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How long to sing this song?

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As Jules once famously said “you were saying something about best intentions”. This project started with those, it really did. My aim to write 40 stories about my first 40 years of work. Then before I knew it the anniversary has passed and the moment has gone. You don’t have to be a genius to work that one out. I was talking recently to someone about old rock stars. Should they carry on, with pomp and swagger, attempt to create new stuff and amaze people. Or churn out the hits on a never-ending treadmill, unable to let go of their limelight and the adoration of all their fans. Even though that fan base was as old as them and their younger peers were respectful but quietly scornful of their lack of youth and rebellion. What if they had never reached megastar status at all? Just as Alison Moyet apparently earns the UK average wage from Spotify streams, should those who had harboured dreams of greatness, persist in the hope that their journeyman canon is one day shot blasted into life by ...
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Courses for Horses

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  Back in the early days of my Graduate Trainee scheme, we used to have regular conversations with the Graduate team about what kind of roles we would like to have when we moved into a “proper” management position. This would crop up again as your career progressed, because for the first few years of my time at Lloyds Bank, people were appointed to positions rather than having the opportunity to apply for something they were keen to do. I quickly became convinced that there was one big joke going on within HR and the Management development people (I know what you might be thinking, but stop that now!), because whatever you expressed as a preference you were almost bound to get the exact opposite. People expressing a desire to work in the City of London’s Corporate team, might be sent to a remote branch in Lostwithiel, while those wanting to go into an IT team seemed to end up in the Treasury. I had gone first to Lloyds Leasing (see previous post) and then into the Branch network su...
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Compressed hours

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  I had the conversation about “generations” again last week. Quite frankly I’m tired of having it and I really must stop getting drawn into it. I even went to the trouble of having a related conversation with my new best friend, well, we are all doing it. Chat GPT told me how to be tactful and diplomatic in putting forward my views and the like. Unlike the young people of today, I forget which generation they are supposed to be, depends who you talk to. They are all-in with their snow-flakiness and their demands for a better life. Now any serious statistician should never promote an argument on anecdotal observations, or even worse, some kind of statement that starts with, “well I was very different when I was [insert age here]”. So I won’t do that. No, really. Back in early 1989 I had been itching to bring my training scheme to its conclusion and move on to my (see the possessive determiner there?!) first real job as an Assistant Manager. Wherever you group people together, they ...
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I should be so lucky

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Memory can play tricks on all of us if we allow it too, and the rose-tinted spectacles can be donned and waves of nostalgia can make the past seem much better than it actually was. That old Shakespearean theme of the bad being interred with bones, something like that. So it is with the 1980s, if you look back now it all seems so bright, optimistic and positive, when it reality it was a time of massive structural change that was atomising our communities and paving the way for the fractured and broken country we have now. But there were good things happening to me. Not that I was thinking too much about it as 1988 dawned. Life seemed quite positive as finally I got my opportunity to move to the back room and work as part of the Lending and Securities teams. This was where the fun in the branch seemed to be, most of the people working there seemed actually to enjoy being there, and a lot of laughter was always radiating from the room, in quite stark contrast to the rest of the branch, wh...
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Now I know my ABC…

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How did an idealistic, slightly naive, vaguely progressive young man of Thatcher’s Britain end up working for a Bank? It’s a very good question, well I think it is. The simple and most obvious answer is “money”. I was fed up with being broke or nearly broke, and graduate management training schemes offered great starting salaries and even better potential future salaries. Then there were the benefits. In a world, a time and a culture obsessed with owning your own home, employment with a bank offered cheap fixed-rate mortgages at a time when interest rates were high and extremely volatile.  But there was more to it than that, at least from the perspective of 40 years I think there was. At that age I was still trying to please my parents, even if they didn’t know it and I didn’t know it. Even if I was hardly speaking to them at the time, some part of me was trying to do something they’d approve of. Furthermore banks in those days were still highly bureaucratic and employed tens of th...
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Real Gone Kid

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Forty years. Wow. That is (very nearly) how long I have been working in full-time, paid employment. On the first of January 1986 I was probably recovering from a hangover somewhere, I can’t remember, but I do know I was rapidly approaching my final exams of my Biochemistry degree at Royal Holloway, University of London. There is a long story I could tell about my student days, how I came to be there, what it was like, but the purpose of this blog is to document, in forty stories, the first forty years of my working life. I hope you enjoy reading them, but if you are not happy with any of this, please leave me a comment below. I may take your feedback onboard! There is one pertinent fact about those student days, relevant to the start of my working life, and that was how much I had become involved in so-called student politics and the role the Student Union played at the University. Unlike many other unions at the time it was not heavily politicised, and though politics played a part, t...
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