Machine mugging

I put my sixty cents in the machine and request a Snickers. (tangential rant: When I was a child this bar used to be called Marathon; a name which conjures up sport and stamina and maybe ancient Greece and war too. Then they changed the name to Snickers; which for me sound likes “sniggers”, or [...]

[insert name]

On two separate occasions in two different jobs (one fairly recent, i.e. about 20 minutes ago) I have had to deal with someone who thinks that all human communication should be standardized, codified and made as free of variation and spontaneity as possible. For these people, each email sent should adhere strictly to a set [...]

Susannah York

As you may or may not be aware, Susannah York died over the weekend. Did I ever tell you about the time she held my face in her hands and gazed into my eyes? No? Late summer 1996. I left university with a respectable humanities degree and no job prosepcts, so I ran away to [...]

Bonding experience

One thing I’m grateful for about my job: there’s no “team-building”. No enforced “fun”. There’s the occasional social event when, for example, someone leaves the unit and they put out quite a decent spread of food and drink to encourage participation, but no one is obliged to come along, there are no targets and no [...]

TEFL

From Tim Parks’ “Europa“: The context is that a group of English teachers working in Italy are on their way to the European Parliament in Strasbourg to speak in front of the Petitions Committee about how they’re discriminated against by being offered more restrictive contracts than their native Italian colleagues. More info on this real-life [...]

London town

In my imagination as a child, London was a place of romance and glamour. I visited a few times as a child, usually only for a day or two, on school trips to the Natural History museum or the Planetarium,  but it wasn’t until I reached my teenage years and began to think seriously about leaving [...]

Are you being served?

While on holiday in Mauritius recently (and yes, I promise that’s the last time I’ll start a blogpost with those words, ok?) I started thinking about the relationship between hotel guests and staff. This was the kind of resort where staff outnumber guests and someone was always nearby to serve you. So how do the [...]

The Management

This afternoon at work my boss asked me to find out what a colleague’s job actually entailed. I looked him up on the work intranet and found this job description: “To lead and manage the Communication team of [organisation], by defining the expected results and ensuring its staff delivers the work required to implement the team’s [...]

Purpose

From a book I’ve just read: “Our technological development had reached a peak and had been established long enough for us to understand the problems it must bring. The chief one was this: there was nothing for billions upon billions of indiviuals to do. They had no purpose but to exist, and then die. That [...]

Bloggers beware

I was asked at the last minute to sit in on a meeting this morning. I fully expected this legal briefing on Intellectual Property Rights to be an almighty snooze, and was counting on the coffee provided to keep me awake, but it proved to be unexpectedly interesting. One point in particular caught my attention: the legality [...]