How am I going to get a new job when Stephen Fry and Clarkson have got them all?

Stephen Fry is bloody everywhere.  I've noticed this because I've been back working in a bookshop and also I sometimes switch the telly on.  There was a Dickens spoof on the other night, and he was in that, he's on bloody QI and every time I pick up a Harry Potter audiobook his face is there looking intelligent on the back of it.  That's not to mention his autobiography which is rammed into just about every shelf we've got, and even Ruth got a copy for Christmas.

And Clarkson is everywhere too.  He's now into about Volume 53 of his rantathon, which has been going on for about the last hundred years.  And hie likes to periodically tell inappropriate jokes on the telly to get even more coverage, as if he wasn't getting enough coverage, by being on the telly already. 

There's a part in the film Demolition Man (which is set in the future) where Sandra Bullock tells Sylvester Stallone that all restaurants are now Taco Bell, because they won the franchise wars.  Well, if we're not careful in the future all we're going to have is Fry and Clarkson.  All fiction will be written by Fry, all non-fiction by Clarkson, all highbrow TV programmes will be presented by Fry, and all programmes about machines and stuff will be Clarkson. 

I don't know either of them.  They might be very nice people for all I know, who like to stroke kittens and give money to charity.  Stephen Fry has obviously got a big vocabulary and he's very clever, and 3 million people think he's worth following on Twitter, but he also looks a bit depressed and full of his own importance to me.  

And Clarkson likes to be oh so controversial and so not politically correct, but now Top Gear is just the same all the time.  Let's go to a foreign country and take some inappropriate cars and act like big kids and have a right laugh, and lets film it for the mugs back home.

And his books are just rants....Oh hang on, what's this?  It's a rant isn't it?

Okay I admit it.  I'm jealous of the two of them.  Because all those people out there, who are listening to them are not listening to me!  What have they got that I haven't?  I mean apart from about a billion quid each, and a network of friends and associates in the world of film and TV and the media to get their foot in the door for any project under the sun they fancy getting involved in.  What's that you say?  You've found a new species of chimp-eating spider in sub-Saharan Africa?  Get Fry and a film crew onto it right away!

But if the government wants to get us back to work, they could make Fry and Clarkson go back to only having one job each, and share their other jobs out between the rest of us.  Otherwise we're on the slippery slope, and it won't be long before we're all buying Clarkson lunchboxes and teabags brought to you in association with Stephen bloody Fry.

For the sake of balance, I should say this.  Keep up the good work Fry and Clarkson, and I wish you continued success in 2012.  I'm off to rummage down the back of the sofa now to see if I can find 50p so I can go buy an onion.

How am I going to get another job, when I've already got a bar of chocolate?

 I'm getting fired on Saturday, so I'm going to be starting the New Year without a job.   That would worry me except for the fact that I've got plenty of stuff in the fridge.

I've managed to reach the age of 43 and I still don't have a clue about what to do for a living.  But part of the problem is I lack the motivation to go after things.  All the things I want are either free or cheap, so I don't invest much time and effort into getting them. 

I am aware that there are people who have proper careers, who have put years of effort into attaining qualifications etc, to enable them to do a skilled job.  I'm afraid I lack the motivation to do this.  Apparently there's a thing called Deferrment of Gratification.  I don't have it.   

Mostly my goals in life are pretty modest, like getting some sort of pie or a bar of chocolate.  There were times when I was a child when I didn't have money for these things, but since I've been an adult I have pretty much had constant access.  I haven't really wanted stuff like motorboats and round the world cruises, so I haven't needed to plan years ahead and build up funds for this.

When I was growing up, we didn't have a car, and we lived in a council house.  I barely owned anything, and the things I did own were very low tech.  Things like clothes, a football, a few toy soldiers and a bike. 

These days I live in a nice house with nice things, I've got a car, two or three bikes, plenty of books and dvds and nice plates and cups and a coffee maker and I don't aspire to have any more than this.  I already think my carbon footprint is huge.  Just taking out the recycling lets me know how much I'm consuming every week. 

The trouble is, I only have a temporary job at the moment and I will be out of work on Saturday, and I've made no strides towards getting another job.  And this is mostly because my modest needs are being satisfied.  I just bought a Yorkie for later so that's today  sorted, and I've got enough left in my wallet to buy two tubs of ice cream tomorrow, so that'll take me through to the middle of the week.

I haven't really planned any further ahead than that.  And that's what's worrying me....

TQM my ass

I used to work in a bank (between 1988 and 1998).  I wasn't very good at it though, because I didn't like selling stuff to people, and that was a big part of the job then.  One of the best ways to avoid selling stuff was to do admin and that's why between 1990 and 1991 I worked in Bradford in a place called the Customer Service Centre.  

It should really have been called the Customer Misnomer Centre, because we tried really hard not to let any customers in.  It was basically an admin centre that allowed us to do loads of mundane work centrally, like setting up standing orders and bouncing cheques and it meant they would need less staff in branches.

Although we used to speak to customers on the phone, they weren't supposed to get in.  We did once get a stray one in the reception area, and no-one knew what to do with him.  It was ages before someone asked him what he wanted and then politely and firmly ushered him out of the door.

We had TQM in those days, short for Total Quality Management.  One of its core principles was that no-one was ever to blame.  If something went wrong, it was a fault in the process rather than in the person who made the mistake.

Well, so much for that theory!  The reality was somewhat different.  We worked in a big open plan office, there were about 40 of us in total.  And we all had individual badge card numbers.  If there was a cock-up it could easily be traced back to your badge card.  The manager and his assistant didn't come and find you if you made a mistake, they just opened the office door and yelled out your badge card number.  This was followed by the walk of shame across the office, and then as you disappeared into their office the door would be slammed behind you and the blinds drawn.  The door got slammed so much in those days that the door frame was coming out of the wall.  If it wasn't your turn, you could see it get looser every time it got slammed.

One of the jobs I used to do at the CSC was to manually redirect direct debits intended for accounts that had been closed when small branches had been shut down.  This wasn't in any way the customer's fault as they hadn't had any say in having their account number changed by us.  In time, the bank put a technological fix in place for this and the original account numbers were retained after branch closures, but this was the early 90s.  We were still using Casio calculators then with green numbers on.

The first of the month was always the heaviest workload for direct debits as that was when Prudential amongst others took their payments out.  Anyway, one first of the month I decided that the originators of the direct debits would get the message more clearly about having to use the new account numbers if we just bounced all of that month's direct debits on the closed branches.  There were about 120 in total. 

I hadn't really foreseen the full consequences of my actions, but I had set off a chain reaction.  One of the direct debits I bounced was the mobile phone payment of one of TSB's very important commercial customer's and pretty soon his business mobile had been cut off.  

With the benefit of hindsight, I probably shouldn't have said when asked about this 'Yeah well, we bounced all of the closed branches direct debits that day'.  I think the manager got a bit high pitched when he said 'What do you mean all of them?'.  

Every time we bounced a direct debit we had to write it on a sheet and he asked me to go find the sheets.  You could fit about 20 to a sheet and I'd filled pages of them.  I remember he kept turning the pages over and over in disbelief.

It was okay though, because I'd told my supervisor what I was doing, and she was pretty gung ho and thought it was all a really good idea, like most ideas that you have in the heat of the moment, so after they'd finished with me, she got a pasting as well, but even more so, because she wasn't a young thing like me, and also a supervisor and so she should have known better!

It wasn't the best day I had working in a bank, but it wasn't the worst either.  No, that was the day I lost £1000 and they had to call the inspectors in.  They found it eventually.  After 3 days of interrogating me.  But that's another story....Actually, that one got blamed on my supervisor aswell in the end.  I think there's a pattern emerging here, maybe it wasn't my fault after all.