Things have been shit lately, hence the lack of insiration, or more likely the lack of motivation to write, or do very much at all. The blame for yet another black mood (which I felt was better not communicated via the blog) is firmly laid at the doorstep of The Company. Not only am I fucked off with my job, and especially The Schoolteacher who manages his employees like your Nan might (have you done this, have you done that, make sure you do this, make sure you do this etc) if she were your guardian and a particularly fussy and pedantic Nan at that. To cap it all, the miserable scrotes reneged on a yearly bonus scheme introduced this year for the workforce. It wasn't brilliant but it might have paid us up to 10% of our gross salary before tax under certain (admittedly utopian) conditions. Of course, The Company didn't hit the financial targets required to pay this out (quelle surprise!) but anyone Band F (see below for Band explanations) or above will recieve their bonus payments as apparently The Company hit the right targets to pay them out. Add to that a bit of Shareholder jiggery pokery to reset Financial targets for Directors and for a small proportion of The Company its "trebles all round".
Following this, they decided to increase the budget for the annual salary rise to a whopping 3.5% , which in todays climate isn't bad I suppose. So, I planned my teams rises on the basis of how good they were and also to introduce some parity between those doing the same job and but earning less through no good reason other than the fact that previous bosses were stingy wankers. I like to adopt a pretty "champagne" socialist methodology to my pay rises, whereby reward is both performance based and used to rectify a few past wrongs...but not this year. Oh no, the bean counters who told us to put across the "positive message" have now applied mandatory rises according to annual review grade (school report in all but name).
We are graded as either P (poor), I (Improvement required), G (Good), E (Exceeded objectives) or X (Excellent or sleeping with boss as we like to call it). So anyone graded as G (like me for example) who meets all their objectives and slightly exceeds in some will receive between 2 - 2.5%. Unless of course we're near the top of our band, or on a salry above the band "soft limits". In which case, you'll get ......fuck all. Or maybe a small token lump sum subject to tax. Since last year we have been re-banded from Band A to Band J. Band A is the very top and contains the CEO as far as we can ascertain, Bands B-F are then descending levels of Senior Management (sorry, Leaders as they're all now called) - a sort of exclusive club the entry key to which appears to be top secret, or can be attained by giving great Corporate Fellatio or Anilingus to the right Corporate Automatons. Bands G-J are for the rest of us. I am Band G, which is firm middle management ground. So, in a company of around 15,000 in the UK, around 600 occupy Bands A-F, and 14,400 occupy bands G-J. Can you see the obvious problem here? When the bands were applied we were all told no salaries were associated to them, but come salary review time we find that in fact salaries have been associated to them, based on some vague external market research. Hence an awful lot of people will have performed admirably, reached or exceeded all their targets but will recive no pay rise or an insultingly patronising payment. And they wonder why people never vote us into The Times Top 100 Compnaies to work for! The ironic thing is that whenever we have team meetings we are always being told about the great Employee Experience programme and how successful it is. To coin a favourite phrase of mine, these people running The Company seem to live in a drug induced collage of utterly fucked up bollocks.
Anyway, I can't stay down for long. I have resolved to wind my neck right in to its limits at work, keep my mouth shut and quietly and efficiently deliver everything on the objectives menu. My relationship with The Schoolteacher, and for that matter all the other "leaders" is entirely professional, no more idle chit chat, no more jovial banter, no more non work related dialogue. Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all. Boring twats wouldn't get a look in down my local. An extreme reaction maybe, but it seems the only way I can stop myself from decking one of them.
My salvation, as usual came from a quick and intense affair with my record collection. The usual suspects gamely did their job of detracting me from the woes of Corporate Imprisonment , you know Zeppelin, Floyd, Radiohead, Abba etc, but something new was needed to just give the final push back to living in a twilight zone as opposed to a midnight zone. 5000 tracks of music and I couldn't find something to raise the hackles. Along came fate, or Skank as it is known. Thats my erstwhile brother for the unfamiliar (look at the Cast!). He emailed me a song I haven't heard in 25 years and it was the catalyst to a night of illegal downloading of stacks of others, including some favourite videos. The song was PSI Power from Hawkwind. I've no idea what album its from or what year, but Skank went through a heavy hippy period, living off dope, bread and butter and weird music back in the late 70's and picked up a few weird musical liking s from then. Hawkwind to be honest were never my bag but they did knock out a few good tunes other than the signature tune Silver Machine. And of course they spawned Lemmy who formed Motorhead so another bonus point for them.
And so here is the list of some of the "new" tracks I've been listening to that have lifted heart and soul......for how long who knows but now's the time to play myself sick of them....
Psi Power - Hawkwind
Hurry on Sundown - Hawkwind
Hocus Pocus - Focus
Watching The Detectives - Elvis Costello - featuring some of the best pop lyrics ever writen
"Long shot of that jumping sign,
Visible shivers running down my spine.
Cut the baby taking off her clothes.
Close-up of the sign that says,"We never close"
You snatch a tune, you a match a cigarette,
She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnet.
I don't know how much more of this I can take.
She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake."
Its My Life - Bon Jovi - the video brings this to life, believe me.
Crackling Rosie - Neil Diamond - yeah I know, but its a bloody happy singalong tune so fuck off if you don't like it!
Samba Pa Ti - yep, the M&S Food ad music. Wonder how many know its this piece of magic from the latin guitar wizard - music to kick your shoes off to......
Dirty Harry - Gorillaz
Love is like Oxygen - The Sweet (hmmm, include Teenage Rampage, Ballroom Blitz, Hellraiser and all the post Chinn-Chapman era stuff)
Please Don't Touch - Motorhead & Girlschool - whatever happended to Girlschool?
Altogether Now - The Farm
And finally, The Devil Went Down to Georgia - The Charlie Daniels Band
Works for me
Later, GrocerJack
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