Jack has been busy…….

Remember when I used to be able to post every day? Remember when I was prolifically writing stuff because my role had changed within The Company and my days were filled with so little to do that boredom and frustration allowed me to vent my feelings with real passion? Remember when my creative thread was fed by the feeling of being cast aside by The Sandman into the wilds of a meaningless and unproductive raison d’etre?

Well, now my role over that 7 month halcyon period has become very different. And it’s heading in the direction of Stress Monster Avenue. If my old role was say…100 on a scale of 100 in terms of stress (and it was ..believe me), then my new role was roughly about 2 on the same scale. Today I am thinking it’s back to about 35 and slowly but inexorably climbing upwards. I still do the Change management stuff, championing such exciting (sic) stuff as ITIL processes, and analysing the changes that we plan to make, kicking the arses of pig ignorant piss taking engineers who still think it’s OK to take down a service to thousands in order to fix a problem for the few. I find myself now actively applying the maxim “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one”. Who actually said that? Nowadays I also manage our relationship with the Big Telephone Company, as well as our “outsourcing” partnership contract with the Desperate Dan Company. On top of that I am also managing a small team whose purpose completely mystifies me. I’ve tried to define the teams role but despite my best efforts the best I can come up with is “we….errrr….manage the System tools and processes”. Yep, very informative isn’t it. I guess that because I now wear 4 hats at work that might act as some sort of insurance for the future when the inevitable effectiveness re-organisation leading to the inevitable streamlining …or redundancies as we all really know them comes about. But even the language of re-organisations has now changed. We don’t call them that any more….oh no…..we now call them “transformations” which is an interesting spin to say the least. Transformation conjures up images of new exciting things, the Butterfly emerging from the cocoon, the young girl becoming the beautiful young woman, the Ugly Duckling becoming the Swan. Whereas poor old re-structure/re-organisation conjures images of shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic.

The last few weeks have been even harder than normal really because this week saw the launch of The Company’s highly expensive new Pipes, Tubes and Strings technology for which the Nanny Government striped us of £6 billion for the privilege to use. Once we had paid that money of course our shares, which constitute my only savings policy (pension aside) went into freefall because The City (I need a nickname for those freeloading scumbags) decided we had “overpaid” for the licence. Hmmm….damned if we do, damned if we don’t. Pay the price for the licence, dictated by the Governments fantastically business (un)friendly auction, or ignore it and have The Scatmunchers (nickname for The City) sit there and destroy the company, and with it my pension, savings and income for not having any future technology strategy. I am no huge Corporate fellatio provider, but The Company really could not win on this score and despite my, albeit champagne, socialist leanings, when someone threatens my lifestyle I suddenly become the most selfish bastard in the world. I

I digress. I guess my point here is that as I become gradually busier the harder it is to post. Also, the less miserable at work I am (and I am rather enjoying the majority of the activity increase) the less inspired I am to write and take the piss. It’s a bit like songwriters never writing good songs when they’re happy. You need angst, pain, frustration, anger in order to sometimes write the better stuff.

I guess the moral here is that…happiness makes you dull.

Later GrocerJack