People are cranky not because of their personality or temperament (like me!) but because they feel The Squeeze, daily, moment-by-moment. They have had their ability to enjoy life drained away from them. They can feel that they’re all on a treadmill they never chose — or expected — and one false move can mean losing everything.
I read Mike Cane every day. He’s the most prolific blogger on my blogroll which means he produces more stuff than TUAW or Daring Fireball and while I may not agree with all of his politics and I also don’t see things as ‘unsustainable’ (because we’ll learn to put up with any old shit), I do enjoy the headlines.
That said, he’s right that we’re heading for a takedown in terms of the economy. The UK at least has the benefit of being several months behind the US in this but will we take action or are we actually too mired in their economy to be able to act? How can we tell? The property market here has utterly frozen with houses remaining ‘AGREED’ for months and house sales falling through even after months of waiting. I’m almost in disbelief that we managed to buy this year when so many others have failed to buy and sell.
But yeah, I want to dodge the rat race. I’m failing abysmally at it, of course, because what I’m looking for is a way to do the things I want to do and, like it or not, I’m vocal enough on here that a lot of bosses would get intimidated by me. I sat through a compulsory ‘Communications’ course last year and it involved a role-play where we had to deal with an employee who was not happy with his annual review. When it came to be my turn to play the aggrieved employee, the people playing the ‘manager’ and the ‘observer’ were alarmed because I went at the role-play with some gusto and they claimed to pity my manager when it came to real review time. Well, review time came and went and ‘due to the current climate’, we got a 4% pay decrease despite achieving or exceeding all set objectives. So bollocks to that and bollocks to me for putting up with it.
I applied for two jobs this week – one of them an outbound sales role which, although not my cup of tea, involves technology that I’m really keen on – because I’m loathing this situation. The job is meant to be managing a Level 2 support function but as we haemorrhage staff and don’t get the go-ahead to replace them, it means that the ‘leadership’ responsibilities are shifting upwards. The job was never as advertised anyway and I’m tired of wading through broken promises while they give millions in handshakes to senior executives and produce verbose ‘vision plans’ which could be succinctly communicated in about a paragraph.
If you stay where you are, you’ll put up with more and more shit and then wonder who you are at some point in the future.
Move on.