I done a great jorb

Work. Ugh. Don’t let the recession fool you, there’s plenty of it out there. Since finishing college, I’ve had three jobs and am about to start my fourth. By the looks of this year’s graduate recruitment here, where numbers are way down, students are just jumping straight on the boat, not even looking for work in Ireland. That’s because Ireland is pretty much a made up country, it shouldn’t really exist in the Real World. Mammy and Daddy, you see, have by and large escaped the recession, because they didn’t actually buy 7 houses in Jerusalem, they didn’t open a manicurist on Moore Street, they didn’t buy a gold plated 2015 Rolls Royce. They didn’t really do much of anything, but pay off their mortgage and put their kids through college by means of fee free “universities”. So when little Marissa and Josh Brennan finally get their degree in America Studies and Haircuts respectively, emerging into society as “well-rounded and employable” adults, why not reward them by spending €10 grand on an all-expenses paid trip to go on the pish in Australia for a year?

Not that I didn’t try my best to do the same in Japan, but you get my point (possibly). Alright, you probably don’t. Our parent’s generation still largely remembers the 80s, when their brothers and sisters left for Britain and the US, and they remember having nothing much of anything. While many spoiled their kids, and continue to spoil their adults, if they can afford it, who cares? By and large, they are survivors, and when they got their invitation to Brian Lenehan’s party, they RSVPed with a “maybe next time”. They own their homes, and have manageable debts. They didn’t try to become tycoons, they didn’t invest in Eircom shares. They just enjoyed the comfort of their circumstance. And they will continue to survive, because they can take a decent pension, or a decent voluntary redundancy because they’ve seen it all now. The real problem is that my generation hasn’t seen it all. We aren’t survivors. It’s too easy to move back home when you need to save a few bob. It’s too easy to piss off somewhere else for a while instead of waiting for Godot. It’s too easy to phone Joe Duffy instead of your local politician. Use your brain and think about this country, how any country, works. They’re all the same economically.

What I mean is that markets work in a spectacularly simple fashion. There is no great trick to managing an economy, there is no vast hidden depth of insider knowledge required to operate successfully in it. All you need is awareness of the most basic points of supply and demand. If demand increases, supply has to increase to meet that demand, and there is a brief period of disparity in the interim. This creates shortages or “rarity”, meaning the object of demand increases in value. Eventually, supply will rise to the point when it overmatches demand, creating a surplus. This causes value to fall. Nobody in Ireland seems to know any of this. That is why we now have thousands of unemployable teachers and nurses, for example, because colleges took in more applicants as demand increased, not giving a flying fuck about the stagnant demand for the graduates they supplied. Similarly, while construction briefly boomed, boys left school to work on building sites, making a mint. When demand for their work fell, the supply remained the same, so rather than using the money they made to go to college and do something else they rather went straight to the dole queues and blamed the government for not continuing to build 80,000 houses a year. The government similarly faces supply and demand problems, that’s what they mean by “budgetary adjustments”. By the time Fianna Fail left us, we had a government that spent €25bn more per year than it made. This means Ireland had a demand for cash in excess of its supply of cash. Rather than lower demand by streamlining, it instead borrowed more and more. And now look at us. It’s easy to be angry, Irish angry, the type of anger where you carry on as normal but phone RTE to whinge. It’s more difficult to be French angry, where you just go and wreck up the place. It’s more difficult again to be understanding, but Joe Duffy doesn’t do understanding.

Anyway, I’ve gone and gotten myself a new jaerb, so I figure it’s time, as someone who has had loadzajobs.ie, to impart some of the universal wisdom I’ve learned

•  It’s not about how busy you are, it’s about how busy you look: right now I’m writing a blog in full view of my direct report. But I’m doing it in word, I’ve got a A4 pad with my shopping list on it that I continually reference salad, turkey, ginger, Head & Shoulders, that makes it look like I’m working on something. I’ve also got a spreadsheet going that’s working out my weekly earnings at my new job and its accumulation into my current and savings accounts over consecutive 12 month periods, and I’ve put the graphs into this word file despite having no intention of posting them in the blog. Occasionally I’ll mop my brow (albeit with a wristband branded with the logo of our biggest competitor). “How are things Cormac”? “I’m up to my eyes, Ezra”.

  

• Talk as much as possible in cliches: while this really only applies to business environments, feel free to think outside the box and add the low-hanging fruit to your skillset of core competencies. Alternatively, apply blue-sky thinking to maximize your leverage and hit the ground running. Cliches provide enough scalability to offer an integrated approach resonating synergy to all mission critical elements.
• Attention to detail is important: be aware of this. This comes with a big NB. Your direct report will make mistakes, and it’ll be your job to either fix them or take the blame for them. It’s not fair, but you not spotting someone else’s mistake is somehow worse than making that mistake in the first place. So forget having excellent attention to detail. I mean that, forget about it, at your level. You need to only have it at the level of your reports. If printing a portrait pdf in landscape isn’t considered a mistake (BUT IT IS! IT IS!), then it isn’t a mistake (EVEN IF IT IS!!!!). On the other hand, typos are universal mistakes, so fix them instead. [Sometimes it works the other way, where your report will have immaculate attention to detail, and you’ll have to keep up. I was once told in an interview that I didn’t demonstrate attention to detail because the indents on the bullet points of my CV were off by one space. I could have punched that guy in the face, because I was using a word template called Executive Resume and have you ever tried to do anything in Word? When I got home, I wrestled with that template for 3 hours, and still couldn’t get everything to line up. Since then, Executive Resume has gotten me 4 jobs so the jokes on… us?]
• Talk around the watercooler as much as possible: this is one that’s best learned but not experienced. The more time you spend talking to people, the less they’ll spend talking about you. Because you’ll be there, and women only talk behind your back. Incidental things, like wearing the same tie two days in a row and leaving or coming in to work with someone, are the fuel that stokes the flames of PURE HASSLE. Should you need water to extinguish those flames, attend your local watercooler.
• If someone asks you to do something, just shut up and do it: work is work, and all jobs are ultimately the same unless you are at the top of the tree. Regardless of whether or not you wish to ascend that tree, just shut up and do your job, arsehole. If you start bitching, while the others may appear to sympathize, as soon as you leave they’ll be waving imaginary dicks around. Nobody cares about you. So just do your job until they tell you they don’t want you any more. Then remain up-shut, because nobody cares that you don’t have a job. Whether you do or don’t have a job, either way you probably won’t be happy.
• Always remember: enjoy yourself.