READ MY WORK
Ideas Above Our Station
new collection of shorts, one of which was written by me,
http://www.route-online.com/routev7/page.asp?idno=292
Nine Stop Trip
even newer collection of shorts, all of which were written by me,
http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=65
For anyone who's interested there's a petition here:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SFOruleoflaw
demanding that the Government allow the Serious Fraud Office to reopen their enquiry into BAE's dealing with Saudi Arabia. It'll take less than a minute of your life, what else are you going to do with that time that's so important?
Had a pretty good day today. Slept all morning then bounced about to some monstrous tunes before spending the whole afternoon at lunch with a mate, having a friendly toke and heading home to read some manga and write this.
After so many pleasant hours it's harder than usual to summon my regular bile and outrage, but I'll try, just for you 
Here's your three:
First up a dream I had a few years ago that pretty much sums up the today's particular vibe to be explored. Vivid as fuck, full colour, all senses, went a bit like this.
Everything on the earth is mud, except for the people trudging through it back and forth, heads down, clothed in brown rags. Everything above the horizon is dark, sheet metal grey, brooding and grim.
Everyone has somewhere to be, hurrying along, pushing past each other. I've just found myself here, I don't know what's going on. I have nowhere to go.
I look around at all these grubby, pissed off looking people, it's all a bit weird. Then I look up and what do I see?
An enormous ball of flaming rock, tearing through the sky and bearing right down on us. Well fuck me, I think, probably best get out of the way of that.
So I start to shout and point and grab people. Only nobody cares, they shrug me off and curse me, not a one raising their eyes from the swill.
The rock's getting bigger and I'm starting to freak. No-one's listening, there're more and more of them. Because I'm standing still everyone's knocking into me and eventually I get knocked to the floor.
One step at a time I get trampled down into the mud, everyone's shows are solid steel. They tramp on over me, still not looking up until I'm buried except for my face and all I can see is the rock in the sky getting bigger and bigger.
Nice huh?
The point here is the hopeless feeling of seeing impending doom but being unable to repel it alone or convince others to help.
So let's move from the unconscious to the barely conscious, ie. the office. Work's been pretty frustrating of late. As of April 1st the ALMO(1) I work for will cease to exist, along with the five others in Leeds.
In their place will emerge three new ALMOs. I won;t going to things in great detail here, (I've spent all day bitching about this in one way or another,) but let's just say this change has not been managed quite as efficiently as perhaps it could have been.
Basically it's an absolute fucking shambles. Now I've recently been tasked with compiling some stats that are supposed to benchmark the ALMOs against one another.
Some bright spark senior manager came up with what he apparently felt was a good way to go about this. Namely pick ten examples of a job, (eg. changing a tap,) and just average out the price.
Now a lot of these managers have spent most of their working lives in the building trade and I wouldn't dream of telling them how to put a house.
By the same token however I feel that the certificate on my wall that reads Master of Physics & Astrophysics entitles me to point out that this methodology is the most spurious bullshit I've ever come across.
In our ALMO alone we raise about 50,000 jobs a year meaning that the ten job sample constitutes 0.02% which, according to long held theories of classical mathematics, is representative of fuck all.
The slightest anomaly in the price of just one of those jobs would be sufficient to render the resultant average utterly useless.
I've tried to make this clear to various managers via various examples of scale such as this which I included in a report I submitted last Friday:
"..this methodology is comparable to taking census data from one tenant in each of our 12,000 properties and using it for the 60,000,000 population of the UK.. "
It's all to no avail however. The various concerns my line manager has raised regarding serious failings in the use of the IT systems have been similarly ignored, partly because she's not fro the trade, partly because she's not a senior manager but mainly, I suspect, because she's a woman.
Frustrating? You don't know the half of it! There can't be may things more demoralising in the work place than seeing things falling apart and being actively prevented from doing anything about it.
Still, maybe that's just an isolated incident. Surely central government, heads of state even, don't act like this.
Well I think anyone such as myself who watched the Trident debate and vote on Wednesday and was utterly sickened would, I'm afraid, dispute that.
If I can just take a moment here to ask a simple but pertinent question:
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?
As my good friend and lunch buddy said earlier today, 'we're all just insane children'. The world and everything in it are in the hands of madmen.
We are committed to disarmament and the non-proliferation treaty, but before we can get rid of the nukes we have to get some more.
In order to get rid of something we need to get more if it.
Doublespeak anyone? Next they'll be telling us peace is war.
Anyway, we're getting our nukes. Our proud and noble elected representatives kept us in the running for annihilation by roughly four to one, shower of bastards that they are.
So sorry all you kids who need operations, people who need somewhere to live and something to eat, our 'civilised' society has better things to spend money on.
At the end of the day the fact is we hate the needy so much we'd rather gamble on getting wiped out all together than dirty our hands by helping them. (Yeah, I reckon the bile's back don't you?)
I don't believe we can solve any of these problems individually, meaning both that we can't solve them one at a time or on our own. What we need is a titanic cultural shift to a whole new way of life.
Out of the question you say?
Well that's just what the people staring into the mud, the wilfully ignorant managers and the scumbag politicians would say.
Turns out titanic cultural shifts are what we're all about. One such shift, the move from hunter / gatherer to farmer made us what we are. More recently the industrial revolution changed western Europe beyond all recognition.
Change is easy, even the greatest changes take no effort at all, all you need is a better idea than the current one. Got one? Me neither, not yet anyway but it's coming, and if not from me then from someone somewhere.
In the meantime however, here we are, in our heads, at our work and in our country, just watching it go.
footnote
(1) ALMO: Arms Length Management Organisation, there are currently six of these in Leeds, private companies completely owned and run by the City Council to manage all social housing, I've worked for one of them as an Assistant Information Officer for just over a year now.
