Interaction-starved?

At time of writing, Boris Johnson has placed the area I live in a Tier 3 lockdown. This means… well, whatever they say it means, which changes from minute to minute. The upshot is I work from home and visit the office to pick up paperwork maybe once a month. The rest of the time our department works with an MS Teams video call going - we mute ourselves when we don’t need anyone, and only turn the mic on to ask colleagues about something or to let them know what’s happening. This has worked really well despite my concerns, and we as a team have adapted to this whole working from home thing quite easily.

What it’s also done is inserted us into the home lives of our colleagues. Now luckily for us, we like all the members of our team and there’s no awkwardness with this. Instead of us now arriving in the office, talking about whatever TV show or weather is current as we work, we’re now party to everything that goes on in people’s houses. We see the grandma arrive to pick up the young daughter to childcare. We see the husband or wife come into the room behind people to pick up something or provide a fresh brew. We see the dogs and cats trying to get attention from their loved one who seems to be ignoring them to stare at a laptop screen all day. We see the young kids rushing up to show their parents their work from school, or to complain they’re hungry, or ask if they can turn on the TV. And all of these people, because they’re functioning members of society, wave to the camera and say hello, say that they hope we’re well where we are, etc. It’s nice. It’s a break from the work routine.

It’s also made us more friends than just colleagues, I think. Now when we come on in the morning we don’t dive straight into the “right, who’s doing this task this morning so I crack on with this other one?” Instead it’s “how’s Grandma today - is she still picking up your daughter?” or “any news on your brother-in-law in hospital?” and “did you get that toy for your dog?” And it’s made my colleagues realise something.

I used to live abroad. I was there for eleven years. And when I came back, I had to adjust to 90% of my friends being still there whilst I was not. Time zones may have tried to stop us, but wi-fi enabled communications apps made it easy to video chat to them, to have a simple phone call, to constantly text and send memes. Before the outbreak of Covid, my colleagues thought my life was a lonely one, with no-one in my flat but me, no pets or children or partners in the place, no friends around the corner. What they didn’t understand is that I felt like my friends were all here, just out of sight - because they were a Whatsapp message or a FaceTime call away. It’s been like that for me since 2002, when I moved to Hong Kong and used the primitive comms apps of the time to text for free and video call family in the UK.

Now we’re all at home and they’re using the same comms apps to keep in contact with friends and family who don’t live with them, they’re starting to understand why my life is not lonely. Now they get that you’re never truly alone when you have a smartphone - for better or for worse. Right now I think it’s for the better of course. I normally do. In fact, when I think it’s not a good thing I simply turn it off. Problem solved.

I think this prolonged lockdown is having an affect on not just how you behave at home, but how you react now to people in general. For example: I went out today to get a haircut. I got to a pedestrian crossing, waited for the traffic to stop, and then me and the people on the other side of the road started to cross. The car to my right had its windows shut as they were calling someone on a hands-free phone. We could all clearly hear the phone ringing. And then someone picked up and called “HELLO?” Without thinking (I believe), me and three other pedestrians raised our hands and joyfully called out “HELLO” like we were shouting to a ship out at sea. We all realised what we’d done, then laughed about it behind our face masks and carried on walking.

Why did we respond like this? Because it’s polite to reply to people saying hello to you? Because it’s a knee-jerk reaction to greet someone if you think you’re being spoken to? Who can say. But I know I wouldn’t have done that before all this Covid kicked off.

Perhaps we’re all getting interaction-starved. Yes, we have video chats and constant contact with people, but it’s all in controlled environments. When you put us back into a situation that could throw up weird events like the HELLO incident, maybe we all fall back on instincts. Maybe we still need to be in those situations every now and again to keep our horizons where they should be, otherwise how do you know up from down?

In any case, we all got a giggle out of it and we all went on our way. It was enough to amuse me on a wet and windy Manchester morning, when it was eight degrees C and feeling very much like October. Where has the time gone?

And on that note, that’s me done. Three posts in one month? What’s that about?

Soopytwist, everyone.

Image by Thomas Ulrich from Pixabay

Better to be bored than troubled?

I’m halfway through a Hong Kong drama just now - On-Lie Game (as always, a play on words. This one is about online scams). If you can get past the Public Service Announcements about how to avoid being scammed, it’s pretty much a run-of-the-mill tangle of casework and the main characters’ personal lives. It’s nothing new - the same kind of melodrama and slow-burn while the leads muddle through a typically cryptic web of stories.

One line made me pause, however. A wife tells her husband working overseas that she’s had a bad day at work (she’s the boss). He tells her that she should just give up her job and be a kept women instead. She’s not impressed; she says she’d have no purpose in life and would get bored. His response? ‘Better to be bored than troubled.’

We’re all going through things like cabin fever, depression, separation turmoil and plain old worry right now due to various lockdown restrictions and regional various in government fuckery. Basically, we’re all troubled by something. Would boredom actually be a better alternative?

I’ve been struck by boredom recently. Since March I’ve been working from home, and it’s been easier for me than many others I work with. I’m not a people person; I’m quite happy to work in solitude, asking people for things I need when I need them, contacting others when necessary. I’m quite happy to sit at home and methodically plough through work without needing companionship, idle chat, or in fact people. We’re now well into September and it’s not the work that’s been getting me down recently - it’s the routine. Wake up at seven, go through a twenty-minute exercise routine, have a sit down for ten minutes to try to recover, then shower, have breakfast, and be online and logged into all systems for nine o’clock. Start an MS Teams video call with the (small) department. Work on everything that needs it until one in the afternoon. Break for dinner; cook something. Be back for half one. Work through till five. Say goodbye to everyone via the MS Teams video call. Log off and find some way to amuse myself until tomorrow morning.

Rinse and repeat.

It’s the routine that’s getting to me, not boredom as such. There’s no variation. Yes, I have a pretty much endless array of media to keep me entertained. Yes, I’m happy living by myself. Yes, I’m ok with calling out for anything I need over MS Teams or otherwise being on mute all day. But that’s all there is. I don’t leave the flat (apparently the latest is that we’re not allowed to mix with anyone of any other household right now), I don’t do anything except amuse myself on the sofa.

I’ve written another fanfic, and now I’m in that ‘post-production’ phase of reviewing plot holes and tweaking scenes. I’ve caught up on series and films on Netflix. I’ve cleaned the flat every two weeks. I’ve sorted the plumbing problem under the bath and even cleared up the whole ordering-of-wheelie-bins misunderstanding with the local council. I’ve sorted my new finance agreement with my current car, fixed the poor IR receiver on my blu ray player, patched the out-of-date wi-fi protocols on trusty Jarvis, my 2013 Mac Mini, and tried two different ways to seal my draughty windows. I’m running out of things to stop putting off and just fix.

So am I troubled or bored? Or am I troubled by being bored?

I’m pretty sure I’m not good at being bored. Too much spare time makes me almost anhedonic. I need to have more work than time to do it - kind of like how a cup of tea should always be slightly too hot to drink. Getting through so much work so quickly (due to not being in the office, and therefore not being distracted by the human need to produce small talk for no reason) means my workload appears lighter. It isn’t at all, it just gets done faster. This means I regularly have half an hour in the afternoon where I need to scratch around for something to do. Most people would love this, right? But I can’t deal with it. I need something to occupy me at all times.

This is why I’m mainlining HK dramas like they’re twenty times better than they are. I can’t get through a whole episode without subtitles, and yet I’m trying to only flick to the subtitles to work out the key words of the series. It’s at least a challenge, something to work at. I haven’t seen it before and I need to pay attention to the subtitles, so there’s no sighing and checking my phone every few minutes.

I guess that’s all any of us can do - try to keep occupied. But then, it’s not the ability to do that, it’s the will. That’s taking a sharp down-turn and I’m doing my best to ignore that it’s getting harder to stop questioning why I’m doing it and just do it. I can keep going. I can.

For now.

But hey, new TV shows start in October (as well as Supernatural returning for its final episodes ever - I am not looking forward to 19th November 2020 when the actual proper finale to the whole fifteen year saga airs). Winter is on its way, Hallowe’en is again getting near, and after that we have some religious thing I don’t celebrate but get public holidays for anyway, so it’s all good.

I guess all we can do is keep on keeping on.

Image by Pitsch from Pixabay

Lockdown

Not, unfortunately, the stellar (sorry) Guy Pierce 2012 film Lockout, which is just a fantastic old-fashioned 1980s survival in a prison (a space prison) flick with guns, violence, snarky one-liners and brilliantly acted stereotypes all round. No, sadly not that Lockout.

Instead it’s now been seven weeks since I’ve worked from my actual work desk, and three weeks since I’ve left the house. And by that I mean I have not crossed the threshold of any doors to be away from the touch of indoor flooring.

Everyone keeps asking - “how are you holding up?”. And my reply is always the same: “has anything changed?”


I mean yes, obviously some things have changed. I don’t go to the pictures on Saturday and then meet up with mates afterwards to talk about it. I don’t go to the Chinese supermarket one Sunday a month to stock up on food. I don’t go to the archery range. I don’t drive to work. Other than that…? Nah, nothing’s changed.

I don’t have kids, pets, or anything that distracts me. What I do have is Doom Eternal on PS4, along with other games I’m still battling through. I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, I have Kodi and Hong Kong dramas (The Exorcist’s 2nd Meter is on - finally we have the sequel to The Exorcist’s Meter!). I have a Lethal Weapon fanfiction story that I’m halfway through posting, and I’ve embarked on a 21 day yoga shred class online. And did I forget to mention, I’m still working, just from the kitchen table. So yeah, I’m pretty busy and I don’t need to go out. My housemate is also still working, but their essential worker status means that they can stop off at a supermarket on the way home and pick up bits and pieces.

Also, I work in payroll (for the NHS, no less), so what with April being a perfect storm of all the statutory and contractual changes no-one in ops wants, it’s been a full-on, fifty-hour week for four weeks for pretty much the entire team. We’ve been given time off in lieu, so it’s not really a big deal for me, but for others with dependents it’s been “a nightmare”.

The only problem I’m going to have is going back to the office when we’re finally cleared by our bosses to do so (i.e. when our healthcare professionals have assessed it and made the requisite changes, not when Boris waffles his way through saying… whatever it was he was saying on Sunday 10th March). I know a lot of people will be glad of the return - to be in a place where they feel like a professional, like they’re away from all the home distractions, out of the ‘home’ environment and into a work headspace. I get it - in words. I don’t feel it, but I understand what they mean. And then there are those who don’t work in office jobs and will have been itching to get back to work for the last month anyway.

Everyone seems uptight and upset that they’re being told to stay home. Everyone else seems to be getting cabin fever. I’ve just woken up one day, been told to collect my kit from work and then go home until further notice, get on MS Teams when I’m working and that’s that. I just kind of went “so this is how it is now” and got on with it. There wasn’t any drama to be had - it just happened and we dealt with it like grown-ups. Others in the team had some IT hiccups and others have been trying to balance kids and dinner-time and all kinds of trials and tribulations. I don’t have those. I sit down, open up all the apps and emails and everything else, look at the list of stuff I didn’t finish yesterday, and get to work. I don’t see the difference between doing that at work and doing that at my kitchen table.

I’m happy that I don’t have to mix with humans, that I can get on and do my job without being interrupted by co-workers asking if I want to go for a brew, or having to put shoes on (I find it hard to sit on chairs ‘properly’ and often end up folding my legs under the table, which is hard to do with Doc Martens on).

Going back to an office environment is going to be very hard.

But then, what with major companies now wondering why they’re paying rent or a bank loan for sprawling offices in the real world when they could just let their office staff keep a laptop and stay away, I wonder what changes are coming.

Was it not Captain Jack Harkness who said that “the 21st century is when everything changes”? Is this what he meant? Where leaders of large, influential countries have gone off the rails (some would argue that they were never really on them in the first place) and caused nearly 80,000 deaths at this point? Where still others are trying to impose their brand of order on a territory handed back to them twenty-odd years ago, despite the entire population being against it and willing to stand in tear gas and water cannon to prove it? With this new pandemic hitting the globe and reminding everyone how everyone really is connected whether they like it or not, is this when everything finally starts to shift? Pollution from fossil-fuel traffic in a lot of cities has started to ease up - because of people not using those vehicles. One retired army captain (now a colonel) in the UK has raised more for NHS Charities in a few weeks than most people will ever raise in their lifetime - in a team. People are reaching out over social media, children are receiving tweets and replying by old-fashioned letter-writing. Others are holding street parties from behind their fences. Still more are coming out onto their doorsteps to celebrate the NHS on a Thursday night with songs, clapping, and banging pots and pans. Caremongering is becoming a thing - people helping others to get their grocery shopping, to post a letter, to connect and keep their sanity. All signs are pointing toward a feeling of unity, of wanting to help.

And yet.

And yet.

We have brainless, self-obsessed presidents telling the masses the most baseless, misinformed and dangerous things - and nearly half the country are still listening to him. We have others over-buying and stocking up on household items so that they can sell those items for a profit. People think they can get away with behaving like Nazis again. There are people deliberately scamming others using miracle cures and snake oil replacements for this virus. There are news outlets deliberately spreading lies and paranoia, to widen the gap between classes, between minorities, between neighbours, between humans. The top ten multi-billionaires just keep getting richer, earning more per day than they could spend in a month, and apparently happy to keep it that way despite the people all around them living on food stamps, foods banks, charity hand-outs and poverty.

This is what we are as a species. We are opposite ends of the spectrum, in all things. The only thing wrong with that is how far apart those ends actually are. It’s ok that everyone believes different things, it’s ok that everyone feels differently, acts differently, has a different perspective. This is essential for humans to survive. What’s not ok is how some seek to stop others from being allowed to be the difference. Some leaders need to be impeached (or just removed forcibly with a blunt object), some leaders need to realise the way their country has been run for the past few generations just isn’t going to work any more - times have changed and not changing with them is not how evolution or progress works. Some people need to get a heart, or at least hire someone who has one and then take their advice. I am the last person to say they know anything about empathy or feelings, but even I can stand back and work out what is beneficial and what isn’t to a society as a whole. When you work toward controlling a population instead of serving them, you’ve already lost the game.

Anyway.

Some good news to lighten the mood: NASA is going back to the Moon. To date, one person has definitely been cured of HIV, and while science is struggling to replicate the how, they’re getting closer every day. Volvo is looking to get into the Tesla bracket of electric cars - meaning the battle is now on (properly) for better, longer-ranging batteries and smaller price tags. And on that note, the production of energy from renewable sources is literally terawatts ahead of anything it’s ever been before. Wind farms alone are making an impact on the amount of energy we have to import, including Russian coal and Norwegian oil.

When all this covid thing is over, and everyone goes back to work in stages, it’s not the lockdown or the whinging or the team spirit I’m going to remember. It’s the good movies I’ve seen, the comic books I’ve read, the stories I’ve written and the courses I’ve done. I’ve let myself watch more on Netflix and it’s resulted in me seeing some very good series I wouldn’t normally have tried out. I’ve gone for that yoga course even though I don’t understand yoga (you can still go through the motions like you mean it, though). I’ve had a whale of a time in the rip and tear moments of Doom Eternal and I’ve got my highest scores ever on the arcade levels of Doom 2016.

I know all around me people have been losing their shit and things have been going off the rails, but for me life’s been pretty good. As an INTJ who really isn’t here for Human Drama, I have to say I’ve been enjoying this lockdown as a chance to stay away from people. If there was a way for it to continue, without the horrific deaths or riots or protests (against people trying to keep them alive? Fine. Let them die) then I’m all for it. We just need to beat this virus and make something new out of what comes next. And if a majority doesn’t get rid of the orange-faced buffoon spewing arse-gravy on the daily when next they vote, then we may just have to call on the SAS to do everyone a huge fucking favour.

You’ll be glad to know that that’s it for today, folks. Rant over - time for more good telly.

Soopytwist.

Final image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

The Superhero Desk

Payrollers, as anyone outside the industry will most definitely not tell you, are superheroes. We deliver on time, every time, by solving other people’s problems, making things happen despite everyone else’s mission to sabotage delivery by deadlines, and making the hard choices to save the world.

We’re invisible. We can toil away with a metric tree-tonne of timesheets, grapple with statutory pay loopholes and convince obstreperous software to just work, and like ninjas, no-one will see us do it. In fact, we’re completely, effectively, and in all other ways non-existent.

Until something goes wrong.

We’re payrollers, yes, but we’re also human. We are not infallible and sometimes we just make mistakes. But when other people make mistakes, it results in a box of ballpoint pens not turning up at reception, or a car being delivered to the wrong address the first time round. When we make mistakes, employees’ bills don’t get paid, direct debits bounce, cars go without petrol and people don’t get to work. It’s nothing short of the end of their world as they know it.

That’s when we move heaven and earth to bring payment to people seemingly effortlessly. Does that mean we save the world on a daily basis? You bet we do. I’ve seen it; I’ve done it.

Let me tell you a story.

We have a small team where I work. One of our payrollers, whose penchant for wearing dark colours that contrast her red hair and her ability to get things done without anyone noticing has earned her the nickname ‘Batwoman’, takes a phone call from a woman at 9:27am on pay day. The woman claims to be an employee and is demanding to know why she hasn’t been paid. Batwoman checks - there’s no record of her in our payroll-cum-HR system. Unwilling to share this distressing news, Batwoman takes down details with her namesake’s trademark calm and promises to call the woman back when she’s got to the bottom of the problem.

Her first stop: HR, whereupon she’s told that the woman is half set-up in the system but they’re waiting on being notified of her working her first day.

A-ha, says Batwoman, but she has worked her first day. It was 15th of the month.

Bother, says HR, as this is one day before the cut-off, which means she is due payment and HR really should have been made aware.

At this point it becomes obvious what has happened - or more accurately, what hasn’t happened. The moment she had worked her first day, the woman’s details should have been updated with HR and they could have finished setting her up in the system and then passed her starter paperwork to Payroll so we could add her to the pay run. The villain of the piece had been revealed, sadly not Scooby-Doo style, to be the line manager who had not informed anyone of the woman’s first day at work.

Batwoman is told that HR cannot sort the paperwork problem at the moment as they’re dealing with any one of the other 1,200 employees and their own little versions of armageddon - it could be 2 or 3 days before they can get to sorting it out.

Batwoman goes back to her desk, calmly picks up the phone and manages to get through to the line manager herself. Line manager says nuh-uh, too busy, and attempts to fob her off.

You can imagine how this went down.

Batwoman gets up, picks up a notebook and pen, and goes into one of the offices, kept available for just such an eventuality. She closes the glass, sound-proof door and sits down at the solitary desk and phone, in full view of everyone due to the ceiling-to-floor glass nature of the ‘wall’ of the office.

What is said is not known. What is caused to happen most definitely is; within ten minutes of coming back to her own desk, Batwoman has been emailed the pertinent paperwork, with HR copied in, so that the employee can be paid. She adds her to the run, rolls her for next month as this one is shut, and makes a same-day advance payment to the employee.

The satisfaction in her voice as she calls the employee back and gives her the news that she will receive money in the next hour is palpable. But when the employee thanks her over and over, she gives the same answer she gives everyone; “it’s what we’re here for”.

The satisfaction in her voice as she tells the Finance department, across the office, that the cost of making a same-day payment is coming out of a certain line manager’s budget is also palpable. An incident report is filed to explain the expense and also to give us something to try to avoid next time.

For the employee, the world was saved. For Payroll, we were left cleaning up a manager’s error on that day and also dealing with the advance in the next month. But Batwoman was right - it is what we’re here for. We are where the buck stops, where the thin blue line is drawn, where the chips hit the table.

Even when other departments or people fail, when we just don’t have the things we need, when it’s not our place to do it, we are still expected to produce money for people. Most of the time, we do. Batwoman took that call at 9:27am (the reason I know this is because we take bets on when the first complaint call or email will come in each pay day, and we all lost) and by noon it had been resolved to the employee’s satisfaction. She didn’t need to know the whys and wherefores - all she needed was the money she was owed. We did that; we made it happen. Everything else was something for line managers and Finance Directors to argue about after the fact. Luckily for us.

I like Batwoman; we get on. We’re both a ‘is it a 0 or a 1? No, it can’t be a 0.5; try again’ kind of person. And when we were getting fresh tea an hour after the miraculous advance payment had landed, we joked about how she’d saved another person’s world in record time.

Of course, the background superhero, the Alfred Pennyworth to all of our efforts, was the Payroll Manager. She made damn sure the reason (and expense) why Batwoman’s latest escapade had even happened was brought to the attention of all line managers (with names withheld to protect the guilty) at the next meeting.

Give us what we need, she told them, and we will deliver every time. And apparently, we deliver even when we’re not given what we need.

Superheroes are just like that, I suppose.

What is this GDPR thing anyway?

If like me you work with details of living people, then you must have at least heard of the GDPR. The General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into force 25th May 2018, is basically an upgraded version of the Data Protection Act 1998 (Stephen Fry rest its soul). What does it mean? Well on top of getting all the usual stuff (people have to ask to collect your data; have to tell you why they’re collecting it and how long they’ll keep it; they can't share it or let it get lost; they can only get data from you in the first place if they actually need it for something, etc.) we get some shiny new rights. Things like telling a company they have to ‘forget’ you (as in shred or delete every single bit of data they hold on you, unless it means they can’t provide the service for which you’ve given it), and a shorter (and free) period of time to request a copy of all the info someone has on you, are quite useful in the long run and I have to say it’s high time we had this tightening of legislation.

But what does it actually mean? I’ve been on 2 courses now for work; the CIPP GDPR for Payroll course and a government accredited IT Governance GDPR course. It’s a pretty dry subject, but it’s well worth the read. The consequences of a breach of protected data at your company or business are one thing, but if you're not even aware of what constitutes a breach and what you’re supposed to do about it, things get very bad very quickly.

Take for example a typical Tuesday morning for me.

Colleague: I can’t get in the restricted-access personnel folder.

Me: Yes.
Colleague: Well I need to get in.
Me: There’s a reason you don’t have access to that folder. What are you trying to do?

Colleague: I just want to look something up.
Me: No.
Colleague: What?
Me: NO. As in ‘no’.
Colleague: But I need it.
Me: If you can demonstrate why, then I’ll get you the necessary information.
Colleague: Do I wait here?
Me: Buses don’t stop here.
Colleague: What?
Me: I don’t know why else you’d be waiting here.
Colleague: Well for access.
Me: Let’s skip a lot of misunderstanding, shall we? You need to show me first why you have a right to see the information. Then, and only then, can I give it to you.
Colleague: You’re taking this a bit far.
Me: *cups hands around mouth and shouts* Does anyone want to see the contents of Colleague’s file? It might have juicy information in it, like any grievances they’ve brought against you, or if they’re divorcing anyone, or how many kids they’re claiming childcare vouchers for - and their surnames! Anyone? Anyone?
Office: *sounds of giggles, general hand-waving of amusement and negation*
Colleague: Stop that. You can’t just show people my stuff.
Me: So you DO understand data protection, then?
Colleague: But I need access.
Me: No. What you need is to ask me for the PIECE or PIECES of information you need, and I’ll get it for you.
Colleague: Well why do you have access and I don’t? I’m a manager. You’re just a—
Me: Steady. I pay your wages into your private bank account, don’t forget.
Colleague: I was only going to say that you’re not manager level.
Me: Data protection doesn’t care about your manager level. I need your private details in order to do my job, which is pay you and create and maintain your personnel records. People sitting next to me in HR do NOT pay you, so they don’t have access to things I do, even though they’re also in HR. Directors of the company don’t have access to it either, because they don't need it to do their jobs. See how it works?
Colleague: This is going to take forever.
Me: It is if you keep going on about it. Just email me with the request for information and I’ll see if I can release it all. If I can’t, I’ll release everything I can.
Colleague: You mean even if I ask nicely I still might not get it?
Me: Correct. The same way that if someone asked me very very nicely for your personal bank details, I would say ‘no, it’s against GDPR principles’. See?
Colleague: So… how do I get the information? Can HR get it for me?
Me: No. For all the reasons I’ve just said.
Colleague: This is political correctness gone mad.
Me: *cups hands around mouth and shouts* Colleague wants to waive their right to all data protection! Who wants to trawl through their file!
Office: *more giggles, more hand-waving of amusement and negation*
Colleague: You can’t do that!
Me: You just said it was going too far. What you mean is, it’s only going too far when YOU want something FROM someone else. Are you going to go away and email me a request? I have things to do.
Colleague: You’re not being very helpful.
Me:

To make matters worse, this person has actually sat through a 1 hour introduction to GDPR and done the mandatory online test afterwards - and must have scored at least 75% or they would be on my hit-list of people who need to complete it before 25th May 2018.

So this person - Fuckwit, let’s just call them Fuckwit - decides to go over my head to the GDPR working group we have. Because we have less than 250 employees we don’t need to employ a Data Protection Officer (DPO), so instead we have a group of people, one from each department, to get shit done. Fuckwit goes to make a cup of tea and tells another colleague all about it. This second colleague, full of themselves because they read an article online once, decides that Fuckwit has indeed been slighted and goes with them to lodge a complaint. So Fuckwit and - let’s call them Chucklefuck - go off together to see the person in the GDPR working group who has the final advisory decision on who gets to see sensitive data (bearing in mind that sensitive data is even more protected than normal personal data).

Fuckwit and Chucklefuck go upstairs and speak to (or rather, whinge to) someone they think can help. They tell them in no uncertain terms that actually, the one person who can advise on sensitive data issues is the only person in the company who has to work with it all day, and is therefore the only person who gets to see it or dispense it.

You get to guess who that person is.

Yes, Fuckwit and Chucklefuck have to come back down to my desk and ask me nicely to see data. I tell them again that they have to ask me in writing, and give the reasons they ‘need’ it. Because if their need isn’t a genuine requirement of completing the job for which the data was given, then the answer will again be no.

You can guess how happy they were to hear this.

They refused to write the email and said they would complain to ‘some kind of ombudsman’. I gave them the website address for the ICO who regulates all this and said I would welcome their contact with the regulatory body in charge of checking and fining people for breaches, and of course a bit of guidance from the European Commission.

They went away happy and I was happy they went away.

So there’s that.

But it’s really not that hard; the old ways of sharing stuff across offices, not even checking to see if it’s relevant or if you’re sharing stuff no-one else it supposed to see, are over. (And don’t under any circumstances share anything with the USA under their Privacy Shield - it's nowhere near the same and nowhere near as water-tight.) Privacy by design (systems that are built in such a way that they have security in every step), auditing access to info and controlling it, maintaining an effort to keep it controlled - these are all things that may seem boring and soul-destroyingly convoluted to most people, but they make up about 80% of being compliant with GDPR. When the very worst breaches in the hugest companies can attract a fine of up to €20billion, showing you’ve tried to mitigate any breach, and then how you’ve installed a better lock on the gate after the horse has bolted so it won't happen again, can really make all the difference.

And that’s pretty much it for today. At some point I’ll have to regale you with the most ridiculous email queries I’ve had just this week - honestly, some of them make you wonder how these people get their trousers on in the morning.

Soopytwist.

Labels

We’ve often been told that labels, in the context of putting people in boxes, is bad. Mostly true. As in, when we then use those labels to profile or segregate people. But labels in general? What did they do wrong? Isn’t it more the people hearing those labels, and the reactions they have to them, that are the problem?

For example, I say “the employment contract you signed says ‘don’t do the thing’ and you did the thing; why would you not expect consequences?” at work and I’m called ‘harsh’, ‘rude’, ‘not how the department should react’. I’m not at all bothered by what people think of me; what I’m more angered by is the fact that this person will get away with their actions because they put on some false anger and do the Storming Off In Indignation routine. And now it’s put down to ‘you handled it wrong’. When I ask how, I’m told ‘you should have been more tactful’. No, I say calmly, the person should not have tried to do the opposite of what he agreed to when he signed the contract. End of: level 1 disciplinary offence, case closed, move on. I’m told ‘it doesn’t work like that’, and now he’s ‘upset’.

*sigh*

Like I give an unidentified flying fuck how he feels; he broke a contract. Deal with him, get this done, move onto the next problem. This is why our department spends all our time in lengthy, drawn-out debates that take weeks to settle. That particular problem could have been solved in 10 minutes in a private meeting between Arsehole, his manager, and someone from our department. But no. Apparently ‘our way’ is dragging everything out.

Which brings me back to labels.

Arsing about on Tinternet this week has caused me, not for the first time, to stumble over the Myers Briggs personality test (or MBTI). In a rare case of ‘is it actually me and not everyone else after all?’, I took the test.

Basically it sorts everyone into 16 personality types (or labels). This in turn gives you insight into what inner forces drive you to act and speak as you do. I’ve done a few simple traits tests and associated tests before (including MENSA), but this one blew me away in terms of how accurate it was.

My label was INTJ. Or, in terms we can all understand, someone who is introverted, intuitive, thinks and judges. (Not in a judgey way, but in a weighing-up way.)

I’ve read a few different sources on what an INTJ is supposed to be like, and to be honest it’s scarily accurate. It also explains why there is so much frustration at work and on social platforms, and especially in areas that matter like who’s running a country and why nothing’s been done about it. For work purposes, it exposes a massive issue that has always been bubbling under the surface for me, but I never knew it was A Thing and therefore needed to be sorted. Now it’s been waved in my face, in apparently true INTJ style, I can work out what to do about it and then just do it.

It also explains why I get so pissed off when colleagues say things like ‘you shouldn’t say that out loud’ or ‘you need to be more professional’. I AM THE MOST PROFESSIONAL PERSON IN MY DEPARTMENT, UNCLEFUCKER. When was the last time I checked my phone during work hours? When was the last time I showed any emotion at all to someone asking stupid questions? When was the last time I held a grudge against someone because of their behaviour or general stupidity? When was the last time I gossiped? When was the last time I had anything on my web browser that wasn’t work-related? When was the last time I wore something inappropriate? When was the last time I was late, or fucked off early, or didn’t deliver my objectives, goals, or projects? When was the last time I didn’t do a handover, or communicate my research findings, or prepare for the latest oncoming storm?

I see these things going on around me all the time, and it staggers me. However, I keep a lid on it - because apparently calling people out on their lack of professionalism is frowned on - yeah, let the irony of that sink in for a moment. I channel my inner Spock - or rather, my inner T’Pol, seeing as she was completely alien and trapped on a ship full of either idiots, incompetents, or people of less insight and ability to think things through, or of much less life experience. I get shit done and I tune out everything that annoys me. And for this I’m called ‘unprofessional’ because THE ONE TIME I don’t manage to do this and say ‘FFS’ under my breath, my colleague hears it and assumes I’m thinking of resigning.

Yes, resigning. For some reason, she believes I am unhappy in my job. She believes that after one bad day you want to leave. I don’t understand - I genuinely don’t. Whether you enjoy the job or not, you still get paid to do that fucking job, and moaning about how much you don’t like it isn’t helping. Do the job or don’t - but don’t pretend that you didn’t know it was going to be like this when you accepted the offer of employment. I knew exactly what I was getting into when I joined the company, and I still know exactly what the place is, perhaps more so than others. The idea that I would want to leave because of one bad hour (not even an afternoon or day) is to me extremely immature. It also tells me that for some reason, she thinks I’m not enjoying my job. I asked her outright: Does my face tell people I hate them or something? Do I seriously have a Resting Fuck Off Face? She said that my face changes when I speak to people, from FUCK OFF into OH HI HOW CAN I MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER?, but she worried what others thought when they saw my concentrating face.

*sigh*

Like I give a shit what someone thinks of an expression on my face WHEN I’M BUSY WORKING. What in the actual fuck? What is this, the Face Police? Can’t they all just get on with their work and stop gazing round the room and FINDING things to worry about? I’m pretty sure that’s not in their job description and - you know what I'm going to say next, right? It’s not PROFESSIONAL.

But anyway. Being an INTJ is apparently not an easy life, but now I’ve read things about how non-INTJs react to INTJs basically INTJing all over their workplace, I can see more of her side than before. The problem is the very basis of being INTJ is not really caring about people’s opinions toward you because it’s not quantifiable evidence that anything is ‘wrong’, and anyway, what’s ‘wrong’ with ‘wrong’? How many people in history have been ‘wrong’ at the time, but then later proven right? And not just in terms of facts (Galileo for example) but attitudes themselves (Star Trek, David Bowie, etc.).

It’s tiring being an INTJ, I’m not going to lie. It’s exhausting tuning out all the inane shit that people ‘small talk’ about, exhausting having to adhere to long drawn-out processes when you can see the logical ending and just want to skip to it. It’s tough to keep my mouth shut when I just want to say ‘can you not?’ to people trying to stop me from working through trying to be sociable or generally distracting. I don’t get nearly enough recognition for the number of times I stop myself from saying, calmly and quietly, ‘fuck off’.

I think that’s this week’s rant mostly out of my system. I’m sure there’ll be more, but now I know the root cause, I can make adjustments. And they won’t include spades or plastic sheeting.

Soopytwist.

You can’t sing the blues in an air-conditioned room

A while ago I wrote about how I’d finally left a place of work that I no longer fitted, for so many reasons. I wrote about how enthusiastic I was to be starting something new. Well it’s been two months at my new job. Result?

Pretty fucking happy, to be honest.

When I bring things up that need changing, instead of the old ‘Do not change that. Do not change anything. We’ve done it like this for thousands of years because the first person who did fucked it up and now it can never be changed’ that I got at my old job, I now get ‘Do you think it’ll work better this new way? We’ll try it and see. Let me know how you get on. But it should be fine.’

It’s a lot to get used to. The freedom to actually effect change and make things better is something you always dream of, but once you get it… It feels weird. And then the secondary consequence kicks in: Am I right? What if I’m full of shit and this idea crashes and burns? What if it’s worse than what we had before? How do I know I’m right?

Over time you get used to the uncertainty, you get used to the risk and you realise that, as the great Baz Luhrmann once said, ‘your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.’ That line, that one collection of words from a track that came on my iPhone halfway to work, changed my entire outlook one morning. The incredible idea that it’s not me that isn’t sure, it’s everyone, all humans in general, made me a lot happier about the uncertainty of ideas I came up with to help me transition into my new job.

And then I got paid. I had more money left over than I thought once I’d paid all my bills and also for some unforeseen work done to my car (which is now running like a fucking F1 car, thanks for asking). It was weird - I could save some money. So I did. And when I got paid again, I saved more. And then, one day at the supermarket, I bought something not because I needed it, but because I’d always wanted to know what it tasted like but it had always been too expensive.

That was epic, for me. I found I could have more than one pair of trousers for work. I bought new work shoes, because quite frankly the others were rough as a bear’s arse and should have been thrown out a long time ago. I did my food shop and had provisions left over at the end of the fortnight - I actually have tinned and packaged food stored, that I don’t have to stretch out till the next big shop. I changed my credit card to one of them zero percent balance transfer things - which means I can actually pay it off in my life time. I paid a garage to do work on my car, instead of trying to half-arse it myself.

It’s all new, it’s all strange, but it’s slowly making me slip into this idea that I can do things other than ignore everything I can’t afford. I can take my blinkers off and look at ideas.


I was just getting used to this, and thinking how easy it was to hire a car to go off to another city for a long weekend to attend a convention (in the same country!), when someone needed my help with their payslip. I am payroll after all, and it was me that produced it. We talked over the meanings of all the addings and subtractings thereon, and they went away happy.


But I wasn’t. It suddenly dawned on me what had happened. I wasn’t one of them any more. I was now one of those people who Had, one of those people who wasn’t living hand to mouth, dependent on their pay cheque, because they were not a Had Not.


Progress, for me. But now I felt bad for having managed to lift myself out of the mud and make something a little better for myself. I’m still on literally half the salary of people close to me, but I don’t care. This salary is more than I’ve ever had, and for a while I was proud of it. Now I’m not sure if I deserve it - what makes me more deserving than that person with with payslip?

The answer, the Dax part of me says, is experience. Theirs lies somewhere useful, but not rare. Mine, luckily, lies in a field that normally attracts more responsibility and therefore risk - and reward. Which Rule of Acquisition is it that states ‘the riskier the road, the greater the profit’? Whichever one it is, it’s not wrong.


So why do I feel like Major Kira, having to confront a man who is exactly the person she was before she herself was lifted up from the mud into a better position, due to her experience?


Why do I feel guilty as I walk past people, on two-thirds my salary for a harder physical job than mine, to my car and then drive home with an iPhone 5S connected to the stereo, offering me Siri to help choose music and text people hands-free as I get there?

Underdog. It’s an underdog thing. Kira was always the underdog - until she was given a commission in the new military and a fancy new job. I always thought I was the underdog - not qualified, not properly trained, just getting by through teaching myself and working long hours. I’m not that person any more. Now I ask for training, and they provide it. Now I leave on time and enjoy my drive home. My writing has picked up again, and now it’s happier, more whimsical, more fun than it has been in about two years. Everything seems to be easier, the wheels more greased, more doors open to me.


It’s true what they say. You can’t sing the blues in an air-conditioned room. Maybe I should just suck it up and get over it. What price serenity?