The Ball's Rolling Again...

You may have ntoiced that both my motivation and the momentum behind my Army application has been pretty non existent of late. With the weather improving there are so many cool things I could do like go places and take photos of stuff, and go to other places and take photos of stuff, and suchlike. It's great in the short term, but thinking about it, I don't want to be a call centre monkey for the rest of my life, and when winter draws in again I don't want to be stuck inside at home, or inside at work, and have nowhere but those two places to go.

So we're back on. I've got my motivation back, and I'm once again training towards my application. Especially now that my ex flatmate Sean has gone in as a communications engineer, I can't let that little sod have all the fun now can I ;).

I've still got a job to go to at the moment, which is a surprise considering the fact that not only have the company been handing discipliniaries around like sweets, just to make sure all the managers are kept in practice at management things. Not only this, but the company have ever so kindly decided to "restructure", putting 140 mid-level managers, most of whom have been there 7, 8, 9 years, out of a job. In a couple of cases, families where the husband and wife work at the same company are now in real real real financial trouble, that would make my latest episode of skint-ness look like a kid losing his pocket money, so that's really sucky for them.
Fortunately for me, I only know three managers that are affected by this, and two of them are absolute dickheads. So while I'm not exactly gonna say "woo", it's slightly slightly slightly less sucky that those two are going.

So what else have I been up to?
Well I traded a laptop for a motorcycle. By this what I actually mean is that my laptop computer spontaneously failed, never to be coaxed into life again (needs a new hard disk, even recovery software can't touch it, grr I want my money back etc :P), but after sticking a thread up on a bike forum, I have finally managed to get my bike working after many many months of being off the road.
The problem was water in the fuel. Half a litre of the stuff swirling around at the bottom of the tank, clogging the fuel filters and wetting the plugs. No wonder the damn thing wouldn't work, so yay, go me, my bike now works again!

We come now though, to an altogether more disturbing subject of discussion:

Fashion, the contrived artificual demand for certain types of clothes, has turned again, it seems, and to use Eddie Izzard's explaination of fashion (2:40 onwards), most of the people around work are so Cool, Cool, Hip and Groovy that they're within nanometers of crossing that line into full-blown Looking Like A Dickhead.

There are two specific things that jump out at me. First of all, there's an almost exponential proliferation of these studded belts. You have two kinds of these, the first ones which have usually been the preserve of alternative, emo, mosher, whatever you want to call them, groups of people, which is fair enough, but now those are beginning to spread everywhere.
These, I can live with.

The ones that get on my nerves, are these ones with slogans "studded" into them. The majority of them seem to be along religious lines, "Jesus saves", "Jesus Loves", "I love Jesus" etc.
Now there are two reasons that these annoy me. First of all, people are wearing them because it's fashionable, not because they believe in Jesus (I'm an agnostic/athiest fundamentalist apparently, according to some christian dude - I'm not religious in the least), so people are kinda getting preached at, by people that don't even follow the values of Jesus (happens all the time, just go to any church), So not only does this annoy me, but the second one, is that some of them are just ambiguously funny.
Seriously, I see the slogan "Jesus saves" and my mind fills in the blanks, "Jesus Saves, Score still 5-2". Yep indeedy.

Now we come to the other thing.
Smurf Hats.
No. Really, I'm not kidding.

I don't know whether some simian gangster in the town center of Nottingham or Medway or whatever decided it was cool to get a beanie hat and have it perching on the top of your head with the top traling down behind you like a wooly pony tail, and the companies just cottoned onto it, or whether the companies just screwed up the measurements on their latest product design and released a load of beanie hats that are 30cm long.

By accident or design (and bearing in mind that this isn't one of those villages conveniently and cleverly built half a day's walk from the nearest water supply, so if we don't like what we have we CAN just throw it away and replace it, or even send it to one of those villages) a whole bunch of people seem to have bought these things and are now putting them on their heads, with the result that the top half of these hats is dangling down the back of their heads making even the coolest and hippest studded-belt-clad youngster look like a bloody smurf.

The first one was an eyebrow raiser, the second one was a double take, now I'm entering rolling-eyes territory when I see these things, because they're spreading like the waistlines of the latest entrants to this lazy-ass job, of which there seem to be a fair few, despite the rolling programs of restructuring and redundancies and general "the-industry-is-in-decline-but-we're-still-on-top-but-let's-pretend-we're-not" crap. Apparently some of our managers went to other companies to look how they do things - yes, read it again, some of the managers from our company, the most successful in the industry, went to less successful less skilled companies, to learn how to do things.
This explains why every day, that place becomes a little bit more like a Dilbert strip I spose.

This is the company that two weeks before the first of two bank holidays in the same month, announced it was slashing overtime (the rate for working bank holidays) from 300% to 150%.
while simultaneously bringing an end to the £150 bi-annual attendance bonus.
Can you guess what happened?

Yep, that's right, on bank holiday monday we had about 8 staff in. The rest were quite sick with inconveniently sudden and acute ailments. And you know what? They got away with it, and I'm glad they got away with it too. Because frankly, [company] moves its employees around like chess pieces, and f**ks its employees around like AT&T is alleged to f**k their customers around. Our company really is one of those where the customer is always right. And now, that's becoming a problem, because now the customer is so right that we drop our underwear and bend over while simultaneously pleading "What is thy bidding, my master?" every time one of the suit-jacketed arseholes walks into the room.

The customer is so right in fact that senior management are running around like headless chickens trying to keep the customer happy, middle management are running around like headless chickens trying to keep senior management happy while looking for another job at the same time, and the junior managers are trying to stomp out bushfires and put down riots from the staff, while trying to show loyalty and concern for both the managers above them and the staff below them.

The staff themselves, the customer service battery chickens, have had enough, and the planning department are literally reorganising certain staff member's lunch breaks, because they're worried that if enough disgruntled and angry "customer service" agents get together in the same room, some kind of critical mass will be reached that can only result in a situation in which the fire brigade is called, the ambulances are called, and something horrible gets left on the customer liason manager's desk. The whole reason we stopped having our annual get-together with the client is literally because after a few beers, the client staff and our staff, were ready for and in some cases resorting to, punchups in the street.

And all the while, the calls keep coming, made by happy cheery clueless muppets, ignorant not only of the trouble they are directly causing, but the suffering and anger and hatred they are indirectly causing simply by existing as a source of income to the much vaunted (and much hated) customer.

We are not a happy business, but still we try. Feck knows why.People keep leaving, I suppose eventually there'll not be much of a business left.
But who cares, by the time the business goes down the pan, I'll be sitting inside 60+ tons of air conditioned tank, laughing my arse off at the entire industry and the idiots, the unmotivated bored angry idiots like myself, who are mostly too apathetic to leave it all behind.

Oh well, I've got things to do, like sit about and be bored, so now I'll go and get on with that :).
Have fun :).