Back To The Real World

So I'm back in the world of 'proper' work again. Albeit on something short term.

Spent a few days in Belfast this week (no I am NOT Gordon Brown), and I'll probably be over there again soon.

Dilemma

So there I was planning a lovely chilled post about how nice it's been to get a whole list of to-do's ticked off, spend some time with the family, put some career development plans in place, and generally depressurise. Some winning poker sessions have even been booked in Hold Em Manager!

Then I checked my voicemail tonight and found a message from the agency I'd recently been working through...

'Hi, err, we've just heard from megacorp and, err, well, err, they're wondering if you could start back on Monday with a view to working til Christmas?'

It was after five, and I needed some time to think, so I didn't bother phoning back.

Having worked for so long in IT, I've long since come to the conclusion most British businesses are managed by people I wouldn't trust to walk my dog (if I had one).

Generally I'm not someone who panders to fools, though neither do I often seek confrontation with them. I think that's why I ended up as a freelancer.

Career development in big companies requires a degree of politicing, and while I'm smart enough to recognise what's required, I don't always have the inclination to do the needful.

Being a contractor I can tolerate the buffoons for a while then move on to fresh pastures with no harm done to my career, and no middle-managers left lying in a pool of blood and teeth.

However the longer a contract goes, the tougher it becomes to keep the frustration bottled up, and I'd long ago realised the breaking point was looming on my current contract, so I'd already started making moves towards finding something new.

When the end came in this contract a little prematurely it was a surprise but in some ways a relief, and I've felt ten times better for it over the last week.

Now I have the chance to grab another five weeks or so of earnings before the festive period, which in the current economic climate isn't to be sniffed at. It also gives me the opportunity to actually have a conversation with my parents that doesn't involve the 'have you found anything yet?' question.

On the other hand, I've earmarked some of that time for training and re-skilling, and well as general life enhancing stuff.

Plus I'd need to take in a huge box of cakes, as is the convention for people who are given a leaving card and present, only to be re-hired within weeks.

Yes, there is a precedent for this very situation within the department I worked in. Which pretty much sums up their ineptness.

There are other considerations too. Many of the people on the team are friends as well as workmates. Not going back will clearly be leaving them with more shit to shovel (albeit with increased job security); but going back also bails out the idiots who got themselves into a state where they couldn't afford to keep me in the first place.

Decisions, decisions...

CV Time

As a freelance IT consultant I should probably be pleased that in a world of 1-month rolling contracts it is four years since I last needed to update my CV.

Numerous renewals and word-of-mouth recommendation has been enough to keep me out of mischief.

Yet it's still a bit of a shock to find myself in that situation, and the timing is somewhat inconvenient. Still, at least I might find some time for the gym between now and Christmas.

My waistline will thank me for it.

Icesave Iced

A few months ago I was perusing the Sunday papers, when I commented to K.

'The Icelandic banking system is looking really dodgy. I think I'll take that money out of Icesave.'

So I did. Online it took me about 2 minutes.

This week, Icesave went tits up. Within hours some woman was on BBC News bewailing the loss of the TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND pounds she had left on deposit with them.

Apparently it wasn't her fault she'd left what, according to her, was her entire cash pile in a failing institution. Oh no, it was the government's fault.

Seems she wasn't smart enough to read the papers, but she was savvy enough to know how to get on TV pronto to pin the blame elsewhere.

Not quite the attitude that made Britain great; and from memory I think she was an Oxford student too. Standards are slipping!

No doubt she will have been grateful today as the government voluntarily bailed out domestic Icesave investors.

News then started to leak that numerous local authorities had left MILLIONS on deposit with Icesave. Kent County Council alone had £50 million on deposit. Now they want bailed out too.

ffs The Chief Executives and Finance Directors of these councils are paid six figures plus benefits and lavish pensions.

Do they read the papers? Can they spell risk assessment? Should they still be in a job tomorrow?

If there are any vacancies maybe I should apply. I've got no relevant experience or skills in running a major local authority. Seems I'd be a shoo-in for the job.

Oil Crisis Hits Home

I've been feeling a little smug as the credit crisis wreaked havoc on the financial markets.

Unlike our esteemed PM, I not only talk the prudence talk, I walk the prudence walk too. So our finances have been pretty much oblivious to the unfolding crisis.

Mortgage woes. Increasing rates. Declining choices.

No problem. We are on a long term fixed rate mortgage that's already overpaid.

Negative equity worries.

We paid a big deposit on the house.

Job security fears.

I'm freelance, so perpetually at risk. No change there. The mortgage over payments would give us a couple of years repayment holiday if required.

Reduced opportunities for credit.

We don't have any need for loans, and I've got enough credit on my cards to buy a very decent car. Mainly courtesy of Egg who gave me a £15,000 credit limit without offering me the chance to request a limit during the application process. A sign perhaps of the root of a lot of the current problems.

So, from a purely selfish perspective, all good. If anything the credit crisis might be a chance for me to exploit a buyers market.

The oil crisis isn't quite such a non-event for me. We are a two car household so rising prices are bound to have some effect.

Yet the big car is a very efficient diesel, and the little car is primarily used to get me to the train station for the commute to work.

Which means a relatively limited impact on me so far.

That may be about to change!

I'm pretty keen on environmental issues, so I should be glad that some people seem to have reached a tipping point and are ditching the car in favour of public transport.

The only problem being on my route to work there's already no spare capacity. The last thing I want after another crap day at work is a rugby scrum just to get on a crowded train for the journey home.

You might think the obvious solution is to run more trains, but there are track capacity constraints.

The best solution is to make the existing trains longer. A lot of the trains on my route are three carriage, when the platforms are built for six carriage units.

I suggested to the rail company they might want to lease more trains. They told me they can't afford it. Which makes me wonder what it takes for them to make a profit, when they've already got the punters crammed in like this...


If the oil crisis means more of the above, I might finally start to have some sympathy for the average motorist, so long as they promise to stay in their cars!

Economic Indicators

Aside from all the usual economic indicators - GDP, inflation rates, employment numbers, FTSE, etc. - there are a range of other ways to gauge the state of the economy.

One financial journalist I read came up with the 'skip index' as a means of judging the health of the property market. He routinely monitors the number of builders skips outside properties in his street and uses it as a means of determining whether activity in the market is increasing or declining.

I liked that idea since it is likely to preempt more scientific measures, as renovating a property and selling it can take several months, after which there is then another few months delay until the statisticians compile their numbers.

Recently I've spotted a couple of new indicators of my own. One with a degree of science/rationality. One more of a gut feel.

The more rational one is in the new car market. I've been inundated with flyers from companies offering progressively juicier financing options on new cars.

The standard seems to be 0% interest over three years with a 35% deposit required.

This isn't a new game for the manufacturers. They want to shift stock but don't want to damage their brands by cutting prices, so they dress a price cut up as something else.

Particularly in the midst of a credit crunch where loans are becoming scarcer it makes sense.

However a recent offer from Renault really got my attention.

0% over three years, with a TEN percent deposit required. Or, to put it another way, put £750 down on a base model Renault Clio to drive it out the showroom, and pay it off over three years with no interest charged!

That's practically giving it away, and as clear an indication as anyone should need that the economy is in a bit of a pickle.

That's the 'big ticket' picture, but my less scientific, more intuitive analysis is from a much lower price range.

Recently I've bought a real range of stuff off a whole range of websites. Clothes, shoes, shaving products, plumbers rods (don't ask!), food supplements.

I'm definitely a bit of a 'long tail' shopper but the unifying factor across all the purchases is they are dispatching super fast.

Either a lot of web-based companies simultaneously upped their logistics game, or the oft forecast consumer slowdown is underway. I know which option my money is on.

Grumpy Old Paxman - M&S and Me

It may not have escaped the notice of my few regular readers that not only am I becoming even more of a grumpy bastard recently, my political thoughts appear to be making steady progress from fairly left-of-centre towards the point where Norman Tebbit starts to appear over the horizon.

Not a thrilling thought!

Equally disconcertingly, I now find myself in agreement with professional controversist Jeremy Paxman on a subject so gratingly middle-class even Hyacinth Bucket would be ashamed. Namely the declining quality of Marks and Spencer's products.

Paxman had M&S underpants in his sights. The subject of my ire is a relatively new pair of plain black shoes purchased for work purposes.

When buying shoes for work, I'm generally looking for something smart, unobtrusive, and sensible. Gucci loafers are not in my thoughts.

Only once can I recall owning a pair of work shoes I had any real enthusiasm for, and that was an accidental purchase. A pair of Rockports bought on a US holiday at the same price in dollars I'd have paid in pounds back home in rip-off Britain.

On my return they became my work shoes by default.

Having size 10 feet, the lightness of their sole was a thing of beauty to me, and I mourned their demise, but I was fucked if I was going to pay the going rate in the UK for a replacement pair.

As winter descended upon us, I decided my current work shoes were showing their age and another re-heeling didn't seem justified. Given that I'm trying to prioritise time over money at present, the quick and easy solution seemed to be a visit to the M&S store.

Sure enough, they had exactly what I was looking for. Albeit slightly overpriced, I felt, at £50.

I was somewhat surprised to discover that fifty quid doesn't even entitle one to a cardboard box these days, as the shoes were plonked straight into a plastic carrier bag.

At first they performed exactly as expected. Until, that is, the rains came...

I should point out that my daily work commute consists primarily of car and train, with roughly a ten minute walk between office and train station. Therefore in total the exposure to the elements consists of less than half-an-hour each day.

With that in mind, the rapid deterioration of my not-so-cheap shoes pissed me off more than a little.

Within weeks they'd begun to stain white, necessitating frequent resprays with waterproofer, and a nightly polish.

Within a couple of months, I was starting to get a damp feeling in my socks by the end of the journey home.

After three months, as I was already contemplating a replacement purchase, the sole gave out and invisible leaks were replaced by a hole the size of a 5p piece.

I won't be back in M&S for a while.

It seems to me that the ceaseless drive to keep down prices in the face of competition is driving more and more companies into cutting corners to the point where quality is abandoned in pursuit of another 2% saving.

Not just on the high streeet. My work encounters with Indian IT outsourcers could fill a volume or two with tales of anguish, but that's for another day.

My shoe woes have been soothed by a most unlikely source. Amazon are now selling shoes - more specifically a huge range of Rockports at generous discounts - and my sub-standard M&S pair have now been replaced by these Rockport Conors for a mere £4 more.

The sole isn't quite as light as the earlier ones, but it has some sort of patented spring mechanism, which makes the walk to work feel like a rather pleasant trampoline exercise.

More importantly, they don't fucking leak! Take note Stuart Rose and M&S...

Road To Somewhere

At first glance the building of a new piece of motorway is hardly something to get excited about.

While bridges and buildings can impress through aesthetic splendour or engineering brilliance, a motorway is rather more mundane. Not much more than a big slab of tarmac built purely for functionality.

Yet I was both excited and relieved when the Scottish Government finally gave the go-ahead for the M74 Completion project.

Excited, because the final five mile stretch of motorway is so glaring an omission from the Scottish road network that it beggars belief.

Relieved, because it has taken a scandalous fourteen years since the completion of the previous phase to commence work on this phase. By the projected completion date of late-2011 an incredible seventeen years will have elapsed.

Seventeen years! Children have been born, reared, educated, and left home in the time it takes us to build five miles of motorway.

Of course some of the delays were self inflicted, as the environmental lobby made full use of the legal and planning processes to attempt to prevent construction ever commencing.

As the legal battles unfolded I've lost a lot of respect for the environmental lobby. I'm all in favour of saving the environment, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, boosting public transport links, etc.

I'm also well of the 'M25 effect' - that boosting capacity simply boosts demand - but on the M74 link the environmental lobby seems to have mistaken connectivity for capacity. The fact is that a key link that should exist does not, which forces thousands of vehicles each day to route along the M8, causing congestion, pollution, and mind searing frustration.

For over a year I was subjected to the 'M8 slog' on a daily basis. I hated it.

A work colleague, who was clearly a masochist, commuted daily from Edinburgh by car. He told me he felt unable to properly converse with anyone for an hour after arriving at work, as it took him that long to depressurise from the journey in.

Eventually we both resigned.

Were the government proposing to widen the existing M8 route to ten lanes wide in each direction, I'd be out chaining myself to a tree too. They are not. They are putting in a sensible alternative route.

I'm equally glad to see the Scottish Government is also pressing ahead with several other major transport schemes.

The relatively new Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) administration may have gotten lucky to an extent in that several schemes devised by the old Labour/Lib-Deb coalition were nearing fruition when they came to power, but I have been impressed by how they've chosen to implement them and the apparent speed with which they have set the wheels turning.

The Edinburgh Airport Rail Link was one such scheme. The SNP undoubtedly did the right thing in canning the original risky and potentially ruinously expensive 'tunnel under the runway' scheme in favour of a more austere overground scheme tied in to the new Edinburgh trams route.

The SNP weren't keen on the trams, but I am. I've yet to visit a city with a tram network that didn't impress me. Somehow trams feel more secure than buses. They are better suited to moving large numbers of people, and electric power is infinitely preferable to diesel in an urban context.

There's a nifty little promo video for the trams here.

The Glasgow Airport Rail Link falls into the same basket as the Edinburgh Airport link. A no-brainer that has taken far too long to move from the debating chamber to the construction stage.

The new kid on the block is the Forth Replacement Crossing. It's hard to think of a more compelling business case for a new bridge than 'the existing one is falling down', but it seemed to take a change of administration for this to sink in with our esteemed leaders.

The existing bridge will still likely be closed to heavy vehicles before the new one is complete, thanks to the interminable delays in getting the project off the ground. Ridiculous.

The tangible progress we are finally making should of course be seen as a positive development, but in reality the completion of all the above projects will merely bring our transport infrastructure up to a barely acceptable level.

Of the outstanding projects that I'd still consider essential, the easiest to justify has to be Glasgow Crossrail.

The cost (probably £300m+ at current prices) is actually comparatively modest in the context of the estimated £16 billion cost of the new London Crossrail scheme, or the whopping £100 billion of liabilities the UK Government has assumed on behalf of Northern Rock.

The benefits in terms of improved connectivity, capacity increases, and reduced journey times are undeniable. At a time when the local network is maxing out, this seems to be another no-brainer scheme.

When was it first proposed? 1968. FORTY years ago, and still not a solitary length of rail has been laid. Suddenly the M74 link seems almost supercharged.

It would be churlish to mock recent progress, but let's not kid ourselves. There's a very long journey ahead. One of the biggest obstacles on that journey will be the challenge of integrating transport policy more effectively with other policies.

More on that later.