‘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.

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.

Me And Asperger's

It is interesting the impact that genealogy (tracing family trees) can have.  A friend of mine once said that all the people he ever met doing that (and he spent a lot of time in local record offices) were convinced that they were somehow related to the Royal Family.  I met one women who certainly was not convinced of that, as she knew that for many generations her family had served royals on a particular estate.  Finding out genealogical information is the second greatest use of searching on the internet after seeking out pornography.  My own family got into tracing their family back in the 1970s long before there was a public internet and anyone had even thought of computerising censuses.  There were certainly on online discussion groups around particular names or database software to lay it out sensibly.  They managed to get back into the mid-19th century before the paper-based resources ran out.  Of course, most of us are descended from labourers and only occasionally some ancestor who was interesting pops up, usually for doing something that would have been condemned at the time, such as committing a crime or adultery or running away to London.  One friend of mine found out his mother had lived on estates in India where her father was a manager and then moved to Mesopotamia (now Iraq) where he oversaw road building.  Despite a range of photos from the 1930s she would not talk about it and now she is dead that slice of a colonial life is gone.  Another friend's relative was a female script writer who left Scotland to work in Hollywood in the 1920s, presumably given some credit on some silent movies, maybe under a pseudonym at a time when very few women were in that line of business.

Anyway, this is not a posting about genealogy though it does touch on inheritance and discussion of what now seems clear that I suffer to some extent from Asperger's Syndrome, was triggered by a cousin of my mother's exploring her family tree.  I had absolutely no memory of her, though apparently we had met when I was a child in the 1970s.  It turned out that we lived 48Km apart and for five years I had been working in the town where she lived; if I had been able to secure a post I was interviewed for late last year, her son would have fallen into my remit, totally unbeknown to either of us.  I have not ascertained her age, but there has to have been some generation slippage as she is far closer to my age than that of my mother, but I guess that happens when one sibling marries early and has children young and another does it much later, especially if this then repeated by their children.  When at primary school I had friends who were already uncles.  Anyway, she had been carrying out genealogical research and emailed me to ask if I was interested in seeing what she had uncovered.  I have no memory of meeting her mother but knew the woman by reputation due to her three marriages and her involvement with political movements abroad, things that enter the folk memory of a family far down the different branches of the tree. 

We got into discussion about common ancestors and she also spoke about her children, ranging from grown-up to primary school age.  She mentioned a number had conditions on the autistic spectrum, which encompasses things such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, Asperger's and autism itself, all with varying degrees.  This brought back to mind an informal diagnosis I had had three years back in which it was suggested that I had Asperger's.  I did not want a formal diagnosis as I feared it would count against me in job applications.  Mental health issues still seem to remain a taboo subject and one for which covert discrimination is rarely challenged.  When raising the issue of me possibly having Asperger's with my immediate family, I received completely no response and a kind of metaphorical awkward shuffling of embarrassment that I might be daring to say that such a condition could have been passed down to me. 

Bascially, the characteristics of someone with Asperger's are as follows: at least average and often high level of intelligence but difficulty with high-level language skills including reasoning and problem solving as well as taking things literally, a challenge in our coded and euphemistic society.  They may lack of empathy with others partly through an inability to see another person's point of view.  This can hamper close relationships with people.  The emphasis on focused tasks is a commonly known trait of people with autism with people referencing Dustin Hoffman's autistic character in 'Rain Man' (1988).  People with Asperger's might find it difficult to chat or have 'small talk' because in many ways there are far more important things to be thinking and talking about.  They may be unable to control anger, depression and other worries.  Though, saying that, seeing all the road rage and anger which you witness on a daily basis, I do wonder if that is now a trait of the bulk of the population.  Perhaps the challenge is that they cannot articulate their concerns well or through lacking empathy with others, see these challenges as being just for them alone.  The adherence to personal rules and rules set by others is another well-known trait as is a focus on a particular pastime or activity.  Again, many people like to structure their lives and in certain jobs and in studying these are in fact real strengths.  The challenge for others is the stress the individual experiences when their routine is broken.  However, I have also seen the positive side.  Having worked occasionally with people with degrees of autism, I know how hard they work. 

Another trait is talking at length on a subject.  In the past that would have been less of an issue, but these days when everyone wants everything communicated very quickly, the enjoyment or the need someone with Asperger's gets from outlining on their favourite subject, is actually seen as unacceptable.  People with Asperger's often tend to misinterpret body language or other cues.  However, I believe that they also have a different valuation of what is in fact important or the truth.  Often today, many people put much emphasis on very frivolous subjects and present themselves as things they are not, things which are an anathema to a person with Asperger's. Thus, while there is more recognition of the condition, how it manifests itself may now be less acceptable in society than it would have been 50 years ago when someone with Asperger's would have simply been put down as a 'windbag', a 'bore' or 'eccentric'. 

Reflecting with my distant relative about my grandfather and his generation of the family, we certainly can now see rather obsessive traits that were seen as cranky at the time, as traits of Asperger's.  Apparently men are three to ten times more likely to manifest Asperger's than women are, though given that the symptoms are different between the two genders the ratio, as yet, is not clear.  However, with current knowledge it certainly seems that with my mother and her cousin it could easily have skipped a generation going through women.  Examples of my grandfather's Asperger's-type behaviour include his inability to empathise with anyone else's situation even that of his wife and child; his obsessive driving across Europe in a matter of days; his ability to retain large amounts of information by memory.  Until the 1960s the ability to recite poems from memory or play a piano with no sheet music were admired, but are now skills that are seen as rather 'odd'.  Asperger's is hereditary and given what my relative from that side of the family has experienced as well as my own circumstances, suggests it has gone down through the blood line.

I certainly seem to tick many of the Asperger's boxes.  I went to university at a time when only 6% of the UK population did which suggests that I have above average intelligence.  I am very focused on my hobbies, over 700 postings to my blog in under 4 years probably shows that.  My postings show my focus on 'the truth' and insisting that it is heard, often at length.  When looking at the Changing The Times website I saw just how much more I write about a counter-factual than the average contributor.  Being able to expound on a topic sometimes very complex ones and see its structure, has helped me when running staff training sessions.  I have become aware of not overwhelming people and keeping it bite-sized chunks.  Ironically, I usually use far fewer Powerpoint slides than my colleagues.  However, it might have come from me having to work at such things in the past where as these colleagues have never questioned their approaches.  I have turned my focus on topics into an enthusiasm which is often infectious, so that has turned it into a positive.  My standard structuring of content and slides, probably fitting the issue of routine, has meant some people find what I produce repetitive.  Certainly in my daily life I did adhere when living alone to a pattern, doing the same chores on the same days, and eating the same meals.  Living with a woman and her child has helped bring variety and when we part I will probably go back to my set pattern, though with more ideas, certainly for recipes, if not for doing laundry on another day to Monday.

Asperger's sufferers' tendency to adhere to certain rules, probably explains why I made so many mistakes when dealing with women and that I had no sexual partners until I was 34. It is interesting as at the time, when I was walking away from a potential relationship I could almost step outside myself and seeing I was doing something that was going to make me unhappy and yet was not able to take the step and make myself say the right thing. Issues around avoiding embarrassment and also, importantly, having low esteem after all the derogatory remarks I received over the years from teachers, my parents and other children, which I can recall word-for-word even today, made me feel I was not worthy of going out with that woman.

The greatest problems for me have come in the workplace.  I have to tell the truth, I recognise that now.  In addition, if I am asked to research something and report, I try to do this as thoroughly as I can and most people working in offices cannot cope with that.  They simply want short answers that confirm the view they already hold.  I know having to accept that is actually physically uncomfortable for me as I have to let it lie.  The focus on brevity is also a problem, as the tolerable length of phonecalls and emails seems to fall every year and I am racing to keep up as to just how far I need to cut down the information I am providing.  In many ways as I have posted recently, I do not think this is a useful approach in business as it leads to people overlooking any conflicting or challenging information and ignoring potential pitfalls that they could be alerted to.  We need a culture shift in which those seeing potential problems are not condemned but rather seen as protecting the company from making mistakes that could have been foreseen. 

In terms of empathy I believe I am out of step with the standard Asperger's profile.  I can often connect with people facing stresses.  This often makes me unpopular with management that sees me as 'having gone native'.  However, I believe all workers of every level need respect and an appreciation of the stresses that are being imposed on them especially at times of upheaval in the company or more broadly in the economy and society.  It may be because I have a very accurate memory of many incidents that often occurred 35 years or more ago.  I have been through so many embarrassing and stressful situations that I cannot only call to mind but often haunt me, that even if I cannot understand what the individual is precisely experiencing I can recall my feelings during a similar situation.  So, maybe, my empathy is second hand, but it works better than those who seem to shut down any empathetic sense they may have as a 'weakness' inappropriate for business.  Perhaps if you are a loan shark or an assassin then it is inappropriate, but for the average office or shop job, it certainly is not.

People with Asperger's are supposed not to realise when they have made social faux pas.  I have the completly opposite problem.  I am often unable to make myself avoid saying things which are going to cause embarrassment, but am immediately aware of the embarrassment caused, it is almost a physical thing, I can sense the wave of embarrassment sweeping through the room.  Subsequently such incidents will haunt me and something I said wrongly back in the 1980s will be replayed vividly in my mind, pricking me with the embarrassment yet again as if it had happened only moments before. This has made me a very cautious person and very nervous of getting into any situations that have the potential to lead to embarrassment. 

I know we all blush when embarrassed but I feel distinctly uncomfortable through my entire body, with my stomach screwing up and I feel very nervous when witnessing other people in embarrassing situations, even if it is simply a character on television.  I cannot watch scenes in which people have no chance to get out of a situation or they suffer simply as the result of the caprice of someone else.  In real life I hate seeing people arrested and will walk away or in one case gave a stranger £20 so he could pay his train fare rather than me having to witness him being fined.  To some degree I have an over-empathy even with complete strangers and can see myself precisely in their situation.  This seems counter to one of the standard traits of Asperger's but as all the advice notes, the symptoms vary a great deal between individuals.

Possibly more characteristic were other phobias that used to be strong in me when a child.  One thing I loathed, again with an almost physical reaction was being compelled to wear a badge or a sticker with any writing on it. Even now I avoid teeshirts with designs on the front and though I can tolerate a small logo over the breast pocket, I am physically conscious of it being there as if it was on my skin rather than my clothes.  Another one was what friends and I called 'ticketaphobia' the fear that I would lose a train ticket (usually envisaging it falling down that crack between the train and the platform) and so would get into trouble.  I also avoided going into shops just to browse, convinced that I would be accused wrongly of shoplifting.  If I had nothing to buy in the shop I would wait outside; some shops were worse than others, I remember I would stay away from one local toyshop in particular, I believe, because I had seen them accuse people of shoplifting when I had been in there.  When at university, asking among a group of 15 friends, I found out I was the only one who had never shoplifted.  I once witnessed a friend do it and was very distraught.  These days with electronic tags it is far harder back in the 1970s it seems that shoplifting by children was endemic, but not for me, I could not even stomach others doing it let alone myself.

Since looking into Asperger's I have become aware that I probably process information differently to other people.  When reading about how autistic people tend to believe that anything they know must be know universally even if it is kept concealed, I realised it showed a different way of processing.  I think the one example of this I have been aware of longest is that when I read some information or a story, I immediately associate it in my mind's eye with an image of a location, usually one I have visited.  Now, the place may have nothing to do with the details or the information or of the story but it becomes a kind of 'tag' which is triggered when I come back to the book or article.  I realise that trying to stop that happening missed a trick when I was at school.  I should have developed it and developed a kind of visual library in my mind, a quite reference system back to the information or story.  I find now that a lot of my writing is triggered by images rather than other input such as sounds or smells.  Certainly the focus on a task and ability to keep details in my mind often for years, really helps doing creative writing and that is one aspect of the condition that has helped my hobby and may explain why I started doing it in the first place.

Another issue though, is other things I obsess about.  Perhaps this is why people with Asperger's have a tendency to get so angry or depressed, we cannot let the thing triggering those feelings, go from our minds.  There are a few examples of useless things that worry me regularly that are unlikely ever to happen so simply just waste my brain power.  One is that I keep considering what would happen to me if I was thrown back in time.  It has two formats, either I worry about driving on roads in the 1970s or finding work in the Victorian period or surviving with diabetes in the Middle Ages or I reflect if I was taken back 5 or 15 years in my own life and begin thinking of all the different decisions I could/should have made to lead to a better life.  These are regular thoughts in my mind which come back like a sore muscle.  It was naturally exacerbated by watching 'Life on Mars' and 'Ashes to Ashes' especially as they sent the characters back in time to periods I had lived through.  If I could relive my life I would have avoided watching those series however good they may have been. 

A similar example, when using things like biscuits, bread or milk is I begin to worry about being in a nuclear bunker and dealing with the situation when one particular item ran out.  I blame this on all the depressing programmes I had to sit through in my youth about what would happen to us if there was a nuclear war.  Those worries were thrust so forcefully into our lives as children that is probably not surprising that someone like me with my condition, still is concerned with then 20-30 years later.  I have certainly avoided watching the movie 'Blast From The Past' (1999) about a man coming out from having lived with his parents in a nuclear bunker all his life.

The other trait is having empathy for inanimate objects.  I know that I am not alone in this, it was a trait of the character Monica Geller played by Courteney Cox Arquette in the long-running comedy series 'Friends' (1994-2004).  She kept bottles of milk next to each other because she was afraid of upsetting them if she separated them in the fridge.  I do precisely the same, seeing 'families' and 'couples' among products on supermarket shelves and even among biscuits in a jar.  I know it is a ridiculous concept, but it something I have lived with all my life and cannot seem to shake.  I guess this stems from people with Asperger's wanting to adhere to a routine, as similarly I used to always wash out a glass three times to symbolise the Trinity even though I was not at all religious.  Similarly I tap biscuits on the table before eating them, as if I was a sailor from the time of Admiral Nelson.  Back in the 1970s when there was a lot on people remembering former lives, I thought I must be a reincarnation of such a sailor still adhering to old habits.

I think my great difficulty in learning foreign languages, in sharp contrast to the rest of my nuclear family may be explained by Asperger's.  I certainly have a very poor short-term memory and have to flick back and forth between one page or one webpage and another to get information across.  I think I package up foreign words in my brain in a way which means I forget them quickly.  I certainly can only retain one foreign language in my brain at one time.  Travelling to France after having been in West Germany for four months back in the 1980s I found myself almost entirely unable to speak French any longer.  I had no problem speaking English but when I tried to address a French person all that came out was German.  Most notably was the immense difficulty I had in remembering any Chinese characters even in simplified format.

The same problem applies to people's names, I can forget them within a matter of seconds of hearing them.  This makes it very hard when being introduced to a group all at once.  It was one reason why I failed as a school teacher as generally you have to learn 240 pupils' names in the first week of teaching in a secondary school.  That and the fact that I gave them more information in a class than you would get these days on the topic in a university lecture.  For some reason I have never been able to translate my association of novel-with-place to name-with-face.  Recently I have noticed I have even forgotten people's faces if I have not seen them for a while and have been surprised to meet someone again who I had remembered as looking very differently, and even of a different height.  This packaging of information and difficulty in getting certain information to stay in my short-term memory long enough to make it into my long-term memory, I believe also explains my inability to remember martial arts moves.  Perhaps also it is an issue of lack of physical co-ordination, an issue when I played sports as a child and balancing on a bicycle.  Given my clumsiness, I suppose I get no 'muscle memory' either, making it harder to recall the move.  Twelve years of studying Aikido and eight years of studying French have shown me that I am never going to have the mind that allows me to engage with either and, in fact I have forgotten all but a few crumbs of either skill.  It is frustrating given how well I can remember embarrasing incidents from the 1970s; why cannot I at least remember some of my French lessons as well?  I guess it is because they lacked the emotional discomfort that the incidents had to imprint them in my memory. 

I do not know if the diagnosis undermines what I have said on here before about British people having difficulties with languages and martial arts being far harder than the clubs make out.  However, even if you exempt me from the equation, I cannot remember the last time I actually met a British person who could speak any foreign languages, certainly not well, probably back in the early 2000s, so they cannot be that common even among the non-Asperger's British public.  Similarly, you do not meet black belts or even brown belts in Aikido or Karate down every street, so it must be pretty hard.

So, how does this stronger confirmation of what I have help me?  As readers of this blog know, anger and depression are things I have wrestled with over the last few years.  However, I do not think I suffer from them any more than the average person in the UK in these times.  Perhaps bringing me out of these situations needs a different approach from myself and those around me.  Working on anger management through Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) methods seems to have helped me a great deal.  Apparently looking at behaviour can help people with Asperger's avoid making blunders in social circumstances.  Despite everything that has been going wrong for me since really December 2009, I am more positive than I was even three years ago and certainly better able to cope with the challenges of computer systems not working and idiotic behaviour when on the road.  I also think I was in a spiral, because not being able to do much about either issue, getting angry was a narcotic that gave moments of relief and became pretty addictive.  Certainly now, I do not think I am simply out-of-step with 'normal' behaviour in the way people tell me basically when I will not kow-tow to  them.  I think differently, I accept that, but that does not mean I am wrong.  In fact it seems to help me to address people who also find themselves wondering what the rules are in the UK context, hence working well with people from China and other states outside Europe.  I think if I can assign certain behaviour to 'oh, that is the Asperger's speaking' then I can challenge it without feeling that I am challenging my whole approach to life.  I can categorise different elements and filter them accordingly.  I do not think I will ever shed my commitment to speaking the truth and I support all who do.  I might have a different way of engaging empathetically with people, but I do feel passionately that everyone's voice is equal and no-one should be shut down simply because of what they are.

Living in the 2010s is probably one of the worst times for people with Asperger's and we would have done better back in the 1910s.  This is because of the growing emphasis in society on how things appear rather than how they are in reality.  Someone with Asperger's will always have something to say about the difference between the two.  The emphasis on everything fitting into a tweet rather than being a proper exposition is also going to make it hard for us.  Empathy is increasingly seen as a weakness, though I think that the issue of empathy differs between what the person feels and how they express it and people with Asperger's are just as human(e) in their feelings as anyone else, often more so due to the prejudices they have suffered.  The positive aspects are that we can blog and we can find people who share our hobbies right across the world, very easily, so isolation is not a problem.  Given how poor so much social behaviour is, social faux pas made by people with Asperger's will be far less obvious.  Having Asperger's does not make you call a woman a 'whore' or a man a 'twat', that is done so commonly and derogatively by 'normal' people.  Our problem solving skills may be different, but I believe they are strong because we can hold an idea in our minds for long periods and look at it from so many sides and that is a useful if overlooked skill.  Knowing that I have Asperger's to whatever degree I do, makes some things make sense.  I know it does not hamper my ability to do a job well, in fact, in many tasks it helps.  However, for now, it is probably safest to appreciate that for myself and not risk sharing it with family and (potential) employers.

P.P.  Having drafted this posting and spoken, in passing, to my parents about my plans to go for an official diagnosis (so far I have had advice from professionals dealing with the condition but nothing written on paper) I was stunned by the reaction of my father.  He rung up and bellowed at me that the condition does not actually exist; denied that the genealogist relative was actually any relation of mine, saying that her father was not in fact her true father and then accusing me of living in a 'fantasy world'.  I said that I accepted he might have a different viewpoint on Asperger's.  I have worked with people who have denied that even dyslexia exists and have treated sufferers simply as malingerers, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  I said he was entitled to hold that opinion though I disagreed with it, I would not insult him in the way he had me.  I did challenge him for ringing up simply to insult me.

I think his problem is that he has always believed in a eugenic approach, that people born with particular conditions should not be helped to survive.  He does not go as far as to say that people with genetic conditions should be sterilised or killed, but he is clearly on the path to old-fashioned eugenic views.  I remember that he was incredibly upset when I was diagnosed with diabetes until it was revealed it was from a virus I had caught, not a condition I had inherited.  Now I feel he cannot cope with the fact that he might have passed on some condition like Asperger's even though, from the limited evidence I have it seems more likely to have come from my mother's side of the family.  I note this to warn people if you reveal you have a condition like Asperger's which is often not diagnosed until adulthood, you might get an unexpected and hostile reaction especially from your parents and perhaps other family members too.

'I Don't Want To Hear That': Censoring In The Workplace

Before Christmas I attended a Christmas Fayre held at a local primary school.  It had the usual games, stalls and refreshments that you find at such events held by churches, schools and other organisations.  Being a small school some of the stalls were in classrooms.  As I made my way into one classroom and joined the queue to buy some Christmas items, I looked at the work on the walls.  It is always interesting to see what is being produced by children, especially as the curriculum is far wider than in my day and a lot of the work has been printed off the computer rather than hand-drawn and coloured.  I was in the classroom used by Year 5 children, i.e., aged 9-10.  On the wall was a series of notices admonishing the children to behave in certain ways, seeming rather old fashioned in style, but that may reflect the tone of that school or of the particular teacher of that class.  Anyway, the one that concerned me most encouraged children not to speak.  It told them not to say anything unless it complied with the following criteria: it had to be True, Helpful, Inspiring, Needed, Kind', as you can see this gave the acronym THINK.  I suppose telling people to think before they speak is not really a bad principle.  However, it seemed to reinforce more unsettling trends I have been encountering in society and in the workplace, in particular, so I was unnerved to see them coming into primary school teaching.


Let us look at the criteria.  I suppose none of us would be against encouraging children to tell the truth.  However, in western society, especially in education, the truth is always being contested.  If it was not then knowledge would not advance, and to some degree this even applies in primary schools where the children are testing out ideas.  If one child said 'Father Christmas exists' and another child said 'Father Christmas does not exist' who, among 9-year olds, would be telling the truth? Does the school rule out any of the mysteries that children often receive from their parents.  What if a child said 'God created the World in 7 days' and another 'the universe started with the Big Bang' and so on?  It certainly rules out any child telling a fictional story; perhaps that school only deals with non-fiction. As to the other criteria, they are all incredibly subjective.  How does a 9-year old understand 'inspiring' and presumably if they did not think what they were saying 'needed' to be said then they would not bother; similarly with 'helpful'.  Perhaps 'kind' is easier to judge, but if the child is not being particularly insulting to another child or shouting at them, then how do you apply this to other statements.  Generally it seemed like an new way of saying 'children should be seen and not heard', a very Victorian precept.


This attitude that seems to be penetrating, even if in just some isolated cases, into schools is already widespread in the workplace.  If I had a pound for every time in the past decade that I had heard the phrase, 'I don't want to hear that' in a work situation then I would be wealthy enough not to need to be applying for a job at the moment.  I imagine it stems from the revived fashion for 1980s style management, encouraged by methods seen on programmes such as 'The Apprentice' in which managers are stern and distant and bellow at their employees as if they are all idiots.  Lord Sugar has been very successful in bringing the methods used my sergeant-majors, including the insults and humiliation, into the office.  The key difficulty is an assumption that the manager determines the parameters of what is a permitted topic and even what language can be used to describe it.  This assumption is one I have often encountered and seems to be increasingly common with each passing year. 

I accept that such an approach is a stamp of authority.  However, it puts a far greater distance between the manager and the workforce, often artificially.  In any given office there are always at least one or two people who could easily step into the manager's shoes and, in fact, in many situations do the job better.  However, in the UK workplace we seem to now have very stratfied approaches and no sense any longer that employees, through hard work and training can progress up the company hierarchy.  These days managers have to be managers brought from somewhere else (though often from elsewhere within the same company), rather than promoted internally.  I accept it is difficult to set one employee above their previous colleagues, but that should not mean that there is an automatic sense that people on a certain grade will never become managers whether in their own office or elsewhere.

Defining the language which people are permitted to use when speaking is discriminatory.  We are not talking about abusive or even crude language, but terminology and ways of expression which I have witnessed being shot down by 'I don't want to hear that'.  I have generally worked in Southern England and the Midlands, but with staff from regions right across the UK, from many parts of the EU, from Canada, the USA, Australia and China and numerous other countries, especially in South Asia.  In addition, I have worked with men and women, people aged 16 to 78 in my work and from all social classes, even interacting with nobility from time to time. 

With this variety there is often wide diversity in the use of words and phrases in the work context.  I have encountered challenges with which floor a meeting is on with Americans (for whom the first floor is the British ground floor) and with a Liverpudlian who pronounced the word 'staff' the way I pronounce 'stuff'.  I even had to work out what a delivery driver meant when he said 'I need to fucking fuck that fuck', which to many would have been abusive, but was expressed in a neutral tone and meant he was going to back up his lorry; I had to interpret it from the context (I was reminded of this reading a China Mieville story in which the language of an alien race alters so there is only a single sound used for all words and sentences are understood purely by the context, partly as a defence against manipulation of the society by people alien to the planet).  Ruling out words and phrases on some criteria which is, again, not articulated, only assumed to be 'common sense', is prejudicial as it descriminates against the speech of particular workers be that on a social, gender, regional, ethnic or age basis.  Of course, it is simply another tool for the manager to constrain other employees left to try to guess at unwritten words and having their comments demoted in relation to the already privileged statements of the manager.


Setting the parameters of what is a permitted topic and what is permitted language helps to separate out managers from the level below them (which in many companies can often be another layer of managers who in turn are separating themselves from the level below).  Usually the parameters are not defined; they are simply things the manager is ignorant of or for some reason does not feel relevant, but rather than saying that, simply the manager holds up their hand and says 'I don't want to hear this' and that is literally the end of the conversation.  There is no explanation; no attempt to help the colleague develop so they say different things in the future.  People saying 'I don't want to hear this' tend to assume that their opposition to some approach is common sense. Typically, however, ruling out certain approaches so peremptorily is not done on any criteria than either the manager does not want to hear 'bad' news or the person addressing them has started referring to things that the manager does not feel confident about and is unwilling to reveal the gap in their knowledge.  No-one in any company or organisation knows everything, but when we have to comply with 20-50 essential specifications to get a job then none of us dare admit that there is something we are weak on.  The only solutions that are allowed to be presented in so many companies now are the ones which the manager understands already and naturally this is detrimental to any innovation and even different ways of addressing a particular problem in order to work out solutions.

Too many managers not only do not want to hear about things they are unfamiliar with, but they do not want to hear anything they deem to be 'bad'.  This marks an interesting change.  Back in the early 2000s I remember a counter-trend which was that I would be asked for 'war stories', taken to mean examples of situations or projects similar to the ones we were dealing with but which had gone badly wrong.  Back then people did not want to hear success stories, rather ones outlining all the potential problems they could avoid.  It was easy to tell this from not only comments and requests I received but also from looking at the number of hits on the reports that myself and numerous colleagues had loaded up to the internal information database.  The hits on the 'war stories' exceeded those on the success story reports fivefold.  Of course, this did not mean that people wanted to hear about the unsuccessful parts of their own projects, but I believe they were far more willing to speak about them, otherwise myself and the people I worked alongside would have had no material from which to write our 'war stories', a situation far more common now, a decade on.

'Bad' is a loose word anyway.  In my experience it encompasses anything that brings doubt about the success of even a single small aspect of the proposal made by the manager themselves.  If they are fixated on even the most hare-brained scheme, you risk your job to highlight even one of the erroneous assumptions or ill-informed decisions in the project.  This is insulting.  What is the point of recruiting capable people, questioning them at length about their knowledge and capabilities; sending them on training courses and to conferences, only then to dismiss any observations that run counter to the leader's vision for the company/department/office.  What is the point of me having these skills and knowledge if you are not going to even let me draw on them?  I remember challenging one boss on two schemes of his.  I pointed out that in one cases there were already 146 examples of what he proposed to develop, already on the market.  In the second I highlighted to him that sending British staff for 3 years without a chance to return to the UK in that period might cause a rapid turnover of staff and questioned how he was going to pay them in China given that the reminbi (also known as the yuan) was not convertible; even seven years on from then and with China having taken steps in this direction, full convertibility has not been achieved.  You would think my points were valid, but they were dismissed 'I only hear bad news from you' I was told and 'you seek to stop anything I plan'.  The sense that anything that tempers or modifies the plan as envisaged by the originator is seeking to stop it entirely, rather than improve it, makes it difficult to develop pragmatic responses and adjustments which would actually make the plan work better or, in some cases, actually feasible.  As with what can be raised, the 'all or nothing' approach hampers what should be the productive evolution of business activities, drawing on the skills of the full range of staff the company has taken so much effort to recruit.

The exclusion of anything defined as 'bad' (and this is defined by the beholder rather than any objective perspective) excludes a lot of the input that is needed when planning and executing plans in business.  One basis for this attitude is the sense that we must all be hyper-positive about everything that happens in the company (the more I write the more the managerial style I am characterising seems to be similar to that of the Five Year Plans of the USSR and China, ignoring the flaws and continuing with unflinching optimism).  In fact, excessive positivity can be dangerous. A study in 2009 by Canadian academics Joanne Wood and John Lee, University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic, University of New Brunswick. They felt that making self-esteem affirmations actually reinforced established behaviour rather than bringing about change. This is easy to comprehend, because if you feel good about yourself then they begin to feel that the way you are doing things must be the correct way, even if this means disregarding signals to the contrary. In an extract last January in 'The Guardian', supporting the release of her book, 'Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America And The World' (2010), Barbara Ehrenreich outlined how the insistance on positivity when dealing with cancer actually can be a hindrance to effective treatment. Her article went on to discuss something which I am on the verge of experiencing, the sessions telling the unemployed to be positive and to see their period of unemployment not as something negative and limiting, rather as something opening up new opportunities. I can say from my own experience that unemployment shuts down so many opportunities, to go anywhere, to socialise, to get things repaired and, in fact, to get another job, because employers prefer applicants currently in work over the jobless.

Now, I am not saying we should all be gloomy about the future and recognise that that can be debilitating.  However, we seem to have got to a situation in which we feel that good news should be the only news we hear, everything else should be dismissed.  This leads to an imbalanced and in turn inaccurate appreciation of the real situation.  This position is exacerbated by another trend in the workplace which I have highlighted before, the insistence on brevity.  See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/02/blogging-blog-10-demand-for-brevity.html  I suppose in our sound bite age this is to be expected.  No-one of today can stomach the kind of political speeches people would stand listening to for hours in the Victorian era and even 30-minute long programmes seem tiresome to some viewers; we have 60-second news broadcasts even on BBC3.  However, this intolerance for anything longer than a single email page or some texted or tweeted lines, has turned into an assumption that anything which is longer than the personally defined tolerance level is wrong.  It does not matter what the content actually says, the length makes whatever is contained in the message wrong in the view of far too many managers.  Complex situations, analysis of different elements of a process, of different markets or customers, often need to be thoroughly analysed.  Of course, you can fragment the reports, looking at a single customer or market at a time, but then all comparison goes out of the window.

Managers should make judgements.  Often for jobs I have applied for 'evidence of decision making ability' is listed as an essential specification for a manager.  However, excluding and bad or neutral news and insisting on only the briefest of reports or contributions, actually takes the decision making away from the manager.  Instead they are given a number of brief, positive options and they simply plump for one or other.  Without a rounded picture and full information about the options, and vitally, the context in which they will operate, the manager cannot make an actual judgement, they can simply 'pick' an option or go with the one which is best sold to them rather than one which might be most beneficial for the business.  The insistence on 'positive & brief' also rules out a combination of elements from different options.  You cannot see the downsides of any option or where its weaknesses might be countered by bringing across something from another option.  I would argue that this kind of culture not only led the 'Columbia' space shuttle disaster of 2003, but also to a whole host of problems in the UK, for example, the defective software used for air traffic control and most recently by HM Revenue & Customs.  Business and public service is complex.  It deals with complex situation which require answers which generally are not simple, but typically multi-faceted and with positive, neutral and negative points about each option available.  However, simply because of a fashion to make managers feel more in control, business and public service culture's insistence on 'positive & brief' will continue to lead us into difficulties because better answers will never even be allowed to appear.


P.P. 09/02/2011: I was reminded of an incident I experienced a couple of years ago, which combined with my knowledge of Chinese business suggests that this trend is even more prevalent in Chinese companies than it is with British ones.  We were having an end of year meal in a restaurant for a number of staff and freelancers who had worked with a new unit, focusing on China, inside the company I was then working for.  Most of the staff of the unit were British but it was headed by a Chinese man who had lived in the UK for some time and his personal assistant was a more recently arrived Chinese woman.  Both of them read and speak English fluently.  The head of the unit offered anyone who wished a lift in his car to the restaurant.  I was the only one who accepted, the others made their own way there.  The head drove with his assistant beside him, I was in the back.  Whilst I was junior to the head I was certainly far more senior in the company than his assistant.

As we approach the restaurant the head pulls into a car park which is clearly labelled as being reserved parking only for members of the company who owned the building the parking sat beside.  I saw this and tried to alert the driver to the fact.  His assistant turned and very vigorously told me not to question the head's driving and when I repeated trying to alert him to the fact that he could not park there his assistant shushed me as if I was a child and then told me I should not say anything.  I found this laughable but was also offended.  The head proceeded to park and get out of the car. His assistant followed in his footsteps saying nothing.  The head then walked away and continued until he saw the sign.  Of course, he had to turn round and come back and move his car farther down the street or risk being clamped and fined.  However, time had been wasted that could have been avoided if I had been permitted to speak.

I know this is a single incident but it seemed painfully characteristic of the problems that the centralised economies of China and the USSR faced in the past which led them in the 1980s and 1990s to move towards capitalism.  However, the attitudes of not questioning authority figures or their immediate agents seem to have persisted from the Communist context into the capitalist environment.  Given the success of China in the global marketplace, perhaps it is no surprise that British companies are apeing this behaviour.  Yet, as I have outlined above, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to warnings of things that may go wrong might work for a short time but ultimately will lead to you running into problems that could have been avoided with just a little care and some attention.

P.P. 21/05/2011
I was interested to catch an episode of Evan Davis's BBC2 programme, 'Business Nightmares' broadcast on 19th May 2011.  He featured serious blunders by companies such as HBOS and Marks & Spencer particularly in taking over foreign companies.  He concluded the programme saying that these examples and others stemmed from when the man in charge of the company had a grand idea but did not permit anyone to present an alternative or to caution him about what he planned to do, not simply about the plan in general but also specifics within it.  Consequently, these cases turned into 'business nightmares' that damaged the company.  As I have noted in this posting, this tendency to see anything which does not fit entirely with the boss's vision as a unwanted criticism that the boss is unwilling even to hear, is increasingly prevalent throughout UK companies, causing not only problems for the company at the top level, but hampering its efficiency and successful progress at all levels, so still damaging the company in the long term.  Davis is a far more respected commentator on business than myself, but his argument that, for a company to prosper, a vision needs to be tempered with practical considerations and that bosses should not 'turn a deaf ear' to these reinforces what I have witnessed working for a number of companies.

Cracking the Whip of Unemployment

Well, as I had feared, just as has been the case, unemployment has completely sapped my inspiration. Despite having more time to blog, the spirit has gone out of me. Unemployment is terribly insidious it saps the will to do anything much. I suppose this is because most of us are people of routine. When you are unemployed, you can make yourself a routine: I rise at the same time each day (7.30am) and look for jobs in set locations on set days of the week, but I know it is false and it is only because I am compelling myself to do it that I do not let the apathy of unemployment completely swallow me. Of course, I have only been unemployed for two months, so it might be tougher in the future to overcome this. I have heard that women find it easier to cope with unemployment than men do, because their lives change much more than men's; every month their period throws them off track to a greater or lesser extent and they learn how to overcome feeling tense or tired or washed out and yet continue with the daily chores much better than men do. Perhaps this is why men are becoming obsolete in modern society, but that is a topic that I have already tackled.

One thing which is not the case is that I have not lost the desire to work. To some extent the more unemployment saps me the more I want to escape the effect it is having on me and I know that will only come from having a job. Consequently, when I do have a focus, i.e. a particular job to apply for I put lots of work into it. I have an interview tomorrow and I have spent a day reading all I can about the company and the people who are going to interview me, so that even if they are not well prepared for the interview and like many interviewers even uncertain about what they actually want, I can hopefully demonstrate that I am the person they need to employ. Of course the job is temporary, not permanent and pays £9000 per year less than I earned in my last job, but that is what happens when unemployment rises. It provides an excellent opportunity for employers, especially in the UK, to force down salaries (though prices are not falling as fast, of course) and to reduce job security.

British employers always feel their workers are lazy and over-paid. It may have been proven that when compared to workers in eastern Europe, British workers do not work the longest hours, but certainly when compared to neighbouring states such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, post-industrial, western European economies which we should be on a par with, UK workers do work long hours. In terms of pay, well, we have the added burden that the price of housing, food and petrol exceeds the costs in neighbouring states and we receive only 12 salary payments per year compared to the 14 they get in Belgium and the 13 workers even get in South Africa. Despite this, the xenophobia and lack of language skills of the British, means most of us are ignorant of these facts so sit back while employers tell us we are lazy and greedy and should be grateful that they deign to give us any work while they take salaries and bonuses equivalent to the combined pay of large sections of their employees.

Last year, I wrote about how many employers felt that with the prosperity of the UK since the 1990s, they had lost the 'whip' of unemployment to frighten workers into being compliant and accepting poor pay and conditions without complaint. Ironically, even immigrant workers especially from elsewhere in Europe were unwilling to take what employers felt was 'fair'. People complain about migrant workers but forget they would not come if employers did not seek to bring them into the UK as a cheaper alternative to training British workers and skilling them. You notice that there is a sector of society which despite being right-wing, is pretty quiet on the immigration issue and these are employers who want the cheapest labour they can get. Now that Poles and other migrants are returning to their own countries now that the UK economy is in downturn, their only option is to pressurise British workers to take lower wages.

Radio news broadcasts today have reported that 'the economy is picking up' and that there are more jobs available. UK unemployment remains at 2.4 million, the highest level since 1996 and conflicting reports say it will worsen. Peaks in unemployment tend to lag behind the economic crises. The economy in the UK nosedived in 1981 but unemployment did not touch 4 million until 1983 (of course real levels were concealed by the Thatcher government's distorted methods of reporting the figures). Unemployment did not start falling until about 1987 and still remained around 2.2 million in the supposed boom of 1989. There was another peak in the recession of 1990-3 getting back to 3.5 million briefly before a steady decline through the remainer of the 1990s and into the 200s, returning below 1.5 million around 2004 for the first time since 1980; 24 years earlier.

Such broad figures conceal the fact that often the people in work were in part-time or temporary jobs rather than permanent ones and at lower salaries than they had been previously. Of course, such factors dent consumer confidence and slow down the economy so holding up recovery in other elements of the economic system outside employment. Ironically, I have not seen any figures on how many jobs the introduction of the minimum wage created. Right-wingers whined that it would wreck the economy, whereas in fact by increasing consumption it helped stimulate service-sector orientated Britain in the late 1990s and most of the 2000s.

To me it seems that employers do not feel that the recent recession has stung hard enough yet. I think most would love to get to a situation where they could say 'we could employ so many more people if there was no minimum wage in the way, it needs to be suspended or scrapped'. Though this is not in David Cameron's list of policies (assuming he actually has one; it is not visible) but I could imagine him being sympathetic to such arguments if he comes to power in 2010. British employers always think they pay too much tax even when it is at historic lows, far below what they paid in 1981. They always feel salaries are too high, even though if they fall further consumption in Britain will continue to be suppressed. I know of no country where business is so indignant about what it sees as its rights and the fabricated 'uppity' nature of its workers that it would cut its own throat in terms of sales to get back at employees. Greed in Britain blinds employers to the fact they are part of a complex economic machine and if they keep banging one part of the machine the rest of it will not work that well. Just look at the German government's policy of paying businesses to keep people in work compared to the slash-and-burn attitude with jobs in the UK.

Anyway, this brings me to my main point about today's 'news' about recovery. If everyone believes that there are more jobs available, then employers can whine 'anyway unemployed is not trying hard enough to find work; they are demanding too much in terms of salary/security'. This happens through individual behaviour already. I am applying for jobs that last only 2 years (so far I am ignoring maternity cover jobs as I know it will cost me more to move to the area than I could make back in 9 months) and at salaries two-thirds of my previous level. Thus, even if I get work, I am still going to be going on no holidays, not buying any clothes or DVDs or a new car. My contribution to the economic recovery is going to be minimal, it is just that I will not lose my house. I know we consume too much, but until you can work part-time locally and travel on wonderful public transport to reach your job and still afford to pay rent on even a small house, then I need to push for better terms. The bulk of us will never be self-sufficient and live in a yurt, so we have to make living in 3-bedroomed terraced houses with a 10-year old car out front at least feasible on an income which is 50% above the national average salary. Heaven forbid that some of us might want to take time to train as a teacher or a social worker! No way of doing that without becoming homeless. Saying this, as someone pointed out after training as a social worker (which the UK is desperately short of) you can earn £28, 000 (€31,640: US$46,200) per year and get attacked in the media at every turn whereas if you train as a manager of the discount supermarket Lidl you can earn £45,000 (€50,850; US$74,260) per year and get hassle only from the occasional irate customer not newspapers selling millions of copies.

We will all jump at the poorly paid, insecure jobs because the bulk of us want to work and any work is better than unemployment. However, again we will have allowed employers in their delusions about their own personal greatness and our supposed greed, to knock us back into living a life that is nerve-wracking and does not permit us to plan or save or experience life. The whip of unemployment is being cracked by this latest claim that there are jobs and the only people not taking them are the lazy or the too-demanding. It is a lie. Unemployment is high and rising and forcing people into temporary, low paid jobs is going to continue that situation for far longer than would be the case.

Gagged by My Employer for Telling the Truth

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have worked on contracts in every job I have had. Most last 2 years. In my current employment I am on my second 2-year contract. Now, under EU legislation, that means at the end of this period of work, i.e. August 2009, I should be made permanent in my post. However, when I contacted the human resources department of my employer, they said that somehow none of this work legislation applied to them, nor did a recent court case about contract workers working for a similar company. I quoted the law chapter and verse at them and they yielded a little saying I could apply for permanency in February, though they thought it was unlikely I would get it. Since then the company has been through an extended period of making redundancies, a process which has now been lengthened since the credit crunch kicked in. Thus, it seems highly unlikely that I will be employed by the company after August 2009. Given that I am now over 40 and have always found it difficult to find work (usually it takes 125 applications and 5 interviews from those before I get one), I am likely to be unemployed by September 2009, whatever the economy does, and we have all been promised a recession lasting until at least 2010 if not 2012. Now, I part bought a house last December, and it is clear that when I lose my job, I will lose my house which has fallen £25,000 (€31,000; US$39,500 - I find it difficult to believe that £1 has fallen from US$2.04 to only US$1.58) since it was bought. I cannot sustain the payments of my part of the house if I am not in employment or even if I get a job that pays less than my current one. I want to sell the house, but the market is incredibly slow, so repossession which is rocketing (11,000 houses repossessed in the UK in October alone) is the likely outcome.

Last Wednesday I was switching off my computer before being on leave and travelling to Whitby on the Thursday to help the woman in my house trade. My email system has an 'Out of Office' function which you switch on to tell people when you are not in the office and when you will be back. Now earlier in the day we had had an email from the very head of the company whining how the company cannot afford our pay rise and how it is going to have to break with national collective bargaining so it can keep our salaries down, of course he earns over £180,000 (€223,200; US$284,400). In that atmosphere I wrote on my out of office message 'I am away from my office trying to help earn enough money so that my house will not be immediately reposessed when my contract expires'. This was entirely truthful. The woman in my house was trading to earn money to pay her share of the mortgage. It is also true that the house will be repossessed after my contract expires next year.

Given the extreme reaction, you would have thought I had said something rude or damaging about the company, not the truth about my own life. While I was away messages were criss-crossing the company and my immediate manager was questioned about how could he permit me to tell the truth in this way. The IT section was contacted to remove the message from my email system and also lock me out of all my work accounts. I was hauled into see my manager the moment I got into the office and was told to write such a thing was damaging to my standing in the company. I am so angry, that actually just stating what is going to happen to me is so shocking to the bosses that it offends them and they have it removed. I was completely offended by the head of the company whining about how greedy we are. I know workers have no comeback and are free to be kicked around by employers. I have already commented on how bullying is carried on without any action against it and in fact support for bullies in senior positions. I need to cling to this job but I am going to leave it as soon as I can. The company has a vaunted policy of free speech and communication but come down heavily on a minor observation about my own life not them.

I would love them to tell me that it is a lie and that I have a permanent position or that the contract is extended, but they are not saying that at all. They have destroyed any lingering loyalty I had to them and have turned my resentment into hostility. I will have revenge on them as soon as I can and in the meantime I am going to stop doing anything more than the most obvious work. What is the point anyway if I have no idea whether I will be there any longer than 9 months? There is no point planning events that I cannot guarantee I will oversee. Who wants to work for a company that is so petty that it puts all the wheels of its machine into action over a single sentence on an email. Surely they should realise that if they cannot stomach such a simple statement and have to so over-react there is something seriously wrong with them. I have not whistle blown, I have not revealed the bullying through naming them, I have not sold secrets to a rival, I have simply said (in line with what they have told me) that I will lose my job and then my house. They want me to be grateful, to kiss their feet for being treated this way. They want to behave badly and treat me like scum and yet not be alerted to the fact of how they are behaving.

People say I am wrong when I say I am powerless, but it is clear that I am if I am unable to make such a simple statement without provoking such a harsh reaction. My only power comes in revenge and I am going to turn my efforts to that now. My intention is to wreck the company as best I can even if it takes the rest of my life.

Unemployment as the Whip

At the end of the Second World War there was obviously a concern not to return to the mass unemployment of the 1930s, partly this was because it was blamed for aiding the rise of Nazism in Germany that had led to the war breaking out. In addition right across Europe by 1938 there were very few democracies left and even if they had not become as extreme as Nazi Germany, most Europeans were under the rule of a dictator in a society that was authoritarian and discriminatory on grounds of race and religion. There was also a fear in 1945 of a repeat of what had happened 1919-21 with the end of the war and the return of demobilised troops leading to unemployment that was hard to decrease before the really bad levels that followed in the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1929.

In the UK in 1945, under a Labour Government, and even before then when civil servants had started thinking about the post-war economy, one issue was how far the UK could get to full employment. It was believed that Keynesian economics which had begun to be experimented with in the UK from the 1941 budget onwards could get the UK in a better shape in terms of unemployment. There was a great deal of debate about how high unemployment should be kept at, because it was feared that if everyone had a job then there would be no incentive for workers to work hard and they could effectively blackmail employers for higher wages. So it was believed that to achieve flexibility in the economy that unemployment should be somewhere between 3%-8% of the working population with left-wingers favouring the lower figure and the right-wingers the higher level.

In fact as it turned out, injections of US capital through Marshall Aid from 1948 onwards and the demands of reconstruction and then the various wars of the Cold War, combined with cheap oil kept unemployment low right until the mid-1970s and really there was no need for Keynesian economics. By the time they were tried in 1976, the world had become so used to not using deficit finance, and to a more stable budget pattern that such an approach was seen as unacceptable and the UK began to go into its highest levels of unemployment since the 1930s. This was not helped by the Thatcher government's privatisation of nationalised industries which then cut cost and the strict monetarist policies which exacerbated the shift from manufacturing to service dominance of the UK policy. There was also an increasing maldistribution of wealth as salaries of the richest pulled away further from the bulk of the working population. This in fact reduced consumption in the economy and millions of poor people actually consume a great deal more than a few rich people and so even the service sector did not prosper. The vigorous encouragement for people to buy rather than rent property also increased frictional unemployment as it made it far harder to move to a new area to find work, especially with the sharp disparaties between (not only in terms of housing but also food and other essentials) prices in different parts of the UK. Official OECD figures put UK unemployment in the mid 1980s at around 3.6 million, it was probably in fact over 4 million out of a working population of somewhere around 22-25 million. It also concealed all of those in part-time, insecure low paid jobs.

Unemployment now in the UK is around 1.65 million people out of a working population of 29 million, so 5.7%. We use ILO figures much more these days than simply counting the people who are claiming benefit was was the case in the 1980s and which actually excluded lots of people seeking work (such as married women whose husband worked, people between the ages of 55-65, etc.). The right-wing press, notably 'The Daily Mail' still complains that there are too many economically inactive people, they claim 7.95 million who they seem to condemn as being unwilling to contribute to the economy and thus should be chasitised. In fact of these 1.89 million are students, the bulk of whom work to pay their way through university and college given the high costs of study. They often take the low paid casual jobs that anyone supporting a family could not live on. Also it is still the case that the more someone studies the more they rise their income. Universities also generate a lot of wealth and in some areas are now the main industry of the town, often employing 3-5000 staff who contribute. Portsmouth claims that even just visits by parents of students who are studying in the city, bring £26 million per year into the economy, let alone what the students and university staff spend themselves. So I would hardly call students economically inactive. These days may go on placements into companies as part of their studies and so form an educated free labour force for part of the year.

Of the economically inactive, 2.35 million are either caring for elderly relatives or for children. Mothers are now condemned as 'stay-at-home' mothers. The thing is the policy of the Blair government and the Conservative ones that preceded it was that having mothers at home was a good thing to be encouraged but at the same time they should also go out to work. This contradictory policy has never been reconciled in the past 30 years in the UK so mothers are attacked from both directions. It is seen as alright for them to stay at home as long as they do not claim benefits. Women in the workplace still earn 17% less than a man in the same post, so where is the incentive to go out and be criticised for not looking after your child when you are going to get paid less. Mothers at home save the state millions of pounds. Private childcare is beyond the reach of most parents in terms of cost so to bring more mothers into the workforce would need a huge increase in cheap nursery places probably supplied by the state. The same goes for carers of the elderly and the disabled. The Thatcher government ran down many long-term care institutions to save money and forced 'care in the community' on the population. Scotland has reintroduced some of the provision for elderly people, England has not. Again, then, these carers might not be economically active, but they are effectively saving the state millions of pounds in the care it would be obliged to provide.

Apparently 619,000 people have retired early. Now, given that unemployment is 1.65 million, if these people were still in the workforce you would actually raise unemployment by 36%. These people tend not to be a burden on society and they are consumers so stimulating the economy. It seems perverse to want them back in the workforce in the place of younger people. By definition people who have retired early do not need to work to earn an income, so why should they not yield their place to those who need a job to support their family? It seems ridiculous to concern ourselves about the early retired they are a benefit not a burden to the economy. We were all encouraged during the 1980s to make millions and retire at 30, so is it any surprise that many people have done that? Again it seems like a contradictory policy. Conservatives want it both ways, it is a very old-fashioned attitude that is reminiscent of the 19th century attitudes of Non-Conformist denominations, that somehow it is sinful not to be working and those who do not work are guilty of committing an offence. We are long passed such attitudes and also to cling on to them suggests we put no value on study or caring.

There are people in the economy who do not want to work, these are the 34,000 termed 'discouraged workers'. Interestingly this figure is almost exactly the same as the number in the 1960s despite the increase in the size of the population. The question is would you want to employ such a person anyway? It is clear that such people are a smaller percentage of the population than they were, say, in 1968 and the number does not necessarily mean it is the same 34,000 people as some will drift in and out of this category as economic pressures dictate. If you think of the homeless people in the UK, of those with mental conditions who have been pushed out from institutions and so on, then this figure actually seems quite low, representing 0.12% of the total working population, actually probably lower than those people who are economically active but making their income from crime and probably scooped up in the 3.75 million people described as self-employed and lionised by the right-wing press!

The other neglected sector is the under-employed, those people who want a full-time permanent job but can only get temporary or seasonal work with very little security or rights. When I lived in East London, this characterised the employment of literally hundreds of people in any given street. When the minimum wage came in many doubled or tripled their weekly income though they had no access to the employment rights that should be taken for granted and in many cases their employers were scooping back their wages through introducing various charges and most often through not paying the national insurance contributions. In some parts of the UK, this grey economy which has legitimate businesses behaving in illegitimate ways is terribly common as the bulk of the employees have no other option bar crime or going back on state benefits. Contrary to the portrayal of the bulk of the population, the large majority of people hate to subsist on handouts and will go out of their way to get a scummy job with no rights, long hours and low pay rather than stay on benefits. However, such jobs do not pay enough and you are at risk of losing them on the whim of the employer. Tax credits have helped for those in such situations with families, but if you lose the job they stop too and you are back to benefits, constantly flickering between the two states.

Why have I got on to unemployment today? It is not because new figures are out, it was stimulated by a report (reported in 'The Guardian' on Saturday) that employers are complaining that people under the age of 40 lack the experience of mass unemployment (you could argue those under 34 as if you are 34 now, you were 16 in 1990) and so do not work hard enough as they have insufficient fear of losing their jobs. This goes back to the thoughts at the end of the Second World War about how much unemployment was needed to prick people into accepting low-paid work. No-one seems to realise that a worker who is in fear of unemployment is not an efficient worker. I am in this situation at the moment. I am likely to be unemployed from August 2009 onwards and yet I am already in fear that I will lose my house and other things despite their being a year to go. I am 40 so maybe I have that fear of the Thatcherite years still lodged in my brain. The effect is though that the fear of unemployment is causing sleepless nights and utter despair. I feel there is little point in putting in any effort to a job I will not see out. I am refusing to start projects that I know I will not see the end of. It causes arguments with my housemate and my family. Is this the kind of situation we want for younger people to be in terror all the time?

The thing about being threatened with unemployment is that it breaks any common interest between you and your employer. I have seen this happen so many times. In the past year two women who knew they were going to be layed off at my work (by a very bullying very misogynistic boss) simply stopped working, minutes were not typed up, things were not filed, they left everything in a mess because they no longer felt any obligation to the boss who had treated them so shabbily. Such fear stunts initiative. I have no incentive to start new things or even make suggestions on how to improve them. There is no point in me receiving training; there is no point going for promotion to work for the employer I will be parting company with so very soon. Fear of unemployment does not make people work harder, it instead quickly leads them to draw in and work less effectively. The hardest workers are those who are valued and feel they have a future in the company they are working in. Employers tend to see their workers simply as a resource like they electricity or raw materials, they forget that workers engage emotionally in their workplace as often the spend more time there awake than they do with their families.

One thing that the employers overlooked about people under the age of 40 is that they tend to view their life as much more changeable. They tend not to have mortgages or families, especially these days when people are leaving (or being forced by the economy) to leave buying a house or raising children until much later in their life. In addition, the age at which it is seen right to do certain things has shifted greatly. In my youth, you were deemed to be entering middle age at the age of 40. These days people in their early 40s carry out the kinds of activities that would have been done by 25-year olds in my youth. A colleague of mine in her 50s water-skiied for the first time last week and another who is in her mid-40s regularly goes scuba diving in tropical waters. Back in the 1970s these women would not think of doing such thing. Despite British people being pretty unadventurous when compared say to their French or Australian counterparts we are all constantly encouraged to get 'out there' travel and experience life. Given this context it is unsurprising that people under 40 are not keen to keep their heads down and work solidly at a job particularly when (in contrast to in the 1950s and 1960s) there is no guarantee that they will not be dropped with minimal notice and minimal redundancy pay. Commitment is two-way and employers cannot whine that their employers make no commitment to the business when the employers make it clear they are making no commitment to the workers.

This leads on to the other complaint from employers that workers under 40 see going to work as an extension of their social life. If employers have suddenly discovered this then they have been blind about employee behaviour for decades. In terms of marriages in the UK, 40% are between people who met at work and this figure has continued to be the case for decades even if the level of marriages (climbing again) has fluctuated. This does not take into account the other relationships and friendships established at work and often promoted by employers through 'team building'. Again employers' expectations are unrealistic if they think they can have their employees working as a team and not for social contact to develop. The shift has been in terms of the media used for the contact. People do not stand around the 'water cooler' as they used to and far fewer gather in the smoking room and many workplaces no longer have a canteen where people socialise. A decade ago people complained that employees used the telephone to talk to friends and relatives now of course they email or text or instant message. This makes it more visible to some employers and in fact more in their control as many now block the usage of such websites through work machines. Another factor is now that we are all service sector workers it is much easier than if you are bellowing across to your colleague standing the other side of a production line. However, I bet if you measured how much time spend socialising at work now and compare it to 1958 or 1978 or 1998 you would find the time would be pretty much the same.

Thus, unemployment is still seen as the necessary whip in the UK to get a higher level of work out of employees. The fact that we work longer hours and have fewer holidays than our European colleagues is not factored into this at all. Fear, despite what employers think, does not make people work harder, it makes them work less efficiently. Society has changed and so have our expectations but people who feel happy and above all secure in their job work hard and make sacrifices for their employer. People who feel they are simply a disposable commodity and are threatened to make them work harder are not going to do. To get a good return on people you have to invest in them as you invest in the other aspects of your business. Of course as in so many facets of British business there is under-investment in this aspect as well as many others and so companies see the consequences of their policies.