This article in today’s Guardian is especially pertinent at the moment. My manager – a relaxed, music-loving, left-wing, genuinely nice guy I’m delighted to have got to know these past months since my return to work – announced last week he is leaving for a post at another agency. He’s been measurably good for me; understanding my mental health problems, always supportive, never remotely placing any pressure on any of us and always on our side. And in a few weeks he’ll be gone, driven up the wall by the myriad failings of our ‘new’ – only eight years old, folks – IT system. in all probability to be replaced by some cocking vapid fuckshard.
He isn’t the only one leaving. I spent many a cigarette break outside with my closest friend at work. A like-minded thirty-something Adidas-wearing socialist relic from the 1990s, unlike me he’s a graduate with cause for genuine complaint that he’s wasting himself here. In a week he’ll be gone and there’ll be no more Friday lunchtimes laughing at New Labour, or the ziggurat-climbing coporate schillings in our place, with their healthy lives and their gym memberships. their Audi TTs and their lunches at All Bar One, their ‘time management’, their euphemisms, their pleonasms and their wholesale support for the ‘journey’ we’re expected to enjoin.
Last night I went for a drink with a colleague on my section (despite liking many of them personally I refuse to use the word team, connoting as it does images of high-fives, paintballing, daily huddles and Key Performance Indicators) and he’s in the same frame of mind. Everyone else I merely tolerate, with their haircuts and their “did you watch Dancing on Ice?” and their “I won’t mind global warming if it means I don’t have to wear a jumper” and their tedious fucking conversations redolent with implicit racism.
My dull, steady little world is untethered from its moorings again and I’m really not good at dealing with the change about to wash ashore. I sure picked a good time to quit smoking. For what it’s worth, I’ll miss them.
March 19, 2008 at 10:56 am |
It’s all about leadership,” says Andrew Pullman of HR consultancy People Risk Solutions.
No, it’s all about people who think it’s all about leadership.
Or indeed who call their organisations People Risk Solutions.
April 30, 2008 at 2:54 am |
This resonates severely, and in many particulars.