This is a story about our perception of time...

Watched pots never boil. Drying paint isn't very interesting. The bus always turns up just after you decided to walk. You think you're always going to be single and then you're fighting girls off with a stick.

I forgot to do a blog post yesterday, or maybe I was ill. I can't really remember. I'm getting a lot of blackouts from the legal benzodiazepines I'm taking. Life is a lot easier if you're unconscious while you wait for the world to catch up with you.

Yes, my single bit of career advice would be, get really good at a job, and then cryogenically freeze yourself until a load of time went down the shitter, so you're now the same age as other candidates for the same role, and then it's really easy to get a job.

You can fill in the bit when you were in the cryogenic freezer by saying you were doing a startup or something. Don't say you went travelling. People will think you like travelling the world meeting new people and experiencing new cultures, and those aren't the sorts of people who are very employable.

Don't whatever you do let your prospective employers know that you're human. That's the worst mistake ever. Just give people the computer readout of your calculation processing power, and problem solving algorithms and the standard deviation and other statistical measures to show consistency, and then they'll know you're an excellent quality cyborg.

Make sure you memorise all the standard answers to all the standard interview questions. They're not actually questions. It's just a means of proof that you do a lot of interviews so you must be very bad at getting a job, or you're very desperate, so they can make you a shitty salary offer.

What a silly game.

Tags: #career

This is a story about running out of ideas...

That's a light box. It's supposed to be a way of treating Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It's the final thing I thought I could try, as a natural remedy for depression. The regimen that I have followed for 6 months is:

• Varied diet, including plenty of fruit & veg
• Sleep hygiene: strict bedtime and getting up after 7 or 8 hours, even on weekends
• No caffeine
• No alcohol (actually only 3 months)
• No medication
• No drugs
• No legal highs
• Amino acids
• Vitamins
• Minerals
• Exercise
• Making new friends
• Trying to have a stable place to live
• Trying to have a job
• Reconnecting with old friends
• Getting some professional help (only had a whole week in hospital)
• Being disciplined and self controlled
• Wearing blue-light filtering glasses after 4pm (for the last few months)
• Using the light box for at least an hour every morning (for the last month)

Guess what happened? My mood was able to react to things, and I reacted to my mood. There was no stability. In fact there was no coping mechanism. Everything I used to do to regulate my mood was removed, so I did other things that were detrimental to my overall wellbeing.

Being hung over or drunk at work is quite good if you hate your job and think that the management are idiots. Because I was sober, I told the HSBC management team that their project didn't stand a chance in hell of being delivered, because it was being run by people who are terrible at Agile Project Management, and seem to be completely lacking any relevant software development experience. I said I didn't want to be any part of it unless some big changes were made. I said I wasn't comfortable doing the wrong thing.

Being hopped up on coffee is good if you want to rescue a project. I recoded Barclays entire Corporate Pingit system, in 30 hours, with no sleep. I kept the existing public API, but everything else was thrown away. Instead of spaghetti code, full of copy & paste, and buggy as hell, poor error handling, poor logging - unsupportable - I just rewrote nice clean code. Lots of coffee, 30 hour hackathon, all the bugs solved, code reduced by 80%, production grade error handling and logging. The team leader felt important because the old system barely worked, so he spent a lot of time understanding the spaghetti. There wasn't really anything for either me or him to do after I wrote a decent system. My boss was happy, the team leader wasn't, I got my contract terminated, Barclays customers were happy, I was happy that I'd delivered the software that meant I no longer had any work to do.

Corporate software is boring. The projects I'm asked to do are child's play. 48 million customer's metadata? That's only 48 terabytes, if we store a megabyte per customer. A low res scan of their passport and maybe a utility bill, plus a few thousand characters for their name, address, phone number etc. etc. At JPMorgan we stored about 3 petabytes of document scans. That's about the same amount of data in the entire Library of Congress.

AI, games, simulation, data analysis, physics & cosmology modelling, codebreaking... those are the hard problems. I remember I wrote a program that calculated every single possible checkmate. Then I wrote a program that found all the moves that led to those positions. It ran out of memory before it got back to the early moves. Then I wrote a program that could take the position of the pieces on the board, and find the moves to checkmate, where there is no opportunity for your opponent to win. Most of the time the program couldn't find a path where the opponent had no chance. In theory, with enough processing power and storage space, chess could be solved by a program. However there are 10 to the power 80 (10 + 80 zeros) atoms in the universe, and there are 10 to the power 123 (10 + 123 zeros) moves in the chess game tree. We should probably concentrate on modelling the cosmos at subatomic scale before wasting our time on a silly game.

So, that's my quandary. I'm not very challenged or interested by anything in the corporate world, and my solution of just being drunk all the time can't have been doing my liver much good. However, without alcohol/benzodiazepines I think too much, and without caffeine/bupropion/stimulants, I can't get motivated to keep solving the same easy problems that don't even need solving.

In fact, when I think about it, I must have made a lot of people redundant. I've automated a lot of stuff that people used to be employed to do. I've made corporations very rich, by allowing them to lay off loads of their workforce, but increase their productivity and profitability. My main specialism is Straight Through Processing (STP). I know how to get $1.16qn processed with just a few programmers, database administrators, infrastructure engineers, network specialists and system administrators. You don't need project managers, because they just put the lies you tell them into a spreadsheet and tell everybody that everything is going really well. You don't need testers, because good programmers write good automation tests, and they don't write bugs. There's no difficult logic or calculations in a corporate system. I do get spooked out when my code works first time, but it's quicker to do it that way.

Human workflow and user experience. Here's a better use of your time and money. Fill out paper forms and then set fire to them. Nobody gives a shit about having to go through your life story just to become a customer or get a government service. If I want broadband, just send somebody to install it and set up a direct debit. If I want to rent a flat, I'm going to pay you 6 weeks deposit plus a month's rent in advance, plus letting agent fees. Just give me the keys as soon as I've put the money in your account. Don't even bother with the contract. Burn it. The contract is simple: I pay you rent, I live in the flat.

You send a person to read the electricity meter. They can take my card payment for whatever I owe when they are in my home. You send a person to read the gas meter. They can work out my bill and I'll pay it on the spot. You send armies of traffic wardens. They can spend less time hiding in bushes and more time knocking on doors taking card payments for the rubbish collection, street lighting, police, fire service, libraries, schools and other things that I quite like rather than hovering near cars whose meter payment is about to expire.

My bank sends me a letter saying that they've paid a bill for me, but I didn't have quite enough money, so they're going to charge me even more money. My bank's only function, so far as I can see, is to make my problems worse. Rather than ringing me up and saying "Hello, Mr. Grant. We can see your income has suddenly stopped. We're not going to charge you any interest until you start earning again, because otherwise we are going to stress you out and make you bankrupt, and then we won't get our money back". 

You see, everything trundles along fine when you play along with the game. Keep working doing that job you hate, at a company run by imbeciles, on a project that just needs 5 decent full stack developers to get on with what they do best, for 2 weeks, with no project managers who couldn't organise a piss up in a bar, and no 'architects' who just draw on whiteboards and produce documents that nobody reads, because they were rubbish at actually producing real working software.

The worst code I ever wrote was my first iPhone game. Games are awful as a single indie dev. You have to do all the graphics, sound effects, music, plus design the user interface, and then there's the game itself which has to run at at least 30 frames per second. The calculations are hard. Doing it in Objective-C was a nightmare. I've never know a language with such whacky syntax. I can probably write code in about 20 languages (BASIC, Pascal, Assembler, C, ADA, C++, Java, Javascript, C-shell, Korn-shell, Bash, Perl, PHP, C#, SQL, AWK, Batch, Google Apps Script, Logo, VBA, XSLT) and there's a bunch more I know enough of the syntax of to read and edit.

I can glance at some data and tell you if it's XML, JSON, Base-64, HEX, key-value pairs, fixed position, CSV. I can probably guess how the programmers of your favourite game store the high score table, and insert myself as the number one player with an unassailable score.

Yes, playing the games that everybody else does, competing... it seems a bit pointless when you know the game is rigged, and if I really wanted to, I could tweak my bank balance. Fraud is not hard, and banks make so much money they don't even go after the small fraudsters. It's easier to charge honest hard working people exorbitant rates of interest and fees rather than doing their actual legal & moral duty to Know Your Customer (KYC). I could buy a digital identity for about $100, open a bank account, get some loans, use the money to buy a real passport from a European country that's a bit more relaxed about staff members making identity documents in return for a cash bonus.

Once you're in Europe you can just keep heading east until you find a country where people don't read too many newspapers and watch too much TV. You can find somewhere you can afford to eat and sleep for a couple of years, while you wait out the storm. You can take some time out from the rat race, because you deserve it.

My iPhone app business was a hit, my first IT contracting company made loads of money, my electrician business was profitable, but the building trade is hard, my enterprise mobile apps business was too ahead of its time and never made much money, my Bitcoin trading and mining was hugely profitable, my second IT contracting company made loads of money. I don't really want to sell out and get another contract just yet. I've got some cool software ideas.  Instead of doing what I normally do and start with a profitable business model, I want to do something I'm passionate about.

I don't work at MIT or Stanford. I don't work at CERN or the UK Atomic Energy Authority, but I can tell you that the strong nuclear force is the energy that's released when a heavy element is split into two lighter elements. But what does "heavy" even mean when we haven't managed to get the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be unified with Special and General Relativity. Special Relativity tells us that energy and mass are two sides of the same coin, and General Relativity tells us how mass stretches the fabric of spacetime. Gravitational lensing has proven the theories predictions. The Standard Model had it's wartime and industrial applications. The transistor radio and faster computers. Every experiment discovers new weirdness though, rather than proving the model is complete. The particle zoo grows and grows, every time we smash protons together at higher and higher energies.

What does Quanta mean? It means "how much". A photon - a packet of light - comes in a specific frequency, which tells you how much energy it has. Let's imagine that a red photon is 2, green is 4 and blue is 6. We can also imagine that an X-ray might be 20 and a gamma ray 50. Do you notice that all the numbers are even? That's because you can't see anything odd numbered. A photon with the wrong energy won't interact with an atom that needs a higher energy to absorb it, and then emit a new photon. The only way you know anything exists is because of the photons that are emitted from atoms.

So we can only work with things we can see, and those things will only tell us about the photons that have the right energy. We can build a machine that measures microwaves, but what material should we use to listen to the frequencies that no known material interacts with. How would we even find elements that our eyes and our radios and our photographic chemicals can't detect?

Well, cosmologists reckon there's loads of it, whatever it is. They call it Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Nobody can see it, but they've done the math, and there just isn't enough visible matter to glue the galaxies together. Imagine if Dark Photons came in frequency 1, 3, 5, 7 etc. but our visible universe is governed by the Planck Constant, which means multiples of 2, in this  simplified example. If you can only see 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 etc. then you can't see the Dark Photons and the Dark Matter that can only be seen with the materials that we only hypothesise to exist.

General Relativity is normally right, and GR isn't fussy about the matter that it accelerates. It doesn't deal in packets of energy. GR doesn't do probabilities. Quantum Mechanics says that if we stop observing something it loses certainty and spreads out into a probability cloud. If you know the location of something, you can't know it's momentum. If you know something's momentum, you don't know where it's located. It's like saying that if everybody stops looking at the moon, it won't be where you predicted it to be when you look back. But GR doesn't care about that. GR has predicted the moon's orbit with incredible accuracy, and the moon always obeys the law of gravity.

If you ignore gravity in your subatomic world, you permit matter to behave unpredictably. If you ignore special relativity, you permit massive particles to fly around faster than the speed of light, in order to uphold the uncertainty principle.

If we think about the duality of light. Both a particle and a wave. We think of photons as massless, but they have energy and finite speed so General Relativity applies. The speed of light is too fast to get caught in orbit but light will bend around massive objects. Let's use the Pilot Wave Theory instead of all that Quantum weirdness. Imagine our photon being carried along by the gravitational waves that it's making. Gravity waves can travel as fast as they like and can even escape black holes. You can't detect them, because your ruler will stretch and compress as a wave passes. You can't take a timing of how long it takes for something to travel from A to B because time and space are different for different observers. Just by carrying my atomic clock to my fellow experimenter, to compare the time I measured and the time they measured, my clock will run slower because I'm moving in space. Time is not distance divided by speed.

Time measures how much slower you're moving than the speed of light. If you could travel at the speed of light, and tried to shine a torch forwards, no light would come out and your watch would be stopped. You wouldn't even be conscious, because you'd be frozen in time. If you slowed down to 99% of the speed of light and shone your torch, you'd see it beaming off just as fast as normal. That's because time is passing more slowly, so you don't notice that your light is moving at 1% of its normal speed. When you get back home, you'll probably find that everybody is dead, because time didn't slow down for them. Your clock is right, but so is theirs.

So what's going on at the subatomic scale then? Well, you can't really detect a single particle. When a photon hits the Charged Couple Device in your digital camera, it's absorbed. Enough photons have to be absorbed to trigger the discharge of a capacitor. Only the amplified signal is strong enough to be measured. The thing about amplification is that you get noise. You're trying to measure a signal, but a percentage of what you measure is noise. That's the signal to noise ratio. It gets worse. Because instruments are digital, they have limited precision. If you measure colour with 8 bits, you can only pick the closest of 256 colours. A CD can only store 16 bits of air pressure: 65,535 possible values. It does this 44,100 times a second. Pretty good, but only an approximation.

Because all digital equipment depends on an effect called Quantum Tunnelling, it's hard to know if the Quantum phenomena are being observed, or whether it's the instrument's noise that is being amplified. Early computers sent signals in parallel, but sometimes the data got 'skewed', with some bits arriving later than others. Now data is sent in serial, with very fast modulators and demodulators, but that means that a lot of buffering has to occur. If you imagine the time it takes for a detected signal to be amplified, that amplified value to be measured, the value stored in a buffer, a modulator to turn the value into electrical pulses, the time to travel down the wire, a demodulator to measure the pulses and store a value in another buffer, a memory controller to load that value into the computer processor's register, the processing instruction has to be loaded from the cache, and then the calculation is performed, the result is copied from the result register to memory, the I/O controller sends the result to the storage device.

Then, ages and ages and ages later, a scientist comes and looks at the values. According to Quantum Physics, every piece of measuring equipment, power source, data transmission cable, the computer and it's storage device, are all part of a quantum superposition, and the value is not determined until the scientist observes it, at which point the wavefunction collapses. Computers are great at doing calculations and for sharing research, but by their very nature as machines that exploit strange subatomic behaviour - semiconductors - they are also not very reliable when measuring the very properties of physics that they themself are built on.

It's useful to think of the Pilot Wave theory, because it explains observations like the double-slit experiment, in a nice deterministic way. Photons don't travel through both slits, but the wave does, and then the two waves interfere. Interference disappears as soon as you polarise the particle, because the peaks and troughs are no longer in phase. We really don't need to mess around with probability waves.

Yes I really hate probabilistic theories. Because subatomic things are smaller than the wavelength of light, we can only make statistical measurements. The size of the atomic nucleus was estimated by hammering a sheet of gold really thin and then firing electrons at it. Based on the number of electrons that bounced back and got detected, an estimate was made of how much empty space there is in an atom. However, you might know the weight of the gold, and the surface area, but you don't know how thick it is. It might be 5 atoms thick, it might be 50. Where did you get your measurement for the weight of a gold atom? How you know its density? How do you know how tightly packed the atoms are together?

At some point you're going to have to rely on some old science. The periodic table gives us the atomic weight, based on a presumed number of protons, neutrons and electrons. But what about the strong nuclear force that's holding the nucleus together? What about the energy of the electrons in the biggest orbits? Does a 1g diamond have as many atoms as 1g of Carbon dust? Prove it.

So we know that heavier elements are unstable, radioactive, and decay into lighter elements. We know what amount of what element, in a certain isotope, will give a self-sustaining fission reaction. We guess that fusion in stars creates all the elements up to iron, and all the elements after that we guess are created in supernovae. We haven't done much apart from a bunch of chemical reactions and some atom smashing yet though. We've done pretty well with electromagnetism and radio waves. Semiconductors and transistors are completely ubiquitous. It's all useless junk if the Van Allen belt blows away in a coronal mass ejection and we're all bombarded by cosmic rays and the radio waves are filled with static noise.

I can tell you something that's fairly easy to observe. Hotter air takes up more volume than colder air. Also, there's an altitude where Earth's gravity can no longer hang onto its Nitrogen, Oxygen, CO2 and noble gasses. Also, if you suck up dense polycarbons from deep underground, where they have been heavily compressed, and then set fire to them, the result is less Oxygen, more heat, and the expansion of liquid into a big volume of gas that's heavy, so it lies close to the ground, while the useful Oxygen is pushed into the upper atmosphere, where it thins out and drifts off into space.

If you have more CO2, you should plant more trees. However, we're doing the opposite. Deserts are spreading, rainforest is being cut down and fire sweeps through vegetation in California, Australia and Borneo.

So many people work in banking, insurance, accountancy, financial services, paper pushing jobs of such woeful uselessness that probably the bulk of humanity's job description is: sit at desk in front of computer, wear telephone headset, read the script on the screen to people on the phone and type their answers on the keyboard, drink tea & coffee, go home.

Why can't I do something to help feed some people, spread the wealth, speed up the conversion to clean energy, get more computers doing more useful calculations and modelling, rather than just massaging sales figures and marketing crap that nobody needs?

I'm going to risk running out of money for another few weeks at least, and that means I definitely will run out of money, because it's usually 60 days until I get paid. For the amount of money I'd get selling my depreciating electronics, and the time and hassle involved, I might as well get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket.

I'm just going to do the type of work that I'm passionate about and good at for a few weeks. I know HSBC are going to need a Customer Due Diligence system before February. I like my ex-colleagues, but my god nobody had the balls to just bin the junk and start again. It doesn't scale, it's not maintainable, it's so hard to roll out in-country, the pilot was a disaster, all the good people are leaving, and 85% of the work still has to be done.

I remember getting really angry at an all-day meeting with about 40 people. I didn't know at the time, but the CIO was there, and head honchos from Retail Bank & Wealth Management and Corporate Banking, plus the best in the software business trying to save Europe's biggest bank, on their number one project, money no object. It maddened me that we spent 2 and a half days estimating how much work there was to do in 3 weeks, but nobody knew what our productivity was. Nobody knew what the backlog was. Nobody knew what Minimum Viable Product was. Nobody was bothered about Continuous Deployment. Nobody had thought about the godforsaken task of pumping thousands of questions and rules and logic into a spreadsheet that you needed to know 3 programming languages to even make a stab in the dark.

I said I'd do half the questions on my own. I then had to spend an absolute age reprogramming the core system so that it would spit out meaningful syntax errors. There were about 500 things wrong before I even started. Then the architect admitted that he hadn't even thought about some fairly fundamental things and his solution took days to get right, while my suggestion was roundly ignored. Then the data architect started changing everything, even though it was tightly coupled throughout the entire system. I had to give loads of people lessons on Git and Maven artefact versioning. It was madness, and I had to call time out: I asked for a code freeze while we got everything stable. To everyone's credit, they listened to me, trusted me and supported me. I think it was only 5 straight days of midnight finishes. The work wasn't hard, but there were major bugs in every single component of the system. The pressure of knowing that hundreds of people are effectively twiddling their thumbs, and if you don't get it all working, you've damaged a huge amount of productivity.

A little cheer went up when everything integrated and the screens went green for the first time in weeks. It was also just in time for the CIO to announce that we'd achieved a significant milestone at the Town Hall. It was false optimism though. I had unearthed an absolute mountain of buggy code and dodgy config. My worst fears about performance were confirmed too. It took 5 minutes for the homepage to load.

I found a Scrum Master I liked and gave him a list of names that I wanted to work on a new version of the application. We picked good tech, designed a simple system and had something to demo in a week. They sacked my scrum master, me, and the longest serving member of the development team. People were getting jumpy and we were making management look pretty incompetent. I was also leaving a paper trail that was inconvenient. I was quite explicit about the urgency of the situation and what the simple remedies were. I didn't sugar coat it, because I'd been giving the same advice for 5 months.

I had plenty of warnings to keep my head down, and toe the line. I knew my days were numbered, and when I found out my old scrum master wanted me back because everything was tanking, I fired my parting shot. I knew I'd get terminated. Quicker than having to work a notice period. No need to lie about your reasons for leaving. No 4 weeks of hell working for a micromanaging idiot.

There's no challenge for me in corporate software. I ran the IT for a nice medium sized company. The board asked me for a data warehouse and a new phone system. Instead I gave them a new card payments processing system and an accurate set of accounts, with the correct ledger for all their customers. It's the only reason why the Office of Fair Trading didn't shut them down when they sent their forensic accountants to see why the books didn't really balance. Oh, and they were in breach of card data protection and were going to have a data theft until I tokenised all the card numbers. I had such a hard time in convincing the CEO of the right technology strategy that when he said "fit in or fuck off" I was more than happy to leave that rudderless captain.

When JPMorgan needed somebody to figure out why their FX system was running like a dog and they were going to cause a market liquidity disaster on International Money Markets Day, they'd had 10 Oracle consultants and none of them could find anything wrong. I found a DBA I liked in London, who didn't even work in my department, and we went through everything with a fine tooth comb. I also harassed the sysadmins until they got my disk I/O up to scratch and tweaked every kernel configuration value, applied every patch and generally wrung every bit of speed we could muster out of the hardware. I then had to take the vendor's code to bits and tell them where they had multithreading issues. They didn't believe me, but I kept sending them the measurements I'd made and pretty graphs, until they put a dev on the phone to me, and we talked through the code, and found a bug. Then the marvellous DBA found the setting that was causing the latency. With the new code and the much faster database, I could hardly believe the timings from the performance tests. When IMM day came, we blitzed it. We absolutely wiped the floor. Fastest FX platform in the world. There wasn't much appetite for developing our own in-house system anymore, I really didn't want to sit around looking busy. I liked my friends and the culture, but I still need interesting work.

And that's how it goes. Hire me to fix your technology problems, and I will, but then I'll want to leave if new challenges don't come along. I hate just keeping a seat warm. I guess that's Bipolar. I work like a son of a bitch for 3 or 4 months, then I'm really struggling to stay motivated for another month or two, and then I'll just stop coming to work.

I could try and pace myself, but invariably I find myself drawn to the impossible challenges. Normally you hire somebody who turns out to be rubbish, but refuses to leave. They literally stick to their chair like glue, because their main motivation is job security, not being good at their job. When you hire somebody who's really good, you can't let them know what a hideous stinking mess everything is in, and that they're going to be under relentless pressure to do horrible work. People who are really good will just go and find somewhere better to work.

I'm an idiot. I want to finish the job I've started and leave feeling proud of delivering stuff. I never ask for the poor performers to be fired. Most of the time I'm able to calmly filter out the new guy I'm training, when they're trying to impress me, but they don't know what they're talking about, and I've got an absolute bitch of a schedule to keep. I had to keep just saying "no" when 3 people were shadowing me, and they were all saying you forgot this or that, or you did that wrong... then I press a button and it all works first time and I can start to be more amenable again.

I'm absolutely not perfect. The first implementation is normally a dog. An ugly dog. But it works, and then the pressure is off so I can refactor for elegance. It's a bit of a thankless task though. When you start refactoring you then start looking at other code, and you end up having to change more and more and more and all the tests break because everything is so fragile, and then people start complaining that they can't find their bit of code anymore, and they have to merge their bit of work into an unrecognisable new world, because people don't pull, commit and push often enough.

I don't even write much code. Ask me for a bit of code that does something, and I'll give you a little bundle that you can plug in wherever you want it. When everybody is developing features but the application doesn't work, I'll concentrate on bug fixing and stabilising the build. When everybody is trampling on each other's toes, I'll concentrate on release management and versioning. When an important demo is coming up but people are committing code that doesn't work, I'll roll it back and tell them to put it on a branch until it integrates. When code starts getting promoted from DEV, to UAT, QA and PROD, somebody has to make sure the database is created with the latest schema, test data is loaded, Business Process Management tasks are cleared down, and all the little microservices are up to the right versions. That can take 3 hours on a bad day.

Software is not hard. Managing a huge team is hard. I haven't had a management role since 2013. However, I know that every untalented email forwarder who thinks they can manage a big project says "features, features, features, we're late, features, features, oh my god we are so late, let's just get it working, get it working, oh my god so many bugs, performance is terrible, let's try and go live anyway, oh my god it's hard doing a production rollout, and the users hate it even more than the testers, what do we do? what do we do? everybody panic, work 25 hours a day 8 days a week, 366 days a year, what do you mean we don't have any metrics? what do you mean we don't have any reporting? what do you mean it's not multilingual? why are all the good people leaving? why do things seem to get done a lot slower now we're supporting 3 or 4 more environments, instead of just one? who could have predicted such a thing? why didn't any highly paid consultants tell me? oh, they did? get me the mail server administrator immediately, there's some junk mail I don't seem to be able to delete permanently. Just get it done before the regulators come asking why we've failed to meet our timetable commitment".

And that's why I hate corporate bullshit.

It's the engineer's curse: we want to just solve problems, to make stuff that works, to make things better. I don't care that it hurts your feelings when I say your idea's rubbish. Your job is to listen to the experts, motivate people and sign the paychecks. My job is to come up with the ideas and make them a reality for you.

I don't really think I'm cut out for having a boss. I don't really think I'm employable anymore. I just completely ignore all the management, then they love me, then I tell them I'm not doing it again unless things change, then they hate me, then I get fired, then they get fired.

I probably need to figure out a way to get paid for more than 5 or 6 months of shouting and swearing at everybody and just doing whatever the hell I want. But it's so soul destroying to go to work and think that you made absolutely no difference. In fact you were complicit. Your day rate bought your silence. You were more worried about losing the stream of big invoices than your ethics. You put financial benefit ahead of professional, moral and legal obligations.

A bunch of white collars have got to get prosecuted soon.

Bankers have had their hand in the till for far too long.

Tags: #banking #bipolar #physics #career

This is a story about stormy weather...

Apologies for the interruption to the blog regularity. This was caused by unpleasant winter weather and being unemployed. I also couldn't see straight and I passed out. Normal service will be resumed again soon.

Since my life fell apart due to illness and divorce, I have never managed get all the essential life things in place at the same time:

1. Stable Accommodation (without 13 snoring people per dorm)
2. A job that's more than just giving blow jobs in a toilet (never tried it, but it's plan "Z")
3. Friends, who respect me, and understand that my life was decimated
4. Family, including parents who can understand how hard it is to do all the things on this list (with no money, despite working)
5. Getting my stuff out or storage and into my apartment
6. A hobby: kitesurfing maybe. Failing that, at least some holidays
7. Deal with a huge pile of 2-and-a-half-year-old post
8. Do my business administration and tax affairs
9. Live near work
10. Not just getting totally smashed drunk all the time, and don't abuse drugs

You have no idea how hard it is too do almost all those things, when you are barely just surviving. The individual tasks are not hard for a person with a job, girlfriend, home. I'm is pretty much totally exhausted and suicidal from other attempts to fix my life. When you get low on funds then idiots start pulling the plug, and all the other work is ruined.

Just because you have a sorted life, don't lecture me. I bought my own home and did loads of work on it, never missed a bill payment, quit my job despite having a "top" ranking in the company (according to my annual performance review). I went to work for New Look to help them internationalise. Job was OK. Commute was too far.

I became an entrepreneur again. I sat in my back garden and made iPhone apps. I had a couple of number 1 hits. This gave me encouragement to say away from 9-5 drudgery, I started IT contracting again, and it was an improvement on being disrespected by the people above your pay grade.

I was then an electrician. If you think your paperwork is bad... wait until you've got to do safety certificates, inspection reports, quotes, cashflow forecasting, wholesaler credit and the challenge of doing all of this comes before paying any money into the bank.

After being an electrician, I went back to iPhone apps, but developing custom ones for companies. That business gave me just about everything I wanted, except a high quality team, and having the cash to grow. There is also even more paperwork associated with a technology company.

I took Hubflow/Mepublish business through the Springboard Accelerator program in Cambridge. We even won 2nd prize at the Cambridge Union Society. The angels didn't want to invest in me at first, because I pitched for their money in flip flops. We still managed to find investors though.

Seeing 150+ mentors in 2 weeks, plus all the other Springboard work was hard too. We had very little time to fix our users bugs, stay on top of invoicing our clients and all the other business administration crap. There were actually too many things on the list.  It was too much to handle.

When I got back from Springboard, my horrible ex was there, pressuring me to go to social occasions and blocking me from moving to the Startup capital of the UK: London. She liked having at least 3 or 4 luxury holidays a year. She liked doing a hobby job that got to stroke her ego. Teachers can work anywhere. She needed to support my 3 years of busting my balls to get into the Tech startup scene.

Anyway, she wouldn't. Her main preoccupation was getting blind drunk at social occasions and then smashing up my expensive camera(s). She'd smashed up one of my cameras 3 weekends in a row. She was never sorry. "It was an accident" is not accepting blame. "I'm sorry" is how humans apologise.

Shortly after Springboard finished, in 2011, the last evening event we ever went to, she smashed another camera, and then when we got back to our hotel room, she started verbally abusing me. She was saying things like "you're a weirdo, none of my family like you [not true] and none of my friends like you [not true]" then she got up, opened the door and stood in the doorway, just shouting "YOU'RE A WIERDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO, EVERYBODY HATES YOU, YOU WEIRDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO" at me at the top of her voice.

I'm not sure whether she held the door open so that people could hear, if I shouted back, or whether it was so she could make a quick getaway if she verbally abused my too much. Whatever the reason, it backfired.

I snapped. I don't really remember what happened, because the next thing that I remember is her screaming. Her scream brought me back to reality. Reality at the time was that she was on the floor, pinned down by me, and my fists was raised in anger.

Because she screamed I let her go and she ran off to many of the concerned faces peering out of their bedrooms: they had been woken up by her tirade of verbal abuse.

I tried to remember what had happened. I remembered asking her to stop abusing me. I asked her to stop being so disrespectful about having broken 3 digital cameras in 3 weeks... I'm the one who paid for those cameras and replacements. I remember being called a "weirdo" over and over again, which was often a schoolyard chant for bullies, which I was on the receiving end of a lot.

Afterwards, my brain finally pieced what had happened together. She had said I was worthless and abusively insulted everything I've ever done, interspersed with calling my a "Weirdo" and telling me that friends and family don't like me.

I grabbed her, but she started trying to punch me, so I threw her on the ground and pinned her arms. She spat in my face, and then the rage was really unleashed. I was no longer in control - I'm guessing - because I don't remember the rage bit. I threw 4 or 5 punches against the struggling abuser before she screamed. The scream woke me up and I got off her and let her run away to the people who had been looking, because of her shouting "weirdo! weirdo".

She spent the night surrounded by her friends and family. I got in my car, knowing that there were a couple of concrete columns I could drive into at 100mph.

Domestic abuse perpetrators should commit suicide though, right. I agree that there need to be severe repercussions for those who commit domestic abuse. Smashing up my face with her fists, going though my personal stuff, isolating me from my friends, controlling my life, verbally abusing, destroying my stuff with no intention of replacing or repairing it, generally being a low grade piece of shit... that kind of stuff affects people.

I blamed myself. I didn't even use the provocation or fact that she physically abused me, as an excuse.

I turned my airbag off and made I made a couple of 100+mph lunges for motorway pillars on the way home. Sadly, most of them have fencing to deflect drivers who  have fallen asleep or want to die.

When I got home I bought something online to kill myself with. It almost worked, but it had very unexpected consequences.

If you think domestic abusers deserve to be miserable, depressed and die, then I'm in agreement with you to some extent.

I had to go to work with two black eyes and a broken nose, and lie for my girlfriend. Nobody can see the verbal and psychological damage that she was doing either. She had an insatiable appetite for spending hours, days, outside my cell, just hurling abuse and threats of violence.

If there is that kind of abuse going on, and you're missing one or more of the 10 things on my list, you are going to struggle to be well. Yes, my mood gets very bad in winter and Xmas/January are particularly horrible times for making it through the seasons.

How can you expect somebody to sort out all the broken things in their life, when they just escaped an abusive relationship, but they lost their job, their home, their friends, their money etc. etc. Just because you've entered a routine boring life, doesn't make you special. I had a normal life. In fact, it wasn't ordinary. It was extraordinary.

Bipolar Disorder can have its blessings. When I'm depressed I can't do much about the shits who gang up on me, but when I'm hypomanic I can work like an absolute machine and avoid having my reputation tarnished by the people who hit and verbally abuse me, and make promises they have no intention of carrying through (another form of abusive): like waving a £50 note in front of a homeless person, asking them if they want it, and then setting fire to it.

To help somebody with a manageable mental heath problem, it's really easy. Just don't lie to them. Don't insult them. Don't stigmatise them. Don't make them spend all their money on private treatment, so they don't have any money. Don't take away their house. Don't badmouth them too all their friends so that they're totally isolated and alone. Don't tell them that you know f**k all about managing a mental health problem that they already successfully managed for 32+ years.

If you're always leaving them out in the cold. If you're always removing opportunities rather than creating them. If you're physically injuring them. If you talk to them in a disgusting way. If you're a totally disrespectful c**t... that's going to drive that person to a bad place.

During my 6 month experiment I discovered this, beyond all reasonable doubt. My Dad's an abusive waste of space who would ruin a supercar to save the money on a single bolt. My Mum is kind and generous, but she's not immune from ignorance, and she trusts my Dad's disgusting views. My ex-wife wanted me dead so she could have my live insurance money, and she's successfully painted a picture of me as some sort of demon.

In private treatment, they teach you not to accept a clinical label for an acute illness as a it will be used against you as derogatory term. Stress and unreasonable expectations, abuse and the relationships collapse around you. Your only visitor is the one who runs the prison. The prison in your home. Your gaoler will come and bang on your locked door around the clock, to make sure you are as agitated as possible.

That's what I've learnt. I've learnt that playing by the rules, being kind, not being vindictive, trusting professionals, but fundamentally evaluating everything base on an objective analysis of the data, has shown this:

• The NHS is wonderful, but Fluoxetine as a first line of defence is ruining lives
• The NHS is wonderful, but getting a referral to a Psychiatrist takes far too long (6+ months)
• The NHS is wonderful, but their Psychiatrists are used to dealing with mostly psychotically ill people who are completely dysfunctional
• The NHS is wonderful, but it's NICE who get to decide what medication they can use. Most things on offer will give you horrible side effects and have very little evidence of long term efficacy
• So, in short, if you're an educated patient, don't listen to your GP. My GP helped to kick me out of my house, so my absolute c**t of an wife could have an affair without distractions
• Your parents know f**k all. Especially if they've put you in hospital a couple of times. Oh, and if they've caused Grievous Bodily Home because they've such primitive apes that they don't have the power of speech, to say "I'm coming to attack you with a piece of glass now because I only know how to be a violent psychopath"
• Private Psychologists and Psychiatrists can be very kind and non-judgemental, and can actually say things that really help. You can actually have a conversation with them about whether a medication is good for dribbling and Jeremy Kyle, or whether there are any upsides
• Dual diagnosis is a fucking curse. Dual diagnosis is a death sentence. When you say something, people have an unlimited amount of ignorant idiotic crap with which to belittle and dismiss your opinion.

But the short explanation is this: people are not very mature and people are not very intelligent. People love to point and laugh and label and exclude the different kid. That translates into adult life too. One of the big reasons why adults don't lose their vicious c**tishness is that all they do is do crosswords and watch TV. They're hopelessly idiotic. When I go to the doctor, I tell them what I want, and they give it to me.

I went to my GP and said "I'm having unmanageable suicidal thoughts, and thinking about self-harming. I've tried to keep myself safe, but I no longer feel able to keep myself safe any more".

My GP wrote a letter to Psychiatric Liaison at the Royal London Hospital, and sent me there immediately.

I spoke to Psychiatric Liaison, and explained that my life was unmanageable, because "my parents kept lying about supporting me, but they were just stringing me on, and that was an unmanageable situation, with a stressful job and the recent stress of moving (without their help of course). I explained that 2 years ago they had told me not to borrow a small amount of cashflow money, and that they would help. I explained that they lied. They waited until the last minute and pretended they had never made the offer, even though they had made it on multiple occasions"

I spoke to the Duty Psychiatrist, and told her I wanted Olanzapine (never taken it before, but I knew it was fast acting... I had no plans to take it... I just wanted to give the Psychiatrist a job) but I wanted to be admitted to hospital.

The Duty Psychiatrist gave me the spiel about hospitals not being a nice environment. I reassured her that I had been on Psych wards before.  She suggested Monday to Friday visits with the Crisis team. I pointed out the day was Saturday.

When I got into the Psych Ward that I wanted, I was happier, relaxed. That's the way things are supposed to work. It took me 13 hours, but I got what I needed.

One of the nurses brought me my Olanzapine, which is what I said I wanted. I knew it's a much smaller pill than Quetiapine, so I could hide it under my tongue and then spit it out when I was out of view.

Yes, I finally got what I wanted out of the NHS, which was to help me from committing suicide. They gave me a safe hospital environment to shield me from the bullshit life that drove me to suicide. Can you believe that my boss at HSBC actually gave me and my sister a hard time. I was in hospital for 2 weeks with a suspected heart condition. That's disgusting.

3 hot meals a day and a bed. Oh, and maybe a TV. I was a little bored, but the other patients were good to talk to, and we did our little Hole in my Bucket musical number. A s**tload more interesting than working on a project that's falling flat (HSBC Customer Due Diligence: CDD) on it's face because they terminate the contracts of anybody with expertise and skill and has a track record of turning failing projects around.

Oh, and while I was in hospital (was it the 4th or the 5th major admission, I've lost count) my parents decided to give me half the sum of money that they promised me I could borrow off them 2 and a half years ago, but just lied. That's right, they lied. They lied about wanting to help, and their lie was exposed too late for me to be able to arrange an alternative. Two and a half years later! Having to spend 2 and a half years living off my wits in London is hard.

So here's the bottom line: if you love your children and you want to help them, listen to them and if you make a promise to help them, don't let them down.

If you think you've got a "bad kid" you're probably a hypocritical c**t. My mistreating your kids, mugging them off, taking the p**s out of them, never praising them for anything, just doing whatever the hell you want all the time. There's no such thing as a "bad kid" they've all got parents. If those parents drink and smoke and take drugs and can't be bothered to get a proper job, and had their house bought for them by their elderly parents... what disgusting hypocrisy.

The reason why this blog post is late, is because I always have to take matters in to my own hands. You know all those anti-depressants you pop, and the beer, wine and vodka that you tip down your gullet? You're buying overpriced medication, and self-medicating for whatever problems you have in your life, or baggage you're still carrying around.

I'm still not drinking, but I'm sick of being in hospital. I'm sick of how much time & money it costs me to be your convenient scapegoat. I'm sick of people looking at medicine bottles and thinking that they know something about me. I actually keep my medication in a bottle by the bed to get rid of shallow girlfriends. The medications inside have never been touched.

I'm going to start tapering psychoactive substances into my life. Total abstinence proves nothing. If we follow the abstinence theory to its ultimate conclusion, we give up on food, because it's converted to glucose in the body, and glucose is sugar.

So, which is a more fitting epitaph?

Here lies Nick. He was such a non-addict he even gave up food. Any oxygen. What a hero. He died, so that his parents could continue being complete selfish ignorant cunts. A noble sacrifice. Turns out that life is a lot more livable with sugar and other things

Or I've got another one for you. Do you like this one?

Here lies Nick. He died doing what he loved. His parents actually gave a shit about him, so they decided to support him for once, and involve the rest of the family rather than just spreading malicious bullshit about him. Turns out that you don't die young if you're nice to your sons and daughters. Rumour has it that Nick's dad even gave £1 to charity for the first time in his miserable life, in the hope that Nick could see it from the afterlife.

They're quite long. Maybe they need to be edited down a bit.

Anyway, chemical oblivion awaits. Wake me up when 2 and a half years have passed and my cunt Dad might actually let my mum help her son.

Oh, help myself? Did you say "help yourself".... yeah, good idea. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, because my parents are such selfish liars who should never have had kids. I've had barely the briefest breaks in between companies in my career. I work my f**king arse off. I'm busting my balls to help myself, and others too.

This is what my parents think I spend my money on. No, when my life has been completely fucked over I very rarely spend the price of a large Dominos pizza on enough drugs to tranquilize an elephant, because you lie to me and fuck over my plans, which is very stressful (December 2015)

Tags: #drugs #suicide #bipolar #nhs #addiction

This is a story about the battle of the sexes...

Why would you punch that face? What would it achieve? What would the effect be? I can tell you about the final point.

If you punch me multiple times in the face, without provokation, I will react. Here's how my reactions will go...

If I'm lonely and isolated, because I've been forced to leave my home and rent a flat for you miles away from all my friends, then I will be sad and depressed. Especially if I'm home alone in that flat all week while you're working away and out drinking with all your friends. That isn't very nice, is it?

Perhaps you don't like me seeing my friends. When I had all my friends to visit for our engagement party you threw a massive tantrum. When I went out kitesurfing with my friends, you went through my internet browsing history and rummaged through all my personal belongings. When I got home, you put me on trial, even though what you found was entirely innocent.

Why would you boast about hitting men in the past? Hitting people is not good. There's never an excuse for it. It's never the answer. I feel bad about the times when I have swung my fists. I can't defend my actions. Why do you think you have an excuse?

So, I was afraid. I was very afraid, because domestic abuse was literally killing me. I had become suicidal.

Men don't really talk about domestic abuse. We're not really allowed to be abused. The system isn't set up in that way. Domestic abuse is when a man hits a woman, not vice versa.

So, I was given every reason to believe that when she got angry, I was going to get my face smashed in. It had happened three times. Three strikes. She had boasted about doing it in the past. She had no remorse. She was unapologietic. She didn't think she had done anything wrong. I didn't even defend myself. Why would I? It was her who was angry and aggressive and violent. I was passive, unguarded, open, loving and caring.

My reaction wasn't great. First I sliced my wrist open with a breadknife. She got even more angry about this. Apparently the fact that I had been driven to self mutilation was a provocative act? Apparently, somebody crying, in pain and bleeding is a target for violence and abuse.

My next reaction wasn't great. I rigged up one of my climbing ropes so I could hang myself. This resulted in the police being called. She thought that was the end of it. The police had 'dealt' with it, so to speak. Her actions were in no way linked to anything. You ring the police, and everything is fixed. That's how society works, isn't it?

My next reaction wasn't great. I smashed up my own laptop. I saw her getting into one of her rages, and instead of letting her start throwing punches, I smashed up my laptop. It stopped me from getting hit. She was quite fond of my £1,000 laptop. She liked watching movies on it with me. I smashed it up and she didn't hit me that time.

You can't keep smashing up £1,000 laptops though. It gets expensive.

So we both suffered a little for the laptop. She didn't get to watch movies with me, but I was the one who mainly suffered, because I didn't have a laptop anymore. It also cost me a load of money to replace all the broken parts. It also took me a load of time to repair it. It was me who learnt more of a lesson than her.

My next reaction wasn't great. I smashed up our bed. I saw her getting into one of her rages, and instead of letting her start throwing punches, I smashed up the bed. It stopped me from getting hit. She was quite fond of our £300 bed. She liked sleeping in it with me, occasionally. I smashed up our bed and she didn't hit me that time. 

You can't keep smashing up £300 beds though. It gets expensive.

So we both suffered a little for the bed. She had to sleep on the mattress on the floor with me, but she was away a lot of the time, so I suffered more. I paid for the bed, so it was me who suffered financially too. I was glad not to have my face being punched though.

My next reaction wasn't great. I smashed up her car. I saw her getting into one of her rages, and instead of letting her start throwing punches, I smashed up her car. It stopped me from getting hit, although she did try. She ended up tearing my favourite clothes, in her attempt to physically hurt me. She was quite fond of her car. She wanted to hit me, and it made her want to hit me even more because I had damaged her car.

So that didn't work at all. It made her even more violent and aggressive. That was a total failure, as well as being expensive. I had to get her a new bonnet and have a dent in the door filled, as well as having the panels resprayed.

Anyway, you get the idea about the way the relationship went. Because I had good reason to expect my face to get smashed in, when she would get angry, I would get scared, and she would be aggressive and threatening, and I would smash something up in order to not be punched. I don't like being punched. I don't like having black eyes and a broken nose.

Seems rational enough? Well it was completely insane. What seemed logical to me, was for her to stop being violent, threatening and aggressive towards me. I had this crazy dream of a perfect relationship, where I wouldn't get punched in the face. I had these wild fantasies of dating somebody who didn't swing their fists into my head. I had the crazy notion that she might admit she was in the wrong and stop being so aggressive.

Anyway, we should have broken up, but my parents taught me to always persevere with a completely fucked up relationship. They taught me to never give up on somebody, no matter how abusive the relationship. I tried to fix things. I tried a kindness offensive. I bought her flowers, I cooked her lavish meals, I took her on luxury holidays, I showered her with gifts, I made her heart-shaped chocolate eggs, I painted her pictures, I made her music... I tried to sooth her rages.

I remember throwing her ski boots into a snow drift because she was having a tantrum about something. The icy air seemed to chill her out a little, and I avoided being hit.

If I'm totally honest - and I tend to be - a lot of her rage seemed to be linked to sex. She seemed to quite like it, and she didn't like that I knew that. She didn't like that I knew she liked having sex with me. She wanted to have sex as a weapon to use against me, but she was frustrated that it hurt her too. She knew that she would weaken before I did. She wanted me to beg and crawl over broken glass, but her libido was too high to permit such power games.

It's strange what men and women will do to each other. I work on a very simple relationship principle: I've got a surplus of love that I want to give away. I want to make my partner feel loved, adored, cared for, secure and happy. Strange, right? I should just be out to get my dick wet, but I don't really work like that.

Sure, I had nowhere near as much sex as would have been good for my adult psyche, as a teenager. I was highly undersexed. Nowhere near enough sex in my teens. Perhaps it's common for many kids, but I only had a couple of girlfriends, and not nearly enough sex.

To say I was a late starter is not entirely accurate. I had a dab of speed paste (amphetamine) at a nightclub, when I was 15, and ended up losing my virginity that night with chemically enhanced confidence, despite having 'speed dick' (stimulants - like speed - shrink your dick due to blood pressure changes... honest, love).

Because I started my career 3 or 4 years early, I always had a nice car and plenty of money. Insofar as I can tell, girls are looking for confidence, not for money or material things, but having a nice car can make you feel confident as a guy. It's a penis extension. It's a confidence booster. It's a social crutch.

My confidence and self-esteem were rock bottom, on account of having my school life ruined by being forced to wear unfashionable clothes, uniform worn in the wrong style, and ride past over 1,000 children at the bus stop in the morning, riding a stolen girls bike. That's not helpful to a teenaged child.

But anyway, between Devon, Dorset and Somerset, there were opportunities for the occasional tryst with a girl from another school, who you perhaps met at a festival, on the beach, at a disco or a club, or later in life when I got a car. It wasn't feast and famine. It was famine with the few occasional crumbs from the table.

I'm jealous of friends who hooked up with childhood sweethearts. I would have loved to have had a childhood sweetheart, but you just can't damage a kid's image that badly without there being terrible repercussions on their social standing.

The net result is that I was grateful to have a girlfriend when I had one. I never took them for granted. I worked hard to please them, and to make the relationship work. Even to the point where I was taking a beating, but not complaining or telling anybody. I took it personally. I took it to heart. It hurt, and I blamed myself.

My ex probably thought she could do better. Yes, when you have a partner who makes you feel adored, when you're put on a pedestal and you have the ground you walk on worshipped, you can get a little arrogant. You can get totally complacent about receiving love and care and attention. Well, I've matured a little now. If you'd rather be with somebody who's unfaithful and treats you with contempt, you know where the door is.

Yes, I'm pretty stubborn. I will act with kindness, and more kindness, and play nice, and be nice and do nice things. I don't play games. I don't try and manipulate. I don't try and frustrate. I don't play hard to get. I'm a bit of an oddball like that.

I'm not perfect, and I did once end up in a relationship because I thought I was worthless and had to settle for somebody I didn't fancy. I ended up feeling resentful though. I didn't know how to get out of that relationship, and I wasn't very nice to that poor girl at times. I didn't hit her though. I do regret some things I said and did though. I did feel remorse for not handling that situation better. However, we saw each other again about 10 years ago, and we still got along just fine.

I guess when two stubborn people meet though, sparks are going to fly. I'm a bit of a weirdo in that I feel sorry when I hurt people. I feel responsible for my actions. I'm a bit strange like that. I really don't like the way I acted with my ex, even though it was clearly a reaction to being victimised. I can't justify my actions. I should have found a way to walk away. I should have ignored my parents example and done things my own way.

My way normally works. Living to try and be somebody's abstract idea of what they want doesn't really work. You can't twist and contort yourself into an imaginary being that they want. You can't be somebody else's fantasy, no matter how hard you try.

I don't like disappointing people. I've always been a disappointment to my parents. They are always looking to pick holes in everything I do, and destroy me in order to blame their shortcomings on me. I selfishly decided to conceive myself and pop out of my mother's uterus and get in the way of the drug taking party. How selfish and inconsiderate of me. Oops.

Why am I still going over all this stuff? Well, I found a way to numb the pain. I found a way to stop the arguments. I found a solution to all our problems. I found a way for us to peacefully co-exist. I found a way to protect myself that kept me safe from violence and aggression. I hid in my shell for 4 years. I used tricks I learned from my parents. Luckily there were no children involved. I'm not that irresponsible and reckless, for fuck's sake!

It's a hard life, dating a rich guy who treats you like a princess and takes you on lovely holidays. You should beat some manners into him (July 2006)

Tags: #divorce #childhood

This is a story about being in a trance...

Choosing your battles is important. You can't fight when you're outnumbered, weakened or compromised in some way. I'm an expert in keeping my powder dry, patiently waiting out my opponent.

I'm not out for revenge. Revenge is a dish that is best never to be served. However, a certain amount of pressure venting still has to happen. If that can be done in a non-violent, non-destructive way, then that's much better.

Lots of people have had a very hard life. Some people have had truly appalling things happen to them. It's not a competition though. It's not only those who are the most damaged who have a right to express their feelings. There isn't a minimum level of mistreatment that you have to receive before you're entitled to be upset, hurt.

If you don't think that I think about other people's suffering, and put my own feelings into some sort of context, you're completely wrong. I actually decided not to get professional help when I went somewhere and heard a few other people's stories. I decided that I wasn't worthy. I decided that because their stories were so awful, I would leave my own untold. That was a mistake.

There should not be a finite amount of compassion in the world. There is no shortage of energy being ploughed into agression, anger, violence. Why can't that energy be channelled into healing broken hearts? Why can't we love a little more, rather than spit and rage and hate?

Does this all sound a bit hippy? Well, why are you being critical? What's fundamentally wrong with what I'm saying? Why don't you park your criticism, and instead think in terms of "yes, and" rather than "no, but". Why don't you try and be constructive rather than destructive?

It's hard though, to let go of prejudice, fear and the baggage that you carry around. You're not very self aware. You've never taken a long hard look at yourself, and the damage that you're doing to your loved ones by beating them down. You can't even see how much you are projecting your own sense of failure onto your family and friends.

Do you remember the crabs in the bucket? Yes, the crabs in the bucket can't escape, because they always pull one another back down into the bucket, whenever one is about to escape. Mutually assured destruction.

People don't like to see their peers being successful. It's a jungle out there and we are genetically programmed to fight with each other, because the assumption is that the world's resources are finite. If you can murder a few competitors, then there is more for you. Co-operation is not part of the selfish gene.

But we have entered an era of technology. With machines and industrialisation, and modern farming techniques, we now have surpluses of food, energy, goods & other commodities. There is no need to fight with each other like cavemen any more. We should be living in an age of enlightenment.

My parents represent everything that's wrong with the world. They are bigots and racists. They are homophobic and xenophobic. They are selfish and stupid. They are critics, without the intelligence to turn the spotlight on themselves. They can't see their own hypocrisy. They think they have arrived in some sort of exclusive club, where they can do whatever they want. It's no co-incidence that they only live a few miles away from David Cameron, and Conservative Party safe seats.

If you live in London, you live with drug addicts, pickpockets, religious extremists, political activists, homeless people, alcoholics, gangs with knives, gangs with guns, prostitutes and every other member of a society that understands self preservation. One wrong step off the pavement, and you'll be flattened by a double-decker bus. We are often reminded by London of the constant threat of death.

London's a big mixing pot. I used to live in a council flat in the Angel Islington. Our flats looked out over some of the most expensive town houses in the world. Millionaires and billionaires rubbing shoulders with the proletariat. Looking out of their mansions at grubby social housing, while we looked in on their pristine little lives, through their big windows.

And do you know what we saw? They eat the same food. They sleep like us. They argue like us. They fuck like us. They look the same as us under their expensive clothes. They bleed the same colour as us. They bruise like us. They hurt like us. The rich cry too.

If you try and insulate yourself from reality, you become dehumanised. How is it that wealthy people are so well practiced at ignoring people who are drawing attention to themselves? You can't help every beggar, every homeless person, but equally how can you just brush off somebody who is in obvious distress? How can you not hear their story? How can you keep your blinkers on?

If everybody just helped one other person, that would halve the amount of suffering in the world. That's all it takes. Just take one person under your wing, who would have otherwise been ignored. If you have more than you need, you have an obligation to spread the wealth, even if you feel like being greedy, selfish.

Yes, it's animal nature to be selfish. It's animal nature to hoard your seeds. Are you a squirrel? Are you nuts?

Yes, it's animal nature to be selfish. It's animal nature to fight like stags, to lock your antlers. Do you have horns on your head when you're horny? Are you the devil?

Yes, it's animal nature to be selfish. It's animal nature to squeal with delight when the food trough is filled. Do you have a pigs nose? Are you a porky pig?

The above picture is of a 3D-printed gun. That's a terrible use case for technology. Why are our brightest minds building banks and bombs? You can't eat gold and bombs kill people. Those things should be worthless, in an enlightened civilisation.

You know the technology that's helped me most in my life? Chemistry. Better living through chemistry. I was able to throw of the shackles of low self esteem and claim my adult identity with a few doses of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Yes, it had the therapeutic value of an entire adult life spent on the psychoanalyst's couch. It allowed me to escape the clutches of my abusive drug addicted parents.

It sounds weird doesn't it, using a drug to escape a life of misery and a family home that was a den of drug addiction? However, the experience was disruptive in my life. It allowed me the time and the space to have some freedom from the oppression of my horrible childhood. I forgave myself for not being good enough for my parents.

The experience launched me and my career into the stratosphere. I had security and happiness for the first time in my life. I had a capability for love that my parents never had. Love conquers all. A kindness offensive is a wonderful thing.

You can learn the techniques of love, and master them without chemical assistance. You can learn to have an open heart. You can learn to trust. You can learn to take risks. You can learn to give and suspend your demand to get. You can learn to do random acts of kindness. You can learn to feel reward from doing good deeds in the world.

Normally oxytocin is the reason why you learn to hug your children, rather than drowning them for giving you a headache with their crying. However, I imagine that if you're fucked up on drugs, it's hard for your body to notice the subtle hormones that are being released. It's really hard to be a loving parent if you're fucked up on drugs.

You should probably date and marry a raver. You should probably have kids with an ex-clubber. If you meet somebody who used to take Ecstasy when they were a kid, then hang onto them... they're a keeper. If your heart has been broken in the past, they'll hug you so hard they'll stick your broken pieces back together.

I can't recommend that you take MDMA. For one thing, it's a Class "A" substance. I also think it's addictive, on account of it sharing a lot of its molecular structure with Crystal Meth. It's also as dangerous as horse riding, or maybe slightly less... but horse riding is quite dangerous. I like extreme sports, but horse riding looks a bit too risky, from the statistics.

For me, my life had reached a point where I was suicidal, so it was a risk I was prepared to take. My parents had also taught me that it was OK to take risks with my life, and that drug taking was somehow a 'victimless' crime, even though I could see a lot of bad effects on health, wealth and our family life.

I've never regretted taking a risk, even when things have backfired. You always learn something, and you often learn most from your mistakes. One mistake cost me the best part of 4 years in the wilderness, but that was because it was compounded by ignorant and abusive c**ts who trapped me in a dead end. More to follow on that soon.

People can be very misguided. They believe ignorant nonsense and end up causing damage. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Butt out unless you know what you're talking about. You will have to do 10,000 hours of anything before you become an expert. I found this note in a package that was delivered in my name. It contained something disruptive. Whoever intercepted it didn't know what they were looking at. They didn't know what they were talking about.

I got that note on the same day as Camden Council decided to make me homeless. I knew I needed help. One help would have been good, let alone a thousand. However, people were actually actively working against me. Ignorance is rife.

When the system fails you, you have to take matters into your own hands. I had very little faith in Camden Council, and I had a plan "B". It was very lucky that I had plan "B" because Camden Council was prepared to let me die. They didn't think my life was worth saving.

I can see why people might be a little bit selfish, when I was let down so badly by the 'safety net' that's supposed to be there for people who get sick. People in Camden Council always assumed that friends and family would help me out. Some friends did help, but they were talked into undermining that help by my destructive parents.

If you're spying on me, and undermining my patient confidentiality by talking to my doctors and other healthcare professionals, you are not acting in my interests. You are undermining trust and respect. You might think you're trying to help, but you're not helping me... you're treating me like a sick person. That's not your job, unless you're a nurse or a doctor or somebody who is professionally engaged to help me. Please just be my friend.

My Mum recently said to me "welcome back". That disgusts me. I really don't feel like talking to her any more. I'm not back. I never went anywhere. Just treat people right, and you'll see how they'll respond. Treat people well... that will help them. If you treat people with respect and dignity, that's the minimum that they deserve.

I have explicitly stated that I didn't want my parents anywhere near my doctors and treatment, after a horrendous experience with my dad and my wife compromising my GP conspiring to remove me from my own home so that my ex could go on dating websites and have no-strings sex. I paid a high price for my Dad's drug addiction and my ex's sex addiction. I've got my problems, but I need love and support like anybody else.

I've been trying to get back to London and recover from the drawn-out ordeal for about 4 years. For 2 years I was trying to forgive & forget, but while I forgave my ex's backstabbing, she never said sorry for abusing me. She's not sorry, and it hurts, but it's time to move on. I'm no angel, but I did give her a nice life and plenty of second chances to be loving and caring.

It's not a difficult recipe for life: be nice.

If you can't be nice, get the fuck out of my life. Admit to the world that you're a horrible person out for yourself, and go and find yourself a dark little hole to curl up and die in.

This is my recipe for living: take some risks. Be the first person to say how you feel. Give out complements. Smile at people. Hug people. Dish out some love. Share.

If the world's not interested in that, then I'm not sure what I'm living for.

These are all substitute medications that you can be legally prescribed. I have never been prescribed any of these. I don't take any substitute medication. I don't take any drugs, medication or drink alcohol (July 2014)

Tags: #addiction #drugs #london #notanonymous #divorce

This is a story about clinging on for dear life...

When you are hounded to the edge of the abyss, you will fall to your death if you allow yourself to be pushed one single step more. You shouldn't push people that hard. You shouldn't be so harsh, critical, judgemental, presumptuous. You don't know how close somebody is to the edge, until they're gone.

I don't want to go on about this, but I'm dealing with suicidal thoughts on a daily basis. If you think that's because I'm mentally ill, you're wrong. My brain has correctly judged the circumstances, and it's telling me that I have very few options. My brain is correctly informing me that I'm on the edge of a precipice, and the other side is a jeering snarling crowd who don't care whether I live or die.

People accuse suicidal people of being attention seeking, or selfish. It's actually neither. You have all the time in the world to hurl those accusations at a gravestone when they're gone. They won't be receiving any attention or anything for themself when they're gone. They won't even be stealing a single precious breath of your oxygen anymore, so how can it be selfish?

I've got a life insurance policy that covers suicide. My family are literally better off if I'm dead. That's cold hard cash in their pockets, rather than the rather draining task of repeatedly telling me I'm not good enough and I'm selfish. Yes, it's hard work to have to keep telling somebody to keep taking steps towards their demise, to keep hounding them until they're dead.

In Oxford, I'm pretty sure I came up with the term pushy parents. It kind of stuck with my friends, and their parents, and the phrase entered the popular vernacular. There were a lot of high-achieving kids at my schools in Oxford, and living nearby. My parents had big plans for their only son. They were going to make me achieve everything that they had failed to ever achieve, by force.

We all want our kids to do well, to get ahead, to achieve their greatest potential, but you have got to realise that they're still children. If you push them hard their whole childhood they won't thank you for it, if you push them beyond their limits and make them sick. You will struggle to judge how hard they can work, and how much stress and pressure they can handle, because you are a mature adult, and they are a developing child.

A child's attention span is different from yours. A child's knowledge and experience is different from yours. A child's ability to express distress and protect themself is different from yours. A child's capacity to experience daily stress and pressure and bullying and coercion is different from yours.

You might think that you are bringing up baby Einstein, but in fact you might be twisting that child's personality into somebody who's very bitter and resentful about being kept in from seeing their friends in order to study more. You might not be aware just how deeply etched childhood experiences are in that child's memory. You have no idea what is important to that individual child, especially if you don't listen.

Why am I bitching and whining about this stuff? Well, let me remind you: I'm living with the desire to commit suicide. I can only act on this once, and then I have no further opportunity to tell you who I really am, to tell you what makes me tick. This is a time capsule. It tells you everything you didn't want to know about me when I was alive.

This is the inconvenient truth. This is the smoking gun. This is the postmortem analysis.

I read a few books that were posthumously published after the author's death. The anguish, the distress, the emotion of the authors, thinly concealed behind passive agression and satire, oozes out from those works of literature. The words are soaked with emotion. Every sentence packs a punch, swung wildly at an unseen enemy.

I was systematically re-programmed to believe that my life was worthless, which is why I take huge risks. It's not selfishness if the self has no value. The more that you tell a person that they're shit and they're a burden and they're not good enough, the less risk-averse they become. They will go to great lengths to prove themself or to feel some connection to life.

I don't care what anybody says. Extreme sports are not stupid... they're brave. I can barely express to you just how cold, hard & rational you have to be to step into an extreme environment. You are literally weighing life & death with your every action. You are making decisions that can barely be comprehended by somebody who hasn't willingly laid their life on the line.

My Dad's a real coward. He's abusive to me and my Mum, and he won't admit he's in the wrong. He's such a coward that he hid behind his front door and got the police to deal with me when I went to confront him. He won't even face his own son, on the level, like an adult. He's never done anything brave in his life. He's a real disappointment to me.

I'm actually very calm and rational. I realise my Dad's an old man, and he's good to my sister and my niece, so I wasn't going to risk his life by pulverising him. I just wanted him to stand and face his own son, and confront the issue of him abusing me and my mum. I wanted him to admit he was wrong, to my face. I didn't demand it, but I felt that only a coward would shy away from an honest face to face conversation about his wrongdoing. I was right. He's a coward.

My Mum gave me life, and actually helped save my life and give me hope when I had my back against the wall, but my Dad is poisonous. He actually talks my Mum out of helping me. He probably thinks he's being a protector, a hero, but he's wrong. He's protecting nobody. My Mum will be hurt when I'm dead, and his son will be dead. My sister won't have a brother, and my niece won't have an uncle, and he won't accept any responsibility.

Yes, responsibility. Let's talk about responsibility.

On a daily basis, I'm responsible for my own life. I need to eat, sleep and not throw myself off a tall building. Yup, that's pretty much my entire existence at the moment. I'm trapped at the edge, and the route back to safety is blocked by my Dad, the 'protector' so I'm desperately trying to find another route back to safety, while my Dad is busily telling everybody not to help me.

I have no idea why somebody would step in and tell a caring person not to help a desperate person. I have no idea why a Dad would tell a Mum not to help their child. It's really upsetting. It's upsetting for me, and it's upsetting for my Mum, to have my Dad driving wedges in-between family members. Why can't we all just get along?

I'm not a defective toy, and you can't just return me to the store. I'm not broken, you just have to accept that I'm a human and I have my own identity, and I have identical needs to any other human. I need glucose, water, oxygen, salt, protein, fat, fibre and emotional sustenance. Cutting me off from my own mother by trying to poison her opinion of her own son, to compensate for your own shortcomings, that's patently disgusting.

I can have a lovely conversation with my Mum. Then, the next time we speak, her views will have been completely tainted by my Dad. I have no idea what his big problem is, but I suppose I should try harder to get to the bottom of it. It's no longer the case that I should assume that his 30+ years more on the planet means that he should be the more mature one.

Yes, I've always wanted to look up to my Dad. I've always wanted him to be a role model for me. I've always wanted him to lead by example.

My Dad doesn't really follow through though. He's a quitter. He's never had a career like I have. He's never achieved anything academically like I have. He's never been able to provide enough for his family. He's a real failure. A drunk and a drug addict, he's a bit of a loser, and I guess he feels pretty bad about himself.

Yes, he took his parents money and squandered it. His parents were wealthy and sent their kids to private school, and he messed up his chances of achieving anything of note. He mucked about with drugs and decided that was his priority in life... to take drugs. Even after the arrival of his son, he decided that the pursuit of drugs was still the most important thing in his life.

One of my best friends was a drug addict. When his son arrived, he cleaned up his act. He got himself a mortgage and a steady job. He quit drugs and smoking and keeps himself fit and healthy for his son. He's my role model. I look up to him. I admire what he's done. He's the gold standard that I aspire to emulate.

Men need father figures in their lives. They need masculine identity, which is about strength, leadership, trust, providing for loved ones, consistency, resourcefulness, reliability, dependability. You can't depend on a drug addict. The only thing they love is drugs.

My Dad actually destroyed his health with drugs, and had to go to hospital for a series of operations at around the time that my niece was born. I'm not sure whether fear of death or the arrival of a grandchild was the reason why he cleaned up his act, but he did finally quit drugs, in his sixties.

Nobody preaches louder than a convert, and I imagine that my Dad is very pious now that he's no longer abusing drugs. I don't drink or take drugs, but my Dad is pretty insufferable about many aspects of my lifestyle. He assumes that because I live in London I'm high on cocaine all the time. He assumes that because I have high earning potential, I spend it all on drugs. He's completely wrong.

Because he's a fuckup, he assumes I'm a fuckup too, but he's wrong. Because he's made mistakes in his life, he assumes I've made the same mistakes. Because he let people down, he assumes I'm going to let people down too. He applies his own guilt to me. He makes me carry the guilt for his wrongdoing.

I've got a brilliant title for a blog post lined up for December 26th, so I can't tell too much of my story at the moment without spoiling the surprise. There aren't actually any surprises. Everything is here, somewhere, but I'm going to spell things out for the world. It's extremely frustrating that I have to pace myself, to tell things little by little, but patience is a virtue.

I'm currently writing 2,000 words a day, and it's already swamping people. Hardly anybody is still engaged with my writing. It's gotten a bit unbalanced, and there are themes that are beginning to be a bit like a broken record. I'm actually dragging things out a little now, because I picked some milestones, and I'm making sure I don't give away enough to allow people to think that they can extrapolate and guess how the story ends.

I'll tell you how and when the story currently ends, according to my plan: I kill myself on New Year's Day, having told my tale but without the energy, support or resources to be able to continue living. It's exhausting being beaten for your 'sins' which are actually a result of taking abuse for somebody else's guilty conscience.

I'm going to tell you how somebody gets driven to extremism. Extreme risk taking. Extreme behaviour. Extreme moods. Death, which is at the other extremity from birth.

When a child is born, you write their future, based on the opportunities that you offer them. Choice is an illusion. Free will is an illusion. We can only play the cards that we are dealt.

Tags: #childhood #suicide #parents #depression

This is a story about being a scapegoat...

There's one simple rule to follow in life: don't be an arsehole. If you're bully, criticising, undermining and generally destroying somebody's character, you're an arsehole. People are basically good. Billion dollar companies like eBay have been built on positive not negative stereotypes.

If you assume that everybody is out to rob you, hurt you. If you assume that everybody is bad and you're the only good person on the planet, and treat people according to this negative worldview, then you're going to be isolated and lonely.

It's important to listen to somebody's story, and consider all things with an open mind. There is no shorthand for somebody's life. You can't just hear one negative label and think "yeah yeah yeah, I know the rest". You know absolutely nothing about a person.

I've been advised by mental health professionals, psychologists and amateur psychologists to avoid labelling myself. However, creativity loves constraints, so I have labelled myself and I'm owning that label while I tell that story, knowing that it will be strongly emotive.

My dad joked that we should name our black & white cat "Ginger" because it would challenge people. It would literally blow people's minds. People would fly into an irrational rage, just because a black & white cat was named "Ginger". Yes, some people are so brainwashed, that they feel pure terror and anxiety at the smallest thing that doesn't meet their expectations of conformity.

We are very programmed to conform. We are groomed, massaged, browbeaten, into a kind of group conformity. Kids in school and adults at work are a lot easier to deal with as one homogenous blob, a sea of blank grey faces, rather than a bunch of individual humans. It's much easier to command & control if there is groupthink and uniformity.

Bizarrely, I hankered after some conformity in my life. I wished that my parents were married, I wished that my Dad was into football like the other Dads, I wanted to wear the right trainers and tie my school tie in the 'correct' way, rather than the way that an adult would wear a tie.

Subcultural phenomena are immensely important as a means of indicating to people that you belong to their tribe. Wearing the right clothes and having an interest in the right things makes the difference between an easy life, or a life as a weirdo, an outsider, a spare part, an alien.

You might not understand why something's so important to somebody, but they do. They understand the difference it makes to their daily life, being singled out as 'different'. They have to deal with the daily consequences of being marked out as not belonging to the clan. Not wearing the right tartan, so to speak.

If you are forced to be trapped into a place where you don't belong, or you're not accepted into the group, to the community. If there is constant friction, resistance, then you have to find survival strategies.

I'm very good at zoning out, putting myself into a trance-like state. I can transport myself to another time, another place. I can transcend my body and just wait it out. If you think I'm impatient you couldn't be more wrong. I'm probably one of the most patient people you'll ever meet.

I had such a good grasp of time at school that one of my party tricks - that gained me a little oddball popularity - was being able to count down 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... and then the school bell would ring. I had a natural sense of good timing, given how important the end of school was in my life.

My entire soul yearned for the brief freedom from the bullies that came after school, at weekends and during holidays. The entire structure of my personality was reshaped by time, the clock, the timetable.

I would be down all termtime, and then I would go absolutely bezerk during holidays, trying to pack all that missing fun into those short periods. I would be very tired and lethargic and not enjoy very much of anything during termtime. I would be sad and crying about the bullying. Then, when the holidays arrived, I would hardly sleep, get ridiculously overexcited to have been released from the chains of relentless bullying, and I would launch myself at things with unbelievable enthusiasm and energy, because I knew that the holidays were short.

You might say that I'd be depressed for 6 or 7 weeks at a time, and then hypomanic for 1 or 2 weeks. Yeah, you could say that there were two extremes in my life. You could say that for 13 years there were two poles in my daily existence. You might say that my entire time at school, I had to be very bi-polar, because of the enforced structure of my life. It was the only way I could survive.

When I started work, I was 3 or 4 years younger than everybody else in the company. I was 17 years old and doing a graduate job for BAe Systems. The graduates tolerated me, but I was just a schoolkid to them. I hadn't yet been to University or done much growing up, so I was immature and obviously, I was a bit weird.

Sure, I made friends, but I was always a bit of an oddball. I was always doing something embarrassing or stupid, because I was going through the transition from childhood to adulthood. I was doing the growing up that my peers all did together at University. I made the mistake of accepting every drink that was bought for me, including the 'dirty pint' that I was tricked into drinking and throwing up in front of my colleagues, for example.

Time is the only thing that can change things. There is no short cut to growing up. Yes I was mature for my age in some ways, and I had to fight against ageism, but I also made mistakes that were purely down to immaturity. The best thing I could do was to sit tight and wait until my face matched my experience. I was never taken seriously when I was younger.

Respecting your elders is a mistake in technology, computing, IT, software. If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got. Technology is disruptive, it's innovative, it's fast-paced and ever-changing. You can learn as much from the 'script kiddies' as you can from the key-man-dependency 'oracle' type character who think's he or she is the font of all knowledge.

Technology is truly meritocratic. I really don't care how many years you've worked in software. How many websites and apps have you made? How many users have used your software? How many trillions of dollars has your software processed? Those are the objective measures, obviously.

The grass roots are taking hold. The pyramid is starting to look like it's built on shaky foundations. The bullied kids, who spent all their time on computers as a form of escapism, are now running your company. You might think that because you did an MBA at some business school and were generally academically bright, that you command & control your company from the boardroom, where you puff out your chest and feel terribly important. You're wrong.

The thing about old companies is that they do things in old fashioned ways. They are not modernising fast enough, because of all the gatekeepers and people who have an over-inflated view of their self importance. Customers pretty much care about only two things: price and quality. Brand recognition is a function of consistent quality over many years of using a product or service. People won't stay loyal to a company forever, if they're getting inferior quality or paying over the market rate.

Challengers are offering innovative products, higher quality at a cheaper price. When it comes to technology, the challengers are offering a delightful user experience, rather than just the bare minimum for an older company to remain competitive. Old companies are all about cost cutting and keeping costs low. New companies are all about investment and offering something that puts them head & shoulders above the competition. New companies can't rely on a monopoly, so they have to try harder.

We live in a highly regulated world, so there's no risk associated with switching to a different product or service. They all have to adhere to the same standards, and they're all underwritten by the same guarantees. You have the same consumer rights, whether you've bought a product from an old company or a new company. You have the same rights as a consumer of a service from an old company or a new company.

The difference with the challengers is that they're hungry. They're enthusiastic, passionate and energetic. They're not sitting back, farming their monopoly and expecting the good times to roll forever. They're trying to nip and bite the ankles of the big players, and take a slice of the big market share pie, by delivering superior products and services.

My watch wasn't made by some amazingly skilled craftsman in Switzerland, who had to spend many many years learning the art of horology. No, it was 'assembled' in China after it was designed in California. It cost a fraction of what a Patek Philippe would have cost and it does a lot more stuff. I can pay for stuff with it, travel on busses and the underground, monitor my heart rate, receive directions when I'm driving or cycling, ask it questions, get reminders of stuff I need to do, check my diary, see who's phoning me before I get my phone out of my pocket, and read my messages and emails. It has seamlessly blended into my everyday life.

Monopolies don't last forever, and if you dig in and refuse to listen to what the disruptive young whippersnappers are saying then you will find yourself stuck out on a limb. You'll be sat there in your boardroom in your massive headquarters, wondering where all your customers and your profits went. The challengers are no longer coming. They have already arrived and they're disrupting your industry, and word is spreading amongst customers that there's a better way.

The geek will inherit the earth. The meek geeks are taking over everything. Chances are, you don't run a product or service company anymore. You run a software house that happens to specialise in a certain product or service. It's the software and systems that run your organisation, not your people and processes. You're mistaken if you think your best sales rep or most amazing manager are your most important assets. Those individuals just won't scale up like a software system can.

Automation and mechanisation is changing the whole world. There are still plenty of examples where we can industrialise. Where we can get the benefits of higher production and lower cost. We can eliminate human error and the limitations of workers ability to work fast and concentrate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The more that we allow machines to do, the more efficient industries become, and the more delightful the customer experience.

Have you ever noticed how it feels as if you're getting to your destination faster, if you see a queue of traffic and decide to nip down a back alley, to take a rat run? You might not actually be moving any faster, but at least if feels like you're travelling rather than standing still. You might take this analogy with supermarket kiosks. Now that you scan and process the payment for your own groceries, it feels faster, because you're not stood in line waiting for the cashier. Really, you're just saving the grocery store the cost of having to have extra checkout cashiers to cope with the demand, but the cost saving means they can deliver higher quality groceries for the same retail price.

Economies of scale do work, and retailers are very good at scaling things up, because their margins are very aggressive. In the marketplace with price comparison technology, consumers will vote with their feet if your prices are not competitive. Banking hasn't really got its head around that yet. Many people still bank with their original current account, because they haven't seen the benefits of being a 'rate tart' or finding a higher quality online or mobile app experience yet. However, as Apple Pay becomes more and more prevalent, your bank is becoming less and less relevant. Having access to a branch is irrelevant if you live in a cashless society and you have a good mobile app.

We are witnessing a changing of the guard. Out with the old, in with the new. Long live the Queen, cash is not king.

Robots are going to pick out your Christmas presents and despatch them to you. One day, a drone helicopter will deliver your packages. Change is coming. Don't fight it. Geeks don't like fighting (June 2008)

Tags: #bipolar #bullying #childhood #career #banking #capitalism #computing

This is a story about being down and out on the streets of Camden Town...

Performing your greatest hits over and over again drives you insane. However, the public and society expect you to keep repeating what you do best, again and again and again, like a dancing bear or a dog trained to do tricks.

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, but I'm not a CD player. If you want to listen to the same song over and over again, just press the repeat button on your iPod. Making an artist compromise on their creativity, in order to simply be a human machine, a robot, can destroy them.

The anxiety associated with knowing you have to do something that you've done so much that it's a complete paint by numbers, starts to become an unbearable burden on your ability to be able to function. Pretty much the only way to remain functioning is to drink yourself into such oblivion that you just don't care anymore.

Alcohol is a GABA agonist. What that means is that it suppresses a certain amount of your brain activity. It's effectively making you chilled out and dumb. Yes, if you're chilled out and dumb, you don't mind doing the same stupid shit over and over and over again. If you're intelligent and creative it destroys your soul, your desire to continue living.

Is it arrogant to say "fuck this" and stop doing what your talent and experience qualifies you to do, because it's destroying you? Should I just shut the hell up and "get a job" as I've been told to do by some ignorant twats? Well, it would literally kill me.

There are 2 ways I could die right at the moment. I could kill myself or I could drink myself to death. These are both sane responses to an insane world. I'm not a robot. Sorry about that.

My whole job is to automate human tasks. My whole job is to get mechanical robots, machines, to perform repetitive tasks instead of having human slaves or human robots doing them. We have reached a point with the development of technology, computing, software, where we don't need to do stupid repetitive shit anymore. Even creating software doesn't have to mean re-inventing the wheel anymore.

So, if you ask me to do something that's just plain wrong, I won't do it anymore. If you ask me to write code that's just going to go into the dustbin, I won't do it. I've stopped writing bugs. I've stopped supporting failures and idiots who don't have a software background. If you don't know your arse from your elbow, I won't show you the respect that you don't deserve.

If you want to know how to build software that can process $1.16 quadrillion ($1,160,000,000,000,000) per year, you can pay me for my professional opinion and I'll show you how it's done. That's the most money that's ever been processed by a banking software system, so that means I know what I'm talking about. If you don't want to listen, we can part company and I'll wish you the very best of luck.

1% of 1 quadrillion is 10 trillion. 1% of 10 trillion is 100 billion. 1% of 100 billion is 1 billion. 1% of 1 billion is 10 million. Any questions?

Ignore what people tell you. Money really does grow on trees, for those who can be bothered to climb. Yes, geese that lay golden eggs really do exist. You just have to climb the beanstalk and risk the wrath of an angry giant.

Magic beans are not a waste of money. They can help you to climb the beanstalk. They won't help you climb back down again though. What goes up must come down, but you might take a tumble. More on this in a future post entitled: Self Medication (Part Two).

You've heard about doping in sport. Why would you think that the athletes of the corporate world would be any different from those who compete in the Olympic Games? The pressure to perform at the very top of your game is just the same, if not greater. The competition is fierce, and anything that gives you a competitive edge is needed unless you want to be trampled underfoot by the thundering herd.

Did you ever wonder why London drinks so much coffee? Did you ever wonder why people are prepared to pay the best part of £3 or £4 for some bitter black sludge? Well, it's because of a plant alkali called Caffeine. Yes, that's a performance enhancing drug. It helps you to concentrate, and allows you to work with more energy, stamina, than would ordinarily be permitted by your body & mind. It increases your output potential.

Limitless? No, not limitless. There is a cost involved, and that cost is insomnia and anxiety. But don't worry about that, because there's always alcohol to take the edge off the anxiety and put you into an alcohol-induced coma that is a substitute for sleep.

You are never more than a few tens of metres from an outlet for caffeine or alcohol in London. They even have bars at bus stops. Well, they don't really, but me and my friends made one. It was very popular. It was the ultimate London pop-up.

What can I get you, sir? Would you like uppers or would you like downers? Uppers in the morning, and throughout the day. Downers after work and throughout the whole weekend. Uppers again on Monday morning to get you going again. Heaps of downers on a Friday to try and calm down from the working week, to 'rest' and recuperate. Oh yes, London is a very high performance place.

So if it's not limitless, what happens when you reach the limits? What happens when you're working on the number one projects for the number one companies, dealing with the biggest amounts of money that have ever been processed in the history of humanity? What happens when you have completely saturated yourself with alcohol and caffeine?

Well, you need crutches. You need a wheelchair. You need something to keep you rolling. You become somewhat disabled, but you need to keep moving, so you get wheeled around or you have to hobble along. Why do you think your office chair has wheels on it? It's because you're probably so f**ked that you can barely stand.

Yes, globalisation and corporate culture will f**k you up. You're only playing by the rules. You're only trying to compete and stay up with the herd, but it's f**king everybody up. Setting everybody up to compete with one another is causing people to be trampled to death.

Adversarial culture is wrecking lives. Us vs. Them and the zero sum game is in the spirit of competition, not co-operation. For somebody to win, somebody else has to lose. The system is designed to have losers as well as winners, and because there can only be one winner, that means everybody else is a loser.

Ultimately, somebody is going to win. Yes, that's right. One person is going to have it all, and everybody else will be dead and buried. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, apart from the one-eyed man, who is king of the world. Everybody else just starves to death. Great system!

But we're all in this together, right? There's safety in numbers, surely? Well, you shouldn't put the Lions in charge of the herd of Zebra. That's pure madness. The conflict of interest between the Lions and the Zebra means that the Lions are not best placed to be in charge of the herd, even if they are at the top of the food chain.

Being an apex predator does not mean that you are best qualified to judge what the greater good is. It means that you're incentivised to be selfish. You don't want to tumble from your position at the top of the pyramid. Being one of the struggling masses is shit beyond belief.

Counter-culture does not mean sitting around smoking dope. That's just totally dumb. You might as well just hurl yourself into the Lion's mouth. Making yourself slow and stupid is just about the dumbest possible thing you could do. It's playing into the hands of the oppressive ruling class.

You think this is a bit paranoid and conspiracy-theory-esque? Well, do you feel lucky, punk? 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Would you and your family like to join them? Would you like to get to the back of the queue? Would you like to swap your decadent western life for the life of somebody in the developing world? No, I didn't think so. You'd much rather prop up the adversarial system where you're lucky enough to be near the top of tottering tree.

Yes, luck is the decisive factor here, not skill or hard work. You don't think people in Asia and Africa work hard? You don't think people in the developing world are smart and resourceful? You're wrong. You're arrogant. You're deluded.

So, why do I reject the system that I profit from? Why do I prefer to live on the street in a cardboard box? Well, it actually pains me to know that I'm part of a system that's causing so much human misery. It's actually physically and mentally damaging to me to help to perpetrate deeds that cause death and destruction. I can't bury my head in the sand like you can.

I know you'll say or do anything to defend your family. More fool you though for not keeping your cock in your trousers. There are plenty of orphans who need parents. Why the f**k didn't you adopt? Are you literally the most selfish c**t in the whole wide world? Yes, the evidence would suggest that you are. You prop up the adversarial system and you create more mouths to feed in the decadent west and do nothing to give a hand up to the already starving mouths in the developing world.

There's no pride in having made a screaming, shitting, vomiting midget. Your body is evolved to do that. You had sex because you enjoyed having sex. You had a baby because your body is programmed to make babies. You did what snakes and scorpions do. You did what sharks and wasps do. You did what spiders and mosquitos do.

If I could give you one bit of advice, it would be to have a lobotomy. Ignorance is bliss. Being stupid is brilliant. Having higher brain functions is a curse. Being conscious and able to absorb information from the world and process it using rational thoughts is a f**king nightmare.

If you're wondering why I liked living with homeless people, it's because our footprint was much smaller. We lived small. We only consumed what we needed, and nothing more. We weren't making more arrogant ignorant greedy clones of ourselves to fill the void in our meaningless lives. We were just surviving and self-medicating for the agony of the f**ked up world.

We were very cheap, in terms of our economic, social and environmental impact. When a white middle class rich person goes haywire, they normally hurt the world a great deal. That's why it's such a great shame that the west is run by such criminal psychopaths. They'll drop bombs and starve people in order to remain quaffing champagne in their palaces. I include relatively modest homes when I say 'palaces'. Yes take a look around at your home and remember that $2 a day to keep a person alive for a year is probably the price of one of your many flat screen TVs.

So am I a hypocrite? Well, calling me one from your palatial surroundings makes you a hypocrite. You can't hypocritically accuse somebody of hypocrisy. That's ridiculous. Have you been homeless? Have you lived on less than $2 a day? No, I didn't think so. Shut the hell up and go and buy your kids an iPad.

So, what's going to happen to me? Well, my current thinking is that I'm going to finish my story and then take the final exit. I can't really see any more point in existing beyond telling this story, this cautionary tale. I'm literally wasting oxygen.

I loved being homeless in Camden Town. At least it was an honest existence. At least it was true to my values (September 2014)

Tags: #homeless #suicide #frank #capitalism #drugs #depression #alcohol #london #career #banking

This is a story about a split personality...

This is 1 Churchill Place and this is Nick: the schoolboy who leads an exciting double life. For when Nick eats a banana, an amazing transformation takes place. Nick is BANANAMAN, ever alert for the call to action.

I'm not actually Bananaman, but I do eat porridge and a banana every morning. I'm also ever alert for the call to action. I wasn't born to follow.

In Silicon Valley, and with the top people in banks, there is an arms race. But it's not with weapons, it's with smart people. If you let good people go to your competitors, they will beat you. It's that simple. High performance teams make stuff happen.

There's no point in being part of a race to the bottom. I was really impressed by the way that Barclays have embraced the modern software development paradigm. They hired bright young people and allowed them to get on and make some damn high quality software. They let them run their projects with a risk-based approach and using Agile best practices.

I got a bit cross with a couple of people at Barclays, who were straddling the line. They were neither demanding quality and an old-school attention to detail, nor were they very talented or quick. However, the bulk of the developers were amazing and a pleasure to work with. There is always dead wood in any organisation. The problem comes when somebody gets promoted to a position of incompetency.

There's no sense in bluffing your way into a role you can't handle. If your skills aren't up to it, you can't handle the pressure or you just don't have relevant experience, stay away... you're just going to land you, your team and your company in trouble. I've never stepped away from a role in a particularly elegant way, but I haven't dug myself a hole either. I hate people who make themselves into a key man dependency when they're incompetent.

Fail fast. Move fast and break things. There's no sense in spending years and years doing something you're not very good at. I hate the way that we all need to push for promotions in order to get a pay rise and not be on the breadline, but people end up being promoted to positions they're hopelessly unqualified for, because all they're good at doing is kissing ass to clamber up the greasy pole.

Yes, if I had an hour to do some actual work or an hour to make myself more indispensable, or improve my promotion prospects, you can guess which one I'm more economically incentivised to do.

The way that corporations are run encourages people to delegate the things that they're supposed to do, and concentrate on things that only further their personal objectives, which are in direct conflict with the organisational needs. The most junior team members do all the work, while their managers concentrate on making themselves look good, and scrapping over the few promotions.

This adversarial system is flawed from the outset.

Look at how compliant these suit wearing office workers are, patiently queuing to get on a packed tube train to take them back to their miserable tiny home that they hardly spend any time in. They spend all their time pushing paper around in order to service the mortgage, which is a millstone around their neck.

God forbid that you end up procreating. Then your nuts really are in the vice. You will be having to sprint along on that treadmill to service all your debt, working to worship angry bawling midgets that are hungry and have relentless needs for clothes that they will soon outgrow or be ruined by this decadent practice of 'playing'. Ha! F**k those little sh1ts! They get to 'play' all day... how nice for them. Bastards.

Well, there's a way to punish those little sh1ts for being born. Yes, they should have a taste of what it's like to have not kept your cock in your trousers. Yes, they should be forced to go to an office like environment. No play for them. I have to sit at a desk all day, bored out of my mind, so the fruit of my loins has to too.

That'll teach the kids for being so stupid as to give birth to themselves, without a care in the world for how they're going to pay the mortgage, dress themselves or feed themselves. There's a rumour that babies can't even forage for food or kill an antelope. Who the hell do this race of midgets think they are? Arrogantly expecting to be wheeled around in carriages, and getting to gorge themselves on milk swelled breasts all day. That looks like a jolly nice life to me. I don't get to suckle on any breasts at all in the office. Yes, I was sacked last time I did that.

I'm rather patiently waiting for the day that I'm big enough to go to school. Mummy says that when I'm all grown up I will get to go and study with the other children. I will get to read books all day, and write poems and sh1t. Yes, that sounds like good fun. I would like to do that all day. At the moment all I do is follow grown ups around and get told off when they make mistakes. I do tests that they know the answers to, but they don't like my answers.

I see that the grown ups like to drink coffee and alcohol. I'm too young to have those things, but they look like a lot of fun. I would like to have those things. It looks like the coffee allows you to concentrate on doing your job, rather than having to deal with the existential angst of executing pointless tasks. It looks like the alcohol allows you to deal with the anxiety of never quite being able to break free from a system that is engineered to break the will of the sheep-like people, and force them into a system of meek compliance.

Yes, I think I will like it when I become a student, and I will get to lie around drinking booze and coffee, and pontificating about life the universe and everything. Reading books and writing is a lot more fun than being told what to do by grown ups. Mummy says I'm smart so I deserve to get to sit around and be complemented for coming up with the same answers to questions as the grown ups.

I can see now that the master plan is working very well. I can see now that studying history, politics and having mastery of the English language, has led us to this point of great enlightenment. Yes, I can see how amazing society has become since we started getting everybody to read the same books and work in the same offices doing the same kinds of things. I can see now that this kind of groupthink has been a very successful experiment. Life is so amazing now.

I'm so disappointed that I didn't come up with the very clever idea of studying other people's mistakes in order to be able to be an expert on mistakes. I'm clearly not very clever, because I'm not very good at making mistakes. Except the mistake of accidentally doing successful stuff. Yes, I should be like the grown ups who study mistakes and then copy them. I'm not very good at following their example. I'm not a very good student of failure.

I stupidly keep building stuff that works. I stupidly keep making a profit. I stupidly keep succeeding. How silly of me. Yes, that's clearly not the way the world works. We need to have failure. We need to have fighting. We need to have war. Success is not an option in the modern, enlightened world.

Let's not listen to the successful people who are proven and are making things work without violence and conflict. No, let's glorify the bullies and the warmongers instead. We should definitely have a society run by failures, run by those who can't make things work, harbour ideas of violence and vengeance to compensate for their inadequacies. Those are the kinds of leaders I want.

I see now that we are choosing just the very kinds of leaders that we really need. The kinds of people who want to go into positions of authority, responsibility... they are invariably the kinds who are not on a total ego-trip and grinding an axe, have a chip on their shoulder. They definitely don't have micropenises and some kind of small-man syndrome.

Yes, all the warmongering. Getting your willies out, I mean getting your guns out. Yes, it's very macho. It's definitely not overcompensation for your inadequacies. I'm definitely full of much more admiration for leaders who advocate violence. I'm definitely in favour of a global society based on bashing each other over the head with clubs. I'm definitely not in favour of diplomacy and peace. War is the answer, but I've been too stupid to see it before.

How foolish of me not to see the brilliance in the idea that we can all have pointy sticks and we can just attack each other and take whatever we want. I'm really looking forward to living in a cave again and foraging for nuts and berries and trying not to be eaten by a tiger. It sounds a lot more exciting than working in an office.

Yes, working in an office is pretty boring. I'd much rather be bullying somebody with my pointy stick. Especially if I have a pointy stick but they don't. Yes if I get to poke them with my pointy stick with no fear them being able to poke me back, because I'm the only one with a pointy stick, then I'll feel like the king of the world, which is the whole reason for the existence of the Earth and humanity, right? The whole reason the entire planet and the human race was created was as a massive entertainment system for me, right? I'm entitled to go out poking whoever I want with my pointy stick because it's fun.

The whole reason the world exists is so that I can have fun. It's a playground, and I'm allowed to play. I'm bored in my job and I want the attention of the other children and I like playing games, so I'm going to sharpen a stick and go and poke the most vulnerable weak person I can find. That will make me feel good.

I have no words to describe just how boring it is moving money around for pointy stick manufacturers. I have no words to describe just how boring it is never getting to play with those pointy sticks. I have no words to describe just how boring it is to never get to poke anybody with a pointy stick.

I've studied the history of poking people with pointy sticks and it sounds like a lot of fun. There's a lot of hope & glory in poking people with pointy sticks. It sounds like a barrel of laughs. It sounds like a game of soldiers.

So what the hell am I doing flying a desk when I could be flying a drone. I'm good with computers. I used to like computer games. Poking people with pointy sticks makes you feel better about yourself. What's not to like? I think I've found my perfect career.

It must take a lot of bravery to sit behind a screen, pressing buttons, in the full knowledge that the remote system that you are controlling that is poking people with pointy sticks, completely protects you from any physical pain or risk of injury or death. Yes, that's a really brave thing, I think, to sit playing war games on a computer.

Whether the people being poked by your pointy stick are real or they're simulated, that doesn't really matter. It's just that the graphics are probably more realistic in the simulator. I like the way the heads explode when you shoot them in the simulator. I don't like the physics of reality. They say that the simulated people don't even have families. Where's the fun in killing some computer simulated person who doesn't even have a family?

It gets boring after a while, killing simulated people. Time to drop some real bombs. The physics in reality isn't as good, but at least you're killing real people with real families. At least there is real human suffering. We haven't figured out how to simulate human suffering yet, or maybe nobody is particularly interested in experiencing simulated human suffering. Maybe there's no money in simulated human suffering. Maybe there is only money in real human suffering, for the manufacturers of pointy sticks.

That is all.

Frankie is well trained. Look at him doing his filing. It's a File-o-Frank (April 2007)

Tags: #frankie #politics #computing #banking #career #london

This is a story about the doors of perception...

So I radically altered my appearance for over a month. I went from being the suit wearing IT Consultant working on the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe (HSBC) to being the crazy suicidal mental patient guy with a moustache and a tattoo. That how I roll [on the floor laughing].

Self sabotage and self mutilation are strange things to do, but then so is suicide. They are symptoms of a very sick society. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a broken system. There can be no pride or honour in being able to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.

I knew what I was doing. I could have held back. I could have buried my feelings and kept my mouth shut. I could have bitten my tongue. However, things have been eating away inside of me, like acid dissolving the container it's kept in. It was time to vent some toxic gas.

This is all a rather extreme form of bridge burning. I'm really pretty sickened by what global banking and corporate culture is doing to the world and I want to do the right thing. I want to whistleblow on all the life-wrecking and economy destroying corrupt bullshit that I have had to endure.

It's not going to do me any favours, it's not going to make me any friends, it's not going to make me rich, famous or popular, but it has to be done. Somebody has to stand up, be counted, and do the damn right thing. It's going to hurt me, a lot.

Is this some personal grievance? Well I wouldn't be so passionate if it wasn't personal, but it's not personal in the way that you probably assume that it is. I was a Griffin Saver with Midland Bank since I was a little boy, and I've always loved HSBC and I was so proud to start work for them, age 21. Later, in 2003, I was amongst the first 8,000 people to work in the prestigious 8 Canada Square... headquarters of the HSBC Group Plc, which employs 245,000 people worldwide.

If you look after me, I will look after you. Actually I tend to do things the other way around. I will look after you on the assumption that once I have proven to you - beyond all reasonable doubt - that I am adding value to your organisation, you will look after me, to some extent. Sadly, the way the system works is to try and get blood out of the proverbial stone.

Yes, the employees of global banks are driven very hard indeed, but they share so little of the reward, in terms of the wealth that they generate for their masters. The customers of global banking pay huge sums of money for financial services, but it's them who still toil all hours to service their debts, rather than being enriched by the products they are sold.

Consumers are being sold a lie. They are being told that products and services will make them happier, richer, more attractive, more successful. The truth is that the only people who will get rich are those who own and operate the pyramid schemes. There simply aren't enough pay rises and promotions for you to be able to reach the rungs on the ladder where you will be able to see your kids and sleep at night... you're going to be stuck on that treadmill for the rest of your life, sorry.

It's not market economics that is broken. The markets really are efficient. However, they are not free from political influence. They are also not immune from manipulation by exceedingly wealthy individuals and institutions. Here's how it works...

Imagine if I were to buy all the insulin producing factories. Building a factory takes quite a long time. During the time that I own and operate a monopoly on insulin production, and the time that a competitor could enter the market that I have monopolised, the demand for insulin is going to remain constant, because diabetics don't want to die. So, if I am in control of the supply, and I know that demand is constant, then I can demand practically whatever price I want. That's market economics.

We see artificial scarcity created through cartels in many industries. Diamonds are only worth as much as they are on the markets because the De Beers family has such a large monopoly that they can control the amount of diamonds supplied to the market. Oil is only worth as much as it is because the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) can artificially control supply in order to maintain high prices. They are quite open about their monopoly, their cartel.

So you can't eat diamonds or money, but we do need energy. Money is the way that energy is swapped for goods and services, like food. It's easier to grow more food or make more goods, using energy that has been generated from a power station, rather than by manpower. Welcome to the industrial revolution.

Technology has made vast efficiency gains in terms of being able to move money around to get it to where it can work most effectively, but it doesn't mean that the system can't be gamed. In fact the whole financial system is a giant game. We need to remember that it's simply a way of keeping score and deciding who - as a person - is somehow 'worth' more than another, using some arbitrary measure.

That's right isn't it? The people in the West are 'worth' a lot more than the people in the developing world. Because they have more zeros on the end of a computer system that is keeping score, they get to have all the food, shelter, medicine, education, transport etc. and everybody else is a worthless slave. The human lives in the developing world are clearly not worth anything because their electronic bank balance is as good as zero, if not negative.

You can quite clearly see from the image above, who the superior being is. Yes, it's the one with the biggest bank balance in the global casino. They're the winner. Gold medal for them, hurrah!

Actually, huge numbers of people in the developing world have been saddled with debt that they didn't even agree to. Their nation's leaders signed away their natural resources, signed huge loan agreements to pay for some multinational to come and bleed the wealth, and then mortgaged every man, woman and child to pay for it all. That's really not acceptable.

When the people inside that country get a bit p1ssed off that their leaders have sold them down the river, then the developed nations can sell a bunch of guns, tanks, artillery and warplanes to keep their people in check. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

Oh, and when the people have really had enough, then it's time to bomb all the roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, power stations, sewerage plants, factories etc. etc. so that they have to have the developed nations come and rebuild it all again using yet more lovely lovely loans.

Yes, economic slavery is the New World Order. Yes, you might not see people in physical chains toiling in the plantations in your actual country, but somebody still has to grow your sugar, wheat, cotton, coffee etc. etc. Did you grow it yourself? Did you see where it was grown? Do you know anything about the life of the people who grew your food?

We're all rather busy in our wanky make-work jobs, feeling all high powered in a suit in a swanky glass & steel office, pressing buttons in the lift and doing the photocopying... great, but how many meals does it put on the table? Has it stopped war and human suffering? Has it stopped the spread of preventable disease? Has it saved the life of sick people?

I'm fed up of being shouted down by people with vested interests. I just wanted to do the right thing at HSBC and I got muscled out for escalating my concerns in line with my moral duty and legal responsibility to the shareholders and customers. I actually wanted to try and save jobs too.

So this is a call to action that is not some viral marketing, psychologically A-B tested, clickbait horseshit spam scam. This is not some pump and dump. This is not me grinding an axe because of a personal grievance. This is about the big picture and a sickness on all our souls, if you are part of the perpetration of the economic enslavement of the developing world.

In actual fact, the wrongdoing extends to your own doorstep. Somebody you know is in distress because of consumer lending. Their life and livelihood is under threat because they were told to borrow, borrow, borrow! Buy now, pay later! 12 months interest free credit! Low rates! Consume consume consume!

The whole ponzi scheme is set up to get people paid out by suckering other people in. Sure, my life looks fantastic with my riverside apartment, and of course I've had cars and boats and luxury holidays and hot tubs and flat screen TVs and Macbooks and iPhones and gadgets and technology galore. It doesn't make you happy, and eventually you realise the human cost. You wake up and smell the coffee.

So, as Nicholas "Mr Ethical" Wilson (@nw_nicholas) says:

I have been radicalised by HSBC/Tory fraud & corruption

Yup, I woke up one day and realised I couldn't carry on being part of something I knew was wrong, from the depths of my experience in my 19 year career as an IT consultant to global banks. It made me very sick to be living with such internal conflict. It made me upset to see talented professionals being completely ignored.

You can't buy me. You can pay for my opinion, but you don't get to choose what my opinion is. I will give you my opinion based on my experience and an objective analysis of all the evidence that I can gather. If you don't like that opinion, it's not up for debate, unless you are qualified to contest what I'm saying.

So my approach is very unorthodox, but the orthodoxy led us to the brink of economic armageddon, so why should I conduct myself in a manner which is clearly misconduct? Only an idiot expects to see different results each time they do the same thing. The only reason to play by the old rules is to protect the old system, but that system has failed.

Thankfully, there are all these motivational posters around HSBC telling you what to do if your manager isn't listening and the number one project is going down the shitter. If you're a consultant, you're specifically paid for your expert opinion... and very highly paid too. Lots and lots of shareholder money is being spent on the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe (HSBC) unsurprisingly.

So, what happens if you do speak up? Well, I'm not giving out any prizes for correct guesses.

But maybe my contribution just wasn't valued? Maybe I wasn't pulling my weight in the team? Maybe I have too much of a high opinion of my expertise?

The email from the HSBC CIO in charge of the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe reads as follows:

"I cannot thank you enough for the work you have put into this and for your commitment"

So, I'm a little bit confused. The Programme Director also told me, in front of loads of people, that he was really happy with my work... shortly before I was sacked. Curious, oh so very curious.

Anyway, I've got no mandate, no authority to communicate these things, so I'm just going to wait and see what happens. Let's see what happens with the Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) and whether the US Department of Justice is satisfied with the naughty banks who have managed to allegedly commit crimes but not been prosecuted for them.

Good luck, I say to them. Like I say, I've been a Griffin Saver with Midland Bank/HSBC since I was a little boy. I'm very loyal.

Merry Christmas!

Tags: #banking #career #london #it #capitalism #politics #hsbc