I haven’t ever had a
moan about local radio, as far as I can remember. That’s probably because I do
not listen to it very much, even though it is available via the internet and a
clever little iPad app.
Actually I tell a lie.
Last summer, I listened a great deal to English local radio stations, including
one (a digital channel called “Gold”) which plays songs from the 1960s and 70s.
These songs are to be listened to and accompanied by a great deal of humming
and joining in and conversation along the lines “Do you remember that one?” and
“I remember where I was when this was being played.” Some caution needed here
of course before opening mouth.
One of the
competitions that goes on amongst broadcasters is the “Let’s see if we can talk
over the whole of this song”. Radio Jackie did well on this last year, managing
to talk over the first 45 seconds and the last 55 seconds of a 2 minutes 30
second song “Airport" by “Motors" (1978), a song, which if you know
it, you definitely sing along to.
And talking over the
music at the end of Morse is a good reason for bringing back capital
punishment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liH-uW2iymk
------------------------------------------------------------KICKSTARTING THE GERMAN ECONOMY
Have you noticed that it
is frequently stated in business and political circles that this or that initiative
is going to “Kick-start” the British
economy? I have often wondered how a half-dead donkey could somehow be
“kick-started” into life. For an economy where the dips are so
indistinguishable from each other that it looks like a flat line, I was not
sure what the appropriate verb might be.
Is it possible for the
economy to shuffle back into life? Perhaps
wriggle upwards might be a realistic
expression. Stagger into life might
be better, like someone with a hangover, staggering into the realms of
consciousness. I had thought of lurch,
but this is a bit too dynamic in the circumstances.
If we slide along the
bottom, then we might be able to say that we are going into a gentle rise, but then saying that the £35 billion High
Speed Rail link is going to cause a gentle rise out of our more general slide
along the bottom, doesn’t make for winning votes or good interviews on the
news.
Actually even this
statement is not true. In the case of the High Speed Rail project, the Germans will
win all the tenders under the EU Open Tender rules and all the grunt stuff will
be sub-contracted to British firms with Central European subsidiaries.
So headlines should
read “British Government to Spend £35 billion on High Speed Rail line to kick
start German and Polish economies.”
After all, as the Siemens
/ Bombardier case from two years ago showed, we don’t have anyone who makes
this stuff properly anymore or at least that is the opinion of the British
Civil Servants who award these contracts.
Is Grumpy getting too
political? Don’t answer this question. I am enjoying myself too much.
---------------------------------------------------------EXCITING OPPORTUNITIES
There is space in this
blog for a further overused or redundant adjective. Normally these are the
domain of the newsreader or newspaper article, but the job advertisement market
has its own list of mandatory adjectives.
In this respect, all job
opportunities are exciting. I don’t
like exciting opportunities, not just because of the endless repetition in job
advertisements of the word itself, but because I like boring. Exciting is for
the ski slopes, some difficult run giving an adrenalin rush or hooting at a
group of pedestrians meandering across the road (very immature, I know.)
I am not sure that I “do
exciting” generally or even ever. But I am an expert at boring. I like lists,
dates and things that have their place. The key to operations and accounting
work is making it routine and boring, even though career advancement lies in presenting
it as “exciting”.
So what is it that all
that all these jobs have got that makes them exciting? Presumably, there will
be plenty of opportunity to work extra hours to prove your enthusiasm for the
job to your boss. Of course, decisive action will be a constant feature, even
if today’s action is the opposite of yesterday’s.
I guess that dynamic
must come into this job somewhere, although this might be similar to being
decisive. “Exciting Opportunity” means plenty of action. I recollect that IBM
did a corporate advert some years back showing themselves as “dynamic”. It was
obvious to the watcher that they and their clients were merely chaotic. “IBM –
Specialist consultants to the truly chaotic” – Confusing the two is an easy
mistake to make.
An “Exciting
Opportunity” must include plenty of change. We are told that we live in a changing
environment, so in the new position, you must be constantly on the look-out for
opportunities for change. In fact, if
you fail to come up with at least 10 new ideas per month, then you are in
trouble. This philosophy has a good
pedigree. The Queen in Alice in Wonderland said that she’d sometimes believed
as many as six impossible things before breakfast. She could run courses in Change
Management at £1,000 per day or apply for one of these “exciting opportunities”.
Does saying a job is
an “Exciting Opportunity” attract a different type of candidate from one that
doesn’t? “Boring steady position in established function” might attract boring
steady people, which would seem an ideal match. So why don’t I see job adverts
like this?
If I do see this
advert, I might apply for it.
