elevenses

Well.  Our Overlady has finally noticed that Vox is sort of like a kinda social networking platform, and has ordered me to move the blog to a platform that 'outsiders' (I don't trust 'em) can leave comments on, if they so wish, which, knowing outsiders, they won't want to.

'What's the point of that?' I cried.  'I never post anything on Vox anyway.'

Apparently she also wants me to post regularly!  And she wants the posts to be 'relevant'!

So basically I'm taking my recruitment related wares elsewhere (elseware?) and keeping this blog for musings on karate, links to videos of dogs running in circles, and extreme political views.  In other words, I can be a proper voxer instead of a pseudo business voxer.  Hurrah!

On the down side, I won't be able to spend any more time at work being paid to put dull personal anecdotes on the internet.  Boo!

Right.  Off to find somewhere to put all these professional reflections I'm supposed to be having.  Will be back anon.

Price pounce

Like you, I have occasionally experimented with inventing new words and phrases with a view to disseminating them and so enjoying the immortality that comes with permanently swelling the English lexicon.  Who hasn't thought, at some point, 'Someone must be coming up with these new words - someone no less a slob than I.  Why not give it a go?' 

Who indeedum?

Just how popular your neologism becomes is a good measure of both your powers of influence and your catchinessability.  But of course it helps to have technology behind you.  Had the internet been around when I was a child, the term 'bingobongobango!' might be the superlative of choice for today's street youth, instead of the occasion for my family threatening to fling me from an upstairs window.  That's why, when I heard a superb new term on the bus the other day, I decided to use the global reach of this 'web log' to give it wings.

Two women were discussing their favourite clothes shop. 

"______* was packed on Saturday," said one.

"It's because there's a price pounce,' quoth the other.

Price pounce!  I love it!

I love it because, like 'credit crunch', it combines catchiness, vividness, and the clunky use of a verb as a noun.

I love it because you can sort of guess what it means even though it's stupid.  Presumably a 'price pounce' is when low prices, perhaps driven by that other alliterative economic condition, lead to a surge in purchasing.  It could be used to describe specific situations (there's a price pounce going on at Tesco) or an overall market situation (consumer spending is soaring because of the Price Pounce) with equal ludicrousness.

I love it because it summons images of people leaping around shops.

As any economist knows, a recession is officially over when Radio 4 report a bit of good news about the economy for four days in a row.  It hasn't happened yet; but perhaps (I've been wondering) that's because the media lack suitably delicious terms with which to describe financial felicitousness.  Financial ruin and evil bankers make good soundbites (FUND-LOVING CRIMINALS!) but increased profits at M&S sounds as lively as loam.  Bad news makes good headlines and vice versa.

But clearly the public - or at least the public on the otherwise awful Number 66(6) to Digbeth - are taking matters into their own mouths.  We must support them.

Anyway, at hts we've been bandying 'price pounce' all week in the office.  But we are a mere handful of spangle-pusses**; there's only so much that we can do.

Any suggestions for cheery economic terms welcome.  Also welcome are suggestions about how we can get 'price pounce' in the OED.

* not real name

** worth a try

Hippo

Had a few relatives round last weekend, and Lady Resourceful suggested we all play a spiffing parlour game in which I and her father dress in morning suits, and then we all go down to St Augustine's Church, Edgbaston, they bolt the doors, the choir does some crooning, a man in a dress mentions something about solemnity, and then everyone throws the contents of a document shredder at us.  It was great!  But unusual. 

Then we returned home and assembled in the living room and looked through the windows at a completely unused gazebo shivering in the rain in the back garden, and then everyone drank themselves blind, thus restoring a touch of normality to the day.  But now Lady Resourceful is insisting that I call her Mrs Resourceful, and her parents are talking to me in the same tone used by members of my own family who think I'm regrettable.

Brummies, eh?  Crazy!

Ceci n'est pas une baguette

There's a good cafe downstairs in the lovely old converted factory in which our offices can be found, and I feel guilty for not patronising it more often.  I walk past their open kitchen door while going through the Bradford Court gates in the morning, and they say hello, and I hide my tupperware salad behind my back and look hangdog.  What can you say?  The 'credit crunch' fob-off is hackneyed.  And I can hardly explain that although I enjoy their heart-stoppingly good egg and bacon sandwiches, more than two a month would make me expire.

Yesterday I went round the corner to a nearby newsagents and got milk, and then decided on a whim to buy one of their monstrous four kilogram baguettes.  Walking towards the gates of Bradford Court, I spotted one of the friendly cafe chaps lingering outside, and so I did the obvious thing and hid the baguette under my jumper, and of course when I walked past him to get through the gates it fell from my jumper and rolled past him, and I ran to get it, and I scooped it up as he watched with some alarm, and, hoping that he hadn't seen the baguette (he had) but wanting to justify my sudden running, I thought I should keep running.  But I was running towards a locked gate.  So naturally I turned around, ran past Mr Cafe again, and carried running into the middle of the road, and then, lacking a good reason for being in the middle of the road, I ran back to the pavement, past Mr Cafe again.  The locked gate had not magically turned into a portal leading to a less embarrassing situation, so, not wanting to stop running, I turned right and raced into the Bradford Court car park, and tried to let myself into Bradford Court through the side gate, the offending baguette in hand.

By the time I'd unlocked the gate with my security card, Mr Cafe and the other Mr Cafe had gone through their kitchen and were watching me from the other side of the gate.  So, of course, I did the best possible thing and turned around and ran back into the car park, letting the door swing shut while they watched with bewilderment, and I hid my baguette behind a car for no reason, and ran around the car park, picked up my baguette, then, peering from behind a Seat Ibiza and noticing that the coast was clear, I made my way back through the side gate and then over to the building via some bushes, from which I burst ungraciously in front of the reception area, brandishing a baguette, causing the receptionist to stifle a scream.

Epilogue.

Today I went round the corner again for a baguette - I would have preferred a bacon sandwich, but I was trying to avoid Mr and Mr Cafe - and I took a sports bag with me, in which to smuggle the baguette back into the office.  As you can't get back in the building without passing the cafe window, I decided to make a show of acting strange before entering the building, to reassure Mr and Mr Cafe (in case they saw me through the cafe window) that I didn't act strange only when encountering them.  Didn't want them to take it personally.  So before entering the building I ran into the road and back again, then ran around the car park.  And lo!  As I was running back, I saw a woman getting into her car.  And lo!  A pair of shoes had fallen out of her bag!

I was already running, so I had sufficient velocity to reach her, scare her half to death, and give her her pair of shoes before she could drive off.

Had none of the baguette business happened, that woman would have left her shoes on the cruel streets of Digbeth, which is the kind of thing that can ruin a person's whole week.  No predictive model, analysing the woman's predicament when she dropped the shoes, would have factored in the possibility that help might have taken the form of a guy running down the road because a baguette had dropped from his jumper the day before.

Next time I'm struck by a bout of sudden madness, I will remember this incident.  I will bear in mind that some happy angel might be grooming me to play a serendipitous role in someone else's drama.

Tomorrow: man chokes on baguette, prevents train crash.

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