Haven’t written a post for days know, and have sort of been pudding it off.  Your thinking: he’s just lazy!  But your wrong.  The truth, I have discovered, is that I am just too much of a perfectionist - and it is slowing me down.

They’re.  I’ve sad it.

Since starting this blob I have tried to write the best English of which i am capable, punctuated properly.  I have been careful with my spelling and strict with my grandma, for one simple reason: this is a company blog and, as such, it is HTS’s calling-card.  But then I read to day, in Penelope Trunk’s brilliant blog The Brazen Careerist, that Writing without typos is totally outdated. You don’t have unlimited time, she writes in her thought-promoking, completely error-free post, so spend it on ideas, not hyphens. 

To me it was like being libated from prison.  The snales fell from my eyes.  I had been bland!  Now I could sea.  Ideas - not hypen’s.

It almost made me feel better about the fact that one reason i haven’t been blogging is that, as a resaucer / admnin monkey in a recruitment agency, i have been going through candidate’s cvs’ all day correctig misspellings of the world liaise, which is not spelt liase, lease or leayse.  What had i been getting so stressed about?  Sometimes it drived me so mad!  I would sit and tremble and a work colleague had to put a hand on my shoulder and calm me down.  ‘Their their,’ they would say.  ‘It’s only woods on a page.’  And they are right.

It’s only wood’s.  Just because on blogs wood’s is all we have, apart from picture’s and video’s and music that is, it doesn’t mean that we have to get so stressed about making them the RIGHT wood’s, or about using full stops sometimes you just have to let inspiration flow and trust you’re reader to make sense of how that or could it?  Well, could it? 

It could.  Or could it?

It reminds me of an incidental I am ashamed of now.  In the pub, having an augment with someone recently, with me winning the augment quite easily, my interloputer suddenly say’s: Why do you have to be so logical all the time?

I said to her: Grammatical be should why we time all the?

She said, What?

i thought it was a good answer at the time but now i feel ashamed, like i just said.

From now on, no more of this ‘anal’ approach to blogging for me.  In fact, I am going to stand on my desk right now and shout at the top of my lugs, NO MORE ANAL BLOGING FOR ME!  And no more cleaning up peoples’s CV’s as though i am some kind of fascist!  Let them leayise to there heat’s content, for all i care!!! 

Its’ only woods.

IDEA’S – NOT - HYPHEN’S. 

Your comment’s are most welcome!!!!!!!!

They’re standing in a group, the teenagers outside my work-place, but there’s no communication between them. They’re all texting, frowning at their upheld mobile phones in stances that strike me as Shakespearean (Alas pr Yrk). Perhaps they are texting each other. I stare, composing a blog-post about them in my head, and one of them, thumbing a keypad with one hand while drinking coke cross-eyed through a straw, suddenly scents me and looks up. For a terrible moment I actually think: Wait – can she see my thoughts? Are they appearing on her screen? Can phones do that now?

I have not made the transition into our current age. It took me a long time to get used a phone vibrating on my person. I went through a long phase of experiencing phantom buzzing. Once a packet of fish fingers seemed to vibrate in my hand in the Frozen aisle in Sainsbury’s and I answered it. Back when I was a school mentor, sometimes the whole classroom would buzz, and not with enthusiasm: the kids could not leave their gadgets alone. They loved them. They stole each other’s stuff. Friends often stole from friends. It was a girl’s school. I noticed that if a girl stole another’s boyfriend, reconciliation was possible. If a girl stole another’s Samsung, things would get seriously Old Testament. (You’ve never seen a stoning until you’ve seen someone being pelted with twenty Motorola Pebls.)

Perhaps, like me, you are one of those people who finds it easy to grumble about kids today and their techno-materialism. Take this easy test: If you punctuate your text messages scrupulously and never abbreviate, you and I are soul-mates (or ‘slmts’, as the kids would put it). We are the kind of people who tell our kids they should get out more, and wish that other people’s kids got out less.

But these kids did not invent the gadgets that hypnotise them. They did not invent the Xbox. They do not sell themselves ringtones. My generation came up with lots of that stuff. Moreover, it is adults who profit from all the industries that seek to keep youths in a state of high excitement. Selling to kids is very big business; it pays to have children forever wanting more. And as someone who works in I.T., albeit tangentially (in recruitment), I am profiteering just like all the others.

I wish I had something better to hand on to the next generation. Any ideas?

This is a blog about ethical recruitment, so I’ll finish this post with a quick note about work. I’ve said before that those of us who choose to work hard for most of our lives deserve more than pay; we deserve for our careers to make us happy. Our time outside work shouldn’t feel like respite. We should be able to honestly promise our children that working hard at things they enjoy – or with people they like being around – will most likely bring them happiness as well as a living. Otherwise, the only incentive we can give to kids to work hard is that they’ll be able to buy more of the crap we tell them they need.

The thing is, I don’t think we can or should expect our bosses to hand out happiness. We need to look out for each other, somehow. We need to be the custodians of other people’s careers, trying to creating environments in which everyone’s talents get recognised, put to use and rewarded. We should help each other find the roles, the companies, and the colleagues we’re best suited to. Recruitment companies can help do this, obviously, by caring more about people than about immediate profits. That is what the ethical recruitment movement is about: how we can do this without going broke. But how can people outside recruitment transform the world of work? How can we make our employers look at us and think, ‘These people really want each other to be happy here’? ‘These people are trying to help each other succeed’?

Any ideas?

Feel free to comment. (Remember to pnctu8.)

Picture: toothpaste for dinner

* and women.

Or: Jigsaw Theory 101.

There were two main fears I entertained when starting this blog over on Vox.  The first fear was that nobody would read it, and the second was that people would read it.  I like to think that every blogger has these fears.  Nobody wants to publish their thoughts and then sit around, with school disco despondency, waiting for comments that never arrive.  On the other hand, nobody wants to click the publish button and find themselves, within the hour, being burned in effigy in Youtube videos.

Any new blog finds itself competing for attention with billions of  other blogs.  It may not survive!  A new blog is created every second.   Swimming in the depths of the blog-ocean (Blocean?) are blogs fated to live and die unseen.  Common sense dictates that if you’re interested in winning web-traffic for your creation, you’ll have to strive to be more that bit more fascinating than untold numbers of people.  Essentially, you will be engaged in a struggle to make billions of people seem duller than you.

Folks like Dale Carnegie, of How to Win Friends and Influence People fame, encouraged us to think that we can and should make ourselves fairly universally likeable.  We can develop attributes that enable us to appeal (more or less) to anyone and everyone.  The cultural influence of Carnegie et al has been pervasive – many of us automatically equate social effectiveness with mastering one-size-fits-all social skills.  We assume that any two people can fit together, like building blocks, as long as they sandpaper down any interpersonal bumps that would otherwise prevent people from smoothly slotting side-by-side.

But what if people aren’t like building blocks?  What if people are like jigsaw pieces?

An individual jigsaw piece usually looks a mess.  There’s a bit of picture on it, but the picture doesn’t quite make sense without other pieces to add context.  It has a funny shape.  Some pieces have distinct bits of picture on them, some are just one colour, some look pretty ugly.  Each piece only fits with a limited number of other pieces – try to force two bits together against their will and you end up damaging both.  Jigsaw pieces are uncooperative and exclusive like that.  (But note that when the whole puzzle is solved, all the pieces will fit together in utopian harmony; but you can only solve the puzzle by first finding out that most pieces don’t fit together.)

If you want to make jigsaw pieces fit together, there are two ways to do it. 

One way is to paint every piece the same colour, trim off all those annoying sticky-out curvy bits, and insist that any piece should be able to fit next to any other piece. That’s the Dale Carnegie way.  Cut away those quirks! 

The other way is to make sure that you navigate each piece towards its proper neighbours, and put them where they belong.  The second way takes a lot longer, of course.

If people are like jigsaw pieces, then perhaps the purpose of blogging is not to reach the widest possible audience.  Maybe it is to display our idiosyncratic messiness, our shape, so that it’s easier for people to navigate towards us or away from us, provided they have internet access.

Perhaps we have onboard navigation systems that try to steer us towards people, situations, pastimes and careers with whom we fit.  Perhaps we’re designed in such a way that if we give up trying to fit where we don’t belong, and give up trying to co-exist with people and situations we can’t stand, we’ll shuffle to the right place eventually.  Maybe we should accept that we’re in the wrong place, believe that there’s a right place, and keep an eye out for road-signs. 

Perhaps there is something intrinsically powerful about refusing to disguise your paintwork and curves, so to speak, whether in conversations or on your CV.  True, some may think you weird.  But maybe the upside of not appearing vaguely attractive to everyone is that you appear irresistibly attractive to the right people.

If people are like jigsaw pieces, then the best way to deal with people you can’t stand is to stay the hell away from them as much as possible, and give up resenting them for driving you mad.  The madness you feel might just be the unseen hand of the jigsaw puzzler, trying to move you somewhere else.  (Perhaps your newfound easy tolerance will irritate your persecutor so much that he or she buggers off.)

If people are like jigsaw pieces, then we should never force ourselves to fit with people we know we don’t fit with.  Instead, we should take our mothers’ advice and be ourselves.  Whatever that means.  (I have no idea.)

If people are like jigsaw pieces, then it follows that nobody’s personality is a complete, self-contained picture, and nobody’s personality is ‘well rounded’.  There are no round jigsaw pieces.  Everyone’s personality is naturally messy and bumpy.  But if we don’t exhibit our native messiness to some extent then how will anyone know that they are supposed to fit next to us?

If people are like jigsaw pieces, what does this mean for our work-lives?  Do our careers mark out our position on the puzzle-board?  If our job feels all wrong, does that mean we’re miles off course?  Camping in the wrong woods?  How should we help our employers or potential employers see what kind of puzzle-piece we are?  Should we mention on our CVs that we enjoy juggling snakes?

How honest should a jigsaw piece be about his or her not-so-nice side?  Should one mention on one’s blog that one enjoys smelling strangers’ hair on buses?  How about on one’s resume?  (Personally I think that we should probably regard truly horrid aberrations as grime to clean off ourselves, rather than inwrought aspects of our personal uniqueness.  I could be wrong, though.)

So.  Are we building blocks or jigsaw pieces?

(Next week: what if we aren’t like building blocks or jigsaw pieces, but countries, islands and nation states?)

I have a dream.  It seems to me that this epoch-making statement, immortalised by Abba (and some civil rights guy), applies to fewer of us than you might think, especially when it comes to careers.  I really don’t know that many people who feel they are following a calling.  Most of us don’t have the jobs we told our school career advisors we wanted – and, moreover, we act as though we don’t really want those jobs any more.  We’ve grown up; we’re realists now.  Expecting one’s daily toil to be meaningful and fun is a piece of childhood naivety.

This disparity between childhood aspiration and adult reality is not necessarily a bad thing.  When I was a child, all the boys I knew wanted to be astronauts or soldiers, and all the girls wanted to be nurses.  Picture a world full of soldiers fighting nurses while everyone else is in space, looking down in horror, and you’ll appreciate that sober realism has its plusses.

Incidentally, I told my career guidance counsellor I wanted to be a Bodhissatva.  That is, I wanted to selflessly defer my entrance to nirvana until all sentient beings had been liberated from the endless cycle of death and rebirth.  (Perhaps you went through the same phase.)  My counsellor, a canny woman, told me that ‘all sentient beings’ would probably prefer me to vanish into nirvana as soon as possible, where I wouldn’t require them to fund my wiggy new-age lifestyle with their taxes.

Of course, some children who say they want to be astronauts do end up being astronauts.  For all I know, some children who say they want to be bank proof operators end up being astronauts.  But listen, all of us who bother to get up and work every day to pay taxes to maintain the army of Neighbours-watching dole-scrounging would-be Boddhisatvas deserve more than just a pay cheque (or BACS payment) for our toils.  We deserve a big slab of happiness, delivered daily, with a side order of fun and some dips of meaningfulness and maybe an After Eight before we go home to watch Neighbours, which we’ve videoed.

That is why I, the most junior member of HTS , a boutique (read: small) IT recruitment company , decided to hoodwink talk my boss into letting me be the company blogger.  I did it because I wanted to open up a forum in which people – especially people in recruitment – could discuss how we can make life better for those of us who work hard most days of our lives.  And because I wanted to be able to say to people that I am a blogger, rather than an admin clerk.

So you are witnessing the realisation of a small dream.  I am aware that when I tell people I’m a blogger, they will assume that I mean I am unemployed.  But so what?  The child I once was, had he known what ‘blogging’ meant, would have dropped that stupid Bodhissatva aspiration like a hot rock and cried, ‘That’s what I want to do!’

Of course, if I’d known about blogging in 1985, I could theoretically have invented the internet myself.  And you, my friend, would be living in a very different world.

It may not be feasible for you and me to undo years of ‘realism’ overnight and decide to follow our childhood dreams.  That path may leave us unemployed and living on the streets eating mice.  But we can surely make what we’re doing now a little dreamier, can we not?