Mr Resourceful

Bah

An admission: the ongoing MP expenses fiasco makes me feel a bit queasy about being human, but greatly proud to be British.

For a start, the whole sordid business proves only what Og the caveperson already knew: that any person put in charge of the pot of dried mammoth snacks will be tempted to help him/herself; and many who are tempted will succumb.  And, of course, if there's a whole bunch of people put in charge of the pot, and most of them are dipping in, then nobody is going to snitch on anyone else, even if that bunch of hairy, grunting brutes (or, to keep with the analogy, cavepeople) are divided into opposing parties whose job is to serve society.  No, they're likely to support each other in the belief that what they're doing is harmless and even warranted - and let he who is without spin cast the first stone.

The truth is that we humans are really good at justifying our actions to ourselves.  Much as I'd like to think that, were I an MP and not an admin clerk, I'd have done the noble thing and paid for my own (say) solid diamond gazebo with caviar fountain, the fact is, I don't know how I'd have acted.  With the fees office telling me to take all I can, and my fellow politicians grumbling about the lack of MP pay rises and opining that expenses allowances serve as de facto pay increases - who knows?  I may not have treated myself to a moat, but I'd be probably typing on an iMac right now, and not on a PC that I have to start six times in the morning until it stops whingeing at me about my roaming profile.

Frankly, in a world where new turns of events leap out like Central Park muggers, it comforts me to know that our national news has the reliable backbone of the MP expenses shock-fest.  I enjoy hearing about all those embarrassing but innocent mistakes made regarding claims for extra houses, relative/employees, personal zeppelins, paper mache sculptures of Ozymandias made out of pensioner's savings, etc - though it's statistically amazing that no MP so far seems to have accidentally paid too much.  Politicians spending our money on second homes for pet cats who are also paid as secretaries: we're used to that.  What I want to hear about is a politician demanding more money, having accidentally paid for a load of stuff that could have been had for free.  But who knows what surprises still await us?

Some people have been angry over the omissions in the Government's own Freedom of Information disclosures, which lack the Telegraph's titillating candour.  Personally, I can live without knowing the details of rejected expense claims.  In all truth, I'm not sure there were any.

What makes me proud is that we live in a society whose overlords are currently squirming and apologising and promising to give back money.  Of course we know their hair shirts are fur-lined.  Of course the Tories are cynically exploiting the situation to call for a GE - fair enough.  Of course they fought hard to keep their dirty doings in the dark (and then turned rabidly on the Speaker who had, frankly, protected their interests).  Viewed in isolation from the rest of human history, it's a sorry spectacle, and it makes us Brits look like muppets.  But in the context of the long history of human governments, the whole affair is something of a miracle.  You'd need a bloody coup to get that sort of result almost anywhere else, or at any time.

So when Khamenei calls Britain evil and cites our money-grasping representatives as evidence, I am inclined to feel indignant.  I would like to answer that our parliament consists of humans of fairly typical moral composition, but that a confluence of factors is presently pushing our besieged MPs away from the corruption that probably typifies most privileged bodies on earth.  I'd probably add that we don't need to take moral lessons from anyone who sits chewing his gums approvingly while his followers shout genocidal slogans.  I'd perhaps also add that this libertarian society he so detests may be full of loose-living dandies, harlots and fans of 'pop music', but without freedom it is impossible to know whether even your own piety is authentic, just as without freedom of belief there is no authentic belief, which is why theocracies suppress both the humanity of their subjects and the very morality they want to engender. 

But he'd probably have hung up by that point.

He wouldn't hear me mention that our evil little nation's jobs market seems to be picking up rather dramatically.

Go, mighty Blighty!  Long may you continue, at glacial pace, to get your act together.

Yoo hoo

Gosh - is that the time (of year)?

Bloggering has been shelved for a while, since HTS got involved in a new Jobcentre scheme, the Jobsearch Support Service for Newly Unemployed Professionals, a scheme as admirable as it is time-devouring.  But to avoid disappointing the droves of people who accidentally end up here by clicking the wrong icon on our website, and are wondering, perhaps angrily, why this blog is lying fallow, I thought I'd take a few minutes to post a blurry picture of a rubber hand.

There's more where that came from!

Regular service, which was never particularly regular in the first place, will resume anon.

Have a fruitful weekend, folks.

Our office yesterday

Sometimes, dear Reader, it takes more to maintain a blog than just occasionally thinking about writing a post, then eating some malted milk biscuits.  I am starting to realise this - and it's been a humbling epiphany, let me tell you!  Possibly tomorrow.  

In my defence, there hasn't been much time for writing about hts' valiant battles with the dragon of recession, what with all the valiant battles we've been having with the dragon of recession.  Dragons are notoriously intolerant of people blogging during battles, even if the people blogging aren't at the vanguard of the battle, but are quite far away from the fighting, behind some trees, maintaining the database and proofreading CVs.  Nor do they relish being asked for a time-out while you read other people's blogs.  So basically I haven't so much of sniffed Vox or any of its denizens since January.

Anyway, here's our news, since you asked:

1. We're finding that the dragon of recession (see above) isn't as sprightly as it was in January.  It has slightly blunt nails and an intermittent cough.  Will provide further economic insights as developments develop.

2. Varun has only gone and become a Dad, hasn't he!  To a baby girl!  Named Manya!

3. Danny did an abseil down the gigantic and weirdly carpeted side of the Fort Dunlop building!  For charity!  (The Stroke Association, to be specific.)  With no previous abseiling experience and his children watching in terror admiration!  Video to follow, as soon as we've edited out the bit where I put my head in front of the camera, thus turning the scene into a big curly nightmare.

4. Jayne passed her CERT-RP recruitment exam with flying colours!  (She used crayons.)  She can now commandeer light aircraft with her business card!

That's the news for now.  Right, I'm off to read some blogs.

Jerry

We finally had our Christmas do!  I admit we have been tardy.  In the office we operate in perfect concert, but outside of work we cannot handle the logistics of arranging social events, and so put them off indefinitely.  It went smoothly enough, although I had to run to the bar/restaurant after my customary Friday humiliation at karate, sporting the kind of sweaty pallor you seldom see on people who aren't going cold turkey after a lifelong opium addiction.

Highlights of the evening:

- Varun and I had knickerbocker glories made with champagne jelly.  Varun hadn't had one before, and is now a knickerbocker evangelist.

- Danny introduced us to Sailor Jerry rum.  Shiver me timbers*, how have we missed this one!  You mix it with ginger ale and some squeezed lime.  It's like Morgan's but nicer.  Drink and repeat**.

- When the fab waitress found out it was our Christmas do, she ran off and came back with crackers!  Not just any crackers, but crackers containing miniature ten-pin bowling sets!

- When the fab waitress found out that we didn't want to go home after our meals / rums, she pointed us in the direction of some nearby underground dive that turned out to be a wondrous drinking-cavern filled with curtained booths!  And Sailor Jerry rum!  We all declared fab waitress to be an object lesson in customer service - not pathologically friendly or ingratiating, but considerate and attentive.  My references to her attentiveness, incidentally, form the indirectly didactic portion of this post.

A fine festive night, all in all.  Roll on next March.

* Strictly speaking, a pirate exclamation, here press-ganged into service.

** 'repeat' in the sense of 'do it again', not 'regurgitate'.

Groovy

Let me be the first to say Happy New Year to all you splendid Voxers and Vox-vistors!* 

It's tricky to resume something as strenuous and dehydrating as blogging after you've had a break, but I've finally decided to take the advice my dad once gave me: if you want to do something, you should do it.  An example: if you're a wannabe novelist and your goal is to get published, you should start by getting something - anything - published by someone - anyone.  Write a story about a magic flannel, print three copies, and throw them into the open window of a family car at some traffic lights.  That way, you begin to carve a thin 'groove' in the vinyl of reality, into which your subsequent circumstances and intentions will begin to slip, thus cutting the groove deeper, and before you know it, you are Jeffrey Archer! 

A less frightening example might be: if you want to blog regularly in 2009, but you can't get into it because you have literally nothing to say about Barack Obama, you should start by just writing a small amount of rubbish about not much at all.

Voila!

Let the floodgates open!

See you in April, probably.

* the first this afternoon. 

Arise, sir cat

An HTS apocryphon tells of how once, in a simpler age, we landed a big deal on New Year's Eve while our competitors snoozed.  That's the reason why most of the staff are in the office today - we're trying to restage a legend.  The trouble is that in addition to those snoozing competitors, our clients and prospective candidates are at home, too, coughing and improvising recipes around sprouts, leaving us with nothing to do but formulate battle plans for 2009 and critique songs on the radio.

It has been a very grotty year for lots of people.  As for the next one, our radio seems convinced that 2009 is going to be worse than 1666.  But anyone who's taken the time to check out the reality behind this year's media horror stories will have noticed that the media has been amplifying the negatives in what I can only assume is a deliberate attempt to force us into a state of surrender.  Which is not to say that things aren't bad.  It's just that when a corporation lays off a hundred full time employees and forty thousand contractors whose contracts were up in a few months anyway, and then the newspapers run headlines like NOT A REAL COMPANY LTD.* TO LAY OFF 40,100 EMPLOYEES! you've got to wonder at least two things:

1. Whether reducing us to nervous jelly might actually be the media's metier, and

2. How much toxic news we gulp down without checking the ingredients.

Job loss seems to be one of the big terrors of the moment.  But from the viewpoint of someone who spends every day following people's attempts to get jobs, and employers' attempts to get staff, it seems to me that 2009 may well be a good year, or at least a character-building year, for those who are willing to be more frugal, inventive and flexible than was considered healthy before The Crunch crunched.

New Year's Resolution:

- Put 10% of salary into an ISA

Things I did this festive season that I have never done before:

- Watched the spookily prescient 'Death Race 2000'.

Things I did this festive season that nobody has ever done before (admittedly in a challenge to do something that nobody has ever done before):

- Knighted a cat with a frozen lobster.

Have a fabuloso New Year.

* not a real company

relatedish:

your job search one month from now

A call to optimism

Good news: Many companies' recruitment freezes are already starting to thaw.  Meanwhile, Jayne has been getting a surprising number of replies to the email she's been sending to candidates:

'Despite all the gloom and doom in the media, our consultants are at the coal face of recruitment and are reporting a much more positive outlook for January and the year ahead. The indications are that many of our clients will be recruiting quite aggressively in the new year and that the current slowdown in recruitment is seasonal as much as anything else.

In light of this we recommend that if you do plan to keep an eye out for fresh challenges next year, you beat the January rush and register your updated details with HTS asap.  We'll then get in touch to discuss anything that matches your skills, experience and preferences...'

Candidates on our database who haven't been in touch for ages are emailing to express appreciation for this glimmer of positivity.  People are starving for a bit of good news, it seems.

I'm starting to suspect that the economy is a sort of phantom summoned by the collective wizardry of the population's beliefs and assumptions about the health of our national finances.  Confidence - a mere mental state, last time I checked - feeds it; lack of confidence makes it wither.  If nobody had ever thought that the economy was in such trouble, it might not have ended up in such trouble.  So perhaps it is time for us to treat the economy (and the jobs market, by extension) as a servitor or golem, and effectively tell it what to do by spreading as much positive news as we can get our hands on...

Some x factor winner

We listen to radio 2 in the office. 

Thank you, Jeremy Vine, for playing the Jeff Buckley Version. (The whole thing would've been nice.)

Not an ipod

If you could wave a wand and completely reinvent our Christmas traditions, how would you have them change?

I'd obliterate high-volume gift-shopping - but then, everyone I know wants to be more humbuggy at Christmas, because everyone has cut up their credit cards.  At the same time, notwithstanding the credit crunch, going into town at the moment still involves dealing with only slightly less congestion than going on hajj.  Lack of funds might force people to rediscover the true meaning of Christmas this year (something to do with the the baptism of Father Christmas, I recall) - and that's a good thing.  For too long, Christmas has meant buying people things that they wouldn't ever buy themselves, and seeing how much contempt we can make family familiarity breed.  It's time, I think, for us to amend our Christmas traditions so that the focus is less on buying stuff.

Personally, when it comes to gifts, I'd rebrand Christmas as a time when everyone buys a book - and nothing else! - for everyone on their list.  Books are personal, edifying, and relatively cheap.  Money usually spent on non-literary rubbish could be given to thoughtfully-chosen charities (there's a thought, eh?) and everyone would get to start the year with an armful of lovely books.  Perhaps someone could promulgate the superstition that it's lucky to read all the books you get for Christmas before the next Christmas comes around.  Or bad luck not to.

Kids, of course, would despise this tradition, because they want mobile phones, video game consoles, and real estate.  I have not yet decided whether kids may opt out this tradition; but you are free to tell your kids to blame me for whatever decision I arrive at.

I was thinking about the idea of giving to charity wholly in lieu of gifts (as in, 'I sponsored a llama for you!  Merry Christmas, Aunt Elsie.')  But there's the obvious danger that some charities would be neglected and 'cute' charities favoured, for fear of giving the 'recipient' the wrong impression.  A gift made to a polar bear charity might tickle big white-bearded Uncle Bob; sponsorship of a scrofula clinic, on the other hand, is hard to make relevant anyone's personality in a complimentary way, unless the 'recipient' has scrofula, which I'm not sure even exists any more.  Any thoughts?

Incidentally, I've just finished my shopping.  Did it all online.  Bought loads of stuff nobody wants, but which courtesy dictates they will have to thank me for.

Maybe next year, eh?

French fly

Careful what you wish for, etc.  You convince the Boss to let you regularly dodge work to post thoughts in a near-hermetic e-cell somewhere on the web, and the next thing you know, your blogging commitment is an albatross - or, as the new Junior OED puts it, excising the word 'Queen' to make room, an alblogtross.  A disappointing abundance of real work strangles your intentions to sit around posting your reflections on emoticons and peanut Kitkats.  Bereft of time, your spangly insights slop about in your head unformed, and become a sort of mush that you dread having to filter.

Although everyone in the office is working at the moment, it so happens that they are also intermittently discussing our consultant Danny's claim that Burger King put something on their chips that is also used on the wings of stealth bombers.  And so I feel reasonably guiltless about abandoning admin for ten minutes to write down my tip of the day.  It's a follow-on from this post about not limiting your options if you're looking for a new job.  Coincidentally, it's also about slipping under the radar.

Warning: the following tip is only relevant to the few people who are posting CVs on internet job boards with salary expectations wildly lower than their current/last salary, in the hope of appearing bargainesque.  It can also be read by people who fear they might, in the near future, be trapped in a lift with such a person.

We're getting a worrying amount of CVs through from people who have been made redundant and, in order to secure a new position quickly, are saying that they'll work for a third of their previous salary.  Some of these people are putting their CVs on internet job boards, so I thought I'd post the following quick tip, which has some broader application, maybe:

If you're very flexible on the salary you'll accept, don't say so upfront on internet job boards. 

Why?  Because if a recruiter is scanning through the cover details of candidates on a job site, looking for (say) a project manager in the automotive industry, and the salary for the role is (say) £35,0000, chances are they'll unthinkingly screen out candidates asking for (say) 50k+, and they'll also screen out candidates asking for (say) 20k.  The former, they'll assume, are probably too senior, and the latter are probably too junior.  Salary expectations are a rough guide to one's level of experience, and although your CV will tell us how senior you are, we might not even download your CV if your cover suggest that you are too inexperienced for our role.

Your job title on the cover information doesn't necessarily make things clear, either.  An employer or recruiter who, scanning zillions of names on a job board, sees this -

PROJECT MANAGER

Clare Hair

Target job: IT manager

Desired salary: 20k

- will not necessarily think what you want them to think, viz, 'Ah - a bargain!'  In all likelihood they'll assume that you're a junior candidate, working for a small company, with a boss who has patronised you by calling you a Manager when in fact you only clean the fluff off the mice.

Sod's Law determines that the only people who will assume that you are, in fact, a senior candidate, are people actually looking for 20k candidates.  They'll think that you've committed a typo.

If you're really flexible regarding salary, leave your expectations blank on the covering information on job sites, and instead indicate your flexibility in your CV's opening blurb.

Broader application: when posting details about yourself on the internet, try to make all the information congruent.

Back to work / jokes about stealth chips.

Tomorrow: something about Christmas.