I am in Toronto (again)

Regular readers will be aware that I am often in Toronto.  It is not bad. In fact, I like it more and more each time I come. It is definitely not as boring as everyone in Montreal thinks it is.  In fact, I like it so much I designed a whole range of clothing bearing my new Toronto: Awesome! logo as a mark of my respect.

Toronto is by a lake that often has boats on it.  There are some skyscrapers and shops and villagey bits here and there.   A lot of people live in "condos" and wear blazers, ironic ties and fashionable jeans with shoes with long square toes.  You can always get a cab and there is more than branch of Terroni, which makes very bloody nice pizza.   A lot of people talk about their "cottage". A "cottage" can be a fucking massive island with 5 houses on it and its own 100ft dock that's been in the family since 1854, or it can be a tiny shed next to a lake full of wee. Either way, a lot of people have them.

Toronto is much bigger than Montreal which is good, because Montreal can feel a bit small sometimes, but much smaller than London (England) which is good, because London (England) can feel too big sometimes (even though it has to be that big to contain all the very interesting and exciting things it contains that most cities do not).

Everyone here, without exception, says "awesome" at least 64 times a day. They also say:

"Fam", when they mean "family"
"Loop back in"
"Totally awesome"
"Who knew?"
and
"I'm so with you on that".

Some of these may be general North American things, but for some reason when said by a Canadian, they are less irritating.  Oddly, white middle class Canadian men can also say "dude" without me wanting slap them, which has something to do with the fact that a lot of Canadians are right up there with irony -  almost top of the irony charts, in fact.*   A lot of Canadians I know can be as dry as bones, and far more entertaining.

Anyway, I can't talk about why I'm in Toronto for various reasons (none of them particularly interesting), but I was supposed to be here for a night, then two, and how I am here all week in a hotel on the 41st floor getting up at 6am to phone people in London, and falling into bed at 11 to watch "Real Housewives of Orange County" (which I think might be the best programme ever made).

It is a strange hotel; it is one of the ones with a little kitchen in your room and no breadknife. I have some pineapple, some $14 ham and some really very poor $7 'handmade' strawberry jam in the fridge, and in the morning I hack at a $7 loaf of bread with a normal knife and drink my 12th cup of Tetley tea, made from a box of teabags found in a strange shop round the corner that sells Mars bars and car telephone adaptors.  It is not bad because the hotel is fancy, although it makes me cross that I have to pay $12 every day to use the fucking internet (not even wireless, mind - a stupid blue cable) in a hotel that costs $264 a night.

Still, these are my views, and they are good. (You can see the CN Tower peeking round on the right in the first one.  It is awful all those lights left on at night, so stupid, but it is pretty in its way.)

The G20 is going on soon, which means there are lots of policemen about and the odd siren (not that I can hear much on the 41st floor).  There was an earthquake today which I felt vaguely (I thought a very fat man was hurling himself against the railings that I was leaning on), and the cab driver taking me away from someone I like very much and towards a 3 hour conference call told me that the earthquake was "God warning the G20".

Anyway, I hope the G20 are OK and I hope I can get home on Friday. I miss my husband and kitchen and with any luck, there's Series 3 of Damages for me to watch with my eyes whilst dipping my tiny monkey paw in and out of a bag of Ready Salted Hula-Hoops.

Pip pip!

NWM



*As many of you will be aware, Alanis Morrissette -  once curiously described in Wikipedia as "the Canadian Debbie Gibson" - once wrote a song called "Ironic" which contained, as we all know,  no examples of irony at all. ("A Bit Annoying and/or Unfortunate" doesn't smell like a smash-hit, granted.)
I will not make the obvious joke that everyone makes, despite it being vaguely amusing.

I make a tribute movie

Cast:

Mr Finger: The finger of the French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist to whom I am 'married',  dislocated (and popped back) during a violent gardening accident

The Voice of Mr Finger: Me, except that is not the voice I use when for e.g. buying oranges or doing a meeting.

Mr Joe: Dear friend and medical genius, who, upon seeing the grossly disfigured digit some months after the violent gardening accident, gave an on-the-spot diagnosis and treatment programme in the Coach and Horses, Romilly Street



The finger is now nearly cured after a few months of special braces and exercises during which, as you can see,  Mr Finger's face becomes bright red with exertion.

Pip pip!

NWM

I consider having some references on LinkedIn

Readers - regular and otherwise - may well be aware of the work of LinkedIn, a strange place where people you worked with over fifteen years ago "link" to you in the hope of creating a "network" of "professionals".  

If someone wants to “add you to their network”, an email arrives in your inbox with a message along the lines of  "Long time no see! How the devil are you? What news?!". 

Because the message suggests that they do actually know you, you look on their LinkedIn profile and see that you worked at the same company fifteen years ago. From this, you deduce that you must, at some level, 'know' them, even if 'knowing' means once being in the same meeting in 1997.

It is very odd, LinkedIn, and I am still not entirely sure what to do with it.  I approach it with caution, and apply some rules:

1.  I do not do not “reach out” to people I have never met or worked with
2. I try not to link to people I think are idiots or bad at their jobs (obv. a couple of preening cockmonkeys have slipped through my non-existent twatfilter, but de-linking them, like de-friending people on Facebook, seems more effort that it's worth)
3. I do not use it for weird shit like making mildly sinister approaches to people that might be "useful"
4. I do not cock on about myself endlessly, putting down only where I have worked and what my job was.

"But why do you do it at all?", I hear you cry.  I will tell you why.  It is because, however odd I think LinkedIn is, I know what people do with it and I do not want to be contrary. I also want to satisfy their crazed curiosity. 

Yes. Here is what happens. You have a meeting with someone,  or they hear they may have to work with you. They know nothing about you. Should they take you seriously?  Is it OK to call you “Spanner” to your face?  Should they take a word of what you say seriously? How high is the chance that you know what you’re talking about?  So they rush off and look you up on LinkedIn and look at the list of what you have done and where you have worked, and from that, they place you in their own internal placement system. (If you want to know if they have looked you up LinkedIn will tell you for free: "A Senior Management Official in the Catering Industry in Exeter has viewed your profile in the last 5 days". For money, it will tell you exactly who; I do not spend money on things like that.)

Some people clearly love it because they have RECOMMENDATIONS.  To have a RECOMMENDATION, you have to ask someone to RECOMMEND you.  I am putting the word RECOMMEND in capital letters because although I can definitely see the point of having easily available references from people called Trevor who you worked with in 1986,  I could not, cannot, and will not bring myself to ask someone to RECOMMEND me because I know what they would say.

“NWM is one of the people I have ever worked with. She has a point of view on most things, and is able to do work. If you need someone to do work, you should give her a job.”

“NWM is the Prime Minster of talking to people like they are idiots.”

“She is quite amusing to be around so if you “like a laugh”, she’s your gal, although I can’t vouch for the quality of her work.”

“I worked with NWM for over 18 months. Despite her relatively senior position in the company I am not entirely sure what she did other than make cookies. She appeared to be quite good at that.”

“Likes spreadsheets”.

“I heard her say she had a sewing kit. I lost a button. She wasn’t in the office but I didn’t think she’d mind me looking in her top drawer. All I could see were 23 different jars of nail polish, some old biscuits, over 1.23m pens, some dust, a monkey in a fez, a small clay pipe, 2 miniatures of absinthe, 3 boxes of tissues and a Ziploc bag containing some dusty teabags. The rest of it was goo and despair.”

“WRITING THIS REFERENCE IS LIKE A GIFT FROM GOD NWM IS GREAT I LOVE HER A LOT INSIDE AND OUT NOT IN A SEX WAY. SHE IS REALLY GOOD AT SPREADSHEETS WITH COOKIES IN IT ALSO SHE LIKES TO SNIFF THE TIPPEX AND STICK HER TONGUE IN THE MAIN POWER SUPPLY AFTER MEETINGS WITH THAT MAN SHE DOESN'T LIKE.SOMETIMES I SEE HER LOOKING AT MY WINKIE.”


"She has 3 charts she always uses for everything but I can't lie, they usually work. Someone once tried to change one of the circles on the second chart but it all went to shit.  Can't say fairer than that really."

What would you be recommended for? 

I analyse the average email inbox over the course of one week

Click on it and it will grow like a magic tree. You will love it. I know it. 

I think about working from home

I am not Alain de Botton.  For starters, I am not the son of a billionaire banker.  I also do not have a gigantic head,  I am not Swiss, I did not go to Cambridge and - O pity that it is so! - I am not the multi-millionaire author of many books, each one more than the last making me shout (in the mental equivalent of stubbing your toe): "Oh cocking HELL! Why didn't I think of that?".  

I do, however, very much enjoy reading about the 'theory of work', which is something that Alain de Botton likes to write about if he needs enough money to buy a new house.   His latest book is called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. I bought it because I am an egomaniac and wanted to see if Alain (as I call him!!!) agreed with me.  Here is my list:

Pleasures
Money
Free paperclips
Free coffee
Chatting and 'having a laugh' with Jackie in accounts
Playing Tetris for 3 hours a day and getting paid for it
Free computers, phones etc
Filling peoples' top drawers with the bits out of a hole punch
Free drink

Sorrows
Having to be in same place at same time every day
Idiots
Futility
Incompetence
Having to pretend to give a shit what other people think
Taking orders from spanners
Making a polite face when you are thinking in your brain "shut up idiot"
Conference calls

Sadly, Alain's book doesn't include these kinds of lists, so I was unable to compare my opinion with his, and at 336 pages, it is far too long for me to read myself in order to extrapolate key information and/or opinions.  Because he is a scientist, used to seeing patterns in things and able to do dispassionate analysis, I therefore briefed my 'husband' - who is (as many of you know by now) a French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist - to read it and do me a synopsis and some analysis.

Here is what he said:

"It's alright.  It's about you know, working and stuff... it's mostly a light read, with some interesting insights about you know ... working and stuff. He starts with very applied situations and characters that he meets, and writes about what they get from what they do, and from those literal concrete things he tries to draw insights. Are you making fun of me? I don't really appreciate your attitude."

I shall conclude from that that Alain does not like lists; otherwise, I am not sure what the book is about but that is OK, because I am very clear about my own opinion and I bet that if I met Alain de Botton, he would probably agree with me (because I am very good at debating, etc).

There is also a book called Rework which I really like because it is very short, and because the ideas at the heart of it are sensible. They are things like:

1. Taking notes is stupid because you remember what's important anyway.
2. Working late is stupid because you get tired and then are crap at work the next day.
3. Conference calls are preposterous, as are most meetings.
4. Usual stuff: don't be a dick, give people responsibility, be yourself, etc.
5. "Planning is guessing"
6. Having a real life outside work makes you less of a gigantic twat.

Apparently you can do qualifications in this stuff, call yourself an "Industrial Psychologist" and get paid $5,400 an hour for saying things like "Your employees are unhappy, therefore they are not loyal and they are unproductive!", or "If you lock your employees in a box, they will die", or "If your ego is too gigantic, your entire body will in time turn into cockroaches, and your workforce will spray you with distain".  It sounds a good sort of a job to me.

Anyway, all this thinking about the 'theory of work' has made me think about different theories of work.   I will definitely promise to write more things like this and then not do it and so here, for your edification, is the first in an occasional series (that I will probably not continue) called "Nonworkingmonkey's Theories Of Work", each one based on my proprietary analysis tool, "Having A Look At The Pros And Cons Before Drawing A Conclusion".

This is Number 1, and it is all about Working from Home.

Pros of Working from Home

• Can make own lunch
• Can work in pyjamas/dressing gown
• Do not have to wash
• Do not have to waste time travelling about the place
• Can have telly breaks and naps without anyone judging you in a negative style
• Not forced to 'interact' and/or pretend to like people for the simple reason that you are in their close physical proximity every day
• Free tea/coffee (well, if not 'free' exactly, definitely under 20p per cup)
• Not interrupted endlessly by idiotic questions and pointless chitchat
• Can work 5am to lunchtime if you so wish then spend rest of afternoon smoking pipe and/or twirling fez

Cons of Working from Home

• Danger of forgetting are in dressing gown with hair on end when answering Skype calls with automatic webcam connection
• Biscuits
• Desk being same as kitchen table, which makes getting ravioli in keyboard probable

Conclusion

Work from home if you can. It is really great.*

And on that note of searing insight, I wish you a happy and productive week. 

Pip pip!

NWM

* I asked my 'husband' what he thought the pro of working from home is. He said, "You don't have to get dressed".  "Are there any cons?", I asked. "No", said he. And because he is an eminent scientist with over 237 degrees from various universities etc, I believe he must be right. Coincidentally, having compared husbands with Lucy Pepper, eminent illustrator and animatrice, we are of the opinion that our husbands should probably have married each other. But that, as they say, is for another day.