Category: Ramblings

I know I’ve been quiet here of late. Three main reasons for this: visitors, notice period, and Tiger Woods 2004.

Visitor-wise, we had Julian up from the far South the weekend before last, and right now we have Abi’s mom staying with us for a fortnight. Blogging is a social activity, but in a virtual context. My computer sits in our living room, and when I’m at the keyboard I have my back turned to the sofas. This is fine when Alex is off to bed and Abi is binding books at the dining room table, but it’s not terribly conversation-friendly when we have guests around.

Then there is the notice period. I handed in my resignation letter at work three weeks ago, and I still have one week of notice period left to work there before leaving. I don’t know how other people feel about it, but I hate working out notice periods. I’m not going to talk about the reasons for leaving my current job, save to say that I was experiencing a certain amount of dissatisfaction with it.

Knowing that I’m going to be starting a new job could have given me the mental resilience to just soldier on for those four weeks, knowing that I didn’t have to be dissatisfied forever, and that fresh challenges lay just around the corner. It didn’t, though. It just made impatient about having to wait four weeks before being allowed to leave all my niggles and gripes behind. It’s like winning the lottery, and then being told that you can’t access your millions until you retire in thirty or forty years’ time.

Well, maybe not that bad, but…WANT INSTANT GRATIFICATION NOW!

I could cultivate a “not my problem any more” attitude, and glide through every working day with the intent of achieving as little as possible, but that’s just not me. Forcing myself to come up with 100% every day, though, is turning into a struggle.

And so in my spare time I have been doing everything I can to leave work behind me. It’s a containment strategy to stop my 9-5 worries from dragging down the rest the hours in the day. Hence: Tiger Woods 2004. Man, that game rocks.

It’s easy to pick up and play, has lovely graphics and well-rendered courses, and above all is immensely absorbing. It usually takes me a little under half an hour to play round 18 holes. Tackling one of the 4-round PGA tournaments takes 2 hours. As you win more money in tournaments and other matches, you can gradually increase the statistics and abilities of your character. Also, there are hundreds of items to unlock throughout the game, from clubs that give extra power and accuracy to your shots, through to lucky shirts and socks that improve your chances of landing in favourable positions in the rough.

So I’ve been losing myself in the land of virtual golf for up to three or four hours an evening. Hasn’t left much time for blogging. But you know what? The rest of the web gets on just fine without me. Wow. Fancy that.

Toblerone, and Gran Turismo 3. What do they have in common? Well, yesterday I had “doh!” moments with both.

For Toblerone, it was noticing that the mountain emblem on the packaging contains not just a mountain, but also a silhouette of a mountain goat, or some other similar animal. To be fair, I only noticed it on a super-large special offer bin, where the normal logo was blown up to twenty times its normal size. Nevertheless, I was momentarily taken aback by this packaging revelation. (Draw whatever conclusions you like about my need to “get out more”.)

Secondly, while playing Gran Turismo for, oh I don’t know, maybe the five-hundredth time in the last two years, I discovered the button that pulls on the handbrake. All this time, I’ve been using just the accelerator and the foot brake, and wondering why I have such a hard time making it through the Complex Spiral course in under the target time. No wonder power-sliding was such a pain in the ass. Jeez.

After seeing it on Charlie Stross’s diary, I just did an on-line Myers-Briggs personality test. The results?

ISFP – “Artist”. Interested in the fine arts. Expression primarily through action or art form. The senses are keener than in other types. 5% of the total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Artist? I’m an artist? The last M-B test I did was back at teacher training college. I don’t remember what personality type I came out as back then, but I’m damn sure it wasn’t “Artist”. Have I changed so much since then?

I’m generally disinclined to put much stock in personality tests. I’m happy enough to spend a few minutes filling in the answers to silly questions to find out what science fiction/fantasy character I am. (Boromir, hmph; at least I go out in a blaze of glory.) But it’s painfully easy to second-guess the questions and subvert the results to reflect your own deluded self-image. If you think they’re anything more revealing than, say, your star sign, then that in itself says more about you than the average test does.

(Myers-Briggs tests can be an exception. M-B personality typing is a well-understood field, and properly administered tests try to take personal bias into account. Most on-line versions aren’t properly administered, but some do make an attempt to minimize the influence of ego (or should that be the id?) by asking the same question in different ways.)

I’d be far more interested in seeing a site that allowed other people to answer questions about you. Now that would be revealing.

When I joined the Royal Bank of Scotland as a trainee in 1996, a group of us got sent to Barfil Farm (and Management Centre) in Dumfriesshire for a team-building course with the excellent Bob Lee. After three days of seminars, role-playing exercises, intensive team-working, and a certain amount of alcohol, we had a round-table session where each of us had to evaluate someone else. We were given a sheet of paper with a bundle of adjectives on it, and we had to circle the ones we thought were most appropriate to our subject.

Now, I don’t even remember which of my other fellow trainees I had to report on, let alone what I said about them. I also don’t remember any of the positive things that were said about me. But here are are three adjectives that will forever be etched in my memory: distant, ruthless, and patronising.

They resonated with me because I dislike those traits in other people. I didn’t (and don’t) want to be like that myself, but that was how someone perceived me. Someone who was not close enough to be a friend (and therefore wary of hurting my feelings), yet not so unfamiliar that they had no idea who I really was (because of the three days of working closely together). Basically, someone who had enough information to form a decent, relatively objective opinion.

Having that external perspective allows me to do something about it. Knowing what I want to avoid, I can (try to) modify my actions and behaviour. In comparison, virtually any on-line test you take will try to massage any negative traits into admirable strengths. You may be a cold-blooded serial killer, but at you’re also methodical, tidy, and have a strongly developed sense of natural justice. Hum.

Don’t expect to develop self-knowledge in isolation, or through self-administered personality tests. At heart, everyone thinks they’re pretty decent. To see the whole picture, you have to seek out your reflection in the mirror of other people. On the one hand, this can be a gift:

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
     An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
     And ev’n Devotion!

Robert Burns – To A Louse

On the other hand, chances are you won’t like what you see. Jean-Paul Sartre, ever the optimist, put it succinctly: “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Hell is other people. Being told that you don’t actually match up to your own image of perfection and virtue is both painful, and immensely valuable.

There are all sorts of lessons here about pride and humility, applicable to fields ranging from writers workshops to international politics. But I’ll leave you to think about them for yourself.