Tag Archives: employment

Aye aye, AI

Fucking Elon Musk. Haunting the sidelines of every argument like a sullen overgrown teenager who recently lost his battle with leukemia, Musk’s interventions are about as welcome as an invite to the Christmas staff party at Yasser Arafat International Airport.

So when he laid out his shambolic, beach-postcard level opinions on artificial intelligence in a discomfiting interview with fanboy Rishi Sunak the other week, imagine my glee when his views matched mine. AI needs to be carefully regulated, and the world should agree to proceed with a sensible degree of collaboration, because none of us wants to be chased up a tree by a robot maid who’s decided your pants need washing, right now, whether you take them off or not.

I’m happy to say that normality has now resumed. Perhaps in part because of the discombobulation of finding myself on the same side of an argument as a man so creepy he makes Charlie Sheen look like Charlie Brown, I’ve had a revelation and completely changed my views on AI.

Fuck it, let’s go all in.

Continue reading Aye aye, AI

The corners of a day

I’m starting to get the horrible feeling I’m middle aged.

Not in mathematical terms obviously; I imagine I passed that event horizon a good 15 or 20 years back. And not necessarily in terms of my state of mind, which got as far down the road of adulthood as it was ever going to get by about 25 and has been sat in a paddling pool ever since. But in one specific way, it feels like I’ve joined my peers in that terrifying centrepoint of human life between carefree invincibility and packing pyjamas for the hospice.

Every day is the fucking same.

Continue reading The corners of a day

Business attire

There’s one massive drawback from all this working from home: the death of a great gag.

Don’t deny you’ve cracked it yourself. “Can we have a meeting tomorrow to discuss it?” “I can’t, I’m working from home.” “Oh yeah, wink, working from home is it?”

“Wanking from home more like!”

Hahaha. Hahahahahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA that’s what you do is it?

But the thought that we’re all sitting around pounding at ourselves while the kids charge about in the background is one that leads to the dark web and a Thai jail, so these days there’s a chance people are actually working from home when they say they are, and maybe even enjoying it.

So no wonder there’s an army of arseholes marching to put a stop to it.

Continue reading Business attire

Living the dream

Let’s face it, every freelancer dreads their job on a daily basis.

You may believe we’re living the dream. It must be so relaxing to be your own boss, even if you do have to give almost a quarter of every one of your invoices to a third-party website you’re being forced to use because it’s almost impossible to start a business by yourself these days. We’re not living the dream.

Continue reading Living the dream

Do you know Iain Hunneybell?

Do you know Iain Hunneybell?

What’s he like? I picture a middle-aged white man, vaguely competent at project management, easily able to slot into a grand-a-day role conjured out of nowhere by an HR department told to squeeze funds like pips from a lemon. When a project needs managing, Iain’s the man to do it, not least because of his proven track record of forcing through that completely unnecessary second I.

Continue reading Do you know Iain Hunneybell?

Stay frosty

War is hell. Women and children are under terrible threat and nobody’s doing a damn thing about it. Politicians seem powerless to stop it and outrage is everywhere.

Even those far from the front lines have their routines badly disrupted. But this is no ordinary conflict. This enemy is different – insidious, targeting the weakest in society, culling the sick and the old like a less cuddly Shipman. It’s an unwinnable war against a truly evil adversary.

Yeah, it’s a bit nippy out.

Continue reading Stay frosty

And specially designed components

If you want an interesting, storied and happy life, office jobs might not be for you. I once spent an entire afternoon writing about how hideous mine was and hahaha you’re about to read it you mug.

Nevertheless, occasionally you find one that could charitably be described as tolerable. It pays, you don’t spend your commute increasingly aghast as the stations tick by and you only want to kill every second colleague loudly discussing The Walking Dead. The odd job is bearable for longer than the probation period takes to congeal like the pool of blood you regularly fantasise about spilling in the second hour of an average Tuesday morning.

But every job has its day.

Continue reading And specially designed components

Morning is broken

The little man with the tiny backpack runs up the steps of Embankment tube, wriggling like a wee ginger salmon with a tazer up the shitter. He looks very much like Alan McGee. I’m so certain he’s Scottish I’ll eat a haggis if he’s not despite assurances haggis is filled with colon juice, battery acid, insects and whatever else radge bastards assault themselves with.

I’ve missed him in the past two weeks, my bespectacled chum. But we’re together again Alan, me old fucker. The ‘festive season’ is done. We’re back in the commute.

Continue reading Morning is broken

Lonely tears of Sancerre

Business travel sucks. That is an incontrovertible fact.

If you aren’t travelling alone, you will be travelling with colleagues. Both of these are bad in different ways.

Travelling alone isn’t inherently bad. In fact, sometimes it’s a pleasure to not have to interact with another human being and pretend you don’t mind when they want to go to the same godawful bar three nights in a row, or visit a museum you have less than zero interest in. And flying alone is the ideal opportunity to lie under a blanket watching films your partner doesn’t want to see while being given free alcohol.

But travelling alone for business is just shit.

It starts when you need to go to the toilet at the airport and you have no-one to watch your bags, so if you don’t want them to be blown up by the bomb squad you have to take them into the cubicle with you. This is the point where you commence an obstacle course of angling your legs around a suitcase and trying to not let anything touch the piss-soaked floor while simultaneously re-arranging your clothing and not dropping your phone down the toilet.

Once you arrive, your evenings will be spent inwardly crying lonely tears of Sancerre while you eat overcooked pasta in the hotel restaurant and hope that all the wine won’t be itemised on your bill. Opting for room service and TV instead will mean you just spend 45 bastard minutes trying to find something to watch in a language you can understand – something that isn’t Storage Hunters – all the while knowing your partner will be watching the final episode of Happy Valley without you.

If you travel with colleagues, imagine someone you work with who you don’t actually like very much. Now imagine being confined to a seat next to them for 8-12 hours. Now imagine it’s an overnight flight and they want to talk shop for the whole journey, or they don’t drink. And remember, if you do manage to sleep, you’ll be sleeping just inches away from a colleague you don’t like very much. You are sleeping with your colleague.

You’re welcome!

Even worse, you will be staying in the same hotel, so you’ll effectively also be co-habiting with this person for the next week. Never underestimate the sheer teeth-clenching awfulness of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner with someone you don’t like very much for Five. Whole. Days. And not even being married to them.

Fuck that shit.

When you tell people you’re going abroad for business, they will invariably say ‘Gosh, how glamorous!’ and say they’re jealous. I’m here to tell you that business travel is not glamorous.

No-one who has had cockroaches running over their feet and hand luggage at 4am in Indian baggage reclaim would agree. Neither would anyone who is sent abroad for an indefinite period of time and expected to pay for the whole fucking trip on their own credit card before claiming it back on expenses. Nor would someone who is forced to take an illicit taxi to get to the office driven by an old man in a full length leather coat who may or may not be a serial killer.

None of that is glamorous.

Expenses. Bafflingly, some companies believe sending their employees abroad with no money is a privilege for which we should be grateful. I’m pretty sure that was a punishment for something in medieval times.

I mean, who wouldn’t be grateful to bankroll a trip costing thousands of pounds in flights, hotels, taxis and meals for an international company with billionaire owners and millionaire shareholders? What’s that? Your card is maxed out, you’ve just moved house and you don’t have a spare £8,000 in the bank? Can’t pay for your hotel or flight up front, sorry, not company policy. Can you get an increase on your credit card limit and we’ll pay you back in two months? Thanks everso.

Aside from companies brainwashing employees into thinking anyone notices if they work 27 extra hours every week, expense trips are the biggest fucking con out there. Stop thinking about it as a free trip to another country. Start thinking about it as an insidious method of encroaching even more on your personal time while getting you to pay for it. Not so glamorous now, huh?

Somewhere along the line, it became normal to do the actual travelling bit of business travel in your own time rather than the company’s. What? The? Actual? Fuck? How the shitting hell did it come about that not only are you expected to pay to go and work in an unfamiliar office with shit coffee for a week, you have to fly there on your own time?

Oh, it’s that privilege again.

Sleep? Sleep is for wimps! If you were really and truly committed to your company, you’d work a full day, take an overnight flight and be in the office abroad bright and early.

I’d love to be able to say this is me getting all hyperbolic, but it isn’t. This is an actual thing that some colossal bed-wetting wanker dreamed up, dressed up in the worst kind of corporate tub-thumpery from a company which issues press releases telling everyone how much it cares for its employees.

The exits are here, here, here and here.