Generalism

A friend once told me, if you’re going to write, write about something that moves you, that you are passionate about. If you’re not passionate about it, leave it to someone who is.

The problem is, when you’ve been out of work for an amount of time, and you’re trying to figure out where the next bill is going to get its next squirt of juice, you get pretty passionate about one thing, and one thing only; finding a job. No, that’s not quite true. No-one wants to work, if they did there’d be a lot less Oscar vulgarity, and a lot more global productivity. No, what you get passionate about is how to get money in, which explains my recent monologues on determinism (what the heck should I do?), employment agencies (why the heck won’t you let me do it?) and now job centres (just give me some money, please!).

If you have a job right now, you’re one of the lucky ones; the speed at which the skittles are dropping at the moment really is quite alarming. Everything being connected to everything else means that car manufacturers lay off workers, which prevents them from going on holiday, which causes the travel industry to suffer, thereby forcing the tourist industry to lay people off. Whilst the car manufacturers are cutting production, they’re also ordering less parts, which means part manufacturers are selling less and making less money, affecting the staff, the material manufacturers, shipping companies, mining companies, miners, fuel companies. No one knows just how far the rabbit hole goes. Which is probably why even experts are saying that it’s unlikely to get fixed soon, and that any measures aimed at remediation are nothing short of educated fingers in the air. Bailouts may work, but they may not. Quantitative easing may work, but it may not.

But what do we do with workers in the here and now, stuck in no-man’s land with seemingly no way out? What about the third of job-centre visitors who are white-collar workers, in the early-to-mid stages of their career, looking to move onward and upward, eager to work only to be faced with a swathe of cleaning and secretarial posts? To say that the UK is woefully unprepared to deal with such unprecedented amounts of well-educated workers out of work is putting it mildly.

The problem is, can the horribly archaic, disconnected, and out-of-touch job centres, who openly admit that their sole purpose is to get people back off their books, ever really amount to anything more than public-sector banks? “Look like you’re making efforts to find work, or we stop giving you money. You want help to find a job? Tough. You want advice on retraining? Not interested.”

Well you can be sure that they’re going to have to get a lot more interested, and soon. The unemployed white-collar brigade is growing, and their demands and expectations are starting to grow in tandem. If the government doesn’t start doing something to at least acknowledge that the difficulties no longer belong solely to the working classes, and to work with them accordingly, they may end up having to deal with something far worse than mere company bailouts.

Well, today really isn’t a good day if you’re a grey squirrel living in Scotland. And it would appear that even you with a mild scottish squeak had better keep a low profile. They’re gunning for ya’s and I don’t know how much time you have left.

Why? Well, times change, fashions come and go, one season grey is in and everyone will love you, want to be your friend, invite you home for tea, and the next, well, you know how it is. Red squirrels have just hired a new advertising agency, they’re hip, they’re happening, and let’s face it, they’ve got the cute factor. And besides, it’s winter, and you know how that russet colour goes with everything at this time of the year. I know I know, I feel for you, I really do, but, it’s just how it is. I think the best thing you can do is grab your bags and keep to the shadows till you’re across the border where you’ll be safe.

/deep sigh

I caught something on the tv the other day about the creation of the universe according to the Bible. I’m not a scholar, I don’t know the texts word for word, perhaps I should and maybe the urge will hit me one day. In the meantime, and for brevity’s sake, the gist is thus; in six days God created heaven and earth, the creatures, and man in the image of Himself, and he gave man dominion over beast.

The problem is, regardless of my religious leanings, I have difficulty with this last statement. I can’t dig into it too deeply, I enjoy my ham sandwiches too much, but I have to draw a mental line. For me, that line sits firmly between food and mere choice. We are creatures born and bred to eat a mix of foods, therefore we kill and harvest to our needs. But when there is a choice, when someone in their infinite wisdom decides to exercise their dominion over beast on what I see as a whim based on subjective opinion, I consider that line firmly crossed.

Some might say that it’s just a bunch of squirrels. Who cares? The verminous scum spread disease, destroy other species habitats, get rid and good riddance. I say be careful. If you want to find the biggest problem on the planet, the biggest danger to every other species, the biggest spreader of disease and destroyer of species and their habitats, you really don’t have to look very far.

For my book, if you’re going to start arbitrarily killing, sorry “culling” a species, make a real scientific case for it, make it objective, and make sure it matters. More importantly, think twice about playing God. It really doesn’t become us.

When I was of a younger ilk during my university years, I needed a spot of cash and did a jot of summer work to fill the pot. I ended up in a furniture factory, playing around with their computers, filling databases, programming machines to drill holes and cut shapes. Nothing mind-expanding, but good overtime rates.

As I got to know a few of the salt-of-the-earths working there, I asked a few of them what they’d wanted to do with their lives and how come they ended up there. One particular character of note worked on an edge-bander. Not a complicated machine doing a not very complicated job, but edges don’t glue themselves, and him and the trusty EB-5000 were it.

Now no-one is ever likely to aspire to do this job. Heck, before I started work there I didn’t even know such a job existed. Nor can you either get promoted to it, or for that matter from it. But here this guy was, day in, day out, taking a waist-high stack of laminated chip board, running all four edges through his machine to create another stack at the opposite end ready for further manhandling. And he’d been doing it for years.

How did he get his job? For that matter how did the machinist in the corner, the sprayer behind the perspex shield, the ban-saw operator, how did any of them get their jobs? Of course they’re all the same; they simply fell into them.

At the time I met these guys I was a young and aspiring student, full of stupid ideals and alcopops, and found the thinking completely alien; I knew what I wanted to do, what moron doesn’t? But of course I look back and smile my wry knowing smile, pat myself on the head and sigh. Because I’m starting to realise that these people are not anything strange or unusual, and certainly not moronic. In fact, if present experience can be trusted, I would guess that they almost certainly represent quite a chunk of people here in the UK.

And it’s not just the lesser-educated personages either; even acquaintances here in London, with their swanky degrees and corresponding bank balances, whether out of work or in, they’ve all said much the same, that they simply don’t know what to do with their lives. Many of them are carrying on regardless, bills have to be paid after all, some of them don’t have that choice and are running in circles trying to figure what a banker does when there’s no more banking, or a games developer does when nobody’s hiring.

It’s a scary time for these guys and I do feel for them. Whether to tread untrodden paths, to throw past experience to the wind in the hopes that new comfortably replaces old, or to keep hammering head vs wall in the hopes that something safe and familiar turns up before foreclosure. It’s not an easy choice, and my heart goes out to anyone stuck in the constant “should I shouldn’t I” loop. Rest assured though, you are most certainly not alone, and hey, maybe now is the perfect opportunity to happen across a direction that really presses your buttons?