written by Drew | 2010.76 Thu 18 Mar
Alexander Kjerulf, the self-styled Chief Happiness Officer, has an excellent weblog post on the kind of workplace culture that makes people – specifically frontline employees – unhappy. Particularly noted is the section regarding my biggest personal bugbear: bad [clueless] managers.
Can I get an amen if you’re feeling this post? 
written by Drew | 2010.76 Thu 18 Mar
Before I begin today’s post, I’m pleased to announce that the situation with AMI (Advanced Medical Institute) seems to have been resolved in my favour. It certainly wasn’t easy, and there’s a couple of precautions still to be taken, but it’s thankfully over. If you’d like to know more, email me directly.
I got to thinking, yet again, about the number of hours I work in a day. This month, solely because of dodgy contractual agreements, I’ve been working 14 hours a day on average. This has left me with next to no free time whatsoever – even during weekends, when I don’t work – and on average four hours of sleep every night. It’s near the end of the third week, and on two occasions I got just over an hour’s sleep. It’s been very tough.
So in total I’ve been tied to some kind of desk for about 60-70 hours a week. Thinking back to a manager in one of my first agency jobs, who “bragged” about putting in an 80-hour work week, he was a f*cking moron.
written by Drew | 2010.73 Mon 15 Mar
Before I begin this post, I want to point you guys to a link about invalidation, courtesy of a good friend of mine. Invalidation is a serious problem in today’s world, and it’s being done very casually – it’s something I’m entirely against, and it makes me sick. It also has something to do with today’s post…
A few months ago I asked someone, in no uncertain terms, the following question:
What was it that you did?
Even if you’d consider yourself to be a “normal”, “happy” person, there’s probably been at least one point in your life when you’ve wanted (or even demanded) answers from someone regarding something they did. You might have wanted to hear someone admit their faults, or to acknowledge how they’ve hurt you, so you could have some kind of closure or resolution to something that troubled you.
Unfortunately, these kind of interactions rarely go well. For one, if it gets to the stage where you have to approach someone for them to acknowledge what they did, it’s likely you’re dealing with a negative person, or even more likely an SCPP. I say that because it’s happened every time.
The usual response from asking these kinds of questions goes something like this:
Probably the worst part of all of this is that it takes courage to be able to approach said person with this kind of thing. How confident would you feel to do it again, if you had that kind of reaction?
The link on invalidation – if you can see how it relates to what I’ve said so far – can explain what’s going on in the background far better than I can right now. However, if someone completely ignores your concerns after something like that, it pretty much sums up how they feel about you.
A case in point: months before I finally moved away from home, I asked my mum to answer a very simple question. This was someone who demanded countless things from me, regardless of how busy I was or how I was feeling. She also had a history of avoiding any responsibility for things that happened in the past. So not only have I not had an answer till this day to that simple little question, but it turned out – as always – she completely ignored it.
This seems to be the age where people think they can do whatever they want and take no responsibility for the outcome – but insist that other people have to all the time, even for things that they had nothing to do with. How else could they be completely unaware of what they themselves did? I personally wouldn’t want to know anyone like that – would you?
written by Drew | 2010.64 Sat 06 Mar
It dawned on me a while ago that the reason why I talk so much about relationships, the workplace and other kinds of social things is because I am very curious about why people interact with each other the way they do, and I personally want to find ways of improving our interactions. Probably the biggest way to do it, outside of reprogramming everyone through the media, is through customer service.
I came back a while ago from a small trip to Crystal Palace, which was where I used to work over a year ago. I had stopped near Tulse Hill to pick some items up from a fellow Freecycler (by the way, thank you again), and eventually decided to pay Gipsy Hill a little visit.
written by Drew | 2010.56 Fri 26 Feb
I’ve been told the original version of this post didn’t make any sense, and I was a little disoriented when I first wrote it. So here’s a rewrite!
Terminator (even though someone insisted on calling it The Terminator when it was released) was a groundbreaking movie, and Terminator 2: Judgement Day is, in my book, the greatest movie of all time. (We don’t talk about the other movies around here). Both films were perfect for the time they were released, as they gave the view pause for thought about what could happen in the not-so-distant future, if technology was to progress as it did.
But we don’t have to live in fear of a possible uprising of killer cyborgs, and being reduced to slaves: we already have a bunch of machines disguised as humans running the planet, and the funny thing is we only have to look around ourselves to see them.
It’s something that becomes more apparent the more one spends time around people: we are being turned into a race of automatons. Not literally of course, but it seems that people are increasingly being treated – and acting like – machines.
Let me try to explain how I came to this conclusion…