Progressive Thoughts - Day 28

Today’s song is another from the brilliant Porcupine Tree called Sentimental.

This is a rather sad song about young kids not wanting to grow old and somehow stay as young as they are but with the added feeling of having wasted their life so far.

I remember when I was a kid that I really wanted to stay young and play forever, but the overriding issue that I realised would remain was the lack of money. As far as I was concerned, with money came freedom and if I had that money I could do what I wanted.

Sadly, a thirteen year old can’t always get the money they want. My parents looked after us but we weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination. Unfortunately I went to, what was considered, the best school in Walsall, and consequently a lot of kids with rich parents also attended. The big difference was that a lot of them were pampered by their parents who gave them enough money to buy all the latest gear, whereas I missed out. I could see the unfairness of life and I think that this shaped me politically and certainly changed my outlook.

What I saw was that my own parents immensely proud of what I had achieved but some of the other kids I knew were pushed by already successful parents and really struggled to cope.

I was happy with where I was going but I didn’t like the environment I found myself in, particularly when I was at the mercy of rich kids who showed off their treasures and mocked me for not having the same wealth.

My only option was to get a job to get extra cash and it was the best thing I ever did. It was a simple job, in a newsagent but I was able to buy stuff and fight back against the more privileged kids. I worked at the newsagent from thirteen to eighteen, assisting the manager with delivering newspapers, setting up all the paper rounds, collecting money, stock taking, shelf-stacking and, towards the end, selling stuff from behind the counter.

It was all menial work but I thoroughly enjoyed the job, so much so that the manager of the shop tried to persuade me to ditch the idea of university and consider a career as a manager in the chain of shops.

Sadly that wasn’t for me and I had to disappoint him.

However, what all of this taught me was that working for money was a good thing and while it interfered with my social life a little, it meant that I did have some freedom and the ability to laugh in the faces of the pompous arseholes at school who flashed their daddy’s cash around without having earned it.

The job prepared me for a real career and when I actually started work after university, I embraced it with gusto.

Regular readers will know that I am now sick of the rat race but the truth is that I am not a kid anymore and, having worked in IT for over thirty years, I want a change. Whether I achieve my new goals in the years to come is questionable but at least I am happy being the age I am and looking towards the future as an old man with some pleasure – as long as I am physically able to cope of course.

But that thirteen year old kid is still in my head and occasionally surfaces.

I love that and don't ever want that to change.

The Perfect Person

I recently saw a job advert and it made me laugh at its absurdity. The job wasn’t for anything special but reading the list of desirable performance and competency related requirements you would have thought that the position was for President of a major country. These weren’t requirements such as “Has experience of Microsoft Word” or “Has at least three years of experience managing a supermarket”.

I am talking about the personality and competency requirements or “What kind of a person are you?”

I read this list and started to score myself.

There were far more failures that successes and if I had been the interviewee I think I would have failed miserably had I been asked truthfully if I satisfied the competency requirements for the position. Furthermore, I think I would have had a huge cross through my name because I would have laughed my head off when asked the questions.

What these people are looking for is basically an alien/human hybrid – somebody like Mr Spock – although he would certainly fail when asked if he was a people person.

Worse, I don’t know anybody at all who would satisfy these requirements. I know for a fact that just about every person I have ever worked with wouldn’t.

And that’s not me being nasty to these people – they are human beings not machines. The have all the beauty and warmth that humanity has but also the deep failings.  Everybody is the same.

I suspect that the list of requirements was written by my old nemesis, Mr Motivator. Do you remember him?

He is the man who appears on the Apprentice claiming to be the best of the best of the best and who will give 250% to “get the job done".

He is the man who will work until stupid o’clock, fuelled solely by Monster Raving Looney strength coffee that is actually pure caffeine.

He is the man who will claim to be your best buddy and then brush you aside when the next opportunity to climb the corporate ladder appears.

He is the man who will buy a Porsche but never have time to drive it.

He is the man who will go on the most expensive holidays money can buy but spend the entire fortnight working and ignoring his long suffering family.

Yet there is a deep irony here, dear reader – because the truth is that not even Mr Motivator himself will pass all of these competencies. Yet he will almost certainly bullshit his way through the interview, claiming to be the best of the best of the best with excellence running through his bloodstream instead of blood.

The competency list is too long to reproduce here, dear reader, and I would hate to infringe any copyright laws. But I can give you a brief summary.

Basically they are looking for a robot with the interpersonal skills.

The person must actually thrive when the going gets tough and enjoy working every hour God sends without getting upset and, while working into those deep dark lonely hours in the night, will do so with a massive smile on his face, praising their boss at the same time and, when the smelly brown stuff hits the whirling cooling device will instantly be able to cope without making a single mistake.

The person will be your best friend and will make every effort to be your perfect temporary  spouse, because, don’t forget, you will be working so hard that you won’t have time to see your family.

The person will love their boss and the harder working the boss is the better because ultimately the person will strive to become just like their boss. 

The person will have a 200% grasp of all business practices and will be able to foresee any disasters and act before they occur. If, for some reason (perhaps being tired due to overwork) the person fails to see the looming disaster then he will be able to immediately react and fix it with a huge smile – even if it’s three o’clock in the morning and he has been working for eighteen hours fuelled only by a triple strength caffeine bomb.

The person will be so ambitious that his ultimate goal will be to rule the entire world.

The person will be the most benevolent human being in the world, caring for all the people he works with, even if they don’t meet his high standards.

And when it comes to conflict, the person will simply end a difference of opinion decisively, even if he is wrong.

The person will be totally creative and will redefine bullshit business terminology like “thinking outside the box” and “blue sky thinking”, perhaps even inventing a new term like “extra-terrestrial creativity” to be used from now on when trying to impress his so-called superiors.

The quality of the person’s decisions will be consistently brilliant. He will rarely be wrong and when he is, he will end the debate and move on.

The person will be the funniest man in the world. His jokes will be the best and the entire audience will spend most of their time laughing at him. Like this guy:

And that’s just for starters, dear reader. There’s lots more where that came from.

As I said, I would fail to get the job.

I didn’t want to stack shelves in the local supermarket anyway.

Aggravators Incorporated

Aggravators Incorporated is the ideal company for employees who despise laziness. We believe that any form of indolence, no matter how fleeting, is an absolute sin, punishable by a life sentence in jail.

We are an excellent company that thrives on the excellence and diligence of each and every employee. Our recruitment techniques have won awards. We refuse to allow anybody to become an employee of Aggravators Incorporated unless they pass a series of gruelling interviews, terrifying aptitude tests, bloodcurdling personality tests and survive two days with our ex-SAS sergeant major who thrives on inflicting dangerous team building challenges involving karate, knives, guns and medieval instruments of torture.

Only then can an employee be deemed suitable for a position at our company.

For those who make it (and there a few) we demand 1000% commitment. Anything less will result in severe disciplinary action.

Our working practices have been described as “impossible”, “insane” and “illegal” by indolent observers, yet we thrive on achieving the impossible.

Our employees have been described as breathtakingly arrogant, pompous beyond belief, subhuman psychopaths and crazy, yet we still surpass all of our targets.

And now we plan to push those boundaries even further.

We are already the best of the best of the best of the best. We are campaigning to have the word “excellence” redefined in the Oxford English Dictionary to refer exclusively to the achievements of Aggravators Incorporated.

But we want more.

Why strive for 1000% when there is a higher target? We can achieve 2000%.

The challenge has been laid down. We have thrown down the gauntlet to corporations and governments. We have licked the arse of the "Working Time Directive" and stuffed a custard pie into the face of "Employee Rights".

We will prevail. We always do. We love a challenge and in order to increase our productivity we are taking the following measures will will help us to achieve our new so called “unattainable” targets.

(1) Holidays – At the present time we have bowed to UK and European corporate law and allowed our employees to take holidays. How can we achieve excellence if we allow our staff to take time off to “be with their family”? Almost all of our employees have no family. And we are certainly assisting the others to dispense with next of kin by encouraging divorce. After all, families encourage laziness and at Aggravators Incorporated we loathe laziness of any kind. Our first step therefore is to phase out annual leave over the next year. From January 1st 2011, employees who ask for annual leave will be dismissed immediately and sued for causing the company to lose an asset. How can we achieve our projected profit margins if we lose assets?

(2) The Working Day – The average working day in the UK is from 9am to 5pm. What craziness is that? How can market leading, ground breaking companies at the forefront of their industry be expected to keep their share holders in the lifestyle they are used to by only working eight hours a day? Are employees expected to wallow in sloth for the remaining sixteen hours? We think not. Therefore, from 1st January 2011, employees will expected to work from 8am until midnight, allowing eight hours sleep. It should be noted that our employees are so wired on a cocktail of extra-strong triple strength coffee and Red Bull that they require much less sleep. So from 1st June 2011 the working day will be extended further from 6am to 1 am.

(3) The Working Week – Laziness is encouraged in the western world by allowing employees to rot in their own filth for two days every week. Those who do not slob around in their pits of apathy are encouraged to pursue pointless activities such as visiting family, extra-curricular activities, such as hobbies, and socialising and having fun. At Aggravators Incorporated we hate this kind of meaningless pastime – why should people be allowed to have a life outside of work? What can they possibly achieve? How will it help our business? It will not. Therefore, from 1st January 2011, the working week will be extended to seven days.

(4) Bank Holidays – Why are these pointless days called “Bank” Holidays when they lose money for corporations such as ours? Money cannot be earned having a day off decreed by a lazy government that encourages apathy amongst its citizens. We therefore defy the government and will from 1st January 2011 ban Bank Holidays including Easter, Christmas, New Years Day and those idiotic pagan days dreamt up by indolent peasants in the past.

(5) Sleeping – We acknowledge that our employees need to sleep (despite our attempts to keep them awake with caffeine and drugs) so we propose to install beds in all of our offices to maximise efficiency. The beds will in fact be chairs that can be tilted back. Furthermore, these beds will have built in alarm clocks that are preset to wake up the occupant at precisely 0558. Employees must log on within two minutes and start selling or they are given an electric shock. When the employee is alert, assistants will be on hand to complete the waking up process with copious amounts of monster strength coffee and Red Bull. This takes effect from 1st June 2010 because we have to wait for delivery of the chairs from a company that is so unreliable they allow their employees to work part time. Such practices should be made illegal.

(6) Toilets – Another source of inefficiency amongst employees is the need to answer the call of Mother Nature. Even we cannot combat this inefficiency in the design of the human being which means that we have to adjust our business practices to accommodate this flaw. Unfortunately the building we occupy is badly designed and the toilets are quite frankly too far away from the average employee. Sometimes it takes as long as ten minutes to use the facilities. How can a company make profit with such poor working practices? We are fighting back by installing toilet facilities inside the chair-beds described above. A strategically placed hole will be provided to allow employees to continue working while answering the call. Interruptions will be eliminated. Unfortunately we must wait for the apparatus to be installed – it is a travesty that we simply have to deal with these appalling companies. In the meantime, therefore we will be installing power points, wireless routers, fax machines, printers and video-conferencing facilities in all of our toilet cubicles until the chair-beds are adapted towards Quarter 3 in 2011.

(7) Coffee Breaks – We positively encourage our employees to consume as much coffee as possible to maintain their optimal brain capacity and processing ability throughout the working day. However, the act of preparing coffee is inefficient not to mention the time taken to walk to the kitchen. Furthermore, thanks to CCTV cameras installed in the kitchen, we have discovered that certain employees have been talking about subjects other than work. That is quite frankly scandalous and must be discouraged before it mutates into other fruitless pursuits such as discussing sport or the weather. Thankfully these skiving, lazy sub-humans have been dismissed and prosecuted for stealing resources from the company. To combat this, we will employ a system that delivers coffee and Red Bull on demand to the desk. To save even more time, a tube will be inserted into the employee’s mouth and the liquid fed in, eliminating the inefficient practice of picking up mug, thus making the employee even more capable. We hope to install the apparatus by June 1st 2011.

(8) Food – Another flaw in nature is the requirement to eat. This flaw is very damaging and encourages alarming inefficiency at many levels. We will therefore be installing a human based system that will allow employees to be spoon-fed three times a day. Sadly we have to employ lesser humans to fulfil this purpose – at least for the short term. Nevertheless, we are hoping that our innovation department will complete the design for the robot slave as soon as possible. The human food providers will be employed on January 1st 2010. The date for the robot slaves is unknown but initial estimates are encouraging – 1st January 2012.

(9) Sickness – Sickness is not permitted. Anybody who is so sick that they cannot achieve our 2000% targets will be dismissed immediately - unless they make up the hours.

(10) Profit – Profit is the goal of Aggravators Incorporated. We work, we earn and we aim to be the biggest global company generating the most cash for our shareholders. We have several schemes to claw in as much cash as we can get our hard-working hands on:

(a) Our customers are royalty and must be treated as such, with money being no object. However, we simply cannot encourage our employees to waste company money by splashing out on expensive meals, copious amounts of alcohol, cigars and lap-dancing bars for these scrounging thieving sub-human arses. Our employees must therefore pay for all entertainment costs themselves, while at the same time spending as much money as possible to encourage our customers to give us their cash. This new expense regime comes into effect on 1st January 2010.

(b) Employees are sometimes sent away on business and while this is a necessary part of corporate life, we simply cannot allow such practices to gouge a massive hole in our finances. Therefore from 1st January 2010 all employees who are expected to go on business must pay for hire cars, petrol, fuel, flight tickets, taxis, food, hotels – everything in fact – from their own pockets.

(c) Our company is the best company in the world. Our employees earn an average of £200,000 per annum. However we feel that our employees are fortunate to work at Aggravators Incorporated and therefore must pay for the privilege. We therefore charge each employee the sum of £150,000 per annum for the privilege. We propose to increase profit by raising this employee contribution to £175,000 starting from January 1st 2010.

As you can see, we aim to become the most profitable and richest company in the world. Aggravators Incorporated is already a household name and you can perhaps see why we are such a wonderful company.

Please come to work for us. We are struggling to recruit for reasons that we cannot fathom.

We’re desperate …