DREWspective

Today I’ve added a new category for my posts here on DREWspective: language. I think it’s important enough to warrant having its own category.

Language—here in the UK at least—is something that people either piss on or use as a manipulative tool. Some people either deliberately misspell words they don’t even know the meaning of, or they use words to control people. Maybe even both.

Nowhere is it more abused than in schools and educational establishments, which is unforgivable in my book as you’re dealing with kids. But you’ve also got to watch out for it at work. I’ve been in my current job for just under two months, and already I’ve heard a series of disturbing, common language themes. (You may have heard me mention it before.)

We’ll start today with one that recently cropped up, and one of my all-time most hated pet hates:

Need.

When someone tells you they need something.

When someone tells you they need you to do something.

When someone tells you that you need to do something.

When someone tells you that something needs to be done.

Some of you reading this will probably say, "do you really need to talk about this?" I rather stupidly asked about it on Yahoo! Answers once, and got a very similar answer. To those people: fuck you, I’m talking.

Wayne Dyer said in one of his audiobooks that a need is something that, if you don’t have it, will immobilise you.

I’ve certainly had times where I felt I really "needed" something: the foam shapes from the US, for example, is something I "need" to continue making the chibiModels, so until them I "can’t" continue work on them. But there you go; I put can’t in quotes, because there are other things (such as painting the heads) that I could do.

You’ve probably heard people talk about how some people feel they "need" a particular thing to be happy, to be rich, or to progress to the next level. Without this thing, they feel like they can’t change. It’s like when you have a craving for a particular food, and you can eat as much of any other kind of food as you want, but unless you have that food, you won’t be satisfied.

There are of course times when the need is genuine. The only basic needs for people are oxygen and water (in my opinion), but some people could have a few more. I’d argue that having faith in something is also a need, even if it’s having faith in not having faith.

My beef, is with people who use the word need as a controlling force. These are people who throw it around, like a sadistic master goes around whipping their slaves, or someone who feels the need to put a curse—or "lol"—in every single sentence. These people are only interested in manipulating others, and the word "need" is usually synonymous with "getting people to do" something.

There are much more relevant alternatives: is required; this must be; I would like; I want; is supposed to; and many more. There’s no excuse.

Just remember that you have a right to define for yourself what you "need"; don’t let anyone define your "needs" for you. As Brian Tracy once said, just wave one finger at them and move on.

As someone who has had ongoing problems with social interaction, depression, employment, discrimination and a whole load of other stuff I can’t be bothered to name right now, I probably don’t have any right to tell people what to do, say or think.

But I do know one thing: to be happy in life, you must have connections with other people. I realised that a long time ago, and it took my recruitment agent to remind me earlier today.

Other people are crucial to any kind of happiness, from wellbeing right on up to your career. Brian Tracy said in one of his seminars: a person who is known and liked by many other people can go all the way to the Presidency, while someone who is talented, but had no friends, would end up working under someone who does.
When I look at how my life turned out, it seemed that people around me knew that from the start. They might have seen that I was an extremely talented, creative person, who could potentially change the world. We can’t have that, they decided, so they made sure I was cut off from everybody and had no reliable friends or relationships. (That does sound paranoid, but anything is possible.)

What very few people realise (or care about) is that you must have connections with the right kind of people. All too often popular culture looks down on outcasts and "loners", and insist they "get out more". But it may be that "getting out more" only puts them in contact with people who don’t serve them well.

Unless you were very sadistic, you wouldn’t suggest to a black person that they should join the [group with people who wear white pointed hoods]. So why assume that they can just form bonds with any old person?

What even less people realise is that finding a place where you can form connections with the right kind of people isn’t always straightforward. These days it’s all well and good for your typical, loudmouth, promiscuous nobody: they have pubs, night clubs and almost all kinds of social settings. There are some who don’t like that crowd.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers to how to solve the connections crisis. The solution to solving these personal problems, I’ve found, is very personal to the person going through them. I hope you find yours, if you have one.

I’ve had two permanent jobs in two years, all of which lasted for less than 12 months. That’s when I decided to move into freelancing, but unfortunately it didn’t work out. So now I’m back to the predictable grind, which—in this position, anyway—I’m beginning to hate.

I tell you this because there’s a reason why I’ve left the other two jobs. I realise now that it’s had nothing to do with money: one of them was a well-paid job, which was relatively easy to get to in the mornings. The other one wasn’t either.

No, the primary reason for me leaving both jobs, and why I might leave this one, was blame culture.

Some of you may know what I mean by blame culture, but I’ll explain further. My definition of blame culture is where you’re in any size group of people, and you find they use excessive negative language for just about anything. These people never seem to be satisfied; actually, whenever something good happens, they act as if they’re entitled to it. But give them a problem, or something they don’t like, and they’ll talk your ass off about it.

People call me negative, and I freely admit I have moments where everything that comes out of my mouth is negatively charged. That comes with the way I’ve been treated by people, who are just as negative if not more so. But there’s a difference.

Despite my negative nature, I prefer spending time focusing on solutions and methods. I don’t like beating myself up over mistakes I’ve made, whether it’s being late or messing something up on a web site I’m working on. Fuck belly-aching; let’s see if we can learn from the problem and prevent these things from happening again.
But I end up beating myself up anyway, because most people I’ve worked with are firmly entrenched in blame culture (at least, on the job): they spend time focusing on problems and fault-finding. They’re not happy unless they’ve assigned or passed blame on someone else.

Now you’ll find out just what the heck this has to do with anything.

A couple of weeks ago, I was brought up on a few "mistakes" I’d made since starting my current job: trivial things such as being late on occasion. Under normal circumstances, you’d probably agree that this would be a one-to-one conversation, wouldn’t you?
Well imagine my horror when I found myself "locked" in a narrow room, mostly taken up by a large table, with three people.

(This was particularly bad because, when I was at university, I received a barrage of criticism while being trapped in an "interrogation room", with a large heavy table and two senior staff members standing directly between me and the door. I don’t appreciate being trapped.)

While I was arguably being criticised for the heck of it, I was a little dizzy from reliving that moment at university. But it was the discovery of a disturbing trend within the office, that I’m very sure is being replicated in many other companies: the trend of withholding praise and dishing out criticism (hence the title). How many of us have worked in a company where that was the norm?

I’ve calculated that for every positive comment I’ve been given at this job, I’ve had roughly nine times as much criticism, nit-picking and blame assigning - possibly more.

I have made a number of mistakes on the job, ranging from coding issues to almost bringing down a site, which were mostly to do with a lack of information and people unwilling to help. But boy do they love to talk about it when it happens. They bring at least one other person to crowd you; they ridicule your comments and methods (even if subtly); they talk your ears off for several minutes.

The only thing that results is in me being afraid to make any more mistakes, and consequently becoming more mistake-prone.

I want to keep this post short because it’s been long enough already.  I will end by saying, it’s likely I won’t be there much longer at this rate.

So yesterday I headed back to Pets at Home to claim the plant that the nice staff person forgot to put in my bag. As mentioned in my last post, I thought it would be a good test of their customer service, which up until now wasn’t anything to talk out loud about.

So I approached the counter, armed with a pack of goldfish pellets that I thought would be more useful for the fish than flakes. Having been straight ignored by one of the staff, I was eventually seen to by another. I explained the situation.

Apparently I was supposed to check the contents of the bag before leaving the store first of all. Fair enough, but a little difficult when carrying two live fish in a brown paper bag.

Failing that, the "correct" action to take, according to the staff member, was to call the store and tell them the plant was missing.
Am I the only person here who wouldn’t have thought of that? After all, if the staff were just standing around, ignoring potential customers and taking an age to give people service, what do you think would happen over the phone?
And besides, what would you do if you had to travel for two hours via public transport, only realising an item was missing when you were well on your way? Chances are, you’d go back the next day.

Luckily, because this staff member had seen me standing in anxiety around the store several times, he made a gesture of goodwill. As a result, I received two plants for the price of one.

Unfortunately I was dismissed straight afterwards, so I didn’t bother with the fish food.

From the aquarium across the road from where I work at the moment, I had been sold a shit, expensive gravel cleaner. It’s the kind that requires pumping of the large tube rather than squeezing.

I’d tried on two occasions to get it working properly, doing as best as I could to follow the poorly-worded instructions on the back of the box. It didn’t work. All I ended up doing was removing water.

So I’m going to opt for one of those squeezy gravel cleaners instead, and hopefully I can sell that piece of shit on.

And before I end this post:

To all those smug, arrongant goldfish keepers around the Internet, who’ve exercised their ALL CAPS fetishes and have bullied and verbally beaten up newcomers and question-askers, because they say 10 gallons of water per goldfish is a supposed MINIMUM requirement:

F*** YOU.

Okay, I’ve managed to track down a 30 gallon tank (which I will probably have a nightmare getting home tonight) which should be enough to house the fish. But the hours of anxiety and stress about getting a bigger tank are entirely down to these people. I wish I could find every single one of them and smack them across the face with a small but inexpensive glass tank.

Go and read some of the comments made about goldfish and minimum tank sizes. I guarantee, you never see me being that way over video editing, or illustration, for example.

Anxiety on two levels.

Last week I’d bought two goldfish, yet to be named. I’d decided to buy another two—much smaller ones—just yesterday; their names are Snipes and Tiger.

The first hit of anxiety occured on Friday, when I was looking for information on goldfish. A couple of places insisted that goldfish have at least 10 gallons of water each in a tank! So if you wanted 3 goldfish, a 30 gallon tank is apparently the bare minimum,

I panicked, because the tank I have right now is 21 litres, or 4.6 gallons. I searched around for affordable, larger tanks, almost forgetting that I have very limited room. In theory I could fit a 3×1x1.5 foot tank in my room

But having talked to a staff member of a small pet store, there should be no problem at the moment. Besides, even a high profile store like Pets at Home sold tanks this "small" (and even smaller!) apparently for goldfish.
It clearly says somewhere in the ; packaging for my tank that four fish cold be kept in it, as long as they were the right size.  According to the new knowledge, it wouldn’t even be big enough for one!

But you know, Pets at Home are supposed to be knowledgable about fish. If the tank was barlely big enough for one fish, why would they sell it? Coincidentally, neither they nor the other place (Maidenhead Aquatics, a great place) asked how big the tank was they were only concerned about water quality (some more than others!).

The second bit of anxiety came when actually buying the fish. As we’ve hinted at before, customer service is one area where Pets at Home falls flat on its face.

It took a while before I’d decided which (and what size) fancy goldfish to get. But a small bunch of people had gathered around the tanks, making life as difficult for anyone else as your typical UK citizen does.
I kid you not when I say it took ten to fifteen minutes to be served, during which I was ignored by staff or frustrated because the people who did get served made their minds up on the spot. Just when it looked like I was getting somewhere, one smarmy bastard (who’d already been served) wanted a gold loach; one of the hardest fish to catch, as it was among regular goldfish.

It was almost like around the 1920s, when white (or lighter-coloured) people got served before black pople, no matter how late they arrived.

The waiting, and worry that someone would take "my fish", made me very anxious. It generally is not a good idea to keep me waiting, and an even worse idea to serve someone who arrived later than me. Had it not been for the voucher I’d gotten for buying the tank, I’d have almost no reason to go back.

But now there’s another problem: they didn’t pack a potted plant that I’d paid for, so now I have to go back! We shall see how good or the customer service at Pets at Home really is.