Kickstarting the German Economy

TALKING OVER SONGS

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

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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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/16/bombardier-at-risk-after-loss-of-thameslink-deal

Is Grumpy getting too political? Don’t answer this question. I am enjoying myself too much.

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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.