Justify your existence internally

Recently, on a not particularly busy day, while processing the usual 150 to 200 emails that flow into my inbox daily, I was inspired to click on one bearing the subject line: Justify your existence internally. 

  I was in a philosophical mood that day, contemplating as I had been doing the pointlessness of life in general and the senseless wasting of my own particular life within the four walls of that particular office. Could the email be the key of some spiritual revelation, something, anything, that would encourage me to live with myself for another day? It turned out to be, of course, the title of a seminar on internal communications.

  It figures.

  The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place, as G B Shaw is widely believed to have observed one hundred year before Twitter was even invented. But even absent the cacophony of social media George Bernard would only have had to spend a couple of hours inside any office to come to his conclusion.  

  Meetings. Meetings about meetings. Pre-meetings, meetings’ agendas and meetings’ minutes. Hours, days of meetings. Short reports, memos, grids and lists. Meeting notes. Relaying meetings to those who weren’t there, email threads, whispered gossip about what happened and who said what. Box-ticking, form-filling, feedback and postmortems to dissect how all of that went.

  No decision is ever reached during a meeting, you understand. The first you hear about a decision is two months after it was taken by someone in authority without consulting anyone and you only find out when you get locked out by the new security system or the website colour scheme turns acid green.

  By then, it is absolutely inappropriate to bring it up in a meeting. That’s not what meetings are for. They are not about the past and they are emphatically not about making things work better going forward. Or foreseeing and mitigating real problems. Or averting possible crises.

  Meetings are about meetings.

  At the end of my working life I’ll be lucky if 20 pc of my time will have been devoted to accomplishing the actual tasks I’ve been nominally paid to do. By the time it’s all over (praise be to god) I will have spent almost 80 pc of my time as a scribe, a compiler of grids and assembler of notes as well as ‘meat in the room’ for endless meetings that won’t result in any change, unless it’s for the worse, due to the total breakdown of communication that is the after effect and the leitmotif of the business of meetings.

  I’m not even angry about this, no longer scandalised or disappointed. I’m simply exhausted. Talked out, minuted out, post-noted and over-listed. Meetings, town halls, memos and complex email threads with an ever-changing cast of 12 people in CC is how the office pond life – that layer of mid-to -top level management whose job titles are completely impenetrable and whose salary level is a daily slap in the face to the rest of the workforce - justifies its existence internally.

  The rest of us, with real tasks, skills, goals and deadlines are just audience, cyber witnesses, clerical courtiers, while our own, one, precious life ebbs slowly away.

  Good luck robots. Do your worst.

The Upside Down is where shame has gone to die

Stranger things are happening, people. 

Thirty years from the fall of the Berlin wall, it turns out it's possible to gaslight a nation, spread disinformation and anxiety, foment division and hatred and get people to vote for, indeed clamour for, policies which go against their own best interest without a single shot fired or protester tortured.

A willingness and facility to lie, a dormant media (more interested in politics as horse race with occasional televised gladiatorial combats than in thoroughly researching topics and preparing for interviews) and the sheer quantity of information available are all it takes to dull people's critical faculties. Throw in a visible enemy (why not immigrants, that always work!) et voila' your got yourself some tasty, freeze-dried culture war where brains should be.

Twitter, sure, FB, digital tricks and dodgy Russian money - all have contributed to transform our public landscape in a murky Upside Down where white is black and everything ends up grey, fluffy, unsubstantial, un-pin-down-able.  Some of these things are technological and new, some, like corruption, have been with us forever.

But shame is what seals the deal and our fate in this particular political junction; or rather, the absence of it. The death of shame is the water you add to the instant coffee of ideological obsession. My bastard is better than your bastard. My liar is more honourable than your liar. My Islamophobe is classier than your anti-Semite.

In the last couple of days alone we have witnessed the spectacle of the Conservative Party Press Office Twitter account disguising itself as some neutral fact-checking outfit for the duration of the leaders' ITV debate to  propagandise for Johnson, then coolly reverting to its usual title: job done! A bizarre post-propaganda move that proved too much for Twitter itself (and they do have strong stomachs that lot) but is still currently being defended by the Conservative front bench on the ground that 'Labour lies need exposing' and the truly Kafkaesque 'no-one gives a toss about social media'. 

I have myself just got involved (against my best human and comms judgement) in an exhausting twitter exchange with somebody claiming that it's Remainers' scaremongering that's driving much needed EU health professionals away, even while simultaneously claiming that there's way more EU doctors now than in 2016 but there's still shortages because of all the EU immigrants seeking treatment. 

Do people hear themselves? The lack of shame makes us deaf to reason itself.
  
Where is the line? Is there even a line anymore, as our American friends may well have asked when a self-styled pussy-grabber was elected President thanks to evangelicals' and conservative women's votes?

It takes the hapless Prince Andrew, a man so genuinely clueless, so terminally privileged, so comically un-relatable that few can be bothered to rise to his defence, to show us the faint outline of where the line now is. So here we go: when in doubt, don't accept the lavish hospitality of a convicted paedophile: it looks really bad! And if you have done (we are all human) for goodness' sake don't talk about it and hope the whole unseemly row will blow over soon. 

Of course secret, as yet undiscovered, paedophiles are still fine - we don't want to get too puritanical now. As for paedophilia itself, the jury is out of course. I mean, it depends, doesn't it, on who's doing what to whose children, in exchange for what type of incentive and whether a newspaper is about to find out. A blanket policy of revulsion and unconditional censure is, frankly, tantamount to communism.