Having reached the age of 44, I know that I upset people. As a child, my name, where my family lived in the town, who my father worked for, the fact we did not attend church, the fact we had an old car, old furniture and a black-and-white television were all grounds on which people felt they could despise me, tell me they despised me and then punch me. These days it is the industry I work in, my appearance, my qualifications, the fact that I have an enthusiastic manner and like to chat, that I either ask too many questions or insufficient questions, the fact that I am a white man, my lack of hair, the country I come from, the fact that I drive an old car and my view of politics that stirs people to get vocally upset at my mere presence. Fortunately since reaching the age of 19 I have been spared the physical abuse which was once so common.
The strangest basis on which people get upset at me is the focus of today's posting, i.e. the time I get up in the morning and even more than that, the time myself and the woman who lives in my house go to bed. It is the going to bed time that causes most upset among the people I meet. You might argue that it is no-one's business what time I choose to go to bed and you would be right. However, as I noticed on many occasions on this blog, these days much of the population of the UK feels it has a right to not only judge on a whole host of aspects, many of them very mundane, but to tell you explicitly of its judgement on your behaviour as if without their help you would never have noticed what you were doing 'wrong'. Britain is the home of unasked-for advice; even random strangers in the street feel obliged and unshamed to come up to you and simply tell you the error of your ways. They are aloud to be indignant but you have to be at minimum stoic and preferably grateful for them enlightening you.
Fortunately most people I meet cannot tell what time I go to bed. However, colleagues can. This is especially the case when you have evening events or they telephone you after you have gone to bed. I had a manager two jobs back who found out that I am often in bed before 21.00 and sometimes as early as 19.30 and on that basis he felt I was unsuited to be sent overseas on work and that he was obliged to ridicule me about bedtime every time he met me. The problem for these people seems to stem from the sense that only children go to bed early, so an adult who does so is juvenile and cannot be given responsibility. There is still a lingering macho/macha attitude that you should have the stamina to work long into the night the way Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler were supposed to do, though the latter it is sometimes conceded, slept during the day to make up the time. So early sleeping equals immature, unbusinesslike and weak behaviour; going to bed late suggests you are mature, professional, hard-working even exciting.
These attitudes are very culturally specific and of our era. When the bulk of the population worked in agriculture, in the UK, sometime up to the mid-18th century most people rose and bedded down with the daylight. The woman in my house keeps very much to agricultural hours, something like 04.00-05.00 to rise and 19.00-20.00 to sleep. Her son, aged 10, nowadays goes to bed at 19.30 in the week and 20.00 on Friday and Saturday night, but it is difficult to keep him in bed after 06.00 in the morning especially with his mother awake and working. Acquiring chickens has just added to this tendency in our house as they become impatient if still in their coops after sunrise and alert us to that impatience. I am the late one in our house, getting up at 06.45 in the week (05.00 on Mondays) and sleeping in until 07.30-08.00 at the weekend.
Professions like farmers, bakers, market traders, the remaining milk deliverers all keep such hours. Of course, shift workers have other patterns, working right through the night and sleeping the day or 'early' work something like 06.00-14.00 or 'late' work 14.00-22.00 which mean they have other patterns. This all tends to be forgotten. We are all middle class now, so the assumption is that we all work 09.00-17.00 and so rise no earlier than 07.00 and are happy to stay up until 23.00 each night. Ironically, even working in an office, my day has lengthened and many people I know now do 08.00-17.30 meaning earlier getting up time and so an earlier time to bed. Interestingly the 'lie-in' which seemed such a middle class luxury in the 1970s when people would not get out of bed at the weekend until 12.00 appears to have faded and remains a habit confined to students and other young people who have raved the night away. Whilst late rising is no less 'unusual' than early rising, it retains a cachet of 'cool' whereas early to rise/early to bed just seems 'worthy'.
There are advantages in getting to bed early. Some people, clearly the two other residents of my house, work better early in the morning. The shops are quieter in the morning and with extended opening hours, aside from on Sundays, there is no need to hang around for them to open, you can get out and buy what you needed before the masses reach the supermarket. Perhaps you miss going out in the evening, but being unable to afford to eat at restaurants and being unable to sit comfortably in the cinema and theatre seats in my town I am not missing much that I would be able to do by staying up later.
Getting a decent amount of sleep, which is seen as nine hours for children and teenagers has regularly reported benefits. A key difficulty is the noise. In our district now that all tenants have to smoke outside, doors banging and loud conversations do not only go on in the evening but into the early hours of the morning too. I am lucky, I fall back asleep easily when roused, but the woman in my house finds it far harder. The noise does not have to come from your district, you have to make sure that friends and relatives know not to telephone.
With recordable digital television and catch-up online facilities many of us 'time shift' our television watching anyway and it is far easier to try to access the latest episode of 'Sherlock' on the I-Player at 05.30 than it is at 18.30. The only down side seems to be playing online community games as there are fewer people (though never none) to partner up with at that time of the morning. Email which is my main form of communication for work and leisure is asynchronous anyway and it is rare that I am able to answer a phonecall when it comes in, it is far more common to have answerphone to answerphone conversations.
If we manage to go through with our plan of relocating to living on a co-operative farm, then the sleep patterns will be an advantage rather than something to conceal. However, for now, having experienced the prejudice of revealing that you are in bed before the ten o'clock news comes, this is something that I intend to keep as secret from friends, colleagues and especially managers as much as I can.
Showing posts with label managers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label managers. Show all posts
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Sunday, 1 April 2012
Trying Not To Become Contaminated With Hatred
As regular readers of this blog will know my line manager in my current job has systematically driven me from it. She has set up conflicting demands, i.e. that by dismissing any suggestion I make as irrelevant or 'inappropriate', even striking through proposals I have written and then complains that I defer to her too much and do not propose innovations. Similarly she complained that I bothered her too much coming to talk to her about things, so I reduced that and used more emails, but that too is wrong as now I am not speaking to her sufficiently and not asking 'probing questions'. She says she finds me too submissive but fears coming to speak to me.
One reason for not asking probing questions and getting everything written down, as I have explained before, is because she forgets what she has said to me previously, for example, switching the days of regular meetings and twice altering the number of copies of reports that have to be produced. Now, there is no problem changing your mind, but when she has she insists it must be me who was doing it deliberately wrongly as she could 'never' have thought the other way let alone given instructions saying that. I have tried to fit in with everything she instructs but even that is apparently inappropriate 'complying' or 'fitting in' with her wishes is the wrong attitude, so she says, though she cannot indicate the right attitude I would adopt, it is just that I am wrong.
Anyway, in the current pattern of working in the UK, the line manager decides everything and so removes you by the rules she sets with no come-back. Thus, over a period of nine months not only has this job proven to be impossible for me to hold on to, no matter what I try to do, it has effectively brought my career to an end at the age of 44. Ahead lies having my house repossessed and a long period of unemployment for me, simply because of the caprice and personal prejudices of one manager.
Obviously all of this has caused stress for me as I have sought ways to please my manager and cling on to my job only for her to come back with new criticisms in the highly indignant way which is apparently the common attitude. My very behaviour is insulting and apparently even a question I asked at a public lecture was insulting to her and 'an embarrassment' to myself and the unit, despite the fact that the lecture was unrelated to the work of my company let alone my unit. Apparently, I am both too confident and outspoken, but insufficiently positive and by that very fact I disparage the unit. I would ask anyone how could they be positive when facing such criticism especially when it is often contradictory. I think I am doing well not to have had a nervous breakdown faced with such Kafkaesque treatment.
I know I will not work again for a long time and that all that I have worked for over the past ten years has been trashed in less than hat in months. One challenge going forward is not holding on to hatred. It is so easy to curse my boss and just to think, 'what if?' before one of these nasty meetings (typically lasting 2-3 hours). What if her car broke down, what if she was attacked in the street, what if she fell ill, what if someone found something to complain about her for, what if someone made her comply with the rules of the company, what if her friends in high places disowned her, or even better, turned on her? It is very easy, sometimes consoling to run through these scenarios. However, I realise how corrosive such thoughts can be. I have written recently about how anger might feel good, but like a narcotic actually damages you and hatred is much the same.
I am undecided on whether I believe in karma, but I do think that you can trigger some immediate effect if you let yourself hate. It begins to blind you to how someone else believes. Perhaps my manager has set out intentionally to do me harm, but it is more likely that she genuinely believes she is right to criticise me and remove me from the company, that I am truly insulting and will damage the reputation of her and the business she works for. If I cannot see the way she sees the world then I cannot be alert to things I might be able to do to make things that little bit less unpleasant for me. Another thing, I realise, is that I am probably well out-of-step with current business culture, in which you are free to take individual words or even tone of voice as something which causes offence to you, for which you have to become vocally indignant and visibly horrified. I must say some of the 'horrified' performances are quite comic as if the manager in question has suddenly gone back to the days of Jane Austen and seen an inappropriately clad man emerging from the lake.
Though I do not like Catherine Tate's 'comic characters', I think the phrase of one of them 'how very dare you?' perfectly sums up the indignant tone so often used; self-righteousness taken to an absurd level. Maybe the absurdity is why I am slow to spot that such an attitude is a weapon that can be turned against anyone they choose. By being offended you stop the question being one of a difference of opinion and turn it immediately into a moral question, one in which you have already seized the 'high ground'. In addition the horror expressed at the view disagreed with means that they can shut down any rational discussion, 'it's so offensive, I can't talk about it' means that they can make a charge, define that it is bad and shoot down any challenge all in one.
Perhaps rather than anger, I should pity the people who are so lacking in business skills that they have to resort to such tricks simply to get their way. Getting their way is a key goal, not just in substance but down to the minute details, individual words, colour of text, absolutely everything. For them getting 99% of what they want is not enough. Even with 100% it is not 'wrong' or 'inappropriate' if not expressed precisely the way they want it (even if they never actually tell you this). Unless you can read your manager's mind you are going to suffer. Maybe I am less tolerant of this attitude than some people but I have seen even very good workers who are praised across their departments, criticised over small issues, sending an email a day later than expected (even with two weeks remaining before the deadline) and not expressing something the exact way the manager wants. Even such petty things they are told, is 'letting the side down'.
I am getting back into repeating my postings about indignitaries and this posting is about something different, even though in my case it has been prompted by indignitary behaviour. What I check myself from doing is running through all this speculation of how bad or even mildly discomforting things should happen to my line manager, even if in part as some kind of balance for the unpleasantness she has assiduously inflicted on me, whatever her motive. Beginning to have thoughts like these are the first step on being contaminated by hatred. Such fantasies begin to dominate your waking thoughts, perhaps even your dreams. They can easily become more extreme. Talking with friends and colleagues it was fascinating how one advised me in all seriousness to shoot my manager and that he being in with certain people in West London could organise that. Another said how he had identified the car park at the company which had no CCTV surveillance and was near to a public exit to the site so was the ideal one for assaulting people returning to their car! To some degree it is heartening to think that I am not alone in thinking this way about our company's management, but on the other hand, it alarmed me to think that I was at risk of becoming like these two, just a step away from actual violence.
I know that simple prejudice at work can muck up your entire life and the lives of those people around you. Violence would do that to a greater extent, not only messing up the life of the manager, perhaps she would simply brush it off, but others around her and of course, myself and others around me. I do worry that if she is mugged or burgled or her car vandalised, already it is me at the top of the suspect list which would put me into even worse circumstances. In addition, it is corrosive to think this way. If there is no way you can get at being treated so badly by your manager, then you have to rely on non-human sources.
I think the reason why karma and 'vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord' were brought in for humans was to stop them wasting their lives. It is so easy to get into a frame of mind in which you think about how the person might come unstuck from severe action you might take against them to humiliate or discredit them to simple things such as their car breaking down on their way to the meeting at which they are going to treat you so badly. This clogs up your brain and means you fail to focus on things like trying to get another job or engaging with effective ways of winning some compensation, Thoughts of revenge easily become your entire focus and sap your energy. While the target is probably oblivious to your thoughts, you are effectively helping them to win by damaging your own life on top of the damage they have already inflicted.
It can be stunning how many people cannot see beyond their own egos. Not only my current manager but also bullies in the past have believed that I 'need to see' that what they are doing is 'right' because it is nothing more than common sense. Their view of the world is so distorted that they set their own moral boundaries. I have sometimes thought what characterises evil and have come to a conclusion that it is a focus which is just on the benefit of the individual and however that can be achieved, with no thought or even disapproval of those affected by the actions of the evil person. If we look at real evil people (as opposed to portrayals) they generally do not believe they are evil. Think of the serial killers and the war criminals, they all believe what they did was 'right' even 'moral'. Yet by objective judgement they are evil. Now I am not equating my manager with such criminals, but it seems all too common that you have people in business who are so focused on their own personal advancement and ensuring their personal perspectives are the only acceptable ones that they begin to stray into modes of behaviour that we see among the genuinely evil.
Everyone, even the most powerful will face people they feel hard done by, whether this is genuine or not. In some/most/all cases we can wreak retribution on these people. Yet to be obsessed in planning to do so, let alone acting on it, we are further corroding ourselves. We become consumed, literally, eaten up by the need for revenge. It strips us of our faculties, we can no longer see clearly, we can no longer hear differing advice, we cannot think about other things, certainly we lose enjoyment. We all hope that 'whatever comes around, goes around' and that the person gets their come-uppance. Of course, quite often we never see them 'fall', but from the moment they begin treating us and others badly, they are beginning to lose and they will continue losing. Perhaps not in the financial sense, but in the fact that they chip away at their humanity and people respond to that.
For all her apparent success, no-one trusts my manager and they only do what she wants not out of respect but from fear of their own positions, something which will no doubt increase now they have seen what has been done to me and how quickly. Things will be done for her at best in a lacklustre way. In addition even the CEO of a company cannot work in a vacuum they need to hear differing perspectives to their own. If they are not then the company will falter, not immediately but steadily. This is happening in my context already no-one is warning my manager of the pitfalls she is walking into. To do so would be to risk being treated the way I have been. Being way behind schedule in planning a prestige event, not keeping the website updated, jobs she has taken on herself but is neglecting because she puts no store by the views of colleagues; only she can be right. When your views are rejected so often you stop giving your view. Consequently you can already see she is walking head long into failure. Her obsession with the advertising of an upcoming prestige event has meant she has neglected the organisation of the event and with less than four weeks to go has only a single speaker for the whole day. There is no incentive for me to step in and try to rectify that. My ideas have now been taken up by her and have become 'hers' but her obsession with style over substance means that the event will fail, it is too late to prevent this now.
It is hard not to wallow in anger and a desire for revenge against someone who has treated you badly. However, with reflection it can be seen that it does more harm to you than to them. In addition, there will be revenge maybe that you will never witness, but it will come. A person who is a bully reaps the consequences of such behaviour and will fail. Their narrow focus means they miss the warning signs and they will not listen to any alerts that they are busily marching towards such an outcome. You have to accept that some balance ensure they will not escape unpunished by their behaviour and instead cut yourself off from concerning yourself any longer with that person otherwise you risk being dragged down into their morass alongside them.
One reason for not asking probing questions and getting everything written down, as I have explained before, is because she forgets what she has said to me previously, for example, switching the days of regular meetings and twice altering the number of copies of reports that have to be produced. Now, there is no problem changing your mind, but when she has she insists it must be me who was doing it deliberately wrongly as she could 'never' have thought the other way let alone given instructions saying that. I have tried to fit in with everything she instructs but even that is apparently inappropriate 'complying' or 'fitting in' with her wishes is the wrong attitude, so she says, though she cannot indicate the right attitude I would adopt, it is just that I am wrong.
Anyway, in the current pattern of working in the UK, the line manager decides everything and so removes you by the rules she sets with no come-back. Thus, over a period of nine months not only has this job proven to be impossible for me to hold on to, no matter what I try to do, it has effectively brought my career to an end at the age of 44. Ahead lies having my house repossessed and a long period of unemployment for me, simply because of the caprice and personal prejudices of one manager.
Obviously all of this has caused stress for me as I have sought ways to please my manager and cling on to my job only for her to come back with new criticisms in the highly indignant way which is apparently the common attitude. My very behaviour is insulting and apparently even a question I asked at a public lecture was insulting to her and 'an embarrassment' to myself and the unit, despite the fact that the lecture was unrelated to the work of my company let alone my unit. Apparently, I am both too confident and outspoken, but insufficiently positive and by that very fact I disparage the unit. I would ask anyone how could they be positive when facing such criticism especially when it is often contradictory. I think I am doing well not to have had a nervous breakdown faced with such Kafkaesque treatment.
I know I will not work again for a long time and that all that I have worked for over the past ten years has been trashed in less than hat in months. One challenge going forward is not holding on to hatred. It is so easy to curse my boss and just to think, 'what if?' before one of these nasty meetings (typically lasting 2-3 hours). What if her car broke down, what if she was attacked in the street, what if she fell ill, what if someone found something to complain about her for, what if someone made her comply with the rules of the company, what if her friends in high places disowned her, or even better, turned on her? It is very easy, sometimes consoling to run through these scenarios. However, I realise how corrosive such thoughts can be. I have written recently about how anger might feel good, but like a narcotic actually damages you and hatred is much the same.
I am undecided on whether I believe in karma, but I do think that you can trigger some immediate effect if you let yourself hate. It begins to blind you to how someone else believes. Perhaps my manager has set out intentionally to do me harm, but it is more likely that she genuinely believes she is right to criticise me and remove me from the company, that I am truly insulting and will damage the reputation of her and the business she works for. If I cannot see the way she sees the world then I cannot be alert to things I might be able to do to make things that little bit less unpleasant for me. Another thing, I realise, is that I am probably well out-of-step with current business culture, in which you are free to take individual words or even tone of voice as something which causes offence to you, for which you have to become vocally indignant and visibly horrified. I must say some of the 'horrified' performances are quite comic as if the manager in question has suddenly gone back to the days of Jane Austen and seen an inappropriately clad man emerging from the lake.
Though I do not like Catherine Tate's 'comic characters', I think the phrase of one of them 'how very dare you?' perfectly sums up the indignant tone so often used; self-righteousness taken to an absurd level. Maybe the absurdity is why I am slow to spot that such an attitude is a weapon that can be turned against anyone they choose. By being offended you stop the question being one of a difference of opinion and turn it immediately into a moral question, one in which you have already seized the 'high ground'. In addition the horror expressed at the view disagreed with means that they can shut down any rational discussion, 'it's so offensive, I can't talk about it' means that they can make a charge, define that it is bad and shoot down any challenge all in one.
Perhaps rather than anger, I should pity the people who are so lacking in business skills that they have to resort to such tricks simply to get their way. Getting their way is a key goal, not just in substance but down to the minute details, individual words, colour of text, absolutely everything. For them getting 99% of what they want is not enough. Even with 100% it is not 'wrong' or 'inappropriate' if not expressed precisely the way they want it (even if they never actually tell you this). Unless you can read your manager's mind you are going to suffer. Maybe I am less tolerant of this attitude than some people but I have seen even very good workers who are praised across their departments, criticised over small issues, sending an email a day later than expected (even with two weeks remaining before the deadline) and not expressing something the exact way the manager wants. Even such petty things they are told, is 'letting the side down'.
I am getting back into repeating my postings about indignitaries and this posting is about something different, even though in my case it has been prompted by indignitary behaviour. What I check myself from doing is running through all this speculation of how bad or even mildly discomforting things should happen to my line manager, even if in part as some kind of balance for the unpleasantness she has assiduously inflicted on me, whatever her motive. Beginning to have thoughts like these are the first step on being contaminated by hatred. Such fantasies begin to dominate your waking thoughts, perhaps even your dreams. They can easily become more extreme. Talking with friends and colleagues it was fascinating how one advised me in all seriousness to shoot my manager and that he being in with certain people in West London could organise that. Another said how he had identified the car park at the company which had no CCTV surveillance and was near to a public exit to the site so was the ideal one for assaulting people returning to their car! To some degree it is heartening to think that I am not alone in thinking this way about our company's management, but on the other hand, it alarmed me to think that I was at risk of becoming like these two, just a step away from actual violence.
I know that simple prejudice at work can muck up your entire life and the lives of those people around you. Violence would do that to a greater extent, not only messing up the life of the manager, perhaps she would simply brush it off, but others around her and of course, myself and others around me. I do worry that if she is mugged or burgled or her car vandalised, already it is me at the top of the suspect list which would put me into even worse circumstances. In addition, it is corrosive to think this way. If there is no way you can get at being treated so badly by your manager, then you have to rely on non-human sources.
I think the reason why karma and 'vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord' were brought in for humans was to stop them wasting their lives. It is so easy to get into a frame of mind in which you think about how the person might come unstuck from severe action you might take against them to humiliate or discredit them to simple things such as their car breaking down on their way to the meeting at which they are going to treat you so badly. This clogs up your brain and means you fail to focus on things like trying to get another job or engaging with effective ways of winning some compensation, Thoughts of revenge easily become your entire focus and sap your energy. While the target is probably oblivious to your thoughts, you are effectively helping them to win by damaging your own life on top of the damage they have already inflicted.
It can be stunning how many people cannot see beyond their own egos. Not only my current manager but also bullies in the past have believed that I 'need to see' that what they are doing is 'right' because it is nothing more than common sense. Their view of the world is so distorted that they set their own moral boundaries. I have sometimes thought what characterises evil and have come to a conclusion that it is a focus which is just on the benefit of the individual and however that can be achieved, with no thought or even disapproval of those affected by the actions of the evil person. If we look at real evil people (as opposed to portrayals) they generally do not believe they are evil. Think of the serial killers and the war criminals, they all believe what they did was 'right' even 'moral'. Yet by objective judgement they are evil. Now I am not equating my manager with such criminals, but it seems all too common that you have people in business who are so focused on their own personal advancement and ensuring their personal perspectives are the only acceptable ones that they begin to stray into modes of behaviour that we see among the genuinely evil.
Everyone, even the most powerful will face people they feel hard done by, whether this is genuine or not. In some/most/all cases we can wreak retribution on these people. Yet to be obsessed in planning to do so, let alone acting on it, we are further corroding ourselves. We become consumed, literally, eaten up by the need for revenge. It strips us of our faculties, we can no longer see clearly, we can no longer hear differing advice, we cannot think about other things, certainly we lose enjoyment. We all hope that 'whatever comes around, goes around' and that the person gets their come-uppance. Of course, quite often we never see them 'fall', but from the moment they begin treating us and others badly, they are beginning to lose and they will continue losing. Perhaps not in the financial sense, but in the fact that they chip away at their humanity and people respond to that.
For all her apparent success, no-one trusts my manager and they only do what she wants not out of respect but from fear of their own positions, something which will no doubt increase now they have seen what has been done to me and how quickly. Things will be done for her at best in a lacklustre way. In addition even the CEO of a company cannot work in a vacuum they need to hear differing perspectives to their own. If they are not then the company will falter, not immediately but steadily. This is happening in my context already no-one is warning my manager of the pitfalls she is walking into. To do so would be to risk being treated the way I have been. Being way behind schedule in planning a prestige event, not keeping the website updated, jobs she has taken on herself but is neglecting because she puts no store by the views of colleagues; only she can be right. When your views are rejected so often you stop giving your view. Consequently you can already see she is walking head long into failure. Her obsession with the advertising of an upcoming prestige event has meant she has neglected the organisation of the event and with less than four weeks to go has only a single speaker for the whole day. There is no incentive for me to step in and try to rectify that. My ideas have now been taken up by her and have become 'hers' but her obsession with style over substance means that the event will fail, it is too late to prevent this now.
It is hard not to wallow in anger and a desire for revenge against someone who has treated you badly. However, with reflection it can be seen that it does more harm to you than to them. In addition, there will be revenge maybe that you will never witness, but it will come. A person who is a bully reaps the consequences of such behaviour and will fail. Their narrow focus means they miss the warning signs and they will not listen to any alerts that they are busily marching towards such an outcome. You have to accept that some balance ensure they will not escape unpunished by their behaviour and instead cut yourself off from concerning yourself any longer with that person otherwise you risk being dragged down into their morass alongside them.
Sunday, 11 March 2012
Caution: Indignitaries At Work
I am now in line to be kicked out of my job. It is not on the grounds that I have stolen money or harrassed anyone or even was incompetent, it is simply that my manager dislikes me. She somehow sees my very person let alone my manner, offensive. She complains I repeat myself and write too long emails and yet goes on at length repeatedly around the office whining the same stories to everyone about her washing machine. She complains I do not meet the 'high standards' of the department, primarily on the basis that I lack 'team spirit' a very ill-defined criterion which basically comes down to whatever she thinks it should be. It has nothing to do with being a colleague as I have worked successfully with the other seven people in my office and tens of others across the company. What is alarming is how a single manager has so much power, how she can set different rules for me to my colleagues. I am supposed to eat elsewhere, I am supposed to knock more loudly on her door than my colleagues, I have to notify her in a particular way if I have to go to the doctor, something my colleagues do not have to do. She complains that I am too outspoken but also that I defer to her too much. There are no objective measures of her criteria which allows her to say such contradictory things at one time. She spends so much time socialising with senior staff, taking up a large part of the working day, that they take her views without question. I have tried to talk to her manager and simply have been told he cannot discuss the case. There is no-one I can turn to bar the union representative and I have no idea what you do in such situations if you are not in a union.
For me the severity of this step is great. I am liable to be kicked out with no pay and so will immediately default on the mortgage payments on my house meaning that my fears of having it repossessed have only been delayed by a year. It seems unlikely that I will work again as I will be unable to get anything but a highly biased reference from my manager. I have explored the problems with this particular manager before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-are-british-managers-so-bad.html
Looking back I wonder if I could have done anything different to forestall this problem and the answer seems to be no. The case against me has been built on such insubstantial complaints that if it had not been these then it would have been something else. Basically the difficulties were two emails which apparently were critical of how my unit worked, though you would struggle to find that meaning in what I wrote. I suppose that I should not have said that I had no ability to control scheduling, the thing that the correspondent was making a mild complaint against. Apparently I was supposed to accept blame for things I cannot control. I was told I should not have said a colleague was off sick, even though that is completely the reverse approach to the previous place I worked. There they felt if you did not reveal the cause of the shortage of staff as something legitimate like illness then you were effectively criticising the company for not looking ahead sensibly to recruit sufficient staff. A more established in my office made the identical error some weeks later and while he has been chastised for it he is not being kicked out. I also said that my job did not involve cleaning up, which is a statement of fact. However, in a twisted way, this has been portrayed as being an unacceptable statement, on the grounds that it is both disparaging to cleaners who do a wonderful job; makes me appear as arrogant due to my qualifications and experience and yet also is said to show I have no pride in myself and thus, by implication no pride in my colleagues, thus violating the team spirit requirement. This statement was apparently so offensive that it led to a complaint being telephoned in by a visitor.
The last damning charge is that I did not inform my manager correctly before going to a hospital appointment despite it being in the Outlook system she can access for weeks and me talking about it with her for 10 minutes precisely a day before I went. Apparently it is fine that she forgot the conversation and she argues that she cannot afford the few seconds it takes to check the Outlook calendar. It is also apparently acceptable for her to stamp around the office demanding where I am, when just asking one of the colleagues could have revealed that. My behaviour is portrayed as 'discourteous' whereas hers is apparently beyond reproach though to most readers I would assume it would appear at best childish at worst idiotic, but maybe I am wrong in modern British society.
This is the key factor: indignation. In our powerless society, it seems that no-one can be anyone I am the first to admit that I make mistakes, but I learn from them. In addition, I have never done anything that is so severe it should lose you your job. Is it fair that individual words, assuming they are not racist, sexist or otherwise insulting should be enough to bring down your career? Maybe in this era of unemployment it is sufficient and we should all look at every single word we use thinking how it might be turned against us.
Of course, it is impossible to see through someone else's eyes, so what to us might be anondyne, apparently can be highly inappropriate to someone else. I have neither violated what society would deem acceptable nor what my company does, just what my manager 'feels' is unacceptable. That is not even direct criticism, but apparently something that seems to her as being insufficiently ardent in singing the praises of the unit she runs. From my historical knowledge such mentality seems very much like a personality cult and I am someone like those who stopped clapping some seconds before the rest of the people having heard one of Stalin's or Mao's speeches. Of course, I will not be killed but at the age of 44, my career is over and I have effectively become unemployable for the rest of my life.
As I have noted before, it is no longer sufficient in the UK to complain about something, you have to stamp and shout at your loudest. Neither is it sufficient to be irritated, annoyed or put out, you must be utterly appalled, completely indignant, generally way out of proportion to what has happened: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/12/rise-of-indignitaries.html I suppose given the prevalence of this trend in society we should not be surprised to find it in the workplace. It is exacerbated by procedures like performance reviews, appraisals, probation periods, fixed-term contracts which put immense power into the hands of often poorly trained managers certainly without an ability to detach personal prejudice from their judgements of work effectiveness. It is a kind of focused discrimination, not on race, age or gender, but simply on who they like or dislike. Staff of all levels will not discuss or debate or really just complain they become indignant as if even the most minor misunderstanding has been concocted with malicious intent, both offensive in itself and aimed at bringing the company into disrepute. Of course, none of these things is done that way. However, not being indignant gives away the few grams of power they feel they have snatched and, horror of horrors, they might be forced to admit that they are sometimes wrong, something my manager seems incapable of acknowledging. Thus, by being so offended, she can play, 'it is so terrible I cannot even talk about it' card, shutting down any reasonable rational debate.
As I have noted before, the clamping down on discussion let alone the suggestion of different approaches or Heaven forbid, even mild criticism, is damaging to British business: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html I have no idea when I might work again and it seems unlikely that it will ever be for a large company. I am naturally bitter that years of study and hard work can be trashed by the prejudice of a single individual, but I imagine it is a common occurrence. There was nothing I could have done once I got the job. If I kept quiet I was being rude and not taking sufficient initiative, if I spoke I was being rude and arrogant. There was never a way of winning and never any redemption for my 'offences'. I just post this as a warning for people who might be in similar positions, I do pity you, yet I fear this approach in the workplace will become even more common as incompetent people remain in position and unemployment rises higher.
For me the severity of this step is great. I am liable to be kicked out with no pay and so will immediately default on the mortgage payments on my house meaning that my fears of having it repossessed have only been delayed by a year. It seems unlikely that I will work again as I will be unable to get anything but a highly biased reference from my manager. I have explored the problems with this particular manager before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-are-british-managers-so-bad.html
Looking back I wonder if I could have done anything different to forestall this problem and the answer seems to be no. The case against me has been built on such insubstantial complaints that if it had not been these then it would have been something else. Basically the difficulties were two emails which apparently were critical of how my unit worked, though you would struggle to find that meaning in what I wrote. I suppose that I should not have said that I had no ability to control scheduling, the thing that the correspondent was making a mild complaint against. Apparently I was supposed to accept blame for things I cannot control. I was told I should not have said a colleague was off sick, even though that is completely the reverse approach to the previous place I worked. There they felt if you did not reveal the cause of the shortage of staff as something legitimate like illness then you were effectively criticising the company for not looking ahead sensibly to recruit sufficient staff. A more established in my office made the identical error some weeks later and while he has been chastised for it he is not being kicked out. I also said that my job did not involve cleaning up, which is a statement of fact. However, in a twisted way, this has been portrayed as being an unacceptable statement, on the grounds that it is both disparaging to cleaners who do a wonderful job; makes me appear as arrogant due to my qualifications and experience and yet also is said to show I have no pride in myself and thus, by implication no pride in my colleagues, thus violating the team spirit requirement. This statement was apparently so offensive that it led to a complaint being telephoned in by a visitor.
The last damning charge is that I did not inform my manager correctly before going to a hospital appointment despite it being in the Outlook system she can access for weeks and me talking about it with her for 10 minutes precisely a day before I went. Apparently it is fine that she forgot the conversation and she argues that she cannot afford the few seconds it takes to check the Outlook calendar. It is also apparently acceptable for her to stamp around the office demanding where I am, when just asking one of the colleagues could have revealed that. My behaviour is portrayed as 'discourteous' whereas hers is apparently beyond reproach though to most readers I would assume it would appear at best childish at worst idiotic, but maybe I am wrong in modern British society.
This is the key factor: indignation. In our powerless society, it seems that no-one can be anyone I am the first to admit that I make mistakes, but I learn from them. In addition, I have never done anything that is so severe it should lose you your job. Is it fair that individual words, assuming they are not racist, sexist or otherwise insulting should be enough to bring down your career? Maybe in this era of unemployment it is sufficient and we should all look at every single word we use thinking how it might be turned against us.
Of course, it is impossible to see through someone else's eyes, so what to us might be anondyne, apparently can be highly inappropriate to someone else. I have neither violated what society would deem acceptable nor what my company does, just what my manager 'feels' is unacceptable. That is not even direct criticism, but apparently something that seems to her as being insufficiently ardent in singing the praises of the unit she runs. From my historical knowledge such mentality seems very much like a personality cult and I am someone like those who stopped clapping some seconds before the rest of the people having heard one of Stalin's or Mao's speeches. Of course, I will not be killed but at the age of 44, my career is over and I have effectively become unemployable for the rest of my life.
As I have noted before, it is no longer sufficient in the UK to complain about something, you have to stamp and shout at your loudest. Neither is it sufficient to be irritated, annoyed or put out, you must be utterly appalled, completely indignant, generally way out of proportion to what has happened: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/12/rise-of-indignitaries.html I suppose given the prevalence of this trend in society we should not be surprised to find it in the workplace. It is exacerbated by procedures like performance reviews, appraisals, probation periods, fixed-term contracts which put immense power into the hands of often poorly trained managers certainly without an ability to detach personal prejudice from their judgements of work effectiveness. It is a kind of focused discrimination, not on race, age or gender, but simply on who they like or dislike. Staff of all levels will not discuss or debate or really just complain they become indignant as if even the most minor misunderstanding has been concocted with malicious intent, both offensive in itself and aimed at bringing the company into disrepute. Of course, none of these things is done that way. However, not being indignant gives away the few grams of power they feel they have snatched and, horror of horrors, they might be forced to admit that they are sometimes wrong, something my manager seems incapable of acknowledging. Thus, by being so offended, she can play, 'it is so terrible I cannot even talk about it' card, shutting down any reasonable rational debate.
As I have noted before, the clamping down on discussion let alone the suggestion of different approaches or Heaven forbid, even mild criticism, is damaging to British business: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html I have no idea when I might work again and it seems unlikely that it will ever be for a large company. I am naturally bitter that years of study and hard work can be trashed by the prejudice of a single individual, but I imagine it is a common occurrence. There was nothing I could have done once I got the job. If I kept quiet I was being rude and not taking sufficient initiative, if I spoke I was being rude and arrogant. There was never a way of winning and never any redemption for my 'offences'. I just post this as a warning for people who might be in similar positions, I do pity you, yet I fear this approach in the workplace will become even more common as incompetent people remain in position and unemployment rises higher.
Friday, 9 March 2012
My Changing Views Of Anger
I suppose many blogs show a 'journey' of the person blogging. I had never intended that for this blog, it was simply a way for me to relieve myself of many of the thoughts and particularly irritations in my mind. It was also an outlet when I have felt powerless against what seems to have been an incessant chain of bad landlords and bad managers causing me such grief. However, recently I read a quotation from Buddha that said 'You will not be punished for your anger, but by your anger.' and I realised that I now understood that statement. In addition, in doing so I could see a great change from the attitude I had about anger back in October 2008: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/10/anger-reasons-i-have-it.html
Do not worry, this is not going to be some pitch about how I found God or Buddha or anything like that, it is simply me reflecting on why and how I came to hold an opposite opinion to one I held before. Regular readers will know that it is rare for me to shift my opinion on anything which is what makes this case unusual. At the time I could see the reasons for having anger and it did make me feel good. I felt just as powerless as I do these days facing up to the weight of the economy, finding sustained work and maintaining a place to live. Constantly I seemed to encounter people who wanted to rub my face in the mud and I had no ability to get back at them. That has not changed, I have a manager who treats me as some combination between a rude idiot and an aggressive threat and picks me up on rules she has made up after the fact. That is the second manager I have had like that and between them they have ruined my career. I was able to get away from landlords in 2007 but since being made redundant in 2009 I have regularly faced the worry of having the house repossessed and have only be saved by loans from my family and HM Revenue & Customs accepting that it had wrongly taxed me £16,000 back in 2007. Thus, problems have not gone away from me and, in fact, unemployment is far higher now and the economy in much a worse state than back in 2008 making the near future appear even bleaker.
What has changed is that I realised that anger was a drug. Some people facing the difficulties I was facing and feeling so powerless of oppose them would have turned to alcohol or narcotics or over-eating, perhaps to violence or self-harm. Some people are able to buckle down and simply tolerate what is being inflicted on them, but they are rare. We live in a society where public anger is now incredibly commonplace. Every time you drive, every time you go to a supermarket or try to check in for an aeroplane or to catch a train there is a good chance in the UK that you will see unbridled fury. Typically it is not over anything major, usually the reverse, that someone is driving at a different speed to you or will not let you into a queue or is simply in the wrong car or you cannot find the product you want or it has sold out or the company has made a mistake on your ticket or the flight or train has been cancelled. These are nothing compared to the anger you should feel against a government which is destroying opportunities, education, pensions and the health service and telling us we should be glad about it. Yet, while we know we can do absolutely nothing to change David Cameron's mind, we feel, however unlikely, that if we shout and make a fuss, we can squeeze out some change to our benefit; the car driver will feel ashamed or we will be 'bumped up' on to a flight or a train. Over the past decades we have been tutored to believe this by what we witness in public and on television programmes. It is strength by the sense that is so powerful of resentment against those who are getting some that we are not.
Over the past few years, even before I went into counselling as a result of mistreatment in my current job, I came to realise that anger achieved very little, no more than getting drunk would do. It made me feel good for a short time but the come down in terms of high blood pressure and constipation were just like a hangover after alcohol and actually made it harder to deal with the problems the next day. Being angry you see things only from your own perspective. You know your limits and forget that those around you do not. This was the impact on the woman and boy who lived in my house. They saw me shouting and hitting the furniture and wondered if it would be them next that I would hit. They saw me revving the car engine and felt powerless as they had no control over whether I rammed into the car in front of me or not. Reassurance and even repeated examples when nothing dire occurs makes it no less frightening to them wondering if 'this time' something more severe would occur.
This links to the next issue is that even in a life when everything seems a battle there are scraps of light. Not going all religious, this is simple things like having a good meal or just all of you sat in front of the television or just laughing about something silly or remembering a good day. They may only be scraps but I found these were being over-shadowed literally by the 'fear and loathing'. In turn this meant that I did not even have these scraps of happiness to fall back on so meaning that I then lacked the kind of resources I needed to deal well with all the nastiness I was facing, especially at work. The two worlds were contaminating each other and that meant there was no refuge. It was easy to get into a vicious circle. Whilst unemployment dropped me into new problems it gave me the time to change things. Partly it was because I was freed from having a nasty manager waiting to pick up any new imagined example of an error in order to hound me with it. Instead I was in my home all the time and had reasonably behaving job centre staff to deal with once per fortnight rather than malicious colleagues every day. In between applying for jobs, I also took the opportunity to look at anger management. This came in part from prompting from the woman who lived in my house, but also from having just one too many anger hangovers - constipation concentrates the mind very well.
Then I found that it is incredibly difficult to get help with anger management. My experience in this respect was very much the same as when I tried to seek help as I came closer to being unable to pay my mortgage. I contacted the building society when I had enough money to pay three months' mortgage payments and they would not discuss the issue with me. They said I had to be down to the final month's payment before they could even talk about it. To me this seemed ridiculous. They did not seem to realise that talking about the situation would have taken some pressure off me and most likely would have meant better performance at interviews and so the chance of getting a job to pay the mortgage. The same situation occurred with anger management. I found that in my town the last courses in anger management had ended two years earlier and that nowadays they only train counsellors in anger management for counties around; I would have had to travel to London for such help. Anger management in my town is only available to people who have been referred to it by the courts or social welfare. Thus, as with defaulting with the mortgage, it was only at the final stage that help became available. To me this seems short-sighted, but I guess it comes from targeting money at those who need it the most rather than preventing problems from developing.
Given that I could find no groups or individuals to help, I thought 'well, I am an intelligent man, surely there are some books or something I can use'. Well it turned out that I could find no books on anger management, again except for professionals counselling people rather than for those suffering from anger problems. I guess the sense is that someone suffering anger will not be able to see that they need help. However, I was able to find bits of references from extensive internet searches to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). This sounded rather alarmingly like some pseudo-science, but actually turned out to be something legitimate. It would have been the approach I would have been exposed to if I had applied for one of the courses two years earlier. What I liked was that looked to treat causes rather than symptoms. There is a lot on the internet about methods to reduce anger such as meditation but these did not seem feasible when you are driving and experience 'road rage'. The NLP advocates likened most anger management to fixing a tyre when you had driven over broken glass and their method as being one that took you down a road without broken glass. Anyway, from various sources I found exercises that I was able to do on my own. Surprisingly, I found I quickly got into a 'virtuous circle' as being able to break the narcotic pleasure of anger I saw it was only doing harm and as anger became rarer it lost the psychological 'high' and feeling of power it had once given. I was then able to recover those scraps of life that made me happy and in turn the two people living in my house felt more reassured so a feedback loop developed,
I have not reached a situation in which I am never angry, especially when dealing with computer games. However, I can identify the symptoms so much faster and change what I am doing. Probably the largest change has come in driving, knowing that I am giving power to worthless people if I get worked up when they hoot or flash or shout at me. They are dangerous drivers and I need to get away from them, typically slowing down helps in that situation. I think I felt I had a 'right' to anger something which was exacerbated because I was told I had other rights, no right to work, no right to enjoy a house without hassle, no right not to be treated as an idiot/inappropriate/to be dismissed, no right to drive my car without being forced off the road and so on. However, I see now that the anger actually just made the things that I had under-valued, have less value. Anger contaminates everything it touches and you need to be going in the opposite direction. If you can derive happiness from lots of small and simple things then you become more robust. You do not need a god to show you that, you can do it yourself. Once you do, you then build up a reserve of some sort of energy that allows you to resist the trouble people seem so intent on pressing down on you, much more effectively. Another trick that I have learnt since from counselling is to keep home and work in different silos, but that is a story for another day.
Do not worry, this is not going to be some pitch about how I found God or Buddha or anything like that, it is simply me reflecting on why and how I came to hold an opposite opinion to one I held before. Regular readers will know that it is rare for me to shift my opinion on anything which is what makes this case unusual. At the time I could see the reasons for having anger and it did make me feel good. I felt just as powerless as I do these days facing up to the weight of the economy, finding sustained work and maintaining a place to live. Constantly I seemed to encounter people who wanted to rub my face in the mud and I had no ability to get back at them. That has not changed, I have a manager who treats me as some combination between a rude idiot and an aggressive threat and picks me up on rules she has made up after the fact. That is the second manager I have had like that and between them they have ruined my career. I was able to get away from landlords in 2007 but since being made redundant in 2009 I have regularly faced the worry of having the house repossessed and have only be saved by loans from my family and HM Revenue & Customs accepting that it had wrongly taxed me £16,000 back in 2007. Thus, problems have not gone away from me and, in fact, unemployment is far higher now and the economy in much a worse state than back in 2008 making the near future appear even bleaker.
What has changed is that I realised that anger was a drug. Some people facing the difficulties I was facing and feeling so powerless of oppose them would have turned to alcohol or narcotics or over-eating, perhaps to violence or self-harm. Some people are able to buckle down and simply tolerate what is being inflicted on them, but they are rare. We live in a society where public anger is now incredibly commonplace. Every time you drive, every time you go to a supermarket or try to check in for an aeroplane or to catch a train there is a good chance in the UK that you will see unbridled fury. Typically it is not over anything major, usually the reverse, that someone is driving at a different speed to you or will not let you into a queue or is simply in the wrong car or you cannot find the product you want or it has sold out or the company has made a mistake on your ticket or the flight or train has been cancelled. These are nothing compared to the anger you should feel against a government which is destroying opportunities, education, pensions and the health service and telling us we should be glad about it. Yet, while we know we can do absolutely nothing to change David Cameron's mind, we feel, however unlikely, that if we shout and make a fuss, we can squeeze out some change to our benefit; the car driver will feel ashamed or we will be 'bumped up' on to a flight or a train. Over the past decades we have been tutored to believe this by what we witness in public and on television programmes. It is strength by the sense that is so powerful of resentment against those who are getting some that we are not.
Over the past few years, even before I went into counselling as a result of mistreatment in my current job, I came to realise that anger achieved very little, no more than getting drunk would do. It made me feel good for a short time but the come down in terms of high blood pressure and constipation were just like a hangover after alcohol and actually made it harder to deal with the problems the next day. Being angry you see things only from your own perspective. You know your limits and forget that those around you do not. This was the impact on the woman and boy who lived in my house. They saw me shouting and hitting the furniture and wondered if it would be them next that I would hit. They saw me revving the car engine and felt powerless as they had no control over whether I rammed into the car in front of me or not. Reassurance and even repeated examples when nothing dire occurs makes it no less frightening to them wondering if 'this time' something more severe would occur.
This links to the next issue is that even in a life when everything seems a battle there are scraps of light. Not going all religious, this is simple things like having a good meal or just all of you sat in front of the television or just laughing about something silly or remembering a good day. They may only be scraps but I found these were being over-shadowed literally by the 'fear and loathing'. In turn this meant that I did not even have these scraps of happiness to fall back on so meaning that I then lacked the kind of resources I needed to deal well with all the nastiness I was facing, especially at work. The two worlds were contaminating each other and that meant there was no refuge. It was easy to get into a vicious circle. Whilst unemployment dropped me into new problems it gave me the time to change things. Partly it was because I was freed from having a nasty manager waiting to pick up any new imagined example of an error in order to hound me with it. Instead I was in my home all the time and had reasonably behaving job centre staff to deal with once per fortnight rather than malicious colleagues every day. In between applying for jobs, I also took the opportunity to look at anger management. This came in part from prompting from the woman who lived in my house, but also from having just one too many anger hangovers - constipation concentrates the mind very well.
Then I found that it is incredibly difficult to get help with anger management. My experience in this respect was very much the same as when I tried to seek help as I came closer to being unable to pay my mortgage. I contacted the building society when I had enough money to pay three months' mortgage payments and they would not discuss the issue with me. They said I had to be down to the final month's payment before they could even talk about it. To me this seemed ridiculous. They did not seem to realise that talking about the situation would have taken some pressure off me and most likely would have meant better performance at interviews and so the chance of getting a job to pay the mortgage. The same situation occurred with anger management. I found that in my town the last courses in anger management had ended two years earlier and that nowadays they only train counsellors in anger management for counties around; I would have had to travel to London for such help. Anger management in my town is only available to people who have been referred to it by the courts or social welfare. Thus, as with defaulting with the mortgage, it was only at the final stage that help became available. To me this seems short-sighted, but I guess it comes from targeting money at those who need it the most rather than preventing problems from developing.
Given that I could find no groups or individuals to help, I thought 'well, I am an intelligent man, surely there are some books or something I can use'. Well it turned out that I could find no books on anger management, again except for professionals counselling people rather than for those suffering from anger problems. I guess the sense is that someone suffering anger will not be able to see that they need help. However, I was able to find bits of references from extensive internet searches to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). This sounded rather alarmingly like some pseudo-science, but actually turned out to be something legitimate. It would have been the approach I would have been exposed to if I had applied for one of the courses two years earlier. What I liked was that looked to treat causes rather than symptoms. There is a lot on the internet about methods to reduce anger such as meditation but these did not seem feasible when you are driving and experience 'road rage'. The NLP advocates likened most anger management to fixing a tyre when you had driven over broken glass and their method as being one that took you down a road without broken glass. Anyway, from various sources I found exercises that I was able to do on my own. Surprisingly, I found I quickly got into a 'virtuous circle' as being able to break the narcotic pleasure of anger I saw it was only doing harm and as anger became rarer it lost the psychological 'high' and feeling of power it had once given. I was then able to recover those scraps of life that made me happy and in turn the two people living in my house felt more reassured so a feedback loop developed,
I have not reached a situation in which I am never angry, especially when dealing with computer games. However, I can identify the symptoms so much faster and change what I am doing. Probably the largest change has come in driving, knowing that I am giving power to worthless people if I get worked up when they hoot or flash or shout at me. They are dangerous drivers and I need to get away from them, typically slowing down helps in that situation. I think I felt I had a 'right' to anger something which was exacerbated because I was told I had other rights, no right to work, no right to enjoy a house without hassle, no right not to be treated as an idiot/inappropriate/to be dismissed, no right to drive my car without being forced off the road and so on. However, I see now that the anger actually just made the things that I had under-valued, have less value. Anger contaminates everything it touches and you need to be going in the opposite direction. If you can derive happiness from lots of small and simple things then you become more robust. You do not need a god to show you that, you can do it yourself. Once you do, you then build up a reserve of some sort of energy that allows you to resist the trouble people seem so intent on pressing down on you, much more effectively. Another trick that I have learnt since from counselling is to keep home and work in different silos, but that is a story for another day.
Saturday, 3 March 2012
The Rise And Fall Of My Blood Pressure
I have always said that this would not be a blog that was about the steady deterioration in my health, but occasionally things that arise in that area of my life have a wider application. Regular readers will know the following two details: that I have suffered from Type 1 Diabetes for over twenty years and that I have a real bully of a line manager. Now, hyper-tension, i.e. high blood pressure is an ever increasing condition among the global population especially in the West. It has a particular impact for diabetics as it can lead to retinopathy, the swelling and bursting of blood vessels in the eye leading to the eye working less effectively and subsequently scarring and potentially blindness.
Since about 2002 all diabetics in the UK have been prescribed three tablets in addition to any injected or tablet form insulin they take. One is a mild aspirin to help with the condition of your heart, one is an anti-cholestrol tablet and one is a tablet to lower blood pressure. When I was first prescribed the blood pressure tablet it led to me 'zoning out' because after the morning rush my blood pressure fell away anyway, so I was put on a lower dose which I have remained with for almost a decade.
When I joined my current job back in June 2011 the Occupational Health unit was in chaos something which still has not settled down and more than eight months since I started, I am still waiting for my initial assessment. In the meantime my GP, the nurse at the medical centre and the diabetic clinic at the local hospital have all noted how my blood pressure was running high. This contrasted with my blood pressure for the previous twenty years, bar two periods of being bullied, first by a colleague in 2003 and by my line manager in 2010. This time they expected it to fall away now that I was in work after a period of unemployment. Of course, this line manager has turned out to be incredibly self-centred and pig-headed fussing about how everything appears rather than what is being done. She will not tell you how she wants something done as she assumes her way is common sense, but if you do it differently you are criticised for hours about how nasty you must be to think that that way was acceptable. This sense that you do things in a particular way with some malicious intent or are constantly plotting to undermine her is clearly not healthy either for her or for her workforce. Not surprisingly my blood pressure has not fallen.
The latest incident came around me having to go to the hospital. When you move into a new health authority area they always like to check you out, this is doubled if you have a long-term health condition as I do. In addition, in contrast to where I used to be treated, this authority has its various facilities spread over 17Km meaning various trips to reach them. As I maintained a high blood pressure and within six months had developed Grade 2 retinopathy in one eye and Grade 1 in the other (Grade 1 is the lesser) I was called for more appointments than ever.
ow, the appointments are always during working hours and I get them scheduled early in the morning or late in the afternoon to reduce the impact on my work. One day when I had three appointments one at a health centre and two in different parts of the same hospital I actually took leave as my line manager whined so much. I put all the appointments on to my computer diary to which my line manager has permanent access but she complained that I should not expect her to read this diary though she can check it in seconds.
One morning when I was at the hospital she was stamping around questioning my colleagues about my whereabouts. I had spoken to her about the appointment just the morning before and outlined where I was going and how long it would take and what time I would be back. My predicted time of return was only out by 15 minutes and that was due to public transport disruption (you cannot drive when you are going to have treatment on your eyes). Somehow in the 24 hours between the conversation and me being at the appointment my line manager forgot all that I had told her bar the bare outline that I had something wrong with her eyes. Thus, I get a forceful email going on about how discourteous I had been not to let her know precisely where I was and when. Of course, I had done that both on my computer diary and orally but neither format was acceptable to her. I began leaving her copies of the letters I receive from the hospital but that apparently was unacceptable too 'because of confidentiality'. Given that it is my confidentiality in question, surely that decision should be down to me. Finally she said I must send an email precisely seven days before the appointment, with the details I have already put in the computer diary. When I asked why she could not have told me that weeks earlier and why she had to be so indignant about these little issues, she said all I did was make sustained allegations. Of course, like many line managers she is untouchable so even a anodyne suggestion of the kind I made can be portrayed as 'inappropriate' and something against which 'measures must be taken'.
It can be no surprise that with such capricious behaviour and the fact that she has to make such a grand fuss about every small issue, with extreme language when a simple suggestion 'please do it this way' would have sufficed, my blood pressure is rising higher. The only solution given that I cannot get my line manager to modify her behaviour and get no-one at the company to take steps to restrain her, was to have my dosage of blood pressure tablets increased. This proved to be a matter of less than a minute with my doctor. The outcome brings us to the nub of today's posting.
Fortunately I did not take the stronger dose blood pressure tablets until the weekend. I guess I probably needed a x1.3 or x1.5 strength over what I had before rather than the double dose as I woke up on Saturday morning feeling incredibly good, too good in fact. The fish in the tank were beautiful and I found myself staring at them. At times my speech would wander off and words would just become very long. This had a great comic effect for the woman who lives in my house as it appeared as if I was on a narcotic. In myself I felt very different. My blood pressure has been so high at times that my girlfriend has been able to feel my heart thumping on the mattress when we lie in bed. In addition, my limbs have felt very heavy and in my mind's eye their flesh has been dark like aged steak, I guess from me imagining all the blood pulsing into them. Now however, I see the flesh as a whitey-pink and my limbs feel lifted up by balloons. The other thing is that my work life is not haunting me right through the weekend in the way it did. The downside is that I have lost a lot of initiative and it took a lot of will power to get out of bed on the Saturday to do all the chores I have to complete.
It seems incredible that I can have an effect like that from something issued for free (because I am diabetic: prevention is much cheaper than cure in the long run) on the NHS. From when I got diabetes I became conscious that never again could I live without medication and that I was fortunate that I lived in a country where this would be for free and was readily available. I am also worried that my peace of mind has become dependent on a medicine, it seems all too much like 'Brave New World' (1932), 'a gramme is better than a damn' in reference to the drug soma which features in that story. As an aside, the answer on Ask.com about that quotation is completely wrong. I want to be able to build my own happiness rather than have it prescribed. Having spent weeks in counselling as a result of my line manager's behaviour I was able to reduce the worst impacts but clearly not completely free myself of them.
I am glad that I can reduce my blood pressure and hopefully head off serious damage to my eyesight. However, I am also dismayed that I have not ability to change my working context in order to prevent me facing this kind of pressure simply due to the quirks of a single person who never seems to never have to answer for her actions despite the fact that they cause so much trouble not just for me but a range of staff; a colleague in my department under the same manager has had a heart attack and a stroke most likely provoked if not caused by the manager's treatment of that person. The consolation is that with these tablets at least my free time is now time off from the burden of working in that context and that, I feel will have a cumulative effect in that I can forget work and really recharge rather than struggling to free my mind of worries about what will be the petty issue my line manager is going to harangue me about for weeks to come.
Since about 2002 all diabetics in the UK have been prescribed three tablets in addition to any injected or tablet form insulin they take. One is a mild aspirin to help with the condition of your heart, one is an anti-cholestrol tablet and one is a tablet to lower blood pressure. When I was first prescribed the blood pressure tablet it led to me 'zoning out' because after the morning rush my blood pressure fell away anyway, so I was put on a lower dose which I have remained with for almost a decade.
When I joined my current job back in June 2011 the Occupational Health unit was in chaos something which still has not settled down and more than eight months since I started, I am still waiting for my initial assessment. In the meantime my GP, the nurse at the medical centre and the diabetic clinic at the local hospital have all noted how my blood pressure was running high. This contrasted with my blood pressure for the previous twenty years, bar two periods of being bullied, first by a colleague in 2003 and by my line manager in 2010. This time they expected it to fall away now that I was in work after a period of unemployment. Of course, this line manager has turned out to be incredibly self-centred and pig-headed fussing about how everything appears rather than what is being done. She will not tell you how she wants something done as she assumes her way is common sense, but if you do it differently you are criticised for hours about how nasty you must be to think that that way was acceptable. This sense that you do things in a particular way with some malicious intent or are constantly plotting to undermine her is clearly not healthy either for her or for her workforce. Not surprisingly my blood pressure has not fallen.
The latest incident came around me having to go to the hospital. When you move into a new health authority area they always like to check you out, this is doubled if you have a long-term health condition as I do. In addition, in contrast to where I used to be treated, this authority has its various facilities spread over 17Km meaning various trips to reach them. As I maintained a high blood pressure and within six months had developed Grade 2 retinopathy in one eye and Grade 1 in the other (Grade 1 is the lesser) I was called for more appointments than ever.
ow, the appointments are always during working hours and I get them scheduled early in the morning or late in the afternoon to reduce the impact on my work. One day when I had three appointments one at a health centre and two in different parts of the same hospital I actually took leave as my line manager whined so much. I put all the appointments on to my computer diary to which my line manager has permanent access but she complained that I should not expect her to read this diary though she can check it in seconds.
One morning when I was at the hospital she was stamping around questioning my colleagues about my whereabouts. I had spoken to her about the appointment just the morning before and outlined where I was going and how long it would take and what time I would be back. My predicted time of return was only out by 15 minutes and that was due to public transport disruption (you cannot drive when you are going to have treatment on your eyes). Somehow in the 24 hours between the conversation and me being at the appointment my line manager forgot all that I had told her bar the bare outline that I had something wrong with her eyes. Thus, I get a forceful email going on about how discourteous I had been not to let her know precisely where I was and when. Of course, I had done that both on my computer diary and orally but neither format was acceptable to her. I began leaving her copies of the letters I receive from the hospital but that apparently was unacceptable too 'because of confidentiality'. Given that it is my confidentiality in question, surely that decision should be down to me. Finally she said I must send an email precisely seven days before the appointment, with the details I have already put in the computer diary. When I asked why she could not have told me that weeks earlier and why she had to be so indignant about these little issues, she said all I did was make sustained allegations. Of course, like many line managers she is untouchable so even a anodyne suggestion of the kind I made can be portrayed as 'inappropriate' and something against which 'measures must be taken'.
It can be no surprise that with such capricious behaviour and the fact that she has to make such a grand fuss about every small issue, with extreme language when a simple suggestion 'please do it this way' would have sufficed, my blood pressure is rising higher. The only solution given that I cannot get my line manager to modify her behaviour and get no-one at the company to take steps to restrain her, was to have my dosage of blood pressure tablets increased. This proved to be a matter of less than a minute with my doctor. The outcome brings us to the nub of today's posting.
Fortunately I did not take the stronger dose blood pressure tablets until the weekend. I guess I probably needed a x1.3 or x1.5 strength over what I had before rather than the double dose as I woke up on Saturday morning feeling incredibly good, too good in fact. The fish in the tank were beautiful and I found myself staring at them. At times my speech would wander off and words would just become very long. This had a great comic effect for the woman who lives in my house as it appeared as if I was on a narcotic. In myself I felt very different. My blood pressure has been so high at times that my girlfriend has been able to feel my heart thumping on the mattress when we lie in bed. In addition, my limbs have felt very heavy and in my mind's eye their flesh has been dark like aged steak, I guess from me imagining all the blood pulsing into them. Now however, I see the flesh as a whitey-pink and my limbs feel lifted up by balloons. The other thing is that my work life is not haunting me right through the weekend in the way it did. The downside is that I have lost a lot of initiative and it took a lot of will power to get out of bed on the Saturday to do all the chores I have to complete.
It seems incredible that I can have an effect like that from something issued for free (because I am diabetic: prevention is much cheaper than cure in the long run) on the NHS. From when I got diabetes I became conscious that never again could I live without medication and that I was fortunate that I lived in a country where this would be for free and was readily available. I am also worried that my peace of mind has become dependent on a medicine, it seems all too much like 'Brave New World' (1932), 'a gramme is better than a damn' in reference to the drug soma which features in that story. As an aside, the answer on Ask.com about that quotation is completely wrong. I want to be able to build my own happiness rather than have it prescribed. Having spent weeks in counselling as a result of my line manager's behaviour I was able to reduce the worst impacts but clearly not completely free myself of them.
I am glad that I can reduce my blood pressure and hopefully head off serious damage to my eyesight. However, I am also dismayed that I have not ability to change my working context in order to prevent me facing this kind of pressure simply due to the quirks of a single person who never seems to never have to answer for her actions despite the fact that they cause so much trouble not just for me but a range of staff; a colleague in my department under the same manager has had a heart attack and a stroke most likely provoked if not caused by the manager's treatment of that person. The consolation is that with these tablets at least my free time is now time off from the burden of working in that context and that, I feel will have a cumulative effect in that I can forget work and really recharge rather than struggling to free my mind of worries about what will be the petty issue my line manager is going to harangue me about for weeks to come.
Thursday, 1 December 2011
How Redundancy Became A Dirty Word Once More
I remember during the last depression in the British economy in the 1980s when redundancy became commonplace, even for people in what had previously seemed ‘jobs for life’ that there remained an attitude ingrained from the 1950s and 1960s that people were made redundant as a result of something they had done wrong. I guess in middle class professions the attitude was perhaps even older because in the 1930s when mass unemployment first really hit national consciousness it was often very regionally and sectorally focused on heavy industries in northern England, Scotland and South Wales, whereas much of the Midlands and the South and new more technological and service sector industries did not suffer nearly so much. My father was only made redundant once in a career which lasted about 43 years and that was at an age when he was entitled to early retirement. My mother was never laid off, but that was because she was a nurse and it has only been in recent years that nurses have been unable to find work very easily.
Going back to the 1980s, my father had a friend he had known since childhood, who worked in the construction industry. I still remember the sticker he had in the back of his car which said ‘Don’t Nationalise Building’ and had a picture of a pair of hands one holding a brick and one a mortar trowel, locked together with handcuffs. The whole campaign these days somehow seems as alien as something that might have been run in East Germany at the time. Anyway, he was made redundant as happened to millions of middle aged family men in the 1980s alongside all sorts of people. I remember being told that his mother was so ashamed that he had been made redundant that she would not talk about it. She could no disassociate being laid off because the company had closed down or was ‘downsizing’ from being sacked for improper behaviour or laziness. Though it was her son, she could not shake the sense that he had done something wrong to be without work. I never found out if she changed her attitudes. My father advised his friend to train in computers which were just coming in on a large scale at the time. The friend took the advice and in his next job avoided further redundancy because of the skills he had and was able to continue working to a profitable retirement.
In my career which has spanned 20 years this year, I have been made redundant three times. In addition, for much of the time I have been on fixed term contracts, which whilst being set up that way have pretty much the same effect when they come to an end, especially if you are uncertain if the contract is going to be renewed or not, something you are usually only told late on. The similarity of the end of such contracts to redundancy is why in the UK since 2002 companies have had to pay redundancy pay if they do not renew the contract of a worker on a contract of 2 years or more. In addition, if the person has been on contracts for 4 years they have to be moved to a permanent contract. This was because previously there were cases of workers on contracts for 12 years with no security. While it might seem the same in terms of pay and condition, that threat of your job coming to an end through no fault of your own does prey on your mind and reduces your productivity.
Anyway, redundancy has been a fact of working life for at least thirty years and in certain industries it has been incredibly common. Now, always on the lookout for a new job, especially as I always seem to end up with the most appalling managers and working far from home, I subscribe to online services such as Monster and LinkedIn. As well as the job searching, CV listing and networking facilities these sites often send you articles about work. Many of these seem to be influenced by US tendencies, which Americans appear to believe are universal, at least for their English-speaking cousins. However, some of them appear to be quite comic to British readers especially when it comes to the precision about matters of clothing for the workplace. For a start we do not have Labor Day and no self-respecting businesswoman would ever wear white shoes to work anyway; for men black suits without a stripe have no such negative connotations that they seem to have in the USA. Setting such cultural differences aside, reading US workplace attitudes can be useful as British employers have a common tendency to follow their American counterparts sooner or later.
The interesting trend I have picked up on at a time when we are facing high unemployment and redundancies, is how ‘redundancy’ is once again a dirty word as if we were back in the early 1980s. I received an article from LinkedIn about networking which advised you when speaking to people you should never mention you have been made redundant and should find some euphemism for the period that you were without work as if it was some kind of dirty secret rather than a fact of working life for people at all levels.
My view of why this attitude has reappeared is that it stems from other recent trends in business. I have heard from employers in my sector and others that two of the key things they value from employees are not their ICT skills or their ability to manage projects or speak a foreign language but ‘deference’ and ‘gratitude’. Employers, or rather managers at all levels, are leveraging the fact that jobs are scarce in order to compel a forelock-tugging attitude towards them from among their staff. They expect workers not only to be grateful for their jobs but to actually say this repeatedly. Of course, because there are recruitment processes in place, often the job is not a gift of your manager but once in post you have to behave as if it is and as a result, regularly thank your manager and support their view no matter how hare-brained or unethical it might be. To even propose a different approach is to be ‘disloyal’, not with a view to the company as a whole but to the individual who wields power over you. I have noted before that even commentators on business have observed that this attitude is unhealthy for a company that wants to survive let alone prosper in the current economic climate: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html
It is interesting that the Coalition government is seeking to reduce the opportunity for industrial tribunals and even remove the chance to protest unfair dismissal. Clearly their view is that all dismissal is ‘fair’. The government is aiming to reinforce this attitude that all workers, whether professionally qualified or not should simply keep their mouths shut and accept whatever they are told by their bosses and similarly to accept the prejudiced treatment which is once again increasingly common.
How does this connect to mentioning redundancy in your career history? Well, managers never like you hear you criticising your previous employers even if they are competitors. They assume that if you are critical of the previous companies you have worked for you can easily be critical of them, something we know they now have no tolerance for. Mentioning redundancy in a single word seems to be critical of the planning of that company and of their treatment of their workers. In addition, you are exhibiting ingratitude for not expressing how grateful you were that the company actually employed you in the first place and kept you there for as many years and months as they did. I soon noticed this three jobs back when I, along with 200 others (the first phase in a lay-off of 500 staff), were told we were being made redundant. I was criticised for any mention of the fact and my email account was shut down because my ‘Out-of-Office’ statement mentioned it. Despite that 10% of the staff were in line to be made redundant gave us no right to discuss it. Consequently it became impossible to even hand over work to the staff who were remaining and projects very close to completion were simply dropped, unfinished with the funds that had gone into them wasted as I was not allowed to talk with people who could have picked them up and finished them off as it would have meant me saying why I would not be around to do it myself.
In such circumstances reality begins to become distorted. Simply because of the criticism-phobia which is now permitted among managers, money is allowed to be wasted and no proper follow on from a period of large-scale redundancy can be implemented, further damaging the company. We have to face up to what is being balanced up here. On one side it is that some managers for a few weeks will be irritated that staff being made redundant talk about it, on the other side thousands of pounds is wasted and projects left unfinished damaging the funds and reputation of the company. Yet, in our distorted world it is the managers’ unease which wins out.
There is an additional way in which the person being made redundant suffers if they cannot mention that they have been made redundant and this is when you apply for other jobs. You have to come up with a range of more or less feasible excuses for why you left your previous employment. With fragmented careers it becomes increasingly difficult to produce good ones and interviewers become suspicious, assuming that you must be hiding something. Of course, it would be easy if you could simply state the reason as ‘redundancy’ but to do so would clearly damage your chances for the new job, yet often the alternatives are little better. Saying you left because you no longer fitted in, for family reasons, for better pay or conditions, to work nearer to home and so on all seem to provide reasons not to employ you in another post. It would be better if you could say I was made redundant, it had nothing to do with my abilities it was simply the company could not afford to employ me and 499 other people any longer.
The default assumption by interviewers that you are seeking to hide something just accentuates this problem. Too often interviews are coming to resemble police interrogations. Rather than trying to gauge what skills you have and whether you could apply them in a new post they cross-examine you to find any flaws in your story. Having read advice about writing a CV I had begun only listing jobs going back over the past 10-12 years. This was a big mistake at one interview. They spent the whole time asking me about my work in the 1990s and in the post-interview feedback said it was because they believed I had been serving a prison term at that time, not realising that at their company the form declaring that I had no criminal record was sent to their human resources department. It seems that other excuses used to conceal redundancy could open you up to a similar risk.
By making redundancy once again a taboo subject the myth that we have total control over our careers is promoted and the view that we are to blame if they are at all disrupted. In turn the view is perpetuated that companies are blameless for the hardships they impose on the ordinary worker even if, as if often the case in the UK, it is the result of bad planning, inertia or not being alert to changing conditions. It is particularly galling when your redundancy comes as the result of some development you tried to alert the company to but were choked off by the ‘I don’t want to hear that’ mentality which is so prevalent.
In the 21st century redundancy is going to be a factor for every worker no matter how illustrious a career path they take. Even members of the boards of multi-nationals lose their jobs. What we need is not to somehow brush it under the carpet but acknowledge it is a fact of working life and not make the person made redundant feel guilty for something that is imposed on them simply because it makes some managers feel a little uncomfortable for a short time. Compared to the worry and financial pressures the person losing their job faces, such unease is nothing and should not become the prime driver for workplace expectations of behaviour.
Going back to the 1980s, my father had a friend he had known since childhood, who worked in the construction industry. I still remember the sticker he had in the back of his car which said ‘Don’t Nationalise Building’ and had a picture of a pair of hands one holding a brick and one a mortar trowel, locked together with handcuffs. The whole campaign these days somehow seems as alien as something that might have been run in East Germany at the time. Anyway, he was made redundant as happened to millions of middle aged family men in the 1980s alongside all sorts of people. I remember being told that his mother was so ashamed that he had been made redundant that she would not talk about it. She could no disassociate being laid off because the company had closed down or was ‘downsizing’ from being sacked for improper behaviour or laziness. Though it was her son, she could not shake the sense that he had done something wrong to be without work. I never found out if she changed her attitudes. My father advised his friend to train in computers which were just coming in on a large scale at the time. The friend took the advice and in his next job avoided further redundancy because of the skills he had and was able to continue working to a profitable retirement.
In my career which has spanned 20 years this year, I have been made redundant three times. In addition, for much of the time I have been on fixed term contracts, which whilst being set up that way have pretty much the same effect when they come to an end, especially if you are uncertain if the contract is going to be renewed or not, something you are usually only told late on. The similarity of the end of such contracts to redundancy is why in the UK since 2002 companies have had to pay redundancy pay if they do not renew the contract of a worker on a contract of 2 years or more. In addition, if the person has been on contracts for 4 years they have to be moved to a permanent contract. This was because previously there were cases of workers on contracts for 12 years with no security. While it might seem the same in terms of pay and condition, that threat of your job coming to an end through no fault of your own does prey on your mind and reduces your productivity.
Anyway, redundancy has been a fact of working life for at least thirty years and in certain industries it has been incredibly common. Now, always on the lookout for a new job, especially as I always seem to end up with the most appalling managers and working far from home, I subscribe to online services such as Monster and LinkedIn. As well as the job searching, CV listing and networking facilities these sites often send you articles about work. Many of these seem to be influenced by US tendencies, which Americans appear to believe are universal, at least for their English-speaking cousins. However, some of them appear to be quite comic to British readers especially when it comes to the precision about matters of clothing for the workplace. For a start we do not have Labor Day and no self-respecting businesswoman would ever wear white shoes to work anyway; for men black suits without a stripe have no such negative connotations that they seem to have in the USA. Setting such cultural differences aside, reading US workplace attitudes can be useful as British employers have a common tendency to follow their American counterparts sooner or later.
The interesting trend I have picked up on at a time when we are facing high unemployment and redundancies, is how ‘redundancy’ is once again a dirty word as if we were back in the early 1980s. I received an article from LinkedIn about networking which advised you when speaking to people you should never mention you have been made redundant and should find some euphemism for the period that you were without work as if it was some kind of dirty secret rather than a fact of working life for people at all levels.
My view of why this attitude has reappeared is that it stems from other recent trends in business. I have heard from employers in my sector and others that two of the key things they value from employees are not their ICT skills or their ability to manage projects or speak a foreign language but ‘deference’ and ‘gratitude’. Employers, or rather managers at all levels, are leveraging the fact that jobs are scarce in order to compel a forelock-tugging attitude towards them from among their staff. They expect workers not only to be grateful for their jobs but to actually say this repeatedly. Of course, because there are recruitment processes in place, often the job is not a gift of your manager but once in post you have to behave as if it is and as a result, regularly thank your manager and support their view no matter how hare-brained or unethical it might be. To even propose a different approach is to be ‘disloyal’, not with a view to the company as a whole but to the individual who wields power over you. I have noted before that even commentators on business have observed that this attitude is unhealthy for a company that wants to survive let alone prosper in the current economic climate: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html
It is interesting that the Coalition government is seeking to reduce the opportunity for industrial tribunals and even remove the chance to protest unfair dismissal. Clearly their view is that all dismissal is ‘fair’. The government is aiming to reinforce this attitude that all workers, whether professionally qualified or not should simply keep their mouths shut and accept whatever they are told by their bosses and similarly to accept the prejudiced treatment which is once again increasingly common.
How does this connect to mentioning redundancy in your career history? Well, managers never like you hear you criticising your previous employers even if they are competitors. They assume that if you are critical of the previous companies you have worked for you can easily be critical of them, something we know they now have no tolerance for. Mentioning redundancy in a single word seems to be critical of the planning of that company and of their treatment of their workers. In addition, you are exhibiting ingratitude for not expressing how grateful you were that the company actually employed you in the first place and kept you there for as many years and months as they did. I soon noticed this three jobs back when I, along with 200 others (the first phase in a lay-off of 500 staff), were told we were being made redundant. I was criticised for any mention of the fact and my email account was shut down because my ‘Out-of-Office’ statement mentioned it. Despite that 10% of the staff were in line to be made redundant gave us no right to discuss it. Consequently it became impossible to even hand over work to the staff who were remaining and projects very close to completion were simply dropped, unfinished with the funds that had gone into them wasted as I was not allowed to talk with people who could have picked them up and finished them off as it would have meant me saying why I would not be around to do it myself.
In such circumstances reality begins to become distorted. Simply because of the criticism-phobia which is now permitted among managers, money is allowed to be wasted and no proper follow on from a period of large-scale redundancy can be implemented, further damaging the company. We have to face up to what is being balanced up here. On one side it is that some managers for a few weeks will be irritated that staff being made redundant talk about it, on the other side thousands of pounds is wasted and projects left unfinished damaging the funds and reputation of the company. Yet, in our distorted world it is the managers’ unease which wins out.
There is an additional way in which the person being made redundant suffers if they cannot mention that they have been made redundant and this is when you apply for other jobs. You have to come up with a range of more or less feasible excuses for why you left your previous employment. With fragmented careers it becomes increasingly difficult to produce good ones and interviewers become suspicious, assuming that you must be hiding something. Of course, it would be easy if you could simply state the reason as ‘redundancy’ but to do so would clearly damage your chances for the new job, yet often the alternatives are little better. Saying you left because you no longer fitted in, for family reasons, for better pay or conditions, to work nearer to home and so on all seem to provide reasons not to employ you in another post. It would be better if you could say I was made redundant, it had nothing to do with my abilities it was simply the company could not afford to employ me and 499 other people any longer.
The default assumption by interviewers that you are seeking to hide something just accentuates this problem. Too often interviews are coming to resemble police interrogations. Rather than trying to gauge what skills you have and whether you could apply them in a new post they cross-examine you to find any flaws in your story. Having read advice about writing a CV I had begun only listing jobs going back over the past 10-12 years. This was a big mistake at one interview. They spent the whole time asking me about my work in the 1990s and in the post-interview feedback said it was because they believed I had been serving a prison term at that time, not realising that at their company the form declaring that I had no criminal record was sent to their human resources department. It seems that other excuses used to conceal redundancy could open you up to a similar risk.
By making redundancy once again a taboo subject the myth that we have total control over our careers is promoted and the view that we are to blame if they are at all disrupted. In turn the view is perpetuated that companies are blameless for the hardships they impose on the ordinary worker even if, as if often the case in the UK, it is the result of bad planning, inertia or not being alert to changing conditions. It is particularly galling when your redundancy comes as the result of some development you tried to alert the company to but were choked off by the ‘I don’t want to hear that’ mentality which is so prevalent.
In the 21st century redundancy is going to be a factor for every worker no matter how illustrious a career path they take. Even members of the boards of multi-nationals lose their jobs. What we need is not to somehow brush it under the carpet but acknowledge it is a fact of working life and not make the person made redundant feel guilty for something that is imposed on them simply because it makes some managers feel a little uncomfortable for a short time. Compared to the worry and financial pressures the person losing their job faces, such unease is nothing and should not become the prime driver for workplace expectations of behaviour.
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