Anonymous Blogging
November 17th, 2006 at 02:49

Its annoying having a blog that is obviously written by me. As my name is plastered all over this website, and I’m a shameless egotist, it’d be pretty hard to say anything of any substance on here. Which is why I mostly talk bollocks.

Ages ago, I nearly got sacked from my old job at a well known highstreet hardware store, for writing about it on the internet.  Thankfully my former co-workers mostly saw the funny side, so they stuck to hating me behind my back rather than publically lynching me using the own-brand gallows in the seasonal section of the store. It probably helped that I was coincidentally starting university and thus leaving the store the week after they found my blog.
There’s so many things I could tell you lovely readers about, but it’d get me into no-end of trouble, or at least into no-end of awkward conversations with people from different parts of my life. Today there was some major shit going on at work (and there was a wonderful Office style moment that I can’t tell you about), but it is written into my contract that I can’t to the press, so I instead have to refer you to the press office.

Likewise, I can’t really talk about all of the amusing moments at University, because for all I know, the lecturer who I might want to make a wry comment about could well be reading this blog.

The lack of anonymity that I’ve given myself worries me a bit. Surely any future employer is going to google my name and find things that I’ve written going back a number of years? And without the context of all of the other rubbish I’ve ever written, am I going to one day be answering questions about teamwork and problem solving in a job interview, before suddenly being asked why I think that slavery should be legalised?

Gah, I should have used a pseudonym.

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Looking Busy
October 27th, 2006 at 14:28

If there’s one thing that I’m terrible at, its horse riding. If there’s two things I’m terrible at, its horse riding and looking busy.

I hate arriving early for things and having to wait around- for some reason I can’t just seem to stand there patiently. As time goes on I get more and more agitated and concious of the fact that people passing me by might think that I’m mental, just because I’m standing there doing nothing.

I’ll check my watch multiple times a minute, and deliberately spend an extra few seconds looking at it, in order to kill time. I’ll check the headlines on my phone, and then scroll through the menus looking for something to do. I might even load up an asteroids clone on there, only to realise that its terrible.

If I’m standing about in a uni building, looking busy becomes slightly easier- there’s noticeboards about the place full of exciting announcements. “The squash club meets on Wednesdays at 4pm… fascinating“, I think to myself. “Bugger me! The third year arts management seminar has been moved to a different room!“. The trouble is that I’m concious of the fact that I might subconciously be exaggerating my movements, in order to explain to any on-lookers what I’m doing. I worry that I might be pointing at whatever poster I’m reading, or stroking my chin making an elongated “Hmm” noise.

The noticeboards at work aren’t as good for looking busy as this. There’s only one board, and that’s for the trade union. I can tell you all about the rights of gay and lesbian employees now.

Sometimes if I’m early to work, I’ll walk into town. The trouble is that I have no real purpose in doing so, so end up looking and feeling like one of the pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto, just circulating the streets waiting for a mad man to slash me up with a Samaurai sword. I quite like going into Virgin Megastores and browsing the CDs- as at least then I can kill some time by flicking through the racks looking for anything I might like, before deciding that I can’t afford anything.

The horrible thing is that I still buy stuff. I’ll buy things like CDs just to avoid spending a couple of minutes with nothing to do… why else would I own Audioslave’s latest album?

How do you look busy? How do you kill time? Please let me know in the comments.

(Top Tip! Google Reader works on mobile phones! This is excellent as you can read hundreds of feeds on your phone and look like you’re doing something vaguely important, when in reality all you’re doing is seeing what dictionary.com’s word of the day is.)

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Holding Doors Open
October 12th, 2006 at 00:47

My workplace is a bit of a maze of corridors in some places- and the entrances and the exits are like a fortress, requiring a combination of RFID cards, keycodes and Iris scanning. This has raised some interesting (ie: tedious) questions that keep me awake at night.

As people are always moving around the building, you’ll find the doors in regular use- obviously its good ettiquette to hold doors open for people, but at what distance does it become acceptable to let the door swing closed? I think I’m quite liberal when it comes to awkwardly standing in a door way, partially blocking it whilst trying to hold it open in an attempt to appear polite and friendly- I’ll hold it open for people within say, five metres or so.

The trouble is that if you factor in the speed of the person who is walking, this opens up a whole new dimension of complexity. If they’re walking too slowly it looks ridiculous that I’m holding the door for so long, and its embarassing for both parties – when the lumbering slowcoach finally arrives at the door, they’re sort of obliged to do a stilted bemused noise- not a laugh, that’d be over the top, and say thanks in a way that sounds like they’re trying to hard to be grateful, as afterall, you’ve been holding the door for what feels like a lifetime.

This is usually unavoidable too- it isn’t socially acceptible to pull out a calculaor and start plugging numbers into the formulas of motion. Writing about it on the internet is fine, though.

This problem is multiplied when you consider that there could be a lot of doorways in close proximity, and the person behind you might be going the same way. It feels faintly ridiculous sometimes when ‘conversation’ consists of the other person say “Thanks…. thanks… thanks…. thanks…” as you walk through multiple doors.

There’s more questions too- does the “critical distance” (as I’m going to coin as meaning the distance in which you will wait and hold the door) change based on whether the door you’re holding has any sort of time consuming security locks? I’d expect the critical distance would increase. Does your level of acquaintance with the person walking towards the door factor at all? Could the critical distance reveal how much I like someone to a casual observer? I mean, I’d make a point of slamming it in the face of Nigel Farage, but I might wait longer if Adam Hart-Davis wanted to get into my workplace. Can any mathematically minded blog readers propose a formula for calculating the critical distance?

Yeah, its things like this that keep me awake at night. This and nightmares about rollerskating.

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Writer’s Block
September 28th, 2006 at 14:54

Well, it’s only taken about eighteen months, but I’m finally writing about the one other thing that’ll change me from the well-spoken, self-aware blogger to the text speaking blogger who only blogs two-line entries about how they had a gr8 time with their m8s last night, without elaborating on what actually happend. So here it goes:

soz 4 not updatin much ive bin workin lotz n goin out drinkin itz gr8 LOL

I’ve been desperately looking for things to write about- the trouble is that for the last month, I’ve been following the same daily routine of slacking/working/slacking- there’s been no unusual quirks to my day that I can write about because its different. I haven’t met any interesting characters like John, and perhaps slightly more disturbingly, I think I’ve become slightly more normal.

In days of old, I would have perhaps devoted an entire blog entry to the other day, when whilst driving to work, a man shouted at me from a van in the lane next to me, asking for directions. Or perhaps I could have told you readers about how when I was leaving the pub with Michael the other day, a slightly intoxicated man shouted “High five”, and how I high-fived him. But alas, I don’t seem to visibly panic about things like that anymore.

I can’t even talk about work. You’d think working in a government office would be ripe with hilarious anecdotes- unfortunately, my colleagues are all nice, normal people, and the work itself is so insufferably tedious that I don’t have stories about any David Brent-like characters. It doesn’t help that I’ve signed the official secrets act, meaning I can’t tell you about all of the exciting adventures that I’ve been on. I think blogging is the only reason I’d ever vaguely want a customer-facing job (like Tillmonkeying), because there’s more scope for yet another hundred “stupid customer” posts.

I suppose I could talk about the news, or something. Everyone loves an armchair politician.

I’ve been trying my best to follow the coverage of the party conferences, however tedious they may be, but I’ve got nothing interesting to say about them. I mean, I’m sure Nick Robinson knows a bit more than I do on the subject matter. I’m sure I’ll be able to write something about the Conservative conference (next week?), as I find it easier to write about things I dislike.

The only thing that I have noticed about the Party Conference season is the Daily Politics’ Little Andrew and Little Jenny – who are sort of the boring version of Little Ant & Dec. They’re two kids who the BBC have lined up to ask politicians questions as a gimmicky little feature. Presumably the benefit is that it is (in theory) easier for kids to act all innocent and ask “Do you have blood on your hands, Mr Blair?”, without the BBC having to worry about their reporters being kept out of the loop in the future for asking any real questions. Unfortunately, when the kids did meet Blair, they were starstruck, and the telly just showed them acting excited and waving signed photos (seriously), like they’d just met a massive celebrity. Way to retain your journalistic integrity, kids!

Anyway, what other news is there to talk about? Richard Hammond? What else can I say apart from “If only it were Clarkson”? Thailand? Done that. Bulgaria and Romania in the EU? Coming over here, taking our low-skilled and low-paid jobs that we don’t want anyway! Political Correctness Gone Mad! You couldn’t make it up!

Oh, well, I’m sure I’ll have something insightful to say soon – I go back to Uni on Monday, so I’ll be able to tell you all about “bog washing” the freshers and stealing their lunch money. The best bit is that before I wrote this post, I googled bloggers writers block, and it suggested that if you have writers block, then you should write about writers block. So really this whole blog entry has been a disgusting ploy and a huge joke on you readers. Owned, I suppose.

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Robot Wars
September 28th, 2006 at 01:14

One of my work colleagues told me today that I remind him of someone who has been on Robot Wars. There’s not really an interesting story attached to this- he just explained that he thinks this based on the way I dress and the way I act.

I just hope that he wasn’t talking about George Francis. Yeah, the one who you couldn’t tell if he was a lady or a boy.

And this inadvertently becomes yet another blog entry that will undoubtably attract Saudis looking for ‘lady boys’. Sigh.

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Hinduism
September 23rd, 2006 at 02:13

Bit of a long shot here considering that my readership consists primarily of Crystal Walrein and Saudis searching for ‘lady boys’, but do I have any Hindu readers?

I ask because at work today I was talking to one of my colleagues who is a Hindu, and being the awkward bastard that I am, I decided to ask her some questions about Hinduism- as obviously, she knows everything about a 900-million strong religion (one of you must read my blog, surely?) with many denominations and variants.

The trouble is that I’m completely and utterly ignorant when it comes to most religions- I know the gist of Christianity, obviously, and know a bit about Islam thanks to the ludicrous “post-9/11″ and “post 7/7″ media coverage about how (shock, horror) not-insane and normal Muslims are, yet I’ve never really had any run-ins with Hinduism. I know a lot about atheism, but that’s because the ‘holy scriptures’ are so short they can be written on a post-it note.

So rather than wallow in my ignorance, I decided to be proactive and try to learn more by asking Hemal antagonistic questions.

First I raised the issue of creationism. I have absolutely no idea what the Hindu story of creation is, but thanks to the internet, I’m now upto a key-stage 2 understanding! I like how the story is pretty abstract- I’m assuming that most Hindus don’t take it literally. From the way the page is written, it seems to me that it leaves it pretty ambiguous too- excellent. This practically tallies with evolution.

Reincarnation is an interesting topic- me being me, of course, and seemingly unable to keep myself from attempting to lodge my foot as firmly into my mouth as possible, I asked what would happen in the following scenario:

Someone’s having a heart transplant- whilst the heart is being transplanted, they’re technically dead for a few minutes, before being woken up with the electric shock machine (you can tell I’m not a doctor)… surely, this person’s soul would move on and be reincarnated at the point of death… if this is the case, then what would happen to the horse that has just been born with the soul of the dead guy, if the dead guy is bought back to life?

Similarly, at what point does a soul enter the new living thing… when it iss conceieved, or when it is born? If that is the case, are aborted babies people?

Yeah, I’m awkward. Hemel exclaimed “I never thought of this!”, when I suggested this, which made me feel a bit awful. I don’t really want to be responsible for her questioning her entire religion and that falling into mental disarray when these logical inconsistencies are exposed.

She suggested that reincarnation isn’t instantaneously, but there’s a waiting period – presumably to make sure that the person is one-hundred-percent dead. I’m guessing this is left a bit ambiguous, like the creation thing, so it can be a sort of get-out clause.

Following this, I did start the sentence “What about Frankenstein…?”, but luckily someone else came over to talk about actual work before Hemel had a chance to compute this, and whilst I realised what I was saying.

Don’t get me wrong- I wasn’t actively trying to dismantle her religion, and I qualified almost everything I said with political correctness and pre-apologising for any offense caused. I guess karma will get me if I have put my foot in it.

So is there anyone reading who knows about this sort of thing? I’m genuinely fascinated by it. Similarly, do I have any readers from any religions that I know nothing about? Sikhs? Mormons? Buddhists? I’d love to have a chat. And y’know, try and prove your religion wrong albiet in a relatively polite way.

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My Desk
September 21st, 2006 at 14:26

At work, as I work in the evenings, I have to ‘hotdesk’. If the term is new to you: 1994 Management School called! Basically because computer networks exist, employees can work on their work from any computer terminal- often on a nationwide scale. This means that all of the desks look the same and are not full of personalised crap that you’d imagine would grow around someone’s work area. This means that you don’t get people printing out Dilbert and pinning it to their divider to show how quirky and wacky they are. In theory.

On my desk there is a photograph of a woman, her husband and her daughter in front of the Christmas tree, as well as a properly framed picture of the woman’s daughter. It’s annoying though, because it shows that the desk isn’t mine.

When I’m slaving away being the pen-pushing beaurocrat that I am, slowly losing the will to live, thinking that slashing my wrists would end the tedium right now, I can’t look up and see a photo of my family and think “I’m doing it for them“.

They’re not my family. The daughter looks nothing like me, and I’m not married to a 40 year old man. And even if I was, I wouldn’t be doing it for them, I’d be doing it to get more money to pump into pub quiz machines (I’m thinking of setting up a direct debit with itBox) and buy CDs with.

I keep talking to one of my co-workers about bringing in a picture of a dog to put next to the happy family- possibly Lassie. The theory is that the person who works on my desk during the day won’t want to move it, as afterall, its my dog, and the reason why I keep working- as far as they know at least.

Believe me, when your job is processing tax returns, ideas like that are exciting.

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Strike?
September 10th, 2006 at 15:51

As I’m now a pen pushing bureaucrat, I’ve decided to join the union for people like me, PCS. Its free, as I’m only going to be there for six months, so I can’t really lose.

I was quite alarmed this morning to discover that my union is thinking about going on strike. This presumably means that at some point in the future I might have to defy my employer and stand about outside, next to a burning oil drum, shouting “SCAB!” at anyone who dares cross the picket. As the strike is a few months away, I think it gives me time to start growing (working class, ie: non-handlebar) moustache, take on a Northern accent and parrot some phrases about “working down t’pit” for “28 hours a day“.

According to the linked BBC News article above, its all Gordon Brown’s fault for privatising everything and causing massive job cuts- this puts me in a vaguely sticky position- sort of ‘hair/balloon static’ sticky as opposed to ‘pub toilet floor’ sticky, as Brown was apparently the guy who introduced Self Assessment tax returns, indirectly creating my job. I’ll probably still strike anyway as I like sticking it to the man and I don’t want my coworkers to hate me.

I just hope it doesn’t end up like the postal strike a few years ago…

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First day at work
September 5th, 2006 at 01:23

Today I started a new job as a taxman. I still don’t actually know anything about tax, you understand, but I at least now know all of the stuff about the mission statements and where I’ll be working. I’ll be working in an office.

I can’t disclose too much about what I did there, because this time around, rather than just talk about my job on the internet and nearly get sacked for it, I can probably be locked up in the Tower of London by a Beefeater. I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act y’see- which puts me on practically the same parr as two fictional characters: James Bond and Tony Blair. The former was created by Ian Flemming and and the latter Peter Mandelson & Alistair Campbell.

This tax office lark is just a cover for some serious terrorist bustin’. I’ve spent most of the evening popping caps into cardboard cut-outs in the shape of terrorists and Brazillians (I was told to aim for the head).

One of the first dialemmas that I faced was what to wear. Don’t worry, I havn’t gone all female on you- I wasn’t given any guidance on the dress code. Playing it safe, I turned up today in a shirt and tie, and some uncomfortable shoes that I can’t actually drive in. In the end, I resolved this surprisingly tedious fashion anecdote by changing to my casual shoes to drive with, resulting in an appearance not unlike an uncoordinated version of David Tennant’s Doctor Who, who has decided to jack in the time travel and take on a temporary contract handling self assessment tax returns.

When getting ready to go out I hit an unfortunate snag- I couldn’t figure out how to wear my iPod and headphones without looking stupid. I even asked the internet for help. Usually I’d just run the headphones under my t-shirt, but this was impossible because I was being choked by the most unneccessary fashion accessory since socks: the tie. In the end I listened to glorious silence whilst a thin piece of material flapped about in front of me as if it was looking for a purpose or a reason to exist.

Anyway, when I arrived at work, much to my horror, some people had turned up wearing casual clothing, like jeans and so on, and I felt distinctly over dressed. Of the 90 people starting (!), there were a few people who like me had assumed that working in a tax office is like attending a funeral, so I tried to stand near them as to not look out of place.

When we were split into groups, I asked my immediate manager about the dress code and he explained that “smart casual” is the way forwards. I’m taking a liberal intepretation of this, and assuming it to mean that I can wear what I usually wear: a black t-shirt with an offensive slogan, and some sort of combat-esque trousers. I’m not sure if “smart casual” covers the front half of a pantomime horse, so I’m not going to risk it.
The trouble now though is that because I’ve turned up on day one all poshed up to the max, I’ve created a sort of expectation, and if I was to turn up tomorrow wearing my George Bush “INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST” shirt, it might shock some of my colleagues- so what I’m going to have to do over the course of the next week is sort of gradually tone down the formality of my appearance. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll go in without a tie, and the day after I won’t tuck in my shirt either. The day after that I’ll wear a bright green Hawaiian shirt, shorts, sandals and stuffed parrot on my shoulder, and then by Friday they’ll be pleased that I’ve turned up looking like I normally do.

Aside from all of this clothing bullshit, it was an interesting day of training. At one point, my manager got us to go around the group and introduce ourselves. I toyed with the idea of inventing an entirely new backstory for myself- these people wern’t going to know any difference, for the time being at least, and I would have been able to make myself sound much more exciting than I actually am. Unfortunately, as you might have guessed, I’m not as excellently extroverted as I make myself seem on this blog, so rather than confidently announcing in full seriousness that “I’m Buzz Aldrin, and I was the second man on the Moon”, I told them I was James O’Malley and I go to University. Damn.

I can’t really say anymore about today, as because I’m an employee of the crown, its really all a big injoke between me and the Lizzy II. You wouldn’t understand anyway.

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Taxman
August 10th, 2006 at 15:29

Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na. Taxman!

I’ve got a new job working as an “assistant officer” at HM Revenue & Customs. Yeah, the tax people. This is useful because it means it should be easier to claim back the tax I was, erm, taxed, from my time in the enveloping trade.

So now if you see a piece in the Daily Mail blaming pen-pushing beurocrats and inefficient civil servants, I’ll be one of them!

I love tax, though. Being a left-minded type, I think the distribution of wealth is ace- and now that it’s keeping me in employment, all the better. I’ll be doing a noble duty of ensuring the NHS gets all the money it needs, and the armed forces get enough cash to buy bombs and guns to use on civilians in an endless war in a far away place.

The interview, which took place last week, was interesting- the questions used were almost a carbon copy of the BBC Interview I had- even the paper they were making notes on looked the samed. I was originally applying for the job as officer (not assistant officer)- I think I lost this though as soon as I claimed that I wanted the job because of power. The evil laugh can’t have impressed them much either.

I didn’t ask if I could be paid cash in hand.

Hopefully I’ll have some exciting stories about tax soon. I hope I get to meet Adam Hart Davis.

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