the annoying tendency of people to be oblivious to the impact their overly loud conversation has on those around them at gigs, I feel I should also condemn a practice which is borne of a similar lack of courtesy but with the opposite effect. I went to an event in London last week, and on the way there I was treated to the sound of some child, around 10 or 11 I’d guess, with his mother, who was definitely old enough to know better, playing some kind of MP3 player out loud on the train! I was gob smacked – I am aware that the yout’ love to whip out an MP3 player loaded with crappy R ‘n’ B, lame guitar bands and the latest ring-tones, but I have never seen one with parents in tow. Do they really think that everyone in the train carriage wanted to listen to their choice of music? Are they the only people who are unaware of fact that all those other people would have brought their own MP3 player had they wanted to listen to music on the train? Is it legal to kill someone for inflicting some warbling half-wit on me while I’m trying to read? I remember when the Sony Walkman was the height of sophistication, and there used to be signs on public transport asking people to ensure that they weren’t listening to their music at such an ear-splitting level that the leak from the headphones would disturb other passengers. It didn’t occur to me that one day, I would be held to mental ransom by a child deciding that what they want is more important that anyone else’s desire for a quiet ride. I am well aware that my main problem is really a public lack of consideration – they could have been playing music I love, and I would still have felt that it was an inappropriate place and time to share it. I also feel very hard done-by that I am considerate to the point of stupidity and if others aren’t going to play fair then the system doesn’t work. I recently spent a frustrating five minutes walking behind a man who was dithering his way to the station because there wasn’t quite enough room for me to pass him without (in my mind) implying that he was slow. I once ended up crying because I had gone round the corner to buy croissants for breakfast, and then I let someone go first at the bread display because I didn’t want to reach across him (even though I had been there before him), only to then watch him take every last croissant in the shop. In the latter case, it was more the rudeness of him that upset me – I am not that pathetic that I get croissant withdrawal – because I was trying to be nice, and he went a ruined it and made me feel like an idiot for doing so. And what’s the point? If I am nice to someone who not only doesn’t appreciate that I have been nice to them, but also breaks the chain of niceness, then it all stops working. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, I was brought up too well to stop saying thank-you to surly sales assistants, holding doors open for people and helping old ladies get their shopping off buses. But one day I really will snap, and if you are the twat with the box of shit music forcing it on me in a public space, then expect pain to rain down upon you, or at least a couple of warning stares, a discontented huff and then a polite request to turn it down.

‘Easy’ cookery shows

Wasting a bit of time last night, the Boy Wonder and I watched a bit of ‘Delia’ in which she claimed to be demonstrating recipes for people who are ‘afraid to cook’ or ‘don’t have time to cook’. Supposedly showing people how to cook ‘on busy days, or if they lack confidence’, her first dish was a salmon and quails’ eggs pie, featuring cornichons, capers and fresh dill. Excuse me? I thought this was supposed to be for busy people who don’t have time to cook, so who are these people who don’t have time to cook anything fancy, but somehow have plenty of time to pop to the shops for quails’ eggs and fresh dill? The element of the show which seems to be designed for a busy chef is that she’s using ready-made mash and ready grated cheese, but I think a recipe involving stuff you can’t buy from your local Spar is probably not a winner for the busy or underconfident, even with two slightly easy ingredients flung on top. Other dishes from last night’s efforts included Peruvian potato wedges with boiled eggs, olives and peppers, which involved using a food processor to make a sauce containing 9 ingredients, one of which was walnuts (who hasn’t got them hanging around in their cupboard?), so already the time saved by using pre-prepared potato wedges has been (pardon the pun) eaten up by making the sauce, boiling the eggs and messing around with peppers and olives. There was also some rather disturbing looking (by which I mean it had the appearance of cooked sick) bread, which seemed a needlessly complicated way of ‘saving time on busy days’. She may as well have called it ‘cooking for the lazy middle classes’, although she did in fact save me and the Boy Wonder plenty of cooking time last night – shortly after her assertion that everyone has a jar of roasted peppers in their cupboard we decided to go out and get fish and chips.