‘You Can’t Handle The Truth’: Forced To Create A ‘Legend’ In The Workplace

As regular readers will know in the past few years I have suffered in jobs as a result of individual words and sentences that I have uttered. These were not rude words or offensive sentences, they just did not fit with very exacting standards that employers have around every word you might utter. I have got into trouble for saying ‘I am not a cleaner’ when in fact I was not a cleaner. I have got into trouble for trying to notify my manager of a hospital appointment connected with my diabetes. I have got into trouble discussing the curriculum that the boy who lived in my house was studying. I have got into trouble for saying that I was not responsible for organising an even date that, in fact, I truly was not responsible for organising. I guess one problem is that as yet I have not learnt how to suck up all the blame being levelled at my managers as if it was my own fault; I do not step forward fast enough or enthusiastically enough to take the blame off their shoulders and as a result it is open season to criticise me as ‘inappropriate’ or rude or incompetent.  The censorship and self-censorship that develops can harm companies, see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html


Now, I know from people who have written to me, that I am not alone in suffering such problems and that schools should teach young people that in any job, no matter how competent they might, they must always expect to be the ‘fall guy’ for any errors made around them even if they are not connected to them. My mistake has been not been ready to do that. Ironically as a consequence I am portrayed as the one creating a ‘blame culture’ simply because I am not able to absorb the blame into myself quickly enough. In this I am hampered further as it seems I have Asperger’s Syndrome. Whilst I doubt it has worsened in recent years, the clear changes in UK society and in working culture mean that there are more pitfalls that I may be missing with heavy consequences for my job and thus for the rest of my life which has been largely wrecked this year.


I began a new job in September and was relieved that a lot of the behaviour I have noted above was absent. This was both relaxing and also reminded me how abnormal the previous places actually were. Workers should behave as adults not primary school children and certainly it seemed as if that was more the case where I am now working, despite the fact that the company, like most in the UK is facing hard economic times and so instability. However, the seemingly warm reception I received in this job clearly led me into a false sense of security. I had originally gone there, scared from my previous jobs to mention anything about my life outside work or my past. However, with people confiding in me about their cancer treatment, medical conditions, marital problems, etc., I too opened up especially about some of the things that have hit me this year. Partly this was also because I have had to speak with people so much about losing my job, my house and household that they have now become mundane; they are the ache that has become dull so to me these things are no longer a big issue. To start viewing this way and even letting down my guard a little has proven to be a big mistake.


On Friday I was summoned to see my line manager who outlined the complaints against me. Now, these differ in nature to the problems I have had before. These days I avoid making statements unprompted even to people I think will not distort them. However, when people ask me questions I respond truthfully. Given that the workplace has an atmosphere of being open, people have asked direct personal questions that they might not have done elsewhere. The first was that I had been asked why I was eating biscuits during a training session. I explained briefly that this was because as a diabetic I tend to have a low blood sugar in the late afternoon especially when I have been on a day’s training as had been the case that day and so ran the risk of hypoglaecemia. I know I should not have used the word ‘hypoglaecemia’ but when you have had a condition 24 years as I have done, you tend to slip into these things. I have explained my diabetes to hundreds of people, so think nothing of it.


The second one was I was asked why I had left the lovely town on the south coast that I have recently moved from, by someone who still lives close by but is also employed now by the same company as me. I responded, ‘because I lost my house’. Now that is the truthful answer, it is the only reason why I left, but again that was an unacceptable answer. A similar situation came when waiting for a meeting to start there were comments at how the set-up of the room resembled that for an interview. I was asked as a newly appointed member of staff, how many interviews I had had. Again I told the truth: ‘67 in the past 4 years’.


I have noted before how people feel somehow contaminated by reference to redundancy and unemployment:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/how-redundancy-became-dirty-word-once.html  However, when asked a direct question, and this may be as a result of Asperger’s, I have the tendency to give the truth. Yet, me describing what has happened to me or my medical condition, not in an unprompted way, but in response to a question, is these days seen as ‘inappropriate’ and even verging on the offensive. Clearly I cannot read the mind of the person asking me the question. I have been alerted to the fact by one company that has interviewed me three times, that I give an answer without first having ascertaining the type of answer the questioner is looking for. I missed out on the training on this approach to answering at school, university and in work. In fact, I received the opposite: answer a question as directly and truthfully as you can. I know I am enthusiastic when talking with people and these days they will not tolerate an answer which is shorter than the question asked. I thought I had cracked that with the answers given above. However, now I have to also quickly judge whether the truthful answer is what they are seeking.


I am in no position to say ‘well that is my business’ as I could clearly have done with these three personal questions or even ‘why are you asking that?’ as that would clearly been seen as rude. You cannot be defensive as that rouses suspicion. The truth, if it encompasses failure or illness or simply bad luck is also unacceptable whether given briefly or explained in full. Thus, my line manager has now advised me to come up with what I call a ‘legend’. This is the term used by spies and undercover police to describe the false identity they establish. It is a fiction, weaving in elements of the truth, but in general appealing to the assumptions of the people that the agent will be working with whilst distancing this fictional personality from the agent’s genuine one. I need to learn this legend well and be able to respond with aspects of it whenever I am asked a personal question again. I have to be careful, as, unfortunately, I have already revealed the truth about my life to quite a few people. I also have to avoid slip-ups that contradict or differ from what I have said before.


Now, from the troublesome questions I have faced recently, I have to come up with an explanation for why I might eat carbohydrates in the afternoon, which does not reference any medical condition nor makes me appear a glutton. I suppose in future I must sneak off to the toilet to eat them. This presents an ideological challenge for me. Back in 2005 when the UK law put diabetics into the disabled category, I took the decision to ‘come out’ as a diabetic. Now it appears I have to go back into the medical closet and conceal my condition as best I can. In terms of why I left the town, I am rather stumped what to say. All the suggestions about house prices seem to be equally as negative and something along the lines that the area was going down clearly are not true to people who know the town. If I say it is simply because I tired of the place, that might make me look feckless. Even saying that I moved to be closer to family would sound like there was bad luck if not for me then for them, so that is out. With the interviews, clearly I have to severely reduce the number. I cannot really guess what the tolerable number of interviews would be over a 4-year period, do readers think 10 still sounds excessive?


The one thing that I must bury even deeper in my legend, is a sense of indignation.  People accuse me of self-pity, however, it is impossible to keep lying to yourself that things will get better or to take all the blame on to yourself for how you have been mistreated; as it is, I cannot shake the sense of guilt at what I may have done wrong, not helped by people telling me that I am a 'natural victim', something which I reject entirely as that is the path to racism and disability discrimination, things I will have no truck with.  As the government tells us that we need to suffer for the sake of the country, people in many workplaces see it as wrong to even indicate that you are suffering as a consequence.  I cannot reveal how badly I have been treated in previous jobs, the social class discrimination, the disability discrimination and the simple maliciousness I have encountered. I cannot express my dismay at the fact that in 2009 I earned £42,000 per year and had 35 days leave and now earn £26,000 (what I was earning in 2002) and get 19 days and 2 hours leave (what is the point of 2 hours’ leave?). I have to pretend that my life has not gone down the drain in so many ways and that my chances of ever owning even a flat, let alone a house, are now zero.   I have to conceal how the pressure from the bad treatment I have received has worsened my blood pressure and consequently my eye sight. My legend has to show me as a successful man, going places despite the worst economic depression in 80 years. It has to pander to the assumptions of the people who ask me questions. It has to provide the answers that they find acceptable, because it has been made very clear to me that in fact, they cannot handle the truth.

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.

Sledgehammer Management

My last post was around my concern that by trying to be a liberal manager who appreciated a lot of the trouble that his employees were going through (I am not allowed to call them 'my team' because apparently they 'belong' to my own boss not me) that I would end up being too much like the manager, David Brent, in the television series 'The Office' making embarrassing fauxs pas.  I do think some of my employees do look on me as if I am rather odd, but I guess that comes from being a Goth in the workplace and from the clothes I wear resembling some hybrid of Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes (1984-94) and the Herr Flick character from ''Allo, 'Allo' (1982-92; played by Richard Gibson with David Janson taking over for the 9th and final series in 1992), especially in the very provincial town I am now working in.  However, generally I seem to get on pretty well with those who have been assigned to me.

The same cannot be said for those above me, especially my immediate manager and, fortunately to a lesser extent, her successor.  Like many companies, ours is currently under pressure, making a loss and looking for ways to do the same or more work with fewer staff.  There are no redundancies (something the management wants us to keep reminding our staff, the 'whip of unemployment' being cracked on a regular basis) but when people leave (the best always go first from a company that is struggling) they are not replaced.  The new requirements of the Border Agency have been put on one of my units meaning extra work for the staff remaining.  At this time of year with illness and with one person on maternity leave not covered, it is tough to ensure all the work is being done.  It is, but most of the staff are working flat out and all of them doing jobs outside their job description to cover missing staff.  New systems are being brought in, but letting someone go off for the necessary training can really dent the capacity of my units.

So, what does a new manager do in such circumstances?  Well, I was repeatedly told by my boss that my staff were 'inefficient'.  This is taken by the workforce, unsurprisingly, as seen to mean 'lazy'.  So I started by surveying all their activity and in fact I feel many of them are working too hard.  They are very flexible in adapting to extra jobs to cover missing colleagues and to some degree this is where any inefficiency is creeping in, that hardly anyone is now doing the work they were employed for or trained in, they are doing fragments of 2-3 other people's jobs and are adapting very well.  Such steps are fine in the short-term but they are hardening as the weeks and months go by and there is a fear that when the 'music stops' with the reorganisation in the Summer that people will be left fixed with this collection of functions that is not rational, simply dished out ad hoc.  I am told that staff should 'rise to the challenges' and seek regrading if they feel their work is now of a higher level, though, of course, that takes time and is very uncertain especially with a freeze on posts and promotions. 

Repeatedly I am told that the units would not be in this position if they had more of a 'can do' culture.  The sense that they are working below full effort is not based on any objective measurement it is simply because someone who resigned from one of the units a year ago had complained that they were 'bored' in their post without exploring why that might have been the case; it was simply assumed she had too little work to do and that assumption, from one person's passing opinion, has become the basis for all approaches to the units even while the numbers have continued to fall and new work assigned to them.

For challenging, what in my mind is an inaccurate perception, I have been summoned to three very unpleasant meetings in which I have been accused of being 'disloyal' to the management, and then ironically accused of trying to create an adversarial environment in the company, wherease in fact I have been battling to reduce the feeling of 'them' and 'us' that has been built up and that I was dropped into.  My management style was well known to my boss before I was taken on.  I had an hour of interviewing and activities and am always explicit about how I manage.  Ironically I was told I was taken on because of my sensitivity to the workforce which is certainly what seems necessary at this time not just because of new work and the economic situation but also company reorganisation.  With six months to go we have little idea what the company will look like or how various units will be grouped.  We keep being told there will be no job losses, but that is little help as we cannot plan our work for the year ahead with so little information.

Of course, a lot of this stems from the attitude of my boss who even back in 1983 would have jarred with how businesses are actually run let alone with current management practice within the company and best practice as outlined in all the training I have attended over the past six years.  She accused my staff of lying to me constantly and accused me of not only being disloyal but also naive.  In that case, the last laugh is on her for employing me for my expertise and experience.  It turned out this week that once I was appointed I was used to threaten others in the company with her saying that I would have some kind of enforcer role for her policies.  The level of fear this has engendered is unpleasant.  One colleague at another site stopped me mentioning something only indirectly related to the manager, about a policy not even the woman herself.  The level of concern reminded me of the Eastern bloc or contemporary China.  The woman might have been over-cautious but her manner was as if she expected the room to be bugged or one of her staff to betray any views she expressed.  You cannot have discussions about working effectively in such an environment.

My challenging of my boss's views led to me subsequently being told that what I was writing in the term of mundane minutes and emails was in fact would form the basis of disciplinary action and might even be the basis of litigation against me.  I was accused of trying to create 'a resistance movement' in the company! I had expressed to colleagues the need for more staff in our unit to carry out the tasks we have been assigned and to end any secondments until we have less pressure, but apparently that is improper to face up to reality and I should have kept on with the lie that they were not working hard enough.  My first contact with the union at this company was to ask for advice for facing disciplinary action despite having only worked for four weeks so far at the place.

The challenge is, of course, that for the second time in my career I have a boss who believes that her view of things is the only truth.  She does not accept that there are differences of opinion or that she might not have the total facts.  Consequently someone who even diverges mildly from her opinions is 'lying' (she lays this accusation against people very freely) and as a result must have some perverse and sinister motive that leads them to say anything contrary to the 'truth'.  In her world there is no room for compromise.  Her talk of loyalty is not about loyalty to the management, let alone to the company as a whole, but to her. We will all fail in this regard, because we cannot be inside her head and see things the way she does, so even those who are very loyal to her in person, often slip up, especially as she has been loath to give us any detail of the future she wants.  I have now stood up to her three times in person and fortunately she now feels that rather than being her enforcer I am beyond the pale and she will not work with me any more.  Of course, steadily I have found that she has irritated many others on my level in the same way.  She seems entirely oblivious to the damage she is doing to morale at middle management to shop floor level among the staff, persisting with her view that all of us are wrong and are lying.  She is not the first boss I have had like this, the previous one I had to make an official complaint against because she would not accept that a member of staff had been bullying colleagues over a sustained period of time and so felt that any complaints against him were 'lies' as they were out of step with her view of the man.

I have had enough of bosses like this.  You wonder how they get to where they are as they must irritate the people above them as well, but I suppose when someone does not have authority over you, then the impact is far less.  The arrogance of this kind of bosses is incredible and whilst I wish no-one harm, you want them to have a kind of 'A Christmas Carol' experience to waken them up to the reality which is not their 'truth'.  I can see why Charles Dickens wrote that story about the employer Scrooge.  Whilst it is set more than a century ago, such characters seem unfortunately persistent in real life.  More practically if I had not been so badly off financially I would have resigned from my post last week, less than a month through.  Of course, my boss would write me off as a liar who was misguided about reality and so it would make no impact on how she saw what is actually going on in the company beneath her; it could not penetrate the cast iron assumptions that she clings to.  Naturally, I see no future with this company and in January will again start applying for jobs hoping that there are more companies where David Brent rather than Margaret Thatcher is the dominant norm for running the place.

Remembering the Bullies

One effect of having a 7-year old child resident in your house is that the things he is experiencing often trigger of memories of events in your own life. I am not entering into the debate around 'false memories' and abuse, but I am going to look at how hearing about bullying of this child has often brought back memories of (unpleasant) things that happened to me, that I had somehow compacted and stored away in a part of my brain where I tend not to go. I was not abused in my childhood, but my father was harsh, sometimes for a few moments violent and certainly often frightening. My mother often humiliated me, but in a way which I think was motivated by what she felt was the right thing to do though it has left scars that have remained for decades. This is partly as I have a real phobia of humiliation not only for myself but for others whether real people or even fictional ones, so I imagine that these things have lingered longer for me than they would for the bulk of the population.

Bullying of school aged children is very common, though it is taken far more seriously than it used to be. The number of children bullied at some time in their school career (ages 4-16) is around 44%. Of course the duration and the severity of the bullying varies and 16 children in the UK kill themselves each year as the result of bullying. Bullying has become far more sophisticated and it is far harder to escape it as bullies use texts and the internet to get at other children. Interestingly 71% of children have said that they have been a bully themselves at some time in their school life. I suppose this is human nature as often the bullied will find an outlet in picking on someone else. Bullying has a wide range and can be psychological and/or physical. None of us likes to be humiliated or teased but it is especially painful when you are growing up and are facing challenges and may lack self-confidence and self-esteem anyway.

With the child in my house being both bullied and a bully, fortunately in what seems like short-lived incidents that as yet do not seem to have had a long-term impact on his life, I have been reminded of things in my life from childhood up into my thirties when I have been bullied. What I have come to realise is that I have segmented each incident and so have not seen it as a long problem, rather a short-term thing. However, now I look back there seem very few years between the ages of 5-19 in which I was not suffering some form of bullying. Bullying was handled very poorly in the 1970s and 1980s (and of course before then), and I am glad that schools pay far more attention to it now in all its forms and have policies and teaching in place rather than simply dismissing it as a natural part (or in many cases in the UK, especially in private schools, as a necessary part) of growing up. My parents' reaction was simply to tell me I acted as 'a natural victim' that my behaviour simply egged on bullies. They offered no solution to this but simply added to the humiliation by saying I walked and spoke like someone with a mental defect which was hardly going to help. Many teenage boys are gangly and their voices are altering, they want to be told that that is part of adolescence not made to feel that they are somehow peculiar because that is often what the bullies try to do anyway; you do not need it from your parents too.

There were lots of bases on which I suffered bullying. I am a white male who grew up in a middle-class area of the UK so you would imagine I would have had a privileged life and little on which to discriminate against me, but bullies will always find something. At primary school I was told by people that they could not associate with me because I came from the wrong side of the town not the exclusive estate. I was told that our house was too small and we did no have the necessary consumer items to be considered worthy friends, namely a brand new car and a colour television. Teachers were often complicit in these sorts of things being very critical of children they did not feel fitted the norm. I was removed from doing a reading in a school assembly because I pronounced the word 'a' as in 'a town' or whatever as 'ay' rather than 'ah' which was apparently the correct way. I wonder what they would have done if someone from northern or western England had come to the school, probably put them into 'remedial' classes as they were called, to give them the 'correct' pronunciation.

There were other biases. I was told that because I had not been Christened people could call me by any name they chose, because my name was odd anyway. I also apparently looked wrong. I did not like football which meant that I was excluded from the bulk of schoolboy activities and discussion and would actually be ordered off the pitch during PE lessons as the team would rather play with 10 players than have me on their side. My friends tended to be the other marginalised people and even girls, which was odd in those days. Once I was old enough I spent my break times in the school library and though I was once assaulted by two boys in a public library at the age of 12, I was generally safe in the school library.

So there was a lot of name calling but there was physical attacks too. I remember when I was eight being pinned to the ground by two older boys for some reason I do not know why. They found a piece of steel that looked like a guillotine blade (the school was very run down and had lots of disused buildings on the site full of debris, these days it would have been closed on health and safety grounds, but this was 1975) which they pressed against my neck and forced gravel into my mouth. At least they were forced to write an apology but they caught me walking home one day (they walked up my street to get to theirs) and the stronger one gripped me by the neck and lifted me off the floor causing immense pain, so the apology letters had been a small, short-lived victory. I remember a particular bully called Ian Johnstone (I imagine he is long dead by now as though he would only have been 41, I first saw him smoking at the age of 7) who simply walked up to me one day and thrust his knee into my genitals and laughed as I writhed in pain telling me I was clearly so weak as not to be able to stand up to such an attack. There was the usual tripping (sometimes in a very sophisticated way I was once caught out by a set of bolas that a boy had made by linking three conkers on string together and deftly throwing them so they caught around my legs sending me sprawling to the floor).

A lot of the bullying was fostered by parents most of whom earned good incomes, had all the latest consumer items, somehow felt they worked hard and were better than those who did now work in offices and that they were tough and their children had to be tough too. Their toughness had nothing about going hiking or being physically fit, it was about being callous. You can certainly see the seeds of Thatcherism in the middle class areas of the mid-1970s. Her nastiness fitted in perfectly with this class that defined success by ownership rather than experience and strength by how selfish you could be. They were the heirs of the mill owners of the 19th century but lacking even the business sense and willingness to put in effort that those ancestors had.

At secondary school things were marginally easier because I spent all my time hidden in the library though I was punched there once. Playgrounds were more crowded so there was no room for football anyway. I was poor at sports but as more of the 'cool' boys smoked increasingly I came in with better results as they began to struggle as we aged. I was fortunate that two of the sports teachers also taught History my best subject so they forgave me a lot and fortunately, but the mid-1980s were aware more of the range of abilities and gave me marks for effort in sport even when I came in last. A bigger school with some pupils who were disabled meant people could not have the narrow criteria they had set at my primary school. Of course it did not stop the teasing and things, but if I went straight from class to the library and back to class I could avoid a lot of it. I was punched once by a girl of my age simply because she felt I had got in her way when coming into a classroom. At 14 I suffered a cosmetic illness and to some extent it got me off the hook as even the thugs of the school appreciated how I had got through it and it stopped them shouting at me in the playground or asking me why my school trousers were so baggy (this was the early 1980s and all trousers had to be tight) or why I had no girlfriend. Other people, however, ironically not the usual thugs, felt they had a green light to slap me round the head and this would happen as I was filing through crowds.

There was still some of the stuff about not having all the consumer items from the very Thatcherite children, but now in a far bigger school (1200 pupils) there was a much wider mix of social class and so they had to tread carefully. It was only years later when talking with a friend who had gone to school in backwater parts of Scotland in the 1980s where she as a English girl faced constant incomprehension from staff and pupils because of her accent, that I realised that even the 'poor' children at my school were far better off than the average. All the parents owned homes, there were no tenants and all had cars. I suppose any microcosm of society sets its own parameters even if these are out of step with the entirety of that society.

I suppose I was quite fortunate, despite my feelings to the contrary at the time, that my illness stopped a lot of the bullying I had experienced. Unpleasant teachers trod more softly with me as well rather than their previous chastising manner. Humiliation seemed stock in trade in those days and I think I have mentioned Mrs. Williams, Mr. Callen and Mr. Salmon in postings before. In particular, Callen moderated his approach; Williams always had new targets to pick on anyway. Once I went to Sixth Form College, what is now Years 12 and 13 (and I in fact did Year 14 too) I was in a neighbouring town with only a few people I knew. You might have thought at that age 16-18, bullying would be left behind as juvenile. I did get misplaced sympathy from people, who, because of my illness thought I was dying and were surprised to meet me again in my twenties. However, some people still indulged in out-and-out bullying, unfortunately one being the boy I was put next to in my History class, a Eurasian called Rishaad who ridicule my clothes incessantly (he came from a wealthy family and always had the latest fashion) and when I did not rise to his bait (by now being well schooled in avoiding bullies' jibes) he would simply punch me as a bit of warming up before the class started. Of course the time I pushed (rather than punched back) he pretended to be very upset and got the teacher involved saying I was discriminating against him. Given all the bullying I had sustained up to now and the ongoing criticism of my parents, I spend these years very unhappy and this led to a vicious circle of low self-esteem and thinking (as I had done in the latter years of secondary school) that any woman asking me out was trying to pull off a trick or was at best mistaken.

University life was not too bad, though I lived in a very strait-laced corridor in my first year and because I was not Christian and because I was anti-Thatcher I was seen as an oddity rather than something to be bullied. At university there is always a huge diversity of people you can usually find someone in the same situation. In the second year, when living in a rented house, the landlord's step-daughter also a student was incredibly bullying. There was unresolved tension between daughter and step-father who seemed to despise her and made her sleep in the house when there was a whole wall missing. She was very arrogant and blamed anything that went wrong on her fellow flatmates, for example the collapse of the 1970s sofa despite the fact that she and her boyfriend used to pet on it one on top of the other whereas the rest of us simply sat there one at a time. She felt she had a right to stand right in front of the television while ironing so blocking the view for everyone else and constantly whining about everything I did. I suppose that was not bullying but it was an unpleasant atmosphere.

I have spoken about the bullying that I experienced while in my last job, a terrible invasive bullying by a colleague. It is interesting that like a number of the bullies he had a real sense of self-righteousness that somehow I was in the wrong and he was behaving precisely normally. He set out to prevent me getting any recognition for any work I did claiming he inspired anything of value that happened in the office. He also expressed amazement when managers trod softly around him, wondering why they thought they might upset him. There was the 'moral' thing too, as a robust Christian he could not tolerate the pattern of life he assumed that I lived, whereas in reality it was boringly sober and asexual. My manager lived in a fantasy world of her own creation and could not tolerate anyone who said anything that did not tally with her perceptions of how the world worked. Despite direct appeals to her she would not accept that bullying was taking place. I only recognised the severity of it when the man in question left for another job, saying incredibly arrogantly that he felt his work there was done. He did, though, come back some years later and it must have been a nightmare when he returned saying something along the lines that he understood the company needed the benefit of his skills.

Having kept a diary every day since 1st January 1978, I know that my memories of bullying are not false, they are real. As I see the boy in my house experience some of the same things, these memories are coming unpacked and each course of bullying has numerous humiliating or painful incidents that made up the whole experience of that bout of harrassment. For a great deal of my life I have experienced bullying and it really retarded my emotional growth and made me feel worthless for so many years. It took some wonderful people to lift me out of that situation and even then I can still be sucked into being bullied by the more sophisticated methods colleagues use. What equated effectively to collaboration between my parents, teachers, colleagues and managers with the bullies made it harder. I have managed to pull out of it, even though it has taken many years. However, for many people, especially children the scarring of bullying often runs deep and can destroy what would otherwise have been a fulfilling life. This stuff is too unpleasant to want to make up.

P.P. 03/01/2010: Having read of a new two-part television drama of 'The Day of the Triffids' shown over the recent Christmas period on BBC1, I was reminded of the last time the BBC produced an adaptation of this story.  It was shown in April 1981 and starred John Duttine.  Like many young people (I was 13 at the time), impressed by the series, which naturally fitted the apocalyptic feel of that time (with the threat of nuclear holocaust a regular topic of discussion on television and even in schools) I went in search of the original novel.  My school had two libraries, one old one which held the non-fiction books and then a paperback library run by one of the younger English teachers which was only open at lunchtimes.  I was a member of both and went to the paperback library and found a 1960s copy of the story which I proceeded to borrow.  A younger girl had also wanted it but by the time she arrived, I was waiting in the queue to check it out, but she insisted that I gave it to her.  I refused so she simply kicked me very forcefully in the small of my back (she had braced herself against a desk, this library being housed in a classroom) throwing me forward against the check out desk.  She had a gruff lightly freckled face, fair hair cut in a common short Eighties style and though a year below me, was little smaller than me.  The teacher did not understand what was happening and assumed I had stumbled.  The girl simply glared at me, expecting me now to give her the book, but I checked it out and left in real pain.  It turned out my father had a copy of the book anyway and I returned the school copy on Monday.  What came back to me so sharply was, however, the girl's assumption, in many ways, twenty years ahead of its time, that she should have anything she wanted, no-one else's interests mattered and that violence was a matter of course if demands were not met.  She did not bully me in the way the others have done, but she was certainly symptomatic of the kind of culture that sees bullying as something of strength and in fact is uncomprehending/intolerant of anything that stands in the way of that particular moment's desire.

Our Selfish Society 2: Mobile Phone Abuse

This one was prompted by recent commentary I have heard about the use of mobile phones as they are called in the UK. I was very much in sympathy with it. As you can see, yesterday I already commented about the selfishness of using mobile phones while driving. Though 'hands free' kits are safer than holding the phone, research has shown that just talking on a phone tends to send the sight lines of even experienced drivers all over the place. I know that talking on a phone is no worse than having children screaming in the back, but it does tend to be more sustained and unlike listening to the radio or a CD or your MP3 player in the car, it needs you to pay attention in order to respond, attention you cannot give to the road or the traffic. Paying attention is very necessary to keep you alive on the UK's roads given how dangerously so many people habitually drive these days.

What about mobile phone use outside the car? Before I go further, I must say I have no problem with mobile phones, I have no problem with laptops and palmtops, with fancy watches or digital cameras, what I have a problem with is the selfish way that people use them. People can sing or whistle selfishly if they choose, it is not an issue of technology. However, I do think, that as many mobile phone advertisers suggest, mobile phones take the users into 'another world' and they become oblivious of where they actually are. Classic cases that all of you must have witnessed is someone sitting in a 'quiet carriage' on a train (I assume other countries have these) and the person is sitting right under a sign with the symbol of a mobile phone crossed out and they are busily chatting away, usually far louder than is necessary and certainly louder than you would normally talk on a train. There is a sense that it is a human right to be able to use your mobile phone, and conversely that no-one has the right to have some quiet even if they have deliberately gone into a specific place to get it.

I see people using mobile phones in libraries, often, in the case of teenagers, to talk to someone actually in the same building. The worse case I witnessed was back as early as the late 1990s when a librarian came over and asked the young man to stop using his phone and he started narrating what was happening to the person on the other end of the phone 'there's an old biddy getting lary with me...' he said, to quote. To translate, 'there is a middle-aged woman who is in a position of some authority but I do not respect who has asked me to comply with the regulations of this building, but I am too selfish to comply...'. Such attitudes again demonstrate the trend I noted yesterday - a supreme arrogance. These people believe that their, very petty concerns, trump any regulation or any comfort of anyone else on the planet. They do not exist in society, just (interestingly again as many mobile phone advertisers suggest in how they style their adverts) in a bubble of their own importance.

I once visited a government office which had some kind of unobtrusive system that blocked mobile phone signals, causing lots of dismay to some visitors who looked like drug addicts cut off from their supply. I do not know if courts, churches, schools, libraries can invest in such equipment themselves. It would benefit everyone even the potential phone users who might actually pay attention to what is going on.

There is much other use of mobile phones, such as texting which is common and may seem anti-social but generally does not cause much harm. Though I acknowledge that many people texting are oblivious to what is around them so put themselves at risk, especially stepping off kerbs without looking and they do knock into others but are usually moving at such a slow speed as to be avoidable. The fact that people should into mobile phones as if they were a tin can tied to a piece of string or that phone technology has not advanced in the past 80 years, is also a curiosity but really only bad when combined with the phone misuse in places like trains and libraries noted above.

I have no desire to ban people breaking off midway through a conversation to answer their mobile phone even when they know the caller's number will be recorded on their phone in the way it was never done in the past with landline phones and also the person most likely leave a message. Doing that is simply rudeness though born from this feeling that the bubble the owner lives in is far more important than the rest of the Planet. People need to learn manners. They also need to learn that they are signalling to the person that they are talking to that that other person means less to them than a squeaking machine which is incredibly insulting.

The most offensive misuse of mobile phones, though, is their use in bullying. This is both in terms of texts, pictures and calls that threaten people and also of images recorded of people being bullied and attacked. Bullying by mobile phone is particularly invasive for one of the reasons I have outlined, it seems to reach right into the person's bubble. Usually with the worst bullies you can run to your bedroom and bolt the door but with phone bullying they get right in there providing no escape. For young people being without a mobile phone is to be socially dead and yet it makes them vulnerable to this additional, very intrusive form of attack.

As for filming or photographing attacks on people by phone, that is simply a criminal aspect. You might wonder why people would video themselves or their friends bullying or attacking someone and so providing evidence of their crime. Well, it happens, and increasingly they even post it on YouTube. Clearly it is part of the bravado of both young men and women, to show how tough they are and that they are 'in' in terms of youth culture. However, to me, it is scarily reminiscent of the photographs taken by SS and Gestapo units on extermination action during the Second World War. There were thousands of photographs taken of such people torturing and murdering people right through Poland, the Soviet Union and elsewhere, absolutely revelling in their barbarity. This aspect of the war was probably best expressed in a mainstream story in the movie 'Music Box' (1989) which features a lawyer uncovering such photos of a unit of the Arrow Cross, a Hungarian paramilitary unit which also carried out such atrocities during the Second World War. The author George Orwell (1903-1950) argued that the UK could never have a dictatorship of the kind that was experienced elsewhere in Europe, but from what I see of British people's willingness to behave in such similar ways, I doubt his view was accurate. The abuse of mobile phones, it seems, just highlights what an unhealthy, self-centred society the UK is today.

Workplace Bullying: Putting myself at risk

In my post of 16th March 2007, 'Bullying in the UK Workplace' I outlined how three colleagues at my company were being bullied by managers using the company's mechanisms to do it. The intention of the managers is to get these people to leave or be sacked simply because the managers do not like these staff. The colleagues are all hard working with years of service to the company, but that seems to count for nothing when a manager simply takes a dislike to you.

The worst bullying, of a woman by her female boss, has now been going on for over 6 months and I assumed that it was common knowledge in the company as it is often a topic of conversation when I meet with people across the company. Last week towards the end of a very informal meeting (one of the colleagues described a play she had seen recently and people talked about the weather) among colleagues of the same rank and status across the company, one manager was present. She has begun bullying a different colleague so that he retires early as she seems to see him as 'dead wood' which has clearly distressed him. I thought (probably foolishly) if I brought up the other two cases of bullying currently going on in other sections, that it might make her stop and reflect on what she is doing herself.

What I had not anticipated was that one of the colleagues on my level was surprised when I mentioned the bullying of the woman that has been happening for 6 months. She dismissed it as nothing and furthermore that the manager in question (who I assume now must be a friend of hers) had the right to behave how she chose because she headed a section. When I complained about the time and effort that must have gone into the trumped up complaints, she dismissed this too, saying if discipline was needed then it had to be thoroughly documented. She gave no consideration that the poor woman being bullied is not guilty of any of the charges put against her. That seemed to be less concern than the manager being able to act how she felt fit.

Now, I know that we all live in hard times in business, but the assumption that someone can simply have someone they dislike removed seems to jar with the personnel policies of the company which portrays itself as a model employer. The dismissal of a complaint because the manager has an important job simply smacked of the attitudes you find in totalitarian states, that the leader is always right simply because they are the leader and no morals come into it. I had previously respected the colleague who spouted these views and she lost that respect entirely in a matter of minutes. I did not come into this business to work in an environment, which I accept is not like a real dictatorship (I have studied enough of those over the years), but is showing similar patterns of behaviour.

I had joked with another colleague who was at this meeting, that in the bullying environment we were now working in, we had to be careful about who overheard our conversations. In the meeting I also began by saying that I was worried that once the three people being bullied have been pushed out or left, the bullying managers would turn their targets on other people. Both of these things now seem to have come true and this week I have found out that that I should not have treated them lightly or rhetorically.

Back after the Bank Holiday break, I was called immediately to my boss's office and warned that my comments in the meeting had been reported to senior colleagues and that there was now a sense that the section I am working in 'is out of control'. I was a fool to take the informal atmosphere at face value, I was a fool to think my previously respected colleague had shared my opinion on the rights or wrongs of what is going on. Now I am seen as a trouble maker and am being encouraged to re-build bridges for the sake of my section. My workplace has changed in 6 months to a place where you cannot judge any situation on its merits or morality, you simply have to toe the line of the managers as they seek to expand their empires and not only eliminate anyone who stands in their way, but anyone they simply take a dislike to.

No, I am not going to be found face down in the company pond, but I could find difficulties in my work and under attack from the managers I have raised concerns about. I cannot believe that morality has gone so quickly out of the window at this company, which was never previously a 'greed is good' place to work. The greed here seems to be about arrogance and vanity, that managers cannot accept anyone with a different view to themselves or even a different way of behaving or thinking, despite all the supposed efforts at inclusivity. No-one seems willing to stick up their hand and say 'hang on, surely we should not behaving so shabbily to workers here'. This is not the place I came to work for in 2005 and it is not an atmosphere I want to remain in.

I need to get out as quickly as I can and find somewhere with the approach this place had a couple of years ago. I know that is abandoning a sinking ship (I doubt this company can succeed in the long term if it permits such corrosive behaviour among its managers) but I fear I will damage my long-term future if I stay here, whether I protest or not, especially if the 'removal machinery' is turned on me. I know my life is nowhere near as bad as those who flee tyranny, but these incidents have certainly allowed me greater insight into what people must experience in those conditions.

Clearly I am not going to risk my job by stating the name of the company here, but if you wish to know, especially if you work or intend to work in the UK, then email me and I will let you know. Saying that I increasingly guess from what I read that tens of UK employers in my industry and elsewhere turn a blind eye to bullying especially when it is carried out by senior staff.

Bullying in the UK Workplace

If like me you are a regular reader of websites such as the BBC News pages then over the past couple of years you will have seen a lot of comment about the increase of bullying in UK schools and of various initiatives to try to combat it. The trend seems to be stretching into the adult world of the UK too, as this week, for example, it was reported that 30% of people who work in British universities say they have or are being bullied at work. The greater use of SMS text messaging, email and the internet is helping this trend and 'cyber-bullying' is now an accepted term.

I suffered about 12 months of bullying at work in 2002/3. I was with a large employer who had about 5000 staff when I started, though 25% were made redundant while I worked there. The bullying was very insidious which made it harder to deal with. The colleague with whom I shared an office slowly but surely undermined my position telling people to ignore my reports and ultimately insisting that I put his name on everything I wrote because he had to have had such a major impact on any work I did. He would edit and censor anything I produced until it got to a state in which I felt it futile to produce anything. Even my mother threatened to come to my employer to complain. Fortunately the colleague decided that he 'had done all that he could do for the place' and resigned. That day I felt physically as if a weight had been lifted from me, and I literally skipped home singing 'Oh Happy Day'. It was only at that stage I realised how bad it had got. I do not really blame the man, I see that he was under immense pressure with a child of 2 and a new baby at home, plus studying for a degree part-time and moving house and he took his tension out on me. This was helped by his faith which gave him a rather 'holier than thou' attitude and meant he looked down upon my unmarried state.

The key problem was everyone kept telling me he was such a wonderful fellow and our boss, head of the whole department, did not seem to comprehend what I was complaining about his behaviour. I was not a union member at the time so had no-one to turn to bar family and friends who could do nothing in my workplace. Two years later while still working at the same place, the issue came up and now my boss, who had stepped down from the senior post, accused me of having made up the whole thing and now more knowledgeable on such matters I was forced to bring a complaint against her as her dismissal of my concerns as fantasy were beginning to undermine my position. Her problem is that she believed any different view of the past from the one her unreliable memory held, had to be lies.

Anyway, I set that out to show that I have been through the mill myself and so am now alert to such behaviour being imposed on colleagues. I left that employer and got a better job at a similarly large, though smaller place. Fortunately here I have not suffered any bullying, but the same cannot be said for colleagues. Currently I know of three of them, each being bullied by a different manager. One is near retirement but they want him out even quicker than that. The other two seem to be that the manager has just decided that they do not like the person in question, despite the fact that both of the women are incredibly hardworking and if they go it will make much work harder to achieve. The approaches adopted by the bullies vary. One is simply declaring the person redundant though is already advertising for their replacement. Another has worked for six months setting impossible tasks, in some cases that could have put clients at risk and put the person under daily scrutiny (they have to log everything they do hour-by-hour and have weekly reviews). The person being bullied made a complaint and despite receiving union backing, the company has managed to delay and dissipate her complaint whilst now saying she needs to be disciplined. The third person has to ask permission to attend meetings relevant to his work, and recently giving permission has been delayed often for a fortnight, which is actually stopping him working effectively (probably intentionally so that he appears ineffectual).

These three cases are putting decent colleagues under immense pressure and despite the legislation in place these days, those being bullied seem to have no power to resist what is being done to them. The three victims work assiduously and have just been unlucky that a manager has taken a dislike to them. The arrogance of these people is astounding, that they feel justified to wreck the job and damage the life of someone junior to them. They may be jealous of them or see them as a threat or something, it is not clear. I can only blame current trends in managerial behaviour, that seem to still retain too many hangovers from the 'dog-eat-dog' attitudes of the 1980s. These managers are able to use the disciplinary machinery and sometimes simply their status to pressurise these workers on a daily basis. They do not see how their own ego trips (and it is nothing else) are damaging the company's business because these people are actually being prevented from doing their work properly. However, the effects go wider than this. Not only is it difficult to liaise with the colleagues being bullied but now an atmosphere of fear is creeping across the whole workplace. People are using private email accounts to email colleagues rather than their work email accounts which might be monitored; similarly they use mobile phones rather than office ones. Within the space of a few months we have started behaving as if we were living under a Communist or Nazi regime, meeting in public places, not trusting anyone, fearing that after these three have been bullied out of their positions one of us will fall foul of the dislike of one of these managers.

It is often not easy simply to throw in a job. The ties of mortgages, schooling, friends, pension schemes are strong. My employer is supposed to be a company which sets an example as a good one in its region, so if such behaviour is going within its walls, I dread to think how many UK workers are having their lives wrecked by workplace bullies at other, less prominent companies.