A nice thing about work being so stupid crazy right now is that this week has just blown right by. Yesterday I did come quite close to losing my shit, though. It's never a quantity of work that gets to me - I'm already there, right? Much as I'd rather browse the Daily Mail and learn how to make my own vodka, I might as well work if I'm already there, and when Mistress La Spliffe gets working . . . well, I may flatter myself, but I work. Mighty projects fall like Goliath and inextricable tangles of bureaucratic razorwire are hacked through like the Gordian knot. There's a reason people keep paying me even though I can't complete a sentence without saying 'fuck' and can't sign off for a delivery without evaluating aloud exactly how much of a peice of ass the courier is. I'm quite good at doing things, and doing lots of things at that, well and fast. So the workload, though remarkably heavy this week, has been fine.
No. What nearly made me lose my shit is other people. To sketch things out, my company has a few media offerings. Some make their revenue from advertising, and some make their revenue from subscriptions. Our offering makes its revenue from subscriptions. Hypothetically, this is quite nice, because it means our main compositional goal is to truffle out the truth - to write the news, in short - to make our words and numbers mirror reality as closely as possible.
In reality, however, the economic crisis is quite understandably turning the people in sales into chickens with their heads cut off and we all have to deal with that. Yesterday one customer complaint got passed along as a Chinese whisper from one non-English speaker to another until it landed on our laps in an absolutely indicepherable form - wherein it was literally impossible to understand. The man who brought it to our attention had no more idea than we did what the fuck it was about (to the best of our knowledge, it looked like the complainers were mixing us up with one of our competitors, which shows you how fucking awesomely competent our marketing team is, but that's a whine for another day). And even in this form, it sparked off hours of soul-searching and a request that we, the editors, set up a meeting with the company with the complaint that we didn't understand at all but which seemed to be about one of our competitors because our marketing team fucking sucks cheese cock.
The request was kiboshed later, or at least put off, by our Yankee head of department, but when I first saw it - as I wrapped up one report, started another, worked out some numbers, checked some other numbers, did the other million little things I have to do every Thursday to make our formatting deadline, and had the pleasure of dealing with one opportunistic, useless French information provider - I seriously considered losing my shit. It seemed like a reasonable option, all of a sudden. First idea was to smash things, but then my salary could get docked, possibly . . . Screaming abuse? The last woman in my department who lost her shit via screaming abuse got a half-year payout to leave that day. Hmmm . . . screaming abuse. But then I realized if I was thinking about it so calmly, I couldn't, in good conscience, lose my shit. My shit was already under control. Losing my shit would be an insult to the thousands of people who really do lose their shit each day.
I have to stop looking on nervous breakdowns and getting fired as an escape from 'all this' . . . I have to take more responsibility for my situation. Nothing is going to rescue me, or if it is I mustn't wait for it. I have a plan and I'm following it, and right now that plan means working through an economic crisis that has people acting like headless chickens. And if that's hard and infuriating, well, at least it's Friday. And my parents are bringing me a new computer from Canada next week.
giovedì, marzo 05, 2009
mercoledì, marzo 04, 2009
The Red Dragon is a learner driver
You fat Belgian cunts,
I'm driving around in a fucking car covered with fucking 'L's and other big signs about how I'm a fucking learner driver in a rental car. As a learner driver in a rental car, I'm not going to go fast. If you don't like that, you can
A) fuck off and die
B) pass me
But what you can not do - not, in any case, without revealing yourself as one of nature's own pukebags - is ride my back bumper with your highbeams on. You stupid fucking shitwipes.
It won't make me go any faster. It will just make me mad. I'm 30 years old now and I don't care what you think. But the fact that you're doing it to me means you're also doing it to dumbfuck little wired 16 year old learner drivers who have been drinking too many caffeinated sodas, who may eventually panic, speed up, lose control of the car, and flame out at great cost to human life and property. Is that what you want, you brainless clapped-out fucks?
Holy fuck, the idiocy of this made-up nationality really makes me want to vomit.
Yours, unfortunately, for another year or two,
Mistress La Spliffe
P.S. Holy shit.
I'm driving around in a fucking car covered with fucking 'L's and other big signs about how I'm a fucking learner driver in a rental car. As a learner driver in a rental car, I'm not going to go fast. If you don't like that, you can
A) fuck off and die
B) pass me
But what you can not do - not, in any case, without revealing yourself as one of nature's own pukebags - is ride my back bumper with your highbeams on. You stupid fucking shitwipes.
It won't make me go any faster. It will just make me mad. I'm 30 years old now and I don't care what you think. But the fact that you're doing it to me means you're also doing it to dumbfuck little wired 16 year old learner drivers who have been drinking too many caffeinated sodas, who may eventually panic, speed up, lose control of the car, and flame out at great cost to human life and property. Is that what you want, you brainless clapped-out fucks?
Holy fuck, the idiocy of this made-up nationality really makes me want to vomit.
Yours, unfortunately, for another year or two,
Mistress La Spliffe
P.S. Holy shit.
martedì, marzo 03, 2009
So how's your portfolio doing?
This is a rant that becomes a bigger rant that ends in a plea.
Yesterday Yankee management did something so inexplicable, so wrong-headed, so cost/revenue/HR unconscious to my department that I've ceased to understand them. Or at least I'm telling myself that I've ceased to understand them, because if I do understand them, they're either blithering idiots or bleeding idiots. And as such, they're perfectly capable of doing one thing or another that will ensure the next Christmas axe falls blessedly on my own welcoming cranium.
The first boneheaded thing I now believe they're capable of doing is going for sheer, number-driven employment practices, which would see me replaced with someone new and a few hundred euros cheaper. That person would take six months to be functional, and considering the history of our department, they'd be statistically likely to turn out either incompetent or emotionally fragile, and depart post-haste, beginning the whole process again. And this would be in a department where one of my three direct colleagues has just quit and is being similarly replaced, and another is on maternity leave, and the third is also a new hire. It would be really fucking stupid, in short, and yesterday I was in some despair because it seemed so stupid as to be absolutely fucking impossible. Now . . . hope springs anew.
The second thing I'm now sure they're willing to do is to replace the managers here, in our office, who I'm accountable to. And who, honestly, I'm crazy about. I've worked some ethically-challenging, infuriating jobs, and the present one is no exception. But here as well, I've been blessed in having some of nature's great managers, who understand how to engage with me, make me work my lazy little fingers to the bone, make me care about the product I'm working on, make me most earnestly desire to be a beautifully functioning cog in a rapidly spinning wheel even when I can hardly leave the house in the morning, and when I cry when I see trees get cut down, et cetera. In short, my managers here are the reason that I can spend a good 15 minutes a day dreaming about the Christmas axe and still not take the natural step of beginning to be really bad at my job. That would reflect poorly on them - it would impact their bonuses and their promotion possibilities - which is the last thing I want to do. If they're gone . . . draw your own conclusions.
I don't want to dip into sensitive information on this blog - sure, I dream about getting sacked, but not until December, and while I insist on the right as a free being to call upper management absolutely fucking moronic, I have a vague idea going into the details of our financials wouldn't be quite kosher. But I will say this: the local management structure here has worked wonderfully well in terms of revenue generation. For years. However, in the best case scenario in terms of what the fuck is going through Yankee management's grey matter, we've run into the reason publicly owned companies don't fucking work and a complete overhaul of the capitalist economic system is presently necessary: our local product is 'mature'.
Now I'm switching into general terms - the bigger rant. A product being 'mature' means its growth prospects are limited. It's profitable, but the possibility of increasing its profitability is low because, in general terms, all the people who would be interested in buying it are already buying it. In a privately owned company that would be fucking great. But publicly floated companies have shareholders, and the shareholders want to see increases in profit levels so the price of their shares go up. That means that key resources get diverted from mature, profitable assets like ours to unprofitable assets that have a chance, if albeit in the present economic climate NO FUCKING CHANCE AT ALL, of becoming profitable.
This sort of dynamic is problematic at the best of times, because it means you compromise the quality of your mature product, and once that happens it becomes very hard to rebuild trust and an audience; even if the gamble works on the previously unprofitable product, you may have killed the golden goose in the process. Another problematic golden-goose killing dynamic just cutting assets from the mature, profitable activities, and hoping they just keep somehow being profitable, except extra profitable because you've just cut the costs, and knowing they won't; for a mature product, people are used to a certain quality level, and will cut it off if that quality level falls. Nothing's easier to lose than brand reputation.
So, in the present, quality-and-cost-conscious economic situation, these sorts of dynamics are incredibly fucking stupid, because the only place such gambles have a chance of working is on paper. Or - and this is key - in terms of the calculation of the CEO's pay and bonus. This is because CEOs must be seen to be doing something to increase profits, and generally their tenures are quite short, so this doing something just has to be doing something in terms of the pay calculations. . . it doesn't have to actually work - the CEO just moves on if it doesn't work for long enough.
Let's switch back to last week's rant about the uselessness of whining about the big fat bonuses CEOs of companies doing phenomenally badly get. I failed to point something out that day which people really need to know; I thought they did, but it's came up four times in my conversations since Thursday. There is a great deal of anger, when it comes to these bonuses, about how they're often awarded to CEOs or upper management at companies that are laying off hundreds or even thousands of employees or otherwise cutting costs. Where's the money for the bonus, one asks, or how can you excuse that bonus, when so many people are losing their jobs? It looks like thievery.
Look: it's not as simple as all that. CEO's aren't getting these huge bonuses despite cost-cutting measures like factory closures and mass lay-offs; they're getting those huge bonuses because of cost-cutting measures like factory closures and mass lay-offs. They're getting those huge bonuses because taking those sorts of measures means they're doing their jobs well. They're minimizing losses, maybe even nudging the company into the black, or into a position where it will re-enter the black within the next quarter or next year, or next couple of years these days, and that's what their employers - shareholders - you and me, the people who hold mutual funds and retirement investments whatnot - that's what we fucking want.
We usually don't know that's what we want - usually we just curse when our portfolio goes down and are happy when our portfolio goes up, as brainlessly as a dog who gets alternately kicked and brushed by its master. But if you want your portfolio to go up, that's what you want. Big CEO bonuses, mass lay-offs, factory closures, outsourcing to cheaper production zones with poor labour standards and poor environmental standards. That's what all us cunts want. And if you don't want that, I suggest you fucking do something about it besides whine about fat cats and unfairness.
Yesterday Yankee management did something so inexplicable, so wrong-headed, so cost/revenue/HR unconscious to my department that I've ceased to understand them. Or at least I'm telling myself that I've ceased to understand them, because if I do understand them, they're either blithering idiots or bleeding idiots. And as such, they're perfectly capable of doing one thing or another that will ensure the next Christmas axe falls blessedly on my own welcoming cranium.
The first boneheaded thing I now believe they're capable of doing is going for sheer, number-driven employment practices, which would see me replaced with someone new and a few hundred euros cheaper. That person would take six months to be functional, and considering the history of our department, they'd be statistically likely to turn out either incompetent or emotionally fragile, and depart post-haste, beginning the whole process again. And this would be in a department where one of my three direct colleagues has just quit and is being similarly replaced, and another is on maternity leave, and the third is also a new hire. It would be really fucking stupid, in short, and yesterday I was in some despair because it seemed so stupid as to be absolutely fucking impossible. Now . . . hope springs anew.
The second thing I'm now sure they're willing to do is to replace the managers here, in our office, who I'm accountable to. And who, honestly, I'm crazy about. I've worked some ethically-challenging, infuriating jobs, and the present one is no exception. But here as well, I've been blessed in having some of nature's great managers, who understand how to engage with me, make me work my lazy little fingers to the bone, make me care about the product I'm working on, make me most earnestly desire to be a beautifully functioning cog in a rapidly spinning wheel even when I can hardly leave the house in the morning, and when I cry when I see trees get cut down, et cetera. In short, my managers here are the reason that I can spend a good 15 minutes a day dreaming about the Christmas axe and still not take the natural step of beginning to be really bad at my job. That would reflect poorly on them - it would impact their bonuses and their promotion possibilities - which is the last thing I want to do. If they're gone . . . draw your own conclusions.
I don't want to dip into sensitive information on this blog - sure, I dream about getting sacked, but not until December, and while I insist on the right as a free being to call upper management absolutely fucking moronic, I have a vague idea going into the details of our financials wouldn't be quite kosher. But I will say this: the local management structure here has worked wonderfully well in terms of revenue generation. For years. However, in the best case scenario in terms of what the fuck is going through Yankee management's grey matter, we've run into the reason publicly owned companies don't fucking work and a complete overhaul of the capitalist economic system is presently necessary: our local product is 'mature'.
Now I'm switching into general terms - the bigger rant. A product being 'mature' means its growth prospects are limited. It's profitable, but the possibility of increasing its profitability is low because, in general terms, all the people who would be interested in buying it are already buying it. In a privately owned company that would be fucking great. But publicly floated companies have shareholders, and the shareholders want to see increases in profit levels so the price of their shares go up. That means that key resources get diverted from mature, profitable assets like ours to unprofitable assets that have a chance, if albeit in the present economic climate NO FUCKING CHANCE AT ALL, of becoming profitable.
This sort of dynamic is problematic at the best of times, because it means you compromise the quality of your mature product, and once that happens it becomes very hard to rebuild trust and an audience; even if the gamble works on the previously unprofitable product, you may have killed the golden goose in the process. Another problematic golden-goose killing dynamic just cutting assets from the mature, profitable activities, and hoping they just keep somehow being profitable, except extra profitable because you've just cut the costs, and knowing they won't; for a mature product, people are used to a certain quality level, and will cut it off if that quality level falls. Nothing's easier to lose than brand reputation.
So, in the present, quality-and-cost-conscious economic situation, these sorts of dynamics are incredibly fucking stupid, because the only place such gambles have a chance of working is on paper. Or - and this is key - in terms of the calculation of the CEO's pay and bonus. This is because CEOs must be seen to be doing something to increase profits, and generally their tenures are quite short, so this doing something just has to be doing something in terms of the pay calculations. . . it doesn't have to actually work - the CEO just moves on if it doesn't work for long enough.
Let's switch back to last week's rant about the uselessness of whining about the big fat bonuses CEOs of companies doing phenomenally badly get. I failed to point something out that day which people really need to know; I thought they did, but it's came up four times in my conversations since Thursday. There is a great deal of anger, when it comes to these bonuses, about how they're often awarded to CEOs or upper management at companies that are laying off hundreds or even thousands of employees or otherwise cutting costs. Where's the money for the bonus, one asks, or how can you excuse that bonus, when so many people are losing their jobs? It looks like thievery.
Look: it's not as simple as all that. CEO's aren't getting these huge bonuses despite cost-cutting measures like factory closures and mass lay-offs; they're getting those huge bonuses because of cost-cutting measures like factory closures and mass lay-offs. They're getting those huge bonuses because taking those sorts of measures means they're doing their jobs well. They're minimizing losses, maybe even nudging the company into the black, or into a position where it will re-enter the black within the next quarter or next year, or next couple of years these days, and that's what their employers - shareholders - you and me, the people who hold mutual funds and retirement investments whatnot - that's what we fucking want.
We usually don't know that's what we want - usually we just curse when our portfolio goes down and are happy when our portfolio goes up, as brainlessly as a dog who gets alternately kicked and brushed by its master. But if you want your portfolio to go up, that's what you want. Big CEO bonuses, mass lay-offs, factory closures, outsourcing to cheaper production zones with poor labour standards and poor environmental standards. That's what all us cunts want. And if you don't want that, I suggest you fucking do something about it besides whine about fat cats and unfairness.
lunedì, marzo 02, 2009
I was the walrus, but now I'm John
I had a dream of being sacked in December, around the time they work out the 2009 books, sort of like how San Francisca got sacked a few months ago. That dream would have seen me get a four-month payout under Belgium's Claeys formula after I'd saved up enough for a down payment on a house, tuition and expenses for another university degree, and a little more besides. Which would mean, with the Claeys formula money, I could have bought us a ticket to Australia for a berth on a freighter, which would give us something like two months on a ship in luxury accommodation, with me reading books and writing books and banging my sweetie and playing in the pool and visiting bizarre ports of call and staring at the horizon and not fucking working, until my corporate brain was healed and I'd be ready to hippy the fuck out in the rain forest. The thinking goes that after two months at sea I'd be so bored that poisonous snakes, plague toads, larrikins ands saltwater crocodiles would be objects of interest rather than fear or disgust.
Anyways, that dream has dwindled to almost nothing. We're a five-man department. One of the men has got pregnant and will be out on maternity leave for most of the second half of the year. And then yesterday, another man who's senior to me quit because she wants to go to teacher's college this summer. Good for her - I think she was going through largely the same sort of thinking I've been. But what it means is that now, after less than two years, I'm basically unfirable next December. Despite this fucking economic meltdown, despite my constant refusal to brush my hair or bleach my moustache before I go to work, despite my piercings, despite my pottymouth, there is almost no chance of my getting fired next December now, especially since my managers reckon our owners are only going to let them hire one more person to fill the breach - but we needed that one more person anyways, without replacing anybody, because we've expanded our coverage.
Okay - it's not the end of the world. And anyways people in my department never get fired, because it's traditionally been easier to wait until they freak out and quit. So it was always a pipe dream. But I imagine it's like losing a lottery ticket that you had a really good feeling about. I guess the hope isn't quite extinguished. This is a very, very remarkable economic situation: now, as a senior person, I'll be making significantly more money than new hires, in a situation where my employers would have access to some really phenomenal candidates. I'd fire me. But I think I should just ignore the hope. When I change my life, I'll have to be the one who changes my life. It's time to take a stand. Time to look my Protestant work ethic (which won't let me be incompetent and get fired in the normal way) in the eye and say, 'fuck you, Protestant work ethic, I'm so much more than my job.'
Alternatively, I could just start shitting on other people's desks . . .
Anyways, that dream has dwindled to almost nothing. We're a five-man department. One of the men has got pregnant and will be out on maternity leave for most of the second half of the year. And then yesterday, another man who's senior to me quit because she wants to go to teacher's college this summer. Good for her - I think she was going through largely the same sort of thinking I've been. But what it means is that now, after less than two years, I'm basically unfirable next December. Despite this fucking economic meltdown, despite my constant refusal to brush my hair or bleach my moustache before I go to work, despite my piercings, despite my pottymouth, there is almost no chance of my getting fired next December now, especially since my managers reckon our owners are only going to let them hire one more person to fill the breach - but we needed that one more person anyways, without replacing anybody, because we've expanded our coverage.
Okay - it's not the end of the world. And anyways people in my department never get fired, because it's traditionally been easier to wait until they freak out and quit. So it was always a pipe dream. But I imagine it's like losing a lottery ticket that you had a really good feeling about. I guess the hope isn't quite extinguished. This is a very, very remarkable economic situation: now, as a senior person, I'll be making significantly more money than new hires, in a situation where my employers would have access to some really phenomenal candidates. I'd fire me. But I think I should just ignore the hope. When I change my life, I'll have to be the one who changes my life. It's time to take a stand. Time to look my Protestant work ethic (which won't let me be incompetent and get fired in the normal way) in the eye and say, 'fuck you, Protestant work ethic, I'm so much more than my job.'
Alternatively, I could just start shitting on other people's desks . . .
domenica, marzo 01, 2009
Pink Mitfords and white pyjamas
Two things I'd like to share from this lovely weekend, so soon over. Well, there's more, but there's no time for them. First, Nancy Mitford, the pink Mitford sister, is a fucking lovely author to read and I recommend her Louis XIV biography without hesitation. It's written with such an adorable style, in an extremely-clever-dilettante way rather than an academic way, with phrases like 'she would try and persuade the King' and 'Mme de Maintenon was loving the humiliation of Mme de Montespan'. Full of good stories and gory details. Top marks. Jessica, the red Mitford sister, wrote in a punchier (though still amusing) vein, and there's no doubt Jessica's my hero on many levels. But Nancy is nicer when your brain is close to breaking, as mine is at the mo.
Another thing: I've found a new Internet hero, the Media Tinker; she's posted a pattern for pyjama pants online, so she's automatically awesome. A free pattern took some finding, but I really didn't want to buy one as I'm so cheap and not fond of the notion of buying something that might be too difficult. But this one was perfect. The instructions were clearer than free pattern instructions usually are and it did exactly what it said on the tin, which is amazing in my case since I'm such an elementary sewing person. But I made a pair for the F-word out of a nice linen-cotton blend and he reckons they're ace. And there's about four other patterns on the site I'll be making - as I find the fabric, which also takes some finding here.
For instance, I wanted to make the F-word silk pyjamas, because nothing's too good for him, but the cheapest bolt of silk I've found in the shops here is 46 euros a metre - that's $74 Canadian, for those of you who are counting. For a metre. Uhm, yeah, nothing's too good for him, but he may have to wait for silk pjs until we move to Australia and I can hit one of those markets in Bali.
As it is I don't buy any fabric from the fabric stores in Brussels; even the flannelette for menstrual towels is prohibitively expensive, and I've got it over from Canada instead of buying it here. There's a charity shop that stocks fabric people bought and then thought better of - I rely on that, but it's not frequent I can find anything there, as the fabric people thought better of tends by nature to be fucking ugly. Or it tends to be synthetic, and we don't wear synthetics, which is a blog post for another day. When I do find quality fabric there, it's almost invariably white-to-cream - very nice cottons or linens that people realized were going to stain like crazy and be quite impractical. The F-word's new pyjama bottoms, for example, are ivory. I'm thinking of finding a way to dye them here - I've heard you can use dandelion heads or chestnut shells for that. Hmm.
Another thing: I've found a new Internet hero, the Media Tinker; she's posted a pattern for pyjama pants online, so she's automatically awesome. A free pattern took some finding, but I really didn't want to buy one as I'm so cheap and not fond of the notion of buying something that might be too difficult. But this one was perfect. The instructions were clearer than free pattern instructions usually are and it did exactly what it said on the tin, which is amazing in my case since I'm such an elementary sewing person. But I made a pair for the F-word out of a nice linen-cotton blend and he reckons they're ace. And there's about four other patterns on the site I'll be making - as I find the fabric, which also takes some finding here.
For instance, I wanted to make the F-word silk pyjamas, because nothing's too good for him, but the cheapest bolt of silk I've found in the shops here is 46 euros a metre - that's $74 Canadian, for those of you who are counting. For a metre. Uhm, yeah, nothing's too good for him, but he may have to wait for silk pjs until we move to Australia and I can hit one of those markets in Bali.
As it is I don't buy any fabric from the fabric stores in Brussels; even the flannelette for menstrual towels is prohibitively expensive, and I've got it over from Canada instead of buying it here. There's a charity shop that stocks fabric people bought and then thought better of - I rely on that, but it's not frequent I can find anything there, as the fabric people thought better of tends by nature to be fucking ugly. Or it tends to be synthetic, and we don't wear synthetics, which is a blog post for another day. When I do find quality fabric there, it's almost invariably white-to-cream - very nice cottons or linens that people realized were going to stain like crazy and be quite impractical. The F-word's new pyjama bottoms, for example, are ivory. I'm thinking of finding a way to dye them here - I've heard you can use dandelion heads or chestnut shells for that. Hmm.
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