This is a story about taking a break...

This time last year I was charging around Ireland, exhausted and stressed out of my mind to the point where I was losing my marbles, because I'd had such a rough ride up to the point that I finally got out of the country for a few days break.

August is a dreadful time to get anything done. The French have the right idea, basically taking the whole month off work, leaving the cities and heading for the coast. I peaked a little early this year, because I wanted to be on holiday while celebrating my birthday.

A friend raised the very valid point that becoming engaged in debate is exactly what I'm looking for when I'm courting controversy. To say that I'm shitposting or attention seeking would be untrue, but there's certainly a reason why I don't just keep a private journal.

Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, most of my peers have spawned offspring, and that means they're taking their snot-nosed little shits on holiday. Can you sense the provocative sarcasm? Certainly the irony in my tone has not come across effectively at times, causing offence to stressed out mummies and daddies over my irreverence towards the magic of parenthood.

Every so often I reconsider whether what I've been writing is balanced and fair, and occasionally somebody tells me I'm out of line or otherwise gives me feedback that directs my attention towards points of view I hadn't considered.

However, now we are in the middle of the school holidays, I definitely feel like any attempts to address my critics would fall on deaf ears. Most of my child-encumbered chums are too busy trying to stop their offspring drowning while in the paddling pool or World War III from kicking off in the back of their family-sized car packed with infants and infant paraphernalia.

Unless you've met me during your sprogged-up years, you're not going to know that I'm actually poking fun. For my own amusement, I'm assuming a caricature: that of the footloose and fancy free bachelor, who is too much of a cultured citydweller to be bothered with mopping up sick and pooh. In actual fact, if you have met me during your years of parenthood, I hope you think I'm at least a little bit sympathetic to the trials and tribulations of raising unruly offspring, and it's obvious that I actually like kids.

Ironically, those friends who genuinely are footloose and fancy free and have rejected the commitments of family life, have also missed the point. While they are off partying around the world, with buttloads of disposable income and zero fucks given for how the other half live, they've ignorantly chided me for not being more grateful for my lot in life. A couple of pals who life has conferred considerable good luck upon, have deigned to give me a lecture on homelessness and the struggles of the working class... presumably while also sipping champagne on a yacht and completely failing to see the irony.

The irony is not lost on me, no matter what you might think, and believe me when I say that I do consider those who have not been fortunate in life when I bemoan my own situation. I hope that I always give an adequate nod to say that I acknowledge my own fortune that I haven't had my limbs all cut off and lemon juice squeezed in my eyes while my testicles are removed with a rusty spoon. My God I'm so glad that didn't happen to me. Oh how terribly fortunate I am. I can hold up a prompt sign if you like, so you know when I'm being sarcastic.

I have this strange habit of directing what I write at various groups of people or individuals, which must be very confusing as a reader, but it's also confusing for me as a writer. Who am I writing for now? My passive-aggressive attacks on my parents, and my rebuttals of my critics, have fallen on deaf ears. It's the school holidays and everybody's off on the beach or at a country show.

I could stop, regroup, and even take this opportunity to actually write on themes rather than using my writing as a vehicle to deal with the demons of my mind and argue aloud with the thrust of my critics words, even if they're not reading or responding.

There's something satisfying in knowing that you've won the argument, whether your opponent listened and responded or not. So many people are terrible at debating anyway, believing that contradiction is the same thing. "No it isn't" then "yes it is" repeated ad nauseam. Yawn!

And so it is, I feel like I'm talking to myself, and this feeling is further exacerbated by the summer break and the "calm before the storm" moment I'm facing, where I feel like I'm shouting into an empty room, but I also know that I'm closer than I think to making a breakthrough.

Taking a break can so easily mean the abandonment of a project, and the web is littered with abandoned blogs. I might not have achieved much, but I've certainly achieved a degree of consistency.

I'm so close to turning a corner, and yet it feels like I'm getting nowhere during a lonely school holiday where everyone is distracted spending time with their families in the sunshine while I plug away at an unfulfilling job and continue to bare every aspect of my soul on the public Internet.

I could stop, but then I would be like Wile E. Coyote when he runs off the cliff. It's only when he stops running and looks down that he falls. If that cartoon coyote just kept running he would be fine.

That's the discipline of the completer-finisher. That's my discipline. I don't stop. I don't give up. Not until I achieve something. Not until I reach some kind of goal. The project's not done. I have to continue even if it's bleeding me dry.

Anyway, void, I know you're always here listening to me and it's mighty therapeutic to be able to talk at length. Feels a bit weird continuing to blog away when so many people are off on their summer holidays, but there we go!

Tags: #writing #ireland

This is a story about destiny...

I've been writing short stories all this week to fill my boring days at work. I wasn't going to share them, because I already share thousands of words every week, but this is one of my better efforts.

Anyway, without further ado, please allow me to introduce The Factory:

* * *

His mother had warned him that if he didn't try hard enough at school he would have to work in a factory, but this conflicted with Alan's day-to-day experience with his teachers. Alan's teachers always told him that he had amazing potential. Alan's teachers always told him that if he just applied himself, he would be a brilliant student. Perfect! No effort required then, until the exams actually counted for something. Why burn yourself out over mock exams and other work? Keep your gunpowder dry until the real battle.

Was it lazy? Was it arrogant? It seemed smart to Alan to not bust his balls on extra homework and every essay and assignment. School was going to go on and on for years and years, and then there was university after that. Yes, it was generally assumed that Alan would be going to university, because he was a sharp cookie. Just needed to apply himself. Just needed to try a bit harder. Why bother trying until the day of his GCSE exams, his A-levels, and his entrance examination for Oxford or Cambridge? Why break a sweat until then? Why get anxious about tomorrow's problems, today?

Whenever Alan did turn it on, concentrate, try hard, he found that he was showered with praise and good grades. His experience bore out everything that the world told him every day, except his mother's prophecy that he would end up working in a factory.

But now he worked in a factory.

In the factory, there were warehousemen who drove fork-lift trucks, ferrying pallets of supplies around the factory buildings, or loading the boxed up products being dispatched to the wholesalers. There were machine operators, who pressed oversized industrial buttons, to start and stop the various plant that mixed chemicals in huge vats, pumped liquid, or carried things on conveyor belts. The machine operators were responsible for hitting the big red STOP buttons in the event of an industrial accident, so they were slightly higher paid than the warehousemen, who only had to have a fork-lift truck driving license.

The lowest paid workers in the factory were those who performed repetitive manual labour that could not be easily automated. The manual workers took cans off the conveyor belt, stuck a sticky label on them, and then loaded them onto another conveyor belt. The manual workers picked out any cans with dents or loose lids, and put them onto large trolleys marked "Quality Control" which were wheeled to another area, where somebody else would check to see if the product could be salvaged or not.

There were the supervisors, who had risen through the ranks by doing one of the many jobs in the factory for 25 years or more. That was about how long it took to get promoted. If you had stuck it out for 25 years, and you'd managed not to make a fool of yourself, you were pretty much automatically promoted into a supervisor role. It was well understood, and it was the reason why many people were sticking with their low paid jobs, holding out hope for that promotion. The supervisors were paid marginally more than their colleagues, but the big bonus was that they didn't have to do any work anymore. The supervisors would march around, clean and smelling fresh, putting ticks on a checklist clipped to their clipboards.

Supervisors would escalate issues to management. Management were all the sons, daughters, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends and close friends of the family who had originally owned the factory, or another factory. To enter into management, you had to be born into management, or marry into management. There was a legend, often told, of the boy who used to sweep the factory floor who got promoted to be a manual worker, then a supervisor, and then a manager. This legend was the lottery-winning chance that everybody in the factory secretly hoped for, but of course it was a myth. Whenever new managers were needed, only people who were already managers would be eligible for the role. Can't get the job without the experience, can't get the experience without the job. That was the Catch 22 that kept the riff-raff out of the boardroom.

But, there had been a new role that had been created, that nobody felt qualified to do. Some of the managers had hired family members, friends, to try and do the role, but nobody had been able to perform the duties required. There had been several rounds of telephone interviews to screen candidates. Human Resources had then called in promising candidates to understand if they had the right cultural fit and commitment to the mission of the company, to be suitable. Then junior management had held some day-long sessions where candidates fought it out with each other, in some real-world scenarios that had been set as a test. Then, finally, there were several more face to face interviews with senior management, before at long last the CEO personally vetted the remaining handful of hopefuls, and selected a winner. A job offer was dispatched and the factory's newest recruit joined the team. However, every person they had recruited to date had left, soon after starting their new job.

It was time to try the open market. Jobs were routinely advertised on the open market, but invariably it would be somebody known to somebody else who would be recruited. You had to know somebody. Any candidate from the open market was there just to make up the numbers, and to pay lip service to the idea that there was some meritocracy to the process, but everybody in management knew that unless you were already in management, your face simply didn't fit: you weren't part of the club.

And so, the unprecedented step of hiring somebody on the basis of their Curriculum Vitae was made. Their aptitude and qualifications were actually considered on merit, and the interviewers actually mulled over the answers to the questions that were asked. The management team was getting desperate. It was time to hire somebody who might be capable of doing the job, rather than simply recycling the same pool of people who had been born into privileged positions. Management were out of ideas, because they had only ever taken their ideas from an insular pool of people with the same background. It was time to try an outsider.

Alan had been through the same gruelling rounds of telephone interviews, HR grillings and face to face meetings with various junior and senior managers. Alan had suffered the same dismissive attitudes, because he had never held a management role, because his family had never owned a factory and gifted him a job. Everybody who interviewed him let him know, subtly, that he wasn't cut out for management because he wasn't part of the club. However, begrudgingly they had been forced to recommend their favoured outside candidate. Alan had been chosen for his strengths, not because of nepotism. Management were not happy about this. This was not the way things worked.

Finally, the CEO had awarded Alan the job. The CEO knew that the factory had little choice. It had an unfilled role that was very important. Nobody from the pool of those with managerial experience had proven able to perform the duties. Of course none of the supervisors could be promoted. That would be ridiculous! Alan had good grades and had studied at Cambridge, so on paper he was a cut above everybody else that they had interviewed, except the one thing that would normally disqualify him from ever entering management: that he actually had to apply for a job, rather than just being gifted one by his family.

Alan's roles and responsibilities had been explained to him at length during the interview process, but now he had an HR meeting to discuss his salary and his final job description.

"There's been a slight change" said Sandra, the HR woman. "There's actually just one thing we need you to do" she explained. Sandra pushed a piece of paper with some text printed on it over the desk towards Alan. "Is this some kind of joke?" Alan asked.

The salary negotiations had taken a new direction now that Alan knew that his intended role had somewhat changed. Normally, candidates enthusiastically accepted pretty much whatever was offered in terms of remuneration by the time that they had reached the point of a job offer. The purpose of the interview process was to make a candidate so relieved when the stress and the anxiety of the whole awful ordeal was over, that they wouldn't want to risk losing the job offer when it was on the table.

"I want twice as much money" Alan plainly declared.

"Ridiculous!" Sandra had replied. "You'd be paid more than the CEO if we gave you that much" she spat, contemptuously.

"But look at what you want me to do" Alan pleaded. "What you're offering just isn't enough to do that".

Eventually, Sandra had backed down. She was shocked. She'd never actually had to negotiate with somebody before, and even when candidates had tried, she just held her ground and they gave in. She'd met people like Alan before, but she'd never come up against such stubborn determination. His attitude had seemed to change completely when she told him what his new role would entail.

Alan started his new job with something of a sense of happiness. He was going to be paid an obscene amount of money. He couldn't believe his luck. Even though Alan knew that the size of his paycheque bore no relation to his actual value as a person, he still felt special and appreciated to be receiving such healthy remuneration for his efforts. Alan was almost cocky and arrogant, knowing that he was the highest paid person in the factory. He was the highest paid person he knew. He calculated how much he was going to earn every hour, every minute, every second... it was a lot.

Three supervisors met Alan at the factory gates and gave him a brief tour of the facilities. Alan was soaking up his surroundings with glee. It was nice to feel part of something. It was nice to see the efficiency of everything, as cans and boxes, and crates and vats of liquid were ferried around the warehouses, and vast quantities of products were stacked up ready to be dispatched to customers.

Alan was shown to the testing room. Everything had been prepared for him.

The testing room was a cube in the corner of one of the cavernous warehouses, with a door labelled "TESTING ROOM" in bold black text. The testing room had a round silver door handle, and a piece of plastic that could be slid so that the words "IN USE: DO NOT ENTER" could be displayed, or hidden when the room was unoccupied.

"Yes, it's ready to go. Please start when you're ready" one of the supervisors said, gesturing towards the door.

Alan slid the plastic so that "IN USE" was displayed, and stepped inside the room, closing the door behind him.

Inside the room, there was black folding chair in the centre, and 4 blank walls. The walls had a slightly glossy shiny look to them. There was a sharp chemical smell in the air. An extraction fan whirred above, sucking away the fumes. Alan sat down in the chair, and begun to look at the walls.

After 12 hours, a loud whistle blast could be heard throughout the factory, including inside Alan's room. The factory workers queued up to clock out of their shift, and then disappeared out of the exit to the car park and bus stop. The supervisors jumped in their battered old cars and drove home. The manual workers queued up in the rain to catch the bus. Alan queued up for the bus too: he would have to wait for his first paycheque before he could think about buying a car.

The next day, Alan arrived and made his own way to the room. He opened the door and there were a couple of men in there who were just packing up their things. One of the men said "all ready for you" and then the room was left vacant. Alan slid the sign to show "IN USE" again, closed the door and sat in his chair, waiting for the factory whistle while looking at the glossy walls.

After 11 or so hours, Alan started to wonder if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Were the walls slightly less glossy? There certainly seemed to be patches where the walls looked somewhat more matt. There were areas that were still shiny and reflecting light, but there were large parts that seemed to no longer have the same sheen. Before he could think about this much longer, the factory whistle blew and everybody left for home.

Alan had a troubling night of sleep, wondering what he was doing. Had he made a mistake in taking this job? It was certainly very well paid, but it wasn't at all what he imagined he would be doing for a living. He started to think about the nice new car he was going to buy himself with his first paycheque. Yes, just focus on the money, he told himself as he drifted off to sleep.

The following morning, two men were just leaving the room as he arrived. They were carrying rollers, brushes and cans of paint. "Morning!" they cheerily called to Alan. "Morning!" Alan enthusiastically replied. It was nice to be greeted by his colleagues. They seemed happy to have him there.

Inside the room, it had been repainted in a wonderful bright new colour. This made Alan joyously happy. This minor change in his environment and routine was well appreciated and his whole 12 hour shift passed quickly. Alan felt noticed, cared for. Perhaps his doubts about this career were misplaced.

In the evening, Alan considered taking out a car loan. I mean, now that he had found a job that he enjoyed and was well paid, surely there would be no risk in taking out some finance to allow him to have a reliable vehicle to transport him to work? It would be a nice treat that he could have now, rather than having to wait until his paycheque. He would be able to drive to work rather than taking the bus. That would be a big improvement in his quality of life, not having to stand and queue for the bus in the rain.

Now the working week was nearly done. Alan felt really happy about the approaching weekend as he rode the bus on his way to work.

The painters were leaving his room again when he arrived, carrying their brushes and rollers. Wow! This was exciting, Alan thought. "What colour have they painted my room today?" he wondered.

Inside the room, the walls were the same colour as the previous day, Alan felt sure. What the hell? Were his eyes playing tricks on him? Was his memory fading? Maybe the paint simply needed a second coat, but it had looked pretty good yesterday, he thought.

Alan's 12 hour shift was spent pondering the conundrum of the paint colour. Strangely, he was almost but not quite able to enjoy watching the glossy sheen of the wet paint change to a matt texture, as it dried. He made a little game, of checking each of the slower drying areas intermittently, to see if they were still shiny.

Friday brought another almost identical day. The painters were leaving as Alan arrived, and the colour was unchanged. The only thing that was different was that Alan was now certain that no further coats of paint had been required in order to give even coverage. The walls had been adequately coated with paint the day before. This extra coat of paint was wholly unnecessary, for even the most diligent decorator.

Clocking out of his shift, Alan was troubled and locked into his own mind, questioning what he was doing and why. His eyes were glazed over and not engaging with the faces of his colleagues as they left the factory. On the bus ride home, Alan started to shake off his doubts and just enjoy the fact that work was over until Monday. It was the weekend and he could relax, knowing that he had successfully got though his first week, and he was a little closer to his first paycheque.

The weekend was overshadowed with niggling doubts. Alan had been planning on going to the car dealership to enter into a finance agreement and arrange to take delivery of a brand new car. Instead, Alan was almost in a daze, unable to shake off the feeling that his new job was not quite what he had bargained for. Were things going to change? For sure, on that day that the walls had been repainted, he had felt that things were going to be OK, but then the end of the week things had made no sense.

By Sunday evening, Alan had started to become quite anxious about the week ahead. If the colour of the walls changed again, that would be better, but it still didn't really answer the question of what he was doing there. If the colour of the walls didn't change, he would be forced to question what the purpose of his role was. He knew that it was important that he didn't ask difficult questions or voice his doubts, and he didn't want to risk that big salary. How long could he hold his tongue?

On Monday morning, Alan felt extremely tired even though he had not stayed up late or slept especially badly. He felt tense. His muscles ached. He felt butterflies in his tummy. Why would he be so anxious? His job was easy and he'd made it though the first week with no problems. There was no reason why he couldn't continue day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. Think about all that money he could save up for retirement. Think how rich he was going to be.

Alan arrived at work with seconds to spare. He was almost late. The room was empty, but the walls were shiny and wet with fresh paint. The painters had obviously left shortly before Alan had arrived.

For the first three days of the new week, the paint remained the same colour but it was always freshly repainted. Alan never saw the painters again because he was arriving later and later to work, questioning what on earth he was doing and how he could carry on without understanding the purpose of it all. It was so meaningless, so purposeless, so lacking in rational explanation, so wasteful. He was the highest paid person in the factory, and yet he didn't understand the importance of his role. In fact, his role seemed pointless to him. He persevered, thinking about the money and the new car.

On Thursday, he was torn between just quitting his job or marching into the boardroom to demand answers from the senior management. He knew that either option would pretty much spell the end of his career.

Arriving exceptionally late, Alan turned the handle and opened the door of the testing room a fraction. Inside, the walls had been repainted a different colour. Alan was flooded with a disproportionate amount of relief that something had at last changed. It had been more than a week since the colour had been altered, and even though it had happened once before, he was now overjoyed that it had happened again. It had seemed like forever that he had lived with the same colour of fresh paint, day after day.

On Friday, the wall colour changed again, and now Alan was almost ecstatic. He felt giddy with the waves of emotional relief that swept over him. He was almost drunk with feelings. Everything seemed to make sense, even though they didn't. Everything seemed to be slotting into place, even though they weren't. Alan spent his whole shift daydreaming about driving his new car, and resolved to rush to the dealership first thing on Saturday and sign the car finance papers.

Alan's sleep was very disturbed with excitement about getting a new car. Of course, he would not be taking delivery for some time, but that's not what he was thinking about as he fitfully slept until the earliest possible opportunity he could get up and rush to the dealership when it opened in the morning. At the dealership, Alan borrowed far more money than he had originally intended. Buoyed with the optimism of last couple of days at work he'd just had, in stark contrast to his misery and anxiety at the start of the week, Alan felt that he must purchase the very best car that he could afford, in order to give everything some meaning.

Then, as soon as the door of the dealership had swung closed behind him, he felt a sense of regret, rising panic. What had he done?

Now his weekend was doubly anxious. What if he had another week where they didn't change the colour of the walls? What if he lost his job before he got paid? What if the new car was not as wonderful as he hoped it would be.

Alan tried to console himself in daydreams about him driving the new car. Alan tried to picture how much happier he would be, owning and driving a new car. It didn't seem to be quite enough to settle his deep sense of unease, that he was now trapped into his job in order to keep up the repayments on the car finance. The thought that he now had no option but to stay in his job, or else face both unemployment and insolvency, was a terrifying amount of pressure.

The following week was sheer agony. The colour of the walls remained the same every day, even though they were freshly repainted for all five days. Alan tried to lose himself in daydreams about taking delivery of his new car, and driving it for the first time. He tried to imagine the new car smell. He tried to imagine tearing off the plastic that protected the brand new seats, like tearing of wrapping paper at Christmas. But it didn't work. Time dragged incredibly. Every second felt like a minute. Every minute felt like an hour. Every hour felt like a day. Every day felt like a month. The week felt like a year. A year of pain. A year of staring at the blank walls, wondering what he had done, but feeling completely trapped by his finance agreement.

Alan made it through a second week that was much the same. He dare not arrive late, for his financial security depended on him keeping this job. He dare not raise his concerns with senior management, for he needed this job. He was locked in. He had to keep quiet and just keep doing what he was doing.

When he woke up on Saturday it was 3pm in the afternoon. He hadn't gone to bed late, but the stress and anxiety were exhausting. He was wrecked by the constant tension, the constant worry, the constant doubt. He was lolling around in bed, not really wanting to face the day because he was too emotionally drained. And then he remembered: he could collect his new car today.

Instead of joy, Alan felt trepidation. He procrastinated in getting ready and travelling to the dealership. There was too much riding on this. If he didn't enjoy his new car, his life was over. How on earth could a new car solve the misery of his day to day existence? No material object was capable of resolving his crisis, surely?

Arriving late, the car dealer was only just able to complete all the paperwork in time to let Alan have the car that day. Alan thought he was going to literally collapse and die when he was told that there might not be enough time before the dealership closed, and he'd have to come back another day. Perhaps the dealer had seen the grimace on Alan's face, and had been taken aback. Instead of being fobbed off, the dealership had pulled out all the stops to get Alan his car, while he sat exhausted in the waiting room.

At last, Alan was handed the keys and led to the car park where his shiny new car was ready to go. The paint colour wasn't quite the same as the one he specified and the dealer had forgotten the upgrade to the wheels that he had been promised, but he didn't care. Alan wasn't going to refuse to take delivery now, when he'd been working for so many years to get this prize; or so it felt. Alan signed his name and stepped into the driver's seat. This was finally happening.

It was certainly nice, like he had imagined, being in a brand new car with the smell of plastic and foam. Everything was unmarked, blemish free. Alan had to pinch himself to be reminded that this was not one of his many daydreams he had been having in anticipation of this day.

Driving to work, Alan drew envious stares from fellow work colleagues who he had previously taken the bus with. He apologetically cringed, knowing that they were thinking how flash he was, displaying his wealth so obviously like this. He felt like a traitor, having taken the bus with the ordinary factory workers, and now flaunting his privilege, while his co-workers were soaked from the rain. However, it had been a remarkably enjoyable journey to work despite the traffic. Alan arrived at his room feeling remarkably relaxed and happy.

Now, Alan spent 12 hours waiting to be able to enjoy his drive home. The anticipation of it almost seemed to make the time go slower, but at least he was carried through the first half of the day with a bit of happiness from his drive to work. He fantasised about perhaps going on a long drive at the weekend.

The week dragged, but it was not too bad. As an added bonus, the room had been repainted on Thursday in a new colour. Alan's week was almost tolerable. This could be sustainable, he thought.

Another couple of weeks passed with Alan's car getting a little bit dirtier, scratched and dented from the daily commute and people carelessly opening doors in the car park, or brushing past his vehicle with sharp protruding zips or studs on their clothing, damaging the paint. Inside the car, it was littered with discarded coffee cups from Alan's commute, which now seemed painfully slow as he queued in traffic. The bus zipped past him in the bus lane, as he sat fuming at the wheel. Driving to work was an added pressure, an added anxiety.

The same nagging doubt about what he was doing, became bigger than the novelty of driving to work, which had quickly become the norm. The changes in wall colour were as routine as anything else. Alan simply spent 12 hours sat in his room questioning his very existence, and trying to will himself to think about the money, which was very much less than before, because of his borrowing obligations. Working to pay off his car loan really did not seem to make any sense except in the context of his job, which also didn't make any sense.

In a way, Alan hankered for the days when he used to take the bus, because he didn't have the pressure of having to drive himself and the crippling financial burden of the loan he had taken out to buy the car. Of course, the car was now well careworn and uncared for and was worth a tiny fraction of what Alan had paid for it. He would never be able to repay his debts by selling his car. He would have to keep the job, in order to keep up his loan repayments. He was trapped, and it was destroying him, knowing that he was damned if he did, and damned if he didn't.

Alan started to drink heavily. At first in the evenings, to deal with his anxiety at facing the working day. Then he started to drink at the weekends, to deal with his anxiety at facing the working week. Then he started to drink in the mornings in the car park, so that he would be drunk at work and the day would pass quicker. Alan had no problem hiding his drunkenness at this stage, because he was inebriated around-the-clock. He would never let the alcohol levels in his bloodstream drop, because he would start to get the shakes and start throwing up. He had woken up in the night, soaked in sweat, when he had suffered an epileptic fit in his sleep.

Now physically dependent on alcohol, Alan's his body would complain with horrific withdrawal symptoms and seizures if he stopped drinking. He was also psychologically dependent on intoxication to be able to cope with the monotony of his job. Sobriety was barred to him, because he was unable to continue to work without alcohol, and he needed the job to pay for his loan. Alcohol numbed the stress and anxiety of the situation.

His mother had warned him that if he didn't apply himself at school, he would amount to nothing, and would be a manual labourer in a factory. He was now the highest paid person in the factory, and higher paid than even the CEO. He had a lovely car, and he was on top of his finances. His credit rating was sky high. He could borrow as much as he wanted, to buy a house, a boat or whatever he wanted. However, he was now wary of borrowing any more, knowing that it would shackle him more to the job that had driven him to alcohol. There was no way out. Material things brought temporary relief, but only at the expense of further tying him to a pointless job that denied him any sense of purpose.

People asked Alan why didn't he just retrain as a circus juggler, or a bricklayer? Perhaps he could be a flower arranger, or a concert pianist? Did these people not understand that those salaries would never allow him to service his debts? Did these people not realise that it costs money, on rent and tuition fees, to be able to retrain, and all Alan's money went on rent, debt and alcohol. "Why don't you save up some money and go travelling?" people asked. Saving money meant less alcohol, and it was only through alcohol that Alan could make it through the day. He was mortgaging his health in order to keep his job, in order to repay his debts. Couldn't people see he'd love to dream. Alan was not short of dreams and ideas, but how could he pursue them when he was so trapped?

Riding the wall of death, faster and faster, round and round. Alan had to keep drinking more and more in order to maintain his intoxication, as his body became more and more tolerant to the copious amounts of alcohol he imbibed. Three bottles of wine every day. Cans of super strength lager to keep him topped up. Then a bottle of whiskey every day. Then two bottles of vodka every day. Then he lost count. There were bottles in his gym bag, in his car, littered throughout his flat. He had hip flasks in every pocket. He lived in constant fear of running out of alcohol and getting the shakes, having a fit at work that would cost him his job.

Nobody seemed to notice that Alan was tanked up on alcohol the whole time. He was functional. He was turning up to work and doing his job just like he'd always done. He was reliable, dependable. He was uncomplaining. He didn't ask any questions. He was the perfect employee. Moulded to fit his job perfectly. He had filled his role better than anybody in senior management could have possibly hoped for. The CEO was overjoyed with Alan's appointment, and the work that he was doing. He was worth every penny of his salary, even if Alan felt worthless.

Knowing that he was an alcoholic and unable to function outside the narrow remit of his role, Alan was even more trapped than before. There was no way that he would find another job. There was nobody who needed somebody with such specific skills and experience. There was nobody who could afford to pay Alan the salary that he needed. There was no way that a functional alcoholic could hide their problem throughout the gruelling interview process. There was no way that a functional alcoholic would be able to start doing something new. He was just surviving on muscle memory, on practice and routine. Alan's brain was shot to pieces.

Alan wondered if suicide would be preferable to his existence. He knew that he was slowly committing suicide anyway. Soon his liver would be destroyed. Soon his health would fail completely, and he would quickly die. Wouldn't it be better to do it swiftly, before he got hospitalised and he painfully slipped away? Death would be unpleasant, as his organs failed one by one and his body gave up due to the ravages of alcohol. Surely it would be better to just kill himself quickly.

Stockpiling paracetamol from the chemist, buying boxes two at a time, Alan gathered hundreds of pills.

There was no moment of doubt when he did it, swallowing handful after handful of white tablets, washed down with whiskey. Alan had selected a fine single malt to end his life. Leaving no suicide note, he had however tidied up his flat and set his financial affairs in order. Everything would be found neat and tidy, when the police were sent by the factory to see why he hadn't turned up for work at all that week.

Of course, people were sad when he'd gone. "He could have been anything he wanted" they said. He had amazing potential. He just had to apply himself to something. The world was his oyster. There were so many opportunities.

Nobody saw how trapped Alan was, and he had known that he could never explain. People would never understand how he could be so trapped, when he was so well paid and so good at his job. He was steady and dependable. He never rocked the boat. He never complained. He just got on with his work.

His mother didn't mention her prophecy about the factory at the funeral. Many of his work colleagues attended the burial, and it would have been insulting to talk about factory work as undesirable. There was also a subtle point that Alan's mother had missed: he had ended up working at a factory, just as she had warned, but she had been proud of him because it was a prestigious role.

What Alan's mother had failed to understand was that the men who manually laboured in the factory felt like they made a difference. Every full lorryload of product that left the factory felt like some small achievement. Even a full day spent sticking labels on cans and transferring items on conveyor belts felt somehow useful.

However, Alan had never figured out what the purpose of his role was. He knew that he was well paid, and that he was a valued employee, but he didn't know why. Alan had been unable to place himself anywhere in the grand scheme of things. Alan had never been unable to get over the most basic reduction of his job description to the simplest possible explanation, which was now chiselled into his gravestone in commemoration of his great work: 

"He watched paint dry"

* * *

Tags: #writing #shortstories #alcohol

This is a story about admiration...

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, we're told. I'm sure it's also a way to make somebody feel self conscious as hell, and maybe even feel great pressure to live up to expectations. People looking to you for inspiration, guidance and direction in their lives: it's a lot of responsibility. Thankfully I don't have that problem, being a complete loser.

While I haven't lifted a life plan straight out of any of my friends' lives, I've certainly borrowed parts of their life that I admire. The easiest thing to do is try and clone something of their digital persona. If they write a blog, you write a blog. If they tweet, you tweet. You read what they read, and try to understand where they're coming from when they make certain intellectual and emotional points: you try and empathise.

If you spend a bunch of time with a person, at school, at work, online, you start to get a sense of who they are, superficially. If you're a relatively sponge-like character like I am, you soak up mannerisms, certain phrases and even accents and colloquialisms. In a way, if you speak like a person, you start to think like them.

Well that got real creepy real quick, didn't it?

I was supposed to be writing a blog post to reassure some of my friends that they're not responsible for me. I was supposed to be writing to say that I'm sorry if it was all a bit too personal, when I alluded to how important your influence has been in helping me discover some of the pieces that make up my personality. However, it's all come out a bit like: I wanna be like you.

If you don't have any role models, how are you supposed to figure out what you want to be and who you want to be? I think you can admire somebody and want to be like certain aspects of their personality and do things like they do, but you're still very much yourself.

When I think about the things that an admired friend has done, built, written, I don't think "I've got to do that too". Instead I think about what was good and interesting and useful and inspiring about what they did, and I try to emulate their passion and industriousness, by reverse-engineering what I imagine to be the process that led them to arrive at their achievements.

Friends who are musically talented have not led me to learning the piano or the guitar. Instead I've looked at their passion for music and tried to understand how the pursuit of music became a passion, and not a skill simply to be acquired through practice and repetition. Sure, you can become good at something purely by imitating somebody. You can learn to play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix, including imitations of all his mistakes, but do you really feel the way that Hendrix felt when you play, or are you merely miming the actions?

There's no point in turning yourself into a best-guess clone of somebody, just because you like and admire them. There's no happiness or salvation to be found in learning to look and act like somebody, unless you wanted to be a professional impersonator. Instead, if you think somebody looks passionate and fulfilled by something, you've gotta understand the dynamic that's driving that.

Life can also throw some weird curveballs. Like, I didn't get the whole social networking thing. When I heard an old schoolfriend was developing a social networking platform, I was like "what's the point?". Then I got into kitesurfing, and through kitesurfing I got into discussion forums, and discussion forums are mostly built on phpBB, which is a social networking platform. Social networking inadvertently changed my life for the better, but if I'd tried to involve myself in the world that my friend was passionate about it, I would have been lost until I saw the value through my own experiences.

Now, when somebody tells me their social business model is like an existing business model, but social, I'm like "so you have a comments section and people can click a button to tweet your shit, right?" and they're like, no, it's also a community, and I'm like "so you have a popup that asks you to fill in your email address so you can spam them?" and they're like, yeah, pretty much that.

Through the clouds of the bullshitters who don't really get it. Through all the swarms of "me too" idiots who are trying to hit all the buzzwords, it's passion and a depth of experience and knowledge that really shines through. I can be cynical as hell with my friends, but I know that I simply don't get the things that they're passionate about, until I do, and then I neatly slot them into my worldview.

It might look like I'm patchwork quilt of stolen ideas, borrowed personality traits and copycat behaviours, but I still make everything my own because I too have grown to see the value in the things that my friends have opened my eyes to.

I apologise if the hero worship is an unwanted pressure, or makes you feel uncomfortable. I'm sorry about where our worlds collide and I might directly or indirectly make reference to your influence on me and the stuff I'm doing. For sure I'm doing a bunch of figuring out who the hell I am and what makes me tick, and that's meant revisiting everything since childhood. It might be a bit cringeworthy, but maybe I'll get somewhere.

Anyway, I hope I don't make you feel too self conscious, and I hope that your involvement in my story has not been unwanted.

Thanks.

Tags: #friends #socialmedia

This is a story about simplicity...

A compressed spring is heavier than an uncompressed spring. When you lay down on your mattress, the springs of the mattress are actually getting heavier. When you get in your car, the springs of the suspension are getting heavier. When you wind up a clockwork watch, it weighs more. Wait, what?

Yes, it's as simple as I just said. When you squash a spring, the spring gets heavier. Any questions?

Probably just one: whaaaaat?

Well, it's because of E = mc² you see.

Oh, boring. It's one of Nick's crazy rants about physics. Perhaps he's gone nuts again. Perhaps he's having another hypomanic episode. Well, in some ways you're right. But before anybody shouts "BANANA" at me [it's my 'safe' word] you should really read on a little further.

The reason why I race off on those hypomanic episodes is that most of the time, some evil passenger in my car keeps putting the handbrake on. People keep climbing on my back and making me carry them. People keep putting rocks in my pockets and getting me to drag their shit along for them. I'm basically frustrated as hell the whole time at the endless monotonous boredom and not being able to get on with my projects because of absolute bullshit. I just like to work on things and finish them, you see. If you tell me that you need something building, I'll get on and build it, and give you a completed project, instead of sitting around with my head up my butt. I don't really like sitting around with my head up my butt. I like getting on and building shit.

And so, I become a compressed spring. The more that I'm held back, the more that I become coiled and squashed and full of energy, ready to spring forwards when I'm released. The time windows are very short, but I build a lot of cool stuff very quickly. I built iPhone apps that reached #1 in the charts in a matter of weeks. I built a gigantic summerhouse in my garden in the space of a few days. I don't generally fuck about.

"But why do springs get heavier when they're compressed, Nick?" I hear you ask. It's really easy to explain.

Energy and mass are equivalent. Therefore, if you apply a weight to the top of a spring, and it squashes down, the energy that is stored up in that spring is stored as mass. More mass means the spring is more heavy. When you take the weight off the spring, allowing it to uncompress, the mass is converted back into energy, and the spring gets lighter again.

That's all that the equation E = mc² really says. It says energy equals mass [times the speed of light squared]. Energy-mass equivalence.

OK... the speed of light squared is a pretty big number, so the amount of mass is pretty tiny compared to the amount of energy. So tiny that there isn't a set of scales accurate enough in the whole world to measure just how much heavier our spring got, when we compressed it. The amount of mass that we created from energy, by compressing the spring, was teeny tiny.

Equally though, you don't need to turn much mass into energy to create lots of energy.

When people talk about splitting the atom and nuclear weapons, I'm not sure what your average person on the street imagines. Perhaps they think that atoms are actually being destroyed to create the explosion. When a chemical explosive is detonated, the chemicals are rapidly being turned into gas, which is many many times more voluminous than the size of the solid or liquid explosives. This is not what's happening during a nuclear reaction.

The nuclei of atoms are held together by the strong nuclear force. Think of it like a door latch. The door latch holds together particles with similar electrical charge. I'm sure you remember playing with magnets, and you know that like poles repel each other. So, when you put the red end of magnet towards the red end of another magnet, they don't want to touch each other. The strong nuclear force holds those two red ends together, stopping them from flying apart. This is much akin to our coiled spring.

When the nucleus of an atom is split by being bashed into by another particle, a bit like a wrecking ball smashing into a house, then the 'latch' of the strong nuclear force is broken, and the particles with the same charge repel each other. The different parts of the atom fly apart because of this repulsion. It's like those coiled springs are uncoiling.

This means that energy is being released. Lots more energy than it took to unlatch the strong nuclear force that held the nucleus together. It's a bit like a room full of mouse traps, all sprung-loaded and waiting to go off. It only takes one light little touch to cause one mouse trap to go off, and before you know it, they're all setting each other off in a great big chain reaction.

And that's how a self-sustaining nuclear reaction works. A small amount of input energy is required to start the chain reaction, but once it's started, there's plenty of energetic particles flying around to smash into other nuclei and cause them to break apart. Less energy input was required than the amount of total energy output, and only a very small amount of the mass is actually being released, by the strong nuclear force being overcome, allowing the subatomic parts of the nucleus to fly apart.

The same cascade reaction is used in a nuclear power plant as was used in the atomic bombs that blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's called nuclear fission.

So, how does this relate to anything? Well, whether it's reading a stack of books about nuclear physics (this, by the way, was only the most basic introduction I'm afraid) or writing hundreds of thousands of words, I'm kinda a bit like that coiled spring, ready to unleash my energy on whatever I can when I'm given my chance, and I'm unlatched.

I just need a small opening, a small opportunity, and I'll run headlong at it. I'm so desperately bored by having to go at snails pace because of the limitations of the world around me. I live with constant frustration that I can't go at a natural pace, and so I go twice as quick as I should do when I'm finally given the opportunity to get on with something.

Had I ever gotten the chance to study theoretical physics at university, I would have read half as much in twice the time. Had I ever gotten to write at my own pace, with enough money behind me to keep a roof over my head, I would have taken twice as long and written half as much.

I'm now wrestling with the problem that I'm pretty much working two jobs, and in one of them I'm trying too hard at to compensate for the lack of fulfilment in the other. My day job doesn't challenge me. My day job gives me zero job satisfaction. And so when I get home in the evenings, I write and I write and I write. I've even taken to rattling off a couple of short stories every day while I'm at work. The one I wrote this morning was 6,000 words. That's right. I just rattled off 6,000 words because I'm so damn frustrated and bored, but I'm still working a full time job as well as producing some 14,000 words a day. It's too damn much and I'm going to burn out, but my day job is utter bullshit. My life is utter bullshit.

It's such a fucking rush, a hurry. It's such a fucking struggle. Trying to put up with enough boring bullshit that I've got a lump of money behind me to allow me to take a break and work on something I love and I'm passionate about. Either that, or I just take the tiny windows of opportunity where I find them, and work as hard as I can and as fast as I can, before the bullshit catches up with me again.

I honestly thought to myself that prison wouldn't be so bad. So much time to read and write, and ponder stuff. Really, I'm a fucking prisoner at the moment. I can't exactly get an interesting book out at my desk. Even when I'm writing, I'm doing it while looking over my shoulder. I've got to keep one eye on the boss, and be on my game in case I get asked to do something or somebody has a question for me. It's so fucking tense you know? It's compressing me. It's squashing me. It's making me dense and dark and heavy.

I fantasise about living in a tent, unencumbered by having to make rent payments and keep the electric and gas switched on. What would I really need, in this day and age? You can do so much on a smartphone.

I'm coming full circle. In a little over a month I will have been writing every day for a year. This whole thing started with me writing about some research I did on a public bench at a railway station. I think how different my life was then, and somehow I had much better quality of life, even though I was destitute.

Do I want this? This life? This life of commuting on the morning train, and office chit-chat and the daily grind, and of looking busy at my desk and saying clever shit to impress the boss, and hiding in the toilets browsing the Internet, and writing short stories in a really small font to disguise what I'm doing, just to pass the endless boring hours, and watching the clock, counting down, counting down, down, down. Down to what? My premature death from the stress and anxiety of it all?

Plenty of research has now proven that working a boring shitty office job is more unhealthy and lifespan shortening than smoking. Famously, people are suing their employers for the mind-numbingly dumb work they're asked to do. It's almost physically agonising. I'm being squashed. My very life force, my energy, my dignity, my passion, my personality... it's all being squeezed out of me like I'm a tube of cheap toothpaste.

I feel so sick and anxious. I don't know how to continue. I know that fiscally it makes perfect sense to continue. It's easy money, but it doesn't look that easy when it seems to be the root cause of my mood instability. People either ask me to work too hard for too long, so I burn out, or they bore the shit out of me, so I eventually explode with frustration. The pyramid scheme of corporate life is destroying lives. My life is being destroyed.

Oh God I want to throw up. This isn't just a job you fuckers. This is literally fucking me up. I can't do it much longer. I'm going to have a motherfucking breakdown. I can't cope and I'm waving the white flag in surrender but yet the gunfire does not seem to pause.

"Everybody needs to work"

"You have a great job"

"You're so well paid"

"People would love to have your opportunities"

"Count your blessings"

"Just another few decades and you'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams"

"Not long now"

"C'mon it can't be that hard"

"You should try my job"

"You've got things easy"

"I'd love it if I was bored all the time"

"You spoiled bratty bastard"

"You earn 6 or 7 times as much as I do"

"Why don't you follow your dreams"

"You've got nothing to complain about"

FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF

Argh! I can't deny my feelings any longer. I fucking well did what I have to, to get out from a fucked up situation, and I got somewhat out of the way of the oncoming collision, but it's been at great personal expense. I can't express how much it's killed me to put myself in a position where I might as well put my brain in a pickle jar and wheel my cryogenically frozen body into position at my desk.

Imagine if I picked fruit and vegetables for a living, and I slept in a barn on the farm where I worked. I could keep some of the fruit and vegetables that I picked, and eat them. My labour would provide my contribution for my space in the barn, as well as enough beans, rice, pulses and meat to keep my protein and carbohydrate intake at a healthy level. I would be able to see, quite literally, the fruits of my labour each day.

I live a life that could not be more opposite. I will never meet the people who use my software, and I don't even create the software anymore. I manage a bunch of people to create software for me. And I don't even see the people I manage face to face. They live thousands of miles away in some developing world country. I don't even know what management is. I pretty much just say "you're doing a great job. Keep going!" over and over again, to these poorly paid people who toil away, on the other side of the planet. Then some money is digitally credited to my bank balance, and I digitally credit it somewhere else to pay my rent. I never see actual physical money. I don't ever carry cash. Coins are just an antique novelty to me.

Modern life is making me unwell, I can sense it.

I have embraced technology and science, and I understand it better than 99% of people. In abstract terms, I'm doing really well, and it looks insane to be dissatisfied with my lot in life, but how do I really define my existence? Can I define myself as a father and enjoy family life, when I have no children? Can I define myself as a builder or a soldier, when what I do is so ethereal and intangible? Can I define myself as a farmer or a gardener, when what I do is so unnatural?

I'm a spring. That's what I am: a rusty spring.

I'm coiled up and compressed, ready to unspring, ready to bounce and boing.

It's fucking awful, let me tell you, being so unable to apply yourself to some useful mission, project or productive endeavour. It's fucking awful, feeling so trapped and imprisoned. That's why my thoughts turn dark and brooding so often. That's why suicide is so often on my mind.

Tags: #physics #writing #suicide #bipolar #career

This is a story about punctuation...

When I was at primary school, aged 4 years old, I drew a picture of a visit to see my grandparents. Specifically, I remembered seeing my grandmother, with bleached blonde hair, and my grandparent's dog.

I was asked to also describe the family visit. Having written the story, I then considered the fact that I had not punctuated the tale. I knew that full stops - periods - were the most important punctuation mark, and so I proceeded to decorate my story with a few randomly placed dots.

Having scattered my full stops throughout the prose that I had written, I then thought that the little dots didn't look very big in comparison with my large and unwieldy handwriting. At age 4 years old, I hadn't achieved a nice neat flowing form of handwriting. In fact, I was lucky if I could get my 'b's and my 'd's the right way around.

In order to draw greater attention to my punctuative efforts, I then embellished each period with more emphasis.

Unsatisfied with the balance between characters and symbols, I decided that I should just put a great big ball between every single word. Extrapolating from the rule that every sentence must be terminated with a dot, I reasoned that every word would benefit from being demarcated with a gigantic black mark.

And so, a perfectly reasonable tale about me spending time with my bottle-blonde grandmother, became a rather bizarre study of how not to do punctuation.

Punctuation, now, for me, is something technical. As a computer programmer, the use of a semicolon is quite essential to mark the end of a concise instruction for a computer to follow. A wayward full stop can cause many thousands of lines of code to fail to successfully be assembled into a computer program. When I write, I assume that I am programming the minds of my readers, and that I must use punctuation to precisely instruct their minds, or else they will reject what I write with a simple error message: syntax error!

I was going to write you a lovely story this evening, about all manner of real-world matters that you could relate to, but instead I feel that I have to self-consciously apologise for the over-punctuation of my texts. I feel that what I have written to date is absolute garbage, because I haven't had the time to read it all and trim away the unnecessary commas that I inserted in the interests of legibility and clarity.

With the most casual of comments, a friend has drawn attention to the fact that I have a tendency to over-punctuate my prose, and it has caused me to call into question everything I have written to date. It's hard, neither having an editor - a proofreader - nor having the time to be able to pore over my output, and perform some kind of quality control process, myself.

If what I'm writing is unreadable crap, so be it. I've just got to get it out there at this stage, because it's been bouncing around the inside of my cranium for far too long. I bitterly regret not making greater efforts to achieve a higher standard of writing that may have avoided 'turning off' many of the people whose opinion I would value, but I've been shooting from the hip. I connect my brain directly to my keyboard, and out it all pours.

It seems like my love of commas has reached epic proportions. Even I think "maybe I have somewhat overdone it" when I glance briefly back over my text, before publishing. However, unless you have the time to read what you have written back again, and to test for the natural points where you would pause for breath, it's very hard to put punctuation in and get it right first time.

If my comma-heavy writing is destroying the enjoyment of what I write, I'm devastated. I've only ever tried to write in an accessible style; attempting to avoid pseudo-intellectual bullshit littered with words and a literary approach that is only ever designed to scream "fuck you! I'm smart!" at the top of my insecure lungs. Screw you, you English literature douchebags. Screw you, you fucking poncey twats with your past participles and split infinitives. Fuck you all to hell. Just write some fucking shit that people can read and understand. Fuck you with your use of a zillion words that your thesaurus told you would be equivalent to their more obvious counterparts. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, for pontificating, posturing and your pomposity. Just write something readable for fuck's sake.

If what I write is unreadable, because of my over-eagerness to punctuate in such a way as to delimit each point that I make, then I feel that I have crashed and burned. I feel that everything that I have written to date is a dreadful failure, and I have screwed up in the most horrible way imaginable. I feel that I may have fallen at the first hurdle.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about storytelling...

Doing the sane and sensible thing when you're being driven insane is hard. I'm having to think creatively, in order to stick with a job that I hate because it's really easy and really boring, but it pays the bills and it's low stress (if you don't count the boredom that's driving me insane).

I was writing my blog at lunchtimes, to break up the day, but I found that took away the thing that I look forward to doing when I get home in the evening. I also found it frustrating, being at my desk during lunchtime, when people could wander over and distract me. The City is not a relaxing place for those on their lunchbreak. Crumbs on the keyboard is the best you can hope for.

So, I've decided to write short fictional stories once or twice a day, to fill the time. My blog is my therapist, patiently listening and never interrupting, while I pour my heart and soul out. My blog is where I work out all the mixed-up shit that happened in my life. My blog is a non-fiction record of who the hell I am and why I do what I do. My blog sets the record straight.

But, I need a creative outlet. Writing my blog is kinda creative, but there are certain needs that have to be met. If something is bugging me, or coming to the surface from my subconscious and memory banks, I've gotta get it out, I've got to put it into words and start to make sense of everything. Writing creatively is different. Writing creatively is scratching that itch that I never get to scratch, as a software developer or leader of software development teams. Software is a science at the end of the day, and for sure it's a black art, but it's important that I don't rely on my job for everything that I need.

And so, today, I wrote the first fiction that I have done in my adult life. I don't know why I've shied away from it. Perhaps it's because I had seen it as childish, juvenile. Perhaps it's because I was afraid that people would laugh. Perhaps it's because even I would laugh, when I read it back again in future. So, it seems sensible that I would hide behind humour, satire. It seems sensible that I would use elements of fantasy, rather than trying to write anything serious, earnest.

I don't do role play. I don't play Dungeons & Dragons. I don't do any kind of fantasy at all, and wearing the corporate mask the whole time is very draining. It's important to not take yourself too seriously sometimes. Wear fancy dress. Pretend to be somebody, something you're not, just so long as it's for fun. I don't really do fun. My life is very simple: work, sleep, eat, repeat... plus some blogging.

I'm not going to publish every one of my stories. In fact, until I know what to do with them, I'm unlikely to publish any of them. I'm going to publish the first one I wrote, in the vague hope that anybody's reading and might have some feedback, but until I find my particular sweet spot, I'm going to keep things mostly under wraps.

Anyhoo, if you've persevered reading this far, I shall cut to the chase and introduce the first short story I ever wrote in my adult life.

It's called The Sysadmin:

The users were scared.

 

The office expanded almost as far as the eye could see, with row upon row of birch veneer desks, in two large columns. The room was cleaved in half by a walkway running down the middle. The polystyrene ceiling tiles were dirty and many of them were broken. Fluorescent lighting bathed the room with a dim yellowish flickering illumination, which harshly lit the people and furnishings, whilst somehow not being bright enough to bring out the colour or definition of anything.

 

Identical swivel office chairs each had their own character, through the damage they had sustained. Some had broken backrests, some were missing armrests, some had their once colourful fabric, hanging frayed from the edges of the jagged black plastic that was designed to conceal stained foam and how cheaply made these pieces of furniture were. Each chair had indecipherable markings that identified it to its owner. Some had initials scratched into the plastic of the backrest using a sharp implement. Some had letters or symbols daubed onto them using Tipp-Ex correction fluid. Some had rectangular sticky labels that were half ripped off, with a name now longer legible, written in felt-tip pen.

 

The grey carpet was almost uniformly patterned with brown patches from spilled instant coffee, which had become so trodden into the floor covering that they were almost unnoticeable in the context of the shabby decay of the office. There was a stripe that was slightly browner, running down the walkway in-between the two columns of desks, that led to the coffee vending machine, water cooler, and a door marked “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS”.

 

Clearly unnerved, but silently huddling together in the walkway and all looking towards the man who had just entered the office, the users were no longer at their desks. The users now stood wide-eyed, clustered in front of the man, but unsure what to say or do.

 

“Hi, I’m the system administrator” the man began. “Did somebody phone IT support?” he asked, addressing the group as a whole, unsure of who to direct his question towards.

 

The users mumbled to themselves almost inaudibly, but didn’t seem to be communicating with each other or the system administrator. They were nervous. Nobody wanted to speak up. Everybody knew, but nobody wanted to say.

 

The users mostly looked the same, men and women, despite subtle differences in appearance. The women wore flowery blouses in muted pastel shades, sensible flat shoes and rimless glasses. Their wavy hair was tamed by hair clips and cut to a uniform length somewhere above shoulder high. They were all overweight and with slightly reddish cheeks. They looked flustered.

 

One of the users spoke up. It was a man. You could tell he was a man, because he wore an off-white button-down shirt with a blue biro in the front pocket, like all the men. His shirt was wrinkled and half-untucked from his bulging waistline. His neck crumpled the soft collar, so that his head and body were just one bulging mass. There were coffee stains down his front and he had clearly wiped his hands on his trousers many times after eating. The hem of his stained trousers didn’t reach the top of his black scuffed shoes, and his white socks were showing.

 

“It.. it.. it’s the… the...” he stutteringly began.

 

The user looked around, with slightly wild eyes. He was desperately hoping that one of the other users would now speak up, but they all looked away and avoided his eye contact. Somehow, a gap had formed in the group around him, as if everyone had stepped away from him without anybody noticing. The user seemed to be attracting all of the inadequate light in the room. It was as if a spotlight had picked him out, and he now stood, floundering, all on his own.

 

“I.. I… I… I’m not in charge here” he continued.

 

“It’s OK, just tell me what’s going on.” said the system administrator.

 

“I didn’t do it. It’s not my fault. We were all here, just getting on with our work” he started to protest.

 

“Don’t worry, I’m not here to blame anybody. Just tell me what the problem is” the system administrator offered, as kindly as he could, putting on his most understanding and approachable face. “You can tell me” he said.

 

“It’s the… it’s the…” the user haltingly continued, struggling to get a handle on his rising sense of panic, almost choking. He felt a sense of responsibility that he was totally unused to.

 

“Please just tell me what the issue is. Somebody logged a call with IT support” the system administrator pleaded, now losing his patience.

 

“It’s the MAINFRAME” the user blurted out. There was a sharp intake of breath from all the other users, as the man spat out the final word, even though they all knew.

 

The system administrator rolled his eyes. “Really? What’s wrong with the mainframe?” he asked, as if a practical joke was being played on him. His face now betrayed a deep skepticism and the impression that his precious time was being wasted by a bunch of low-brow imbeciles.

 

“It’s angry” the user said. “Yes, it’s angry” many other users now quietly agreed, in defence of their colleague. “Angry” and “it got angry” they all muttered, not really addressing anybody except the room they were all stood in.

 

“Right, get back to your desks. I’ll take a look” the system administrator said. He stepped forward, having to push people out of the way, as clearly nobody was in any mood to return to their desks. The users were stood in a trance-like state, just muttering “angry” below their breath, and staring at the system administrator as he tried to pick his way through the crowd and make his way down the walkway in-between the two columns of desks, where all the users were still clustered.

 

Walking through the office, up to the door marked “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS” the system administrator glanced back towards the group of users, who were still crowded together on the opposite side of the room, near the exit. They were all looking at him, in perfect silence and stillness.

 

Reaching for the door handle, the system administrator was about to twist it and enter the restricted area behind, but he hesitated, and instead put his ear to the door. It sounded like… footsteps. But these were not the footsteps of your average light-footed person. It sounded like deep thuds of metal and rubber on concrete. DUSH! DUSH! DUSH! Would come the thumps of heavy machinery hitting a solid floor in a slow rhythm, and then stop, and then repeat again.

 

In a moment of calm rational thought, the system administrator decided that perhaps one of the air conditioning units had failed, and the motors that drove it were now causing some kind of mechanical fault to create this racket. Immediately, he twisted the door handle and opened the door a fraction.

 

Inside the restricted area, it was dark. Almost pitch black. This was unusual. The restricted area should have been well lit.

 

The system administrator craned his head through the doorway. It looked as if the glass doors that allowed entry into the temperature controlled housing for the mainframe, were open. The doors should not have been open. The vibration absorbing shock mounts, that the mainframe sat on top of, were in the housing, but the mainframe was nowhere to be seen in the darkened room. The system administrator couldn’t see the whole room because he was just peeking in through the gap in the doorway. The thumping had stopped, and everything seemed eerily quiet. Where was the hum of the cooling fans and the chatter of the hard disk drives? Where was the bleep and crackle of the networking devices? Where were the blinking LED lights that signified the activity of the mainframe? It seemed like the restricted area was empty and lifeless.

 

Then, a gigantic shape lunged out of the darkness. A humongous black box, big enough to fill a quarter of the room, suddenly thumped forward out of the corner, where it had been previously unseen due to the poor lighting. DUSH! came an earsplitting sound, as metal crunched into the reinforced concrete floor. A sudden scattering of red lights lit up across the front of the object as it thrust towards the door where the system administrator stood.

 

Quick as a flash, the system administrator slammed the door shut and ran down the walkway in-between the desks. Almost scattering the statue-like users who were still milling around near the exit, he left the office. Just before the office exit door slammed shut behind him, the users heard him call back to them: “I think it’s hungry”.

 

The users appeared to wake up, and now a mild kind of panic spread amongst them. They started to talk amongst themselves, while also shooting nervous glances towards the door to the restricted area.

 

“Should we get out of here?” and “it’s dangerous, I don’t want to be in here when that thing escapes” they said to each other, in hushed tones. The users were quite calm in their indecisiveness. They mumbled to each other in low voices for several minutes, with no clear plan of action emerging.

 

Then, the system administrator threw open the office door again. He struggled, getting stuck in the doorway. In his arms were bundles of grey cables, like a great mass of tangled rope. The users cleared the gangway for him, but nobody stepped in to help him. Finally overcoming the obstruction, the system administrator burst through the doorway, and made his way to the restricted area door, while tripping up and dropping cables along the way. He dumped the tangled mess next to the “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS” door, and then made several trips back up and down the walkway, picking up the cables he had dropped and adding them to the pile.

 

Grabbing handfuls of cables, and massaging them into a giant knot, the system administrator now took hold of the door handle in one hand, while holding the beach-ball sized lump under his other arm. With a single fluid motion, he flung open the door to the restricted area and threw the cables into the room.

 

The mainframe roared with a bloodcurdling mixture of computer fans that were spinning at maximum revolutions, hard disks that were clattering, network devices that were chattering and the screeching sound of the twisted metal of its frame. The front of the mainframe was an angry mess of red LED lights, that flashed furiously in the darkness. It lunged for the door, but the system administrator was too quick and slammed it shut, before diving to one side with his back flat against the wall, panting heavily.

 

There then followed a graunching, crunching, high-pitched sound of plastic being stripped, broken, and metal being bent and torn, and then the low hum of fans and hard disks spinning. There were a few thuds and crashes, as the mainframe stomped around, and then things went quiet again.

 

The system administrator repeated the procedure, of rolling up balls of cables and tossing them into the restricted area several times, before the pile was exhausted. The users watched nervously from the other end of the office the whole time, although they craned their necks in interest, trying to see what was going on.

 

There was a moment of calm when the pile was gone. The system administrator and the users momentarily relaxed. Perhaps the mainframe was satisfied?

 

Then, a roaring and stomping started, many times worse than it had been before. The speed of the steps was rapid, and it sounded like the mainframe was tearing the room apart.

 

The system administrator looked worried, then pensive, and then he appeared to have a eureka moment. He sprinted energetically towards the office exit, hardly breaking his stride as he flung the door open and disappeared. Just as the door was closing, he called back to the users: “I think it wants dessert”.

 

Some time went by, and the users were getting very nervous, as the mainframe set about destroying the restricted area. Several times, the door seemed to vibrate and rattle in its hinges, as if it was going to be blown wide open at any moment. The users started to back up against the opposite wall, trying to get as far away as possible, but still unwilling to leave the office.

 

At last, the system administrator returned. He strode into the office carrying a brown cardboard box of modest size. He walked down the walkway, looking back at the terrified users with a cheeky grin. With a twinkle in his eye he produced a flat object, about 4 inches square, from the cardboard box. “I think it’ll like these” he said.

 

The system administrator proceeded to slide floppy disks through the gap at the bottom of the door to the restricted area. The floppy disks came in various sizes. The bulk of them were 3 and a half inches, with a metal sliding part that protected the black plastic magnetic disk inside. A lot of them were 5 and a quarter inches, and had no metal protective part. The mainframe gave a grunt of approval each time that it was fed a disk, but its satisfaction was audibly less pronounced each time.

 

However, the system administrator had saved the best until last. Producing some 8 inch and 3 inch floppy disks from smaller white cardboard boxes that had been concealed in the bigger brown cardboard box, he now fed the mainframe these rare delicacies. It didn’t take many before the mainframe started to sound positively delighted, with a crescendo of modulated digital signals gracing everybody’s ears.

 

The system administrator disappeared into the restricted area, opening and closing the door quickly behind himself. Soon, soothing noises and words of encouragement could be just heard outside the room, and there were a few thud-like stomps, and then the sound of computer fans and hard disks whirring back into life. As he stepped out of the restricted area, the lights in the room were back on, the doors to the glass housing were closed and the mainframe was back on its anti-vibration mounting. The LED lights on the front of the machine flickered in ordered patterns, and a thick trunk of network cables that hung from the ceiling had all been plugged back into the gigantic black box.

 

As the “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS” door closed behind the system administrator, hundreds of terminals blinked into life on the desks of the users. The office was now bathed in light from the computer screens that were displaying lines and lines of green text on a black background. The green glow seemed to soothe the nerve-jangled users, and they all went “aaahhh!” in unison, and started to slowly file back to their desks without prompting.

 

The system administrator ambled up the walkway for the last time that day. Most users were now seated back at their terminals, busily performing calculations for the mainframe, happy again. He paused at the office exit and looked back over a sea of green screens, with users hunched over their beige plastic keyboards. The natural order of things had been restored.

The end etc. etc.

Anyway, I noticed that my story was 2,500 words, which is about 3 and a half times more than what I normally write. If I write two stories like that every day, plus my blog, I'll be producing over 4 novels a month. That's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) on steroids. I think I'll burn out.

So, it remains to be seen what the sweet spot is for the length of the stories, and what I'm going to write about. Maybe I will be struck by the infamous writer's block. Maybe my enthusiasm for the whole endeavour will fizzle. Maybe I will never find anything that I think people will enjoy reading.

Let the games commence.

Tags: #writing #shortstories

This is a story about dream jobs...

Why aren't nurses who work in geriatric care the best paid people on the planet? When humans are old and shrivelled up, senile, incontinent and are simply an inconvenience, getting in the way of children receiving their inheritance, geriatric nurses are there mopping up the poop and vomit, and generally trying to ease the suffering and discomfort of the age-ravaged creatures who are long past their sell-by date. On the face of it, palliative care seems a thankless task, and the low pay would certainly back that up.

But what about nursery nurses and nannies? These people also mop up the shit and puke of those who can't look after themselves, but the tiny tots that they care for are all cute and brand new. People who work in childcare are similarly badly paid, but maybe that's because it's supposedly fun and rewarding, playing with children all day.

How can this be? How can it be the case that somebody who looks after those who are dying gets paid badly, but then so is a person who looks after those who have their whole lives ahead of them?

Perhaps it's the case that anybody who deals with human waste is badly paid. Certainly when we examine the remuneration of garbage collectors and cleaners, we find that these people who scrub human stains from the world, are very badly paid. The people who unblock sewers and those who work in sanitation are hardly big earners, and might in fact be in a similar pay bracket to the people who look after children and old people.

You would have thought that having to deal with dirt, grime, death and bodily fluids would carry a pay premium that would see the people I just mentioned, amongst the highest paid there are, but this is not the case at all.

Hang on though! What about musicians, poets and writers? Sure, there are a handful of successful individuals who are paid mind-bogglingly humongous sums for the art that they create, but the very vast majority of people who have chosen music and wordcraft as their profession, will find themselves very poor indeed. Think how many struggling writers there are. Think how many people there are who play in bands, but barely earn a single cent for their trouble. How many people reciting wonderful poetry are able to call it a well paid profession?

So if writers and musicians are badly paid too, but they don't have to deal with bodily fluids and rotting trash, then what exactly is the common link?

Do you think it's time spent studying? Do you think it's qualifications? Well, many musicians will have spent tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours mastering their instruments. Music theory is not trivial. Music theory and harmonics are governed by discrete mathematical rules. Can you really say that a corporate lawyer or accountant is more qualified than somebody who has dedicated their life to music? Of course not.

So what is it? What is the rule that decides whether you will be well paid, or you will struggle to make ends meet?

Well, my theory is that the more alien and dehumanising your job is, the more you will be paid. Humans have caring and nurturing instincts built into them. We will naturally feel sympathy for those in discomfort and pain, and we will want to help if we can. Humans have a dislike for waste and mess, and we will want to keep things clean and ordered. We have evolved the instinct to not live in piles of our own filth. We have even evolved the social instinct to create art that binds us together. Whether it's trancelike-state inducing beats and chants, paintings on cave walls, or the telling of stories that are our very earliest form of preserving our history, myths and legends. It's human to want to perform, to sing, to entertain.

What innocent young child really can imagine that they would want to grow up and get a job massaging numbers in spreadsheets or editing the minutiæ of legal contracts? What the fuck does your bullshit job even entail? What the fuck is it going to say on your motherfucking gravestone? How the fuck would you even go about explaining what you do to your grandmother?

And so, we now have an army of the living dead who are, in the words of David Bolchover, switched off, zoned out. This is the shocking truth about office life. Nobody gives two fucks about their job or their employer. There is no job satisfaction. The jobs are alien, dehumanising.

What do these armies of disillusioned people do all day? Well, they read and they listen to music. Some of the most cultured art patrons that we are lucky enough to have in the world, are just bored people sat at their desks with glazed eyes, wondering what they're going to have for lunch.

But then what? What happens next?

Well, these people start dreaming about becoming musicians, writers, artists, poets and pursuing all manner of things that will connect them with the aesthetic and creative elements that their bullshit daily humdrum gives them precisely fuck all of.

What even is a journalist? Well, the clue's in the name: journalist. As in day. As in somebody who writes a journal every day. That's all it is. That's all it takes to be a writer. You don't have to be qualified to be a writer. Just write. Every day.

There's a myth that you can't do anything without studying, that has been perpetuated by the professions. It's true that you can't become a lawyer or an accountant without studying, but those are bullshit jobs with bullshit professional bodies whose job it is to limit how many people enter the profession every year, in order to maintain false scarcity and prop up their salaries.

It's utter bullshit. We don't need any lawyers & accountants. Without builders, there are no houses. Without farmers and fishermen, there is no food. Without weavers and seamstresses there are no clothes. Without lumberjacks and miners, there is no wood and coal to keep ourselves warm and to cook our meals. Everything else is just intellectual masturbation. Unnecessary bullshit made up jobs that add nothing of value.

So, as people are realising that the fact that they didn't go to an Oxbridge university to study English, or at least attend a creative writing course, but yet they can still write a blog and entertain their friends and family on Facebook and Twitter, the value of journalists has been completely eroded.

Yes, it's a shame that The Guardian and The Observer newspapers are going down the shitter, whether they add a paywall or not. Yes it's a shame that a lot of friends and people who I know, who are extremely talented and have dedicated their whole lives to the pursuit of journalism and writing careers, are finding that there's just no way that they're ever going to earn a decent salary doing what they love.

And that's just it. That's the kicker. That's the real kick in the teeth. As soon as you do something you love, you'll find there's no money in it. We all want to be footballers, singers, food critics, cinema critics, writers, journalists, poets and every other job where you fuck about doing nothing more than entertaining, informing, educating, inspiring.

We all love the thrill of the limelight. We all love dressing up. We all love exotic locations. We all love to seek new sensations. We all love to meet interesting people. We all love to talk and write about what we're passionate about. We all love to make art that expresses our deeply felt human emotions that can't be articulated using the blunt instruments of words.

If you do what you love and it's necessary, like nursing, then you'll be paid just enough to survive. If you do what you love and it's unnecessary, like art, then you'll not be paid anything at all. It's a race to the bottom. We can all stick a paintbrush on a piece of paper and produce something passably artistic.

The arts used to be the preserve of the aristocracy, but with the democratisation of the arts through the digital medium, my crude drawing of a penis can be reproduced infinitely many times across every computer screen on the planet. I can write a library full of books, and they're all immediately in print and available to be read by anybody, at any time, for free, because of the limitless power of the digital printing press that is the internet. Why the fuck would anybody pay anything for art anymore?

Of course, scarcity still has value, and a few super-high profile artists will continue to produce original artworks in the form of paint on canvas, art installations and live performances. These artists are the courtiers in the entourage of the plutocracy. You have about as much chance of becoming one of these people as you have of being struck by an asteroid, twice.

As the global recession deepens, the amount of people who are able to just about scrape a living as a freelance writer or a busker will drop away to nothing, and the arts will once again be the preserve of the sons & daughters of the very wealthiest, who have the monetary means to pursue things which society largely deems worthless.

The Huffington Post has shown the future for journalism, where an army of bloggers are leveraged to provide the same kind of re-hashed reporting of the stories that are churned out by a handful of news agencies who are still able to have people on the ground. Your dreams of being a war correspondent are over. Even your dreams of being a lifestyle blogger are looking pretty hopeless.

There is a vast oversupply of opinion and wordcraft and music and art and everything else that's fun to create. There is no longer any room to do something you love. As soon as you derive any kind of job satisfaction, that's going to be the last pay rise you ever get.

Don't you get it? It's a race to the bottom. See you there!

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #capitalism #career

This is a story about ingratitude...

Why do I attack the industry that has suckled me? Why am I so angry and upset with the profession that has nurtured me? Why am I so ungrateful for my whopping big salary and cushy benefits?

Administration: the unnecessary bureaucratic headache that creates unwelcome red tape, adds no value to the real economy and is an overhead that limits the productivity, innovation and creativity of those who are truly useful. I don't work in the Information Technology business. I work in the business of administration.

The two most productive things that I do in any given week are filling in my timesheet and submitting my invoice for payment. The most important thing that I do each quarter is to pay my Value-Added Tax (VAT) down to the precise penny that I owe. If I'm not perfectly on top of my bureaucratic administration, the Government will stop me doing my 'real' job, which is creating software.

But what does the software I create do anyway? Most of it is just keeping score. It's bean-counting software. It's software that creates jobs for zillions of IT professionals like me, so that companies can get rid of zillions of administrators, that they immediately re-employ to make sure their IT professionals are filling in their timesheets correctly.

For every person who I put out of a job, by automating the processes they perform, the company will then invent some other pointless position. Our whole economy is based on bullshit jobs.

Should I be happy to have a job, and to count my blessings? Well, no. It's immoral to not consider whether you are having a positive or a negative impact on society, and on the planet. To count my blessings is an incitement to be wilfully ignorant of global issues, and the betterment of humanity.

So what am I doing instead, to align my values? How do I reconcile the rhetoric of what I preach with the obvious fact that I am enabling massive corporations to continue to ride roughshod over the human race and the fragile planet?

Well, I take the money, and with it I pay my rent & bills. And then, I spend 90% of my time thinking about issues and writing this blog. I'm not paid to create software - so little of my time is actually spent doing that - instead, I'm paid to bite the hand that feeds me. It's an inside job. I'm disruptive and cynical. I'm disillusioned and critical.

Does that mean my colleagues have to work harder to make up for me slacking? No. It doesn't work like that. If my boss asks me to do something, I won't do it. I'll wait to see if they ask me again. My boss isn't going to ask somebody else to do it, because they've already asked me to do it. 9 times out of 10, I'll never be asked again. The tenth time, I'll realise that whatever was asked of me actually was important, so I'll apologise and do the work.

So, am I idle? Absolutely not. With the time I could have spent doing those 9 things that were clearly unnecessary, I will conduct a kind of audit. I will go around, looking to see if there's anything more useful I could be doing. Invariably, there isn't. Everybody is just so locked into a hierarchical system of managers, administrators & clerks, that nobody has looked at the bigger picture and realised that what they're doing is absolute bullshit. Or if anybody has realised that their job is utter bullshit, they're not talking about it.

Now, I'm not talking about nurses, garbage collectors, train drivers, firemen. It's pretty obvious what the useful function of many front-line workers is. However, these people are working all hours for some of the lowest wages. No manager needs to tell a nurse to help a patient who is in pain & discomfort. No administrative drone needs to make sure that a garbage collector is hitting their Key Performance Indicators and is going to achieve their annual objectives at their appraisal. Either the important job is done, or it isn't.

There are functions that literally nobody would miss, except maybe not being harassed by an army of micromanagers and bureaucrats. Isn't it the case that you're propping up a sick and twisted system, by continuing to count your blessings and not rock the boat?

I frankly find it disgusting that I'm paid so many more times more than what a nurse gets paid. If I was to simply sit back and "think positive" and try to enjoy my ill-gotten gains, doesn't that make me a terrible, terrible person?

It's probably true that the world doesn't need any more bloggers, but what am I supposed to do? Impoverish myself and retrain as yet another disrespected front-line worker? It's hardly like they're being heard today, is it? How are the social wrongs ever going to be righted?

It seems to me that the right thing to do is to speak up. Yes, I jeopardise my lucrative career in doing so, but it's the right thing to do. People are more likely to listen to an IT consultant from the banking world, who is critical of the sector that pays me handsomely, than they are to somebody who could easily be dismissed as simply "jealous" or "not smart enough" to land themselves a similar job.

Truly, I do not think that front line workers are not smart enough to do my job. In actual fact, you have to be pretty dumb to be able to turn a blind eye to the social injustice of being highly paid to be an idle manager of hardworking people who do the real jobs.

I currently have no cash to put my money where my mouth is. Quitting my job would literally see me homeless and destitute again. However, I do anticipate a time when I will be faced with a true test of my morality: when I am able, will I quit the rat race and try to do something that is more in line with my values?

I have massively impoverished myself, trying to take an ethical stance, and I would do it again. It's the right thing to do.

Tags: #politics #banking #capitalism #career #computing

This is a story about writing stuff that people want to read...

Firstly, let's start with an apology. What I wrote yesterday evening was total rushed junk. I shouldn't bother writing if I only have a tiny bit of time sandwiched in-between other commitments, or if I've got somebody peering over my shoulder. I really dislike what I write when I'm pressured.

I was tired and cranky yesterday. I had planned to spend the day on the sofa watching the Wimbledon men's tennis final and the Euro 2016 final, while getting drunk. Instead I was at a restaurant where you had to stand and queue to order your food and watch it be cooked in front of you. There was limited novelty, when I would really rather have been sat down with a waitress bringing drinks to me.

Anyway, I've got a bunch of topics that I want to write properly about. I want to write directly about my experiences, rather than these long ranty opinion pieces that would bore almost anybody to tears.

Upcoming topics include:

• The Dark Web
• The paradox: hard work vs. high wages
• My ongoing experiments with abstinence from caffeine and alcohol
• The trials & tribulations of being unmedicated for Type II Bipolar Disorder
• Will this damn depression ever lift?
• Am I going to go hypomanic again?

Writing serves the purpose of giving my life meaning in an uncaring world and while working a day job that consists of endless pointless IT projects. Writing is my means of having some kind of insurance policy, in case I decide to suddenly end my own life. Writing is my mechanism for trying to articulate my distress and invite people to engage with me once again. Writing means that I'm an open book, and you can dip in or tune out, as you please.

My purpose has been very confused. Am I writing to shame and embarrass my parents, in retaliation for everything they inflicted on me? Am I writing because I'm lonely, depressed, suicidal and I've run out of ideas for how to connect with the world? Am I writing to have a soapbox, in order to broadcast my opinions? Or, am I writing in order to share my colourful life experiences, in the hope that others who are going through tough times might benefit. Hopefully, it's the latter.

So, as I now start to think about the final couple of months of daily writing, to round off a complete year, I'm starting to figure out when is a good time of day to write, to fit with my work schedule and other commitments. I'm starting to figure out things that I'd like to write about, not because I've got an ulterior motive, but because I've got some interesting experiences to share.

I might have totally turned off a bunch of people whose opinion I value very highly, and made this piece of writing into an impenetrable rat's nest of deeply troubling psychological issues, but perhaps I can start to shape and hone things.

I've prematurely declared that I'm going to turn over a new leaf and bury the hatchet too many times, so I'm not going to make any more proclamations of that nature. However, I don't regret going on this extremely eccentric journey, and the incredibly personal things I have revealed about my twisted psyche.

This could all be summed up as writing therapy that has been done in the public domain. But isn't it so much more interesting and a little exciting, to let it all hang out in the breeze? How more publicly could I wear my heart on my sleeve?

"For God's sake, don't encourage him" I imagine people saying. This makes me chuckle, and spurs me on to dredge the depths of my deeply repressed painful memories. Where will it lead? I have no idea.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about pressured speech...

A lot of my life has felt like driving with the handbrake on. When I'm finally released from the crap that's been artificially holding me back, I go off at breakneck pace, because I don't know when the next time is, that I'm going to be thwarted by somebody who is simply getting in the way and slowing things down unnecessarily.

Teachers at school need to pace their lessons so that most of the kids in the class can keep up. I'm not saying I'm the brightest, but school certainly didn't stretch and challenge me to the point where I really had to concentrate or try hard. I had plenty of spare time to draw cartoons, write rhymes and stories, and to mess around with computers. It's lucky that it worked out like that, because my computer skills have been far more marketable than any academic qualification ever would have been.

I entered the world of full time work at age 17 as an experienced computer programmer who had written games, simulations and produced websites. It was a painful transition, because now I had layers of ineffectual middle managers, incompetently pushing paper and trying to justify their pointless existence. There's one job: build the fucking software. I don't need some pleb to 'manage' me.

When you make a computer game or a website, it's a fairly creative process. You have to design the look & feel of the software, as well as actually write the computer programs that make it work. The success of a piece of software hinges on how useable it is by people. If people can't intuitively use your software or website, it's a failure.

Making games is hard. If you can make computer games, you can do anything. Honestly, having written software that guides torpedos to blow up ships, I can say that computer games are way harder.

So, I found the world of work to be extremely frustrating. I learned how to program in machine code at college. That's the very lowest level programming language there is. All other computer programming languages compile down to machine code.

Programmers try to keep themselves entertained by inventing more and more abstract programming languages... C becomes C++ and C# etc. However, it's all just instructions in machine code that are executed by the computer processor... it's all ones and zeros at the end of the day: boolean algebra.

Am I blinding you with science? Really, please don't switch off... it's easier than you think!

The whole logical thinking part is the easy bit. The hard part comes when you start thinking about how a human is going to use your software. You can guarantee that somebody will click the wrong button, or type something that you just weren't expecting them to type. Attempting to guide and constrain humans into a machine interpretable set of predefined steps, is the biggest challenge, not the logical processes that happen in code.

What happens when your whole job is to control the variables, and make software into something functional and boring... no weird and wonderful bugs... no unpredictable behaviour? In a way, once you have a few strategies for solving these problems, there is no challenge left in the job. It becomes a paint-by-numbers.

There are probably more ways of developing a website than there are atoms in the universe. I pity the poor web developers who have to know tons of User Interface frameworks, but their job is essentially always the same: what colour do we want the fucking buttons?

I could take no joy from the 'creative' side of being a web designer. There's no creativity. It's just listening to the dumb ideas of your client, who has shit taste and no idea about what good design looks like. The client always wrecks the creative process, along with everybody else in the entire world, and their mother. Everybody's got an opinion on something so subjective as the look & feel of a piece of software. You can't take any joy in creating beautiful looking apps and websites, because you'll never please everybody and the person paying the bill will always wreck things.

So, having neglected my cartoon drawing for many years, I return to writing.

I sit at my desk at my boring job, and I write. But I'm always looking over my shoulder. I'm not supposed to be writing. I'm paid an unspeakable amount of money to manage a software project, but I know that I'll basically just make the lives of my developers fucking miserable if I micromanage them, so I just let them get on with things while I write.

However, I'm always wary of who can see my screen. Is my boss going to suddenly appear at my desk and ask me what the hell I'm doing? How can I relax and write away, when I should be 'working'?

And so, I hack away as fast as I can, to produce something before I'm interrupted, or somebody asks about what's on my screen. I need my little creative outlet, or else I would go insane. I need to write.

But, it's frustrating as hell, trying to get all my creativity out in snippets of time that I grab in the dead time on the run-up to lunchtime, and before I need to prepare my evening meal and go to bed to start the whole miserable cycle all over again the next day.

You might think that writing is a luxury, but it's actually a necessity for me. It's helping me to organise my thoughts and process what just happened to me. It's helping me to deal with the fact that I have to work the most depressing boring easy job in the world, just to plump up my finances again, after a traumatic couple of years.

So, I write, and I write lots. You might think that it's self indulgent, and maybe you've got a book in you too, but you don't have the luxury of sitting around writing. Well, if you were serious, you'd do it. I could rattle off 50,000 words in a week, I reckon. The words just have to come out.

What's super frustrating right now is how the quality really suffers, the more pressured I am. When I'm at work, when somebody is trying to talk to me, when I've said I'll go out and meet somebody in the evening... it's fucking agonising to have to rush. I write as fast as I can, but I don't get the enjoyment from the creative process that I should do. I don't get the full benefit.

I've already written once today, but I'm writing again because I'm not satisfied. I'm not satisfied because I never got to consider my words. I'm not satisfied that I because got to review and refine what I wrote. I'm not satisfied because I was so rushed.

But if I don't get this stuff down, the lack of creativity and challenge in my day job is going to kill me.

Tags: #writing #career #computing