Couldn’t sell a rubber ring to a drowning man…

I am not a born salesperson. It is somewhat outside of my normal character to be nice. In that nice way that good salespeople are nice. All remembering your name and your kids’ names and where you use to work and all that other nice stuff.

I work in an industry where I am a fairly distinctive-looking woman amongst a lot (and I mean a lot) of middle-aged men in suits. Which frequently results in exchanges like this:

Middle-Aged Man in Suit (MAMS for short): ‘Hey, TiS, how are you doing?  Your kids must be, what 3 and 1 by now?’

TiS (frantically dredging memory for this particular MAMS, to no avail): ‘Hi, doing well, doing well ‘ (..generates cute but generic anecdote about the kids without sounding too mumsy so they can’t shove me into that ‘mother who works’ box, but long enough to buy time so that my poor brain can find something about this particular chap but still, nothing. Who is this guy?)

MAMS: ‘And how have you been doing since you left [last dodgy place of work], you must have been there [insert frighteningly accurate number of years]‘. (What? is he stalking me?) 

TiS: ‘Oooh, marvellous, you know how it is (riffs wildly on the joys of running one’s own business to buy time, but inevitably runs out of steam, and still, nothing)’

*uncomfortable pause during which it becomes increasingly obvious that I haven’t got a tossing clue who this chap is*

TiS: ‘So, how’s business?’  (last ditch attempt at garnering some sort of useful information to stick a name to a face).

At this point the MAMS in question will (hopefully) launch into a many and varied tale of woe/success/hardship (delete as applicable) with enough specifics in it that I can at least work out which company he works for, even if I can’t nail down who he actually is.

I used to rather glibly say that unless the guy was a complete arsehole, incredibly good looking or we had a fabulous meeting then I was unlikely to remember them. Now I really ought to find a way of remembering all of them, given that sales is a numbers game, and the more people you get yourself in front of, the more likely you are to get a bite. So any suggestions, any at all, that you have for remembering generic MAMS, would be much appreciated…

 

I am not suicidal

Stressed? Yes. Anxious? Permanently. Planning my imminent end? I don’t think so.

I will acknowledge that the last 12 months have been hard going. I will concede that PND following the birth of number 2 segued neatly into a longer lasting slump after a series of crap and demoralising things happening, one after another.

I will even accept that, as a creature that has historically actively avoided change, the amount of changes we have been through are probably a bit much for my intransigent little self.

I am lonely. I do feel isolated. I am finding the whole new town/new friends dynamic tough, but if I don’t force myself to get out there it will never get better. I just hate feeling like the new girl all the time.

But suicidal? Again, I don’t think so.

So why then when I am standing at the station and the non stopping intercity through train passes through do I find myself edging back from the platform edge, in case the compulsion to jump (in fact it need only be a step) becomes too strong?

Why do I hug the walls on the underground platforms to avoid confronting the feeling that if I did do it then at least people would know. They would finally get how intense this feeling of loss and loneliness is, how low it brings me. But that would be stupid because then I’d be dead and I wouldn’t be here to appreciate that people were listening.

I used to look at people who attempted suicide as a cry for help and think time waster.

Drama queen.

Now I get it. They need you to understand how bad it is and they want someone to care enough to listen and save them.

I guess it’s time to start talking.

The thing is, I can’t help wondering how many of those that jumped didn’t plan it, didn’t mean to.

In search of a secular education…

The Business Partner and I are currently thinking (fighting?) about things education-related for our little ones. Girl will be going into reception in September and despite the fact that he’s not even 2 yet we need to start making decisions about what to do with Boy when the time comes.  Having moved into a rental we are not sure where we are going to settle permanently so with the school decision comes, potentially, a house decision, which further complicates matters.

We have got as far as deciding that the private sector makes the school/house decision easier as then we aren’t complicating things with catchment areas but now the choice of school is proving to be more difficult.  So far we are wrestling with co-ed versus single sex – does the fact that they have a sibling of the opposite sex outweigh the impact of being in a single sex environment at school?   We hope it does as the options for co-ed private education in the county where we have chosen to live are limited.

The other question we are dealing with is the issue of religion in the schools we are looking at. Generally speaking they all seem to have some sort of connection with a local (C of E) church, although the one we saw this morning claimed relationships with the local C of E, Catholic and Baptist churches (Wit-woo!  Check out the diversity!), and they all claim to teach comparative religion and respect for ‘other’ faiths through religious education classes and in daily assemblies.  So far so lovely and tolerant.

The question we are asking is proving more difficult for schools to answer.  What about people with no faith?  What about the humanists and secularists, the agnostics and (whisper it) the atheists.  How are they catered for?

The assumption that is generally made is that children who don’t go to church or have a stated ‘alternative’ religion fall into a sort of lapsed C of E bucket. But that is not the case with us.  We struggle to call ourselves atheists, as that has taken on a fanatical, absolutist reputation (Dawkins, you don’t help) bordering on the evangelical, in part due to the way it is represented by the religious community (think the the Grinch that stole Christmas, ‘oooh, those mean atheists want to spoil our fun’).  Empiricists is a better word. Or Scientists.  Evidence-based belief. Happy to believe in your god when you show me empiricial evidence of its/his/her existence. Until then I’ll rely on the scientific method, thank you very much.

But how is this addressed in school?  I have no problem, per se, with sending my children to a school linked to a religious institution, providing they are not trying to force a belief on to them. The bible stories that the BP and I heard at school provide a framework for discussions about morality that are good and healthy and unproblematic as long as they are not treated as historical fact.  Its hard to get to the bottom of how these things are being taught and presented to our children as the teaching is heavily influenced by the individual teacher, and their religious leanings.

I don’t claim to have an answer to this, but what we are finding is that the schools don’t really have an answer either, and that nowhere (certainly where we are) can claim to be giving a completely secular education, which is what I think I would like, and what I think is reasonable.  Religion needs to be a personal choice and a choice for a family to make, so I’m not sure I should be thinking about having to ‘de-programme’ my child when (s)he comes home from school.  Ultimately I suppose its our duty to teach them an analytical and thoughtful approach so when the time comes they can make their own decision. I would love to think that we could find a school to do the same thing, but on current evidence I suspect that might be too much to hope for.

Image courtsey of the Abstruse Goose http://abstrusegoose.com

Subversive story books for when you can’t take another princess book.

Despite my best efforts Girl (nearly 4) tends towards the girly and loves a princess story.  While I subscribe to the view that pretty much any reading with children is good reading, sometimes Rapunzel starts to grate and I get a bit fed up with how generally wet the lead characters are (this was also my problem with Jane Eyre, but that’s another post).

Thankfully she also has a wicked sense of humour and also loves some of the more subversive stories.  The ones we have been enjoying recently are by Jon Klassen.  I want my hat back and This is not my hat are both clever books with unusual illustrations (which surprisingly, Boy (nearly 2) also enjoys, even though they are not the usual gaudy pictures you see in books for the under-2s). For a laugh read the Amazon reviews on I want my hat back for how not to react to a children’s book!

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

‘Banker bashing’ has gained massive popularity since the 2008 crisis, and rightly so in some cases, given the institutional-level corruption and greed which introduced true systemic risk of a previously unforeseen scale and saw me standing outside my bank in October 2008 wondering whether I should just withdraw all my cash and keep it under my bed until the storm had passed, just in case.

While the bashing is justified at an institutional level, and in the cases of some specific and frankly criminally incompetent individuals, I do get frustrated that an entire category of ordinary, (mostly)tax-paying members of the workforce are vilified to the point where friends in the industry choose not to disclose what they do or where they work for fear of negative reactions.  It angers me that people who do work hard and who do understand the concept of fiduciary responsibility are lumped in with the sort of cowboys that sold crap to widows and orphans or took unjustifiable levels of risk with other people’s money and were paid handsomely for it.

That said, the industry still doesn’t do itself any favours in the way that it treats its staff. In the years since I left the industry I have run into a number of former colleagues, clients and contacts who have either resigned or been made redundant from positions of responsibility and the unifying theme is the way in which they were treated by their employers both before and after they left.  Verbal abuse in the office, fabrication of poor reviews to avoid payment of bonuses, raising complaints with the FSA to damage their ongoing career, threats of ‘never working in the industry again’ if they don’t go quietly, bad-mouthing them to clients after their departure, changing the benchmarks for payment of contractual bonuses…  The trouble is that when you are in the industry this sort of treatment goes with the territory and its only when you have the courage to walk away that the Stockholm syndrome effect wanes and you realise quite how bad things were.

My hope is that the current economic picture means that more people are waking up to this situation. As earning potential declines and the reality that they are not being paid to take the crap any more becomes apparent more talented people are prepared to say so long, and thanks for all the fish.  Managers in the industry will realise that the people that kept the whole show running are gradually disappearing to more fulfilling, if not better paid roles elsewhere.

If the industry doesn’t start to treat its people better, then the brain drain will continue and even accelerate at the top and the bottom, as disaffected senior staff who want a better way to work move out of the industry altogether, and junior staff who see no way of progressing without having to tolerate this sort of abuse and who realise that the days of earning mega-bonuses for very little commitment or work have gone will decide that other industries offer a fairer and more fulfilling career option…

 

Challenge: write about work-related maternal guilt whilst avoiding clichés

One of my main issues with ‘Mummy Blogs’ is the repeated reinvention of the blogging wheel. Once you’ve read about one lot of maternal guilt its kind of hard to get excited/interested/sympathetic about the next lot. Its boring because while maternal guilt exists for most of us, like other people’s children, other people’s guilt is just not as special.

One of the reasons The Business Partner and I kicked the wage-slavery into touch and decided to start our own business was the old chestnut of work-life balance. We were keen that the kidlets knew who we were and remembered us as being around, rather than just two random strangers who turned up to put them to bed at night, five nights a week, and then snapped at them all weekend (because the brain never really disengages and the kids insist on wanting our attention all the time), or continually referred to the blackberry (because A.N. Other Investment Bank will go under if I don’t read that email from that dude in Hong Kong who has no other life).  We had a lovely summer off with them, working gently on the side on the beginnings of TechCo, but not really committing to anything.

Now TechCo needs to get going in earnest, or the experiment will fail and we’ll be back in wage-slavery.  The problem is we’ve all been spoilt over the summer and now the work-life balance has to shift again.  Working from home while the kids are with the World’s Best Nanny seems to be something that The Business Partner can do easily. Switches off outside input, laser-like focus.  Kids shouting?  Doesn’t hear them. He’s working and so has his work head on.  I only wish I could do the same.

Kids shouting?  I’ll just pop in and intervene.  Kids quiet? I’ll just make a cup of tea and see what they are up to. Kids out?  Maybe I’ll finish that bit of knitting up.  I know I need to work, I just seem to have forgotten how. And it feels so wrong to be in the house while they are with someone else in the next room.  (That was the guilt part, feel free to be unsympathetic).

End result:  I feel like I’m giving neither the kids nor the business my best. I’m cross with myself for not getting as much done so I’m back to grumpy when I am with them, and I’m cross with myself for not being with them when I’m in the house so I’m not focussing on the work side of things.  (Ooooh, look at me letting everyone down at once, cliché, cliché, cliché…) So we’re solving it before it kills the business.

Mid-November we move into our new office (wit-woo, get us) and we’re making a commitment to be there at least three days a week.  We’ll still not be doing the hours we did before, but it will give us focussed time to build the business. One day a week from home and then one day off so we keep the three-day weekends we always wanted. Hopefully that’s the compromise we need. And hopefully my guilt wasn’t too boring.

 

Permanent Essay Crisis

One of the problems with starting your own business is that everything you write seems to take on much more import. It took us weeks to write any copy for the company website, and we’re still not happy, it still doesn’t sound like us. And don’t talk to me about the powerpoint presentation which has been ‘in incubation’ (sitting blankly on my desktop) since last month. It’s so much easier to write when it’s not your business and it doesn’t really matter what you write. When it’s yours it feels like it could be make or break if you can’t express yourself powerfully enough.

The frustrating thing is that when we’re in meetings and pitching then the ideas flow, and they really make sense and clients like them, but when I try to commit them to paper (or screen, or parchment, or whiteboard, or scratched into the walls in my own blood…) they evaporate. Maybe I should just record myself pitching, listen back and then write it down. Though that could be too awful for words.

One of the reasons for starting The Reluctant Entrepreneur was to get the writing flowing, with the hope that it might break the essay crisis, and to give me an outlet to the stuff that doesn’t belong in the company literature.  It remains to be seen whether it actually works or not, so any suggestions for how to break the essay crisis gratefully received…