Poster dogs Potter

Pass this Dutchie

Living in the Netherlands brings its interesting moments and it is with interest that I review the events that I have raised in earlier blogs that do not seem to go away for all sorts of reasons.

To help in catching the perspective of these issues, first of all the Netherlands is the official name of the country we regularly refer to as Holland. Holland however only comprises 2 of the 12 provinces of the Netherlands.

Holland is made prominent from the fact that the major ports of the Netherlands were in Amsterdam which is in North Holland and Rotterdam which is in South Holland. The area of Holland is hardly one eighth of the total area of the Netherlands.

Furthermore, whilst many might know we have a monarch, Queen Beatrix, our Prime Minister or Minister-President in Dutch Parlance is Jan Peter Balkenende - who? The leader who shares a likeness with Harry Potter - now you know.

More foot for mouth

Well for the past month he has been laid low with a persistent and unremitting foot infection, I alluded to that in my Foot in mouth disease blog for which a number of skin grafts has been made to deal with the this infection. Whilst some might wonder if the problem is a gangrene, I would not even dare to speculate.

News comes to me that Harry Potter has just won a legal action from his sick-foot bed against a publication that shows him on a raunchy poster as an Ex-porn star.

As usual you never hear of these unseemly issues until someone makes such a fuss of it that what was mundane and unnoticed suddenly gains such popularity and publicity, none of which can be bought or planned for.

Remember the furore this summer about the distribution of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, when Disney stopped Miramax a subsidiary from releasing the film, by the time we knew what was going on, a row had broken out about the film, it won the Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival and it grossed over $100 million in the box office. Everyone wanted to see it even those who normally would have had no interest.

Why? Because curiosity creates the feeling that makes people ask "What is the fuss all about, let us find out what is going on?"

Likewise, having not seen the poster for an event that was going to happen down the road from my residence in two weekends, I have trawled the net looking for this so-called offensive poster which could have just past off without notice to see what the fuss is all about.

PM wins legal action against raunchy poster {From the Expatica.com news site}. The rather "offensive" poster which to my mind is of no particular damaging import apart from poking simple fun at a public figure would exact punitive sanctions on the publisher if they are not removed from publication.

Methinks, this would create souvenir hunters who would go round and remove these posters for keeps and private publication. I have attached a link to that poster for your perusal; it might not be safe to view this in an office environment - The ex Porn Star

Just let it be

What is my point in this matter?

The feeble sensibilities of public figures who adopt a "holier than thou" persona of pious mien, thinking they are more men than their public and expect to be treated with more deference than is necessary apart from acknowledging that as our government they are in fact servants of the public and should execute their office of service with humility, honesty and integrity. Another of my earlier blogs addressed this - Cellophane skinned lion hearts

Everyone knows that the PM is not a porn star and no one would believe that he in fact is engaged in that silly pose. However, if he does make an issue of it, it leaves him humourless and prone to having delusions of grandeur. Greater men have been maligned much beyond this act of common child's play and it has all gone without a whisper or whimper.

Poster dogs Potter

In 2 weeks all these posters that would have just given us a momentary snigger would have been taken down or covered with other posters. But having kicked the sleeping dog, the bark and ensuing bite would definite leave us with more memories of how funny the poster was and how unfunny the subject became.

Living up to the continued passion of putting foot in mouth with aplomb; nonetheless the skin-grafts from his thigh has reduced his thick skin in more areas than are obvious.

The image that needs burnishing from the cohorts that constitute the government of the Netherlands is good innovative and constructive ideas of governance, of economic stimulation and of radical restructuring, not the squeezing of the middle classes and the penny-pinching that has characterised stopping paltry benefits and the hard-nosed stubbornness of adherence to indefensible issues like the being part of the coalition in Iraq.

All this personal makeover stuff does not cut the muster; the polls now indicate that the governing coalition would go into opposition when we next have the opportunity to turf them out - to which many would say - pretty good riddance.

Half of a quarter full of an eighth empty

The psychology of charlatans

The false psychology that informs interviewers in interviews has unfortunately misrepresented interviewees, if not done them an unfair disservice bearing on the result of probably not getting recruited.

Two such questions in interviews belie that fact that the intention never really gets the intended answer or the interviewee gets wrong-footed on a subjective assessment that has no objective bearing on suitability for the job.

a) What do you see yourself doing in five years time?

b) Is the glass half-full or half empty

Five Years Time

In answering one has been a victim of the crass unprofessionalism and subjectivity that accompanies giving the right answer to this question.

One would suppose this question seeks to appreciate career goals within the company with adequate training, promotion, prospects and advancements. Probably in five years time you would have attained the post of your interviewer and your interviewer should have moved higher in the organisation.

Unfortunately, the person who asks the question does not at first consider the relative basis of having advanced five years within the company before considering the new recruitment, so laying out a plan could in effect create the impression that the interviewee is out to unseat the interviewer.

It could also flag the fact that the company has bad career development policies and the mentoring factors in the company are very poor.

At which point the interviewee could already be judged as ambitious, over-rated and unsuitable for the team, no fault of the interviewee, rather a sitting failure of Human Resource processes within the company.

Having put this question to my colleagues, one suggestion was to reply by asking if there was the scope for the advancement that would allow you to have career prospects, developments and promotions and how this was managed in the company.

On ascertaining if the company does have its employee’s interests and developments at heart, you can then frame your answer within that context. You have in effect debunked the psychology and infused a sense of objectivity into a rather unpalatable situation.

It however, does not take away from the fact that the question is unnecessary and it does turn the focus on what the company is prepared to do for career progression and how it can accommodate the well-intentioned aspirations of the new entrant.

A glass of half truths

What is really missing from this question is the context. Why at any time would a glass be half-full or half-empty? One would paint a number of scenarios to debunk the false psychology of optimism and pessimism that this question is purported to reveal in an individual.

Any glass on a table

If you approached a table which had a glass of some liquid content in it observable before you touch the glass but without you knowing who put it there.

If you were a cleaner you would probably take the glass away and pour the contents down the drain, if you were anyone else, it would not matter what was in it, curiosity however, might make you take a whiff to find out if it is alcoholic or some other concoction.

That the glass if half-full or half-empty would be of no significance.

If you knew who placed the glass on the table and you were at a party, you would probably pick up the drink and take it to the owner of drink, who would have the view of emptying the glass rather than filling it.

So the optimistic import of this would be that to enjoy a drink you have to empty the glass and then fill it again to empty the contents by drinking and ingestion.

A glass of wine or some alcoholic beverage

In the setting of a bar, you will be served with a filled glass of beer or lager which you would systematically empty by drinking in a social setting.

Once you have drunk a bit, the glass of half-full, I am not aware of people filling their glasses whilst it still contains beer except in a case where the beer is being served from a bottle. The intent would be to empty the glass and obtain a new glass of beer at the bar.

In the case of wine, the glass is full for white wine and champagne and half filled for red wine, during the course of drinking the glasses can be refilled to their appropriate levels.

For a glass to be refilled the observer who would be one of the party or a sommelier would notice that the glass is half-empty as the impetus to refill, because if the glass is half-full, there would be no case for refilling.

Context of glass and contents

It appears that this issue is taken completely out of context if not represented in the continuum of why a glass is full and why a glass is empty.

The reason for filling a glass is to empty it by drinking and as you empty the glass it gets half-empty as would be the case of the person drinking and the glass becomes half-full when it is being filled either as a service or by the drinker or observer.

To capture a moment in time and without the characteristics and events surrounding the moment delivers a wrong interpretation of the event.

It goes without saying that a glass becomes half-empty from the pleasure of drinking and it becomes half-full in order to experience or continue the experience of the pleasure of drinking.

Whilst we would all want our glasses full before we start drinking, the reasons a glass would be left half-full or half-empty would revolve around the person having had enough to drink, the person not enjoying the drink or some other circumstance that has allowed the person to abandon the drink.

A glass half-full or half-empty without a person to manage its contents is useless.

Hence, there is no psychological value in asking a person to answer this question and no psychologist worth his salt would use this question as a basis for judging character.

In fact, the simple think is we should stop pretending to be good judges of people's character at an interview with such silly questions.

The real purpose of the interview is to ascertain qualification, suitability, flexibility and ability to contribute to the team in which they would be working; we should stick to those things and avoid veering off to areas where we are no experts or proficient enough to assess character with trick questions.

The first law of holes

A memoir in the making

This would be a gloat if it were not so serious as to warrant a scrutiny, yea a commentary in fact.

The proximity of experience coupled with a memory of recent events allows for one to state contemporary issues as facts without need for serious analysis or revision. Documenting these facts makes for history, that it is so recent is a memoir in the making.

Having left my old company, I have acquired another completed chapter which consists of a successful job, a rotten ex-boss and various opportunities for perspective management.

Were it not for this age of civility, my parting with my ex-boss would have been completed at high noon after 10 paces. There is no doubt that my slug would have hit the target even if I was limp-wristed, like Big Ben the master of the tower that now bears the name, he is as tall as he is round.

News reaches one that the incompetence and mismanagement that followed the handling of my departure has not abated, rather complications have mounted to the point of farce, one is wont to feel sympathy, but one is better occupied in other events.

Fortunately, once again, he has fudged, budged, nudged and dodged his way out of the developing crisis, you have to give it to him. But then, even Teflon eventually gives.

My role at the time I left was in charge of making software available to users in a managed, recorded, assured and reliable fashion.

At my leaving there was no one to handle those tasks with any appreciable level of competence, time and again, one was commended for the successes of our deployments of critical business applications, basically, the system worked and was working on the day I left.

The people who were asked to step into my shoes were typical of being asked to go mountaineering in flip-flops – go figure.

It transpires that so recently, there was a major upgrade to their business process software and no one could use that infrastructure to manage deployment, so they resorted to techniques that were obviated probably 5 years ago.

What is missing from such a method is assured and managed deployments, statistical proof of success and managed use of the network. A case of substituting a kayak for a flight in a trans-Atlantic journey – it is crass and beggars belief.

It goes without saying that one offered to return to help out at no cost, but the offer of deftly refused.

Back to the law of holes, the ex-boss has an incredible schizophrenic persona of being best employee to his bosses and worst boss to his employees, he is successfully working through becoming ex-boss to many of his able and competent staff, one presumes 6 since August.

Those would summit the Everest need to climb to down to tell the tale, this man, I fear would summit but wherefore the tales?

Having dissembled and plied many issues with falsehoods, revisions and at times blatant lies without impunity, this is the man, the man without integrity, whose word is nothing, it would be no wonder if all these precipitates of inexactitudes begin to unravel as a Tom Clancy plot.

The law of holes

The first law of holes is to stop digging, stop the rut, stop the abuse, stop the wrongs, and stop the lies.

The second law of holes is cover up, fill it in, and keep it from becoming a hazard.

The third law of holes is scrub it; I’ll explain, any holes dug up cannot be properly concealed, and where they have been concealed, the detectives would first go digging there and not fresh ground.

Just imagine what gets dug up. You have to eliminate detections because you don’t go digging holes if you have nothing to keep from view.

My ex-boss has mastered the second law of holes without any recognition of the first, since he is digging faster than he can fill it all in, he cannot use the third law of holes.

Where the 3 laws are out of sync you end up with the paradox of holes, fossils, bones and bodies, it would be forensics long before the dinosaur chasers have a field day.

Meanwhile, news does have a way of getting here all the time. Keep you posted.

The dead are dumb when money talks

Letting the dead bury the dead

Once, a person looking for a purpose in life was offered a career opportunity with prospects that make heroes of the subjects of the Bible, but he felt that he could only take up that prospect after he had buried his father.

The response of the employer was, "Let the dead bury the dead". There is a possibility that this meant the literal but I'll err on the side of the figurative.

The inference being let those who have not prospects continue in their purposeless lives and those who do get on with doing something meaningful.

Blunt as that may seem, the proponent was never known for mincing his words and these ones in particular.

This saying however carries more poignancy when viewed in terms of some recent events that have caught my attention. The last weekend witnessed the occurrence of two major but man-made tragedies.

First the 3 suicide bombings in Bali, Indonesia [1] and then the day after a tourist boat capsized on Lake George in New York State. [2]

Both events bought untold grief to the victims, survivors, relations and citizenry in general; as an act of terrorism in Bali [3] and some freak accident on Lake George.

What however bothered me more was the way the news was delivered without a pause to allow the disaster to sink in before agonising about the loss of tourist revenue and business.

Now, there is no doubt that those locations do really depend to a great extent on people visiting as tourists, keeping those economies and livelihoods going, but there is no use being an anxious tourist.

For those who are not anxious, it is not time for the bravado for business as usual in the midst of the recovering from the event.

It is saddening that subtle aspects of humanity and conditioned response to tragedy are being lost to the quest from the tourist dollar above all else.

Indeed these places do need tourism as I do say again at the risk of inadvertent tautology, but at least, let the wounded be succoured and let the dead be buried before we return to counting the pennies which either fall from heaven or come from afar.

References

[1] Two questioned over Bali bombings

[2] Jemaah Islamiah split but still deadly

[3] Tourists die in US boat disaster

I have legal advice too

You don’t fool me.

Many may have thought Mr Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations was wrong-footed last week when he was prompted into saying the war lead by the United States in to Iraq did not conform to the UN charter and was hence illegal.

This has always been Mr Annan’s stance even though he has gone out of his way to try and accommodate the belligerents and suffered great losses as a result.

Every supporter of the war expressed incredulity at his comments; especially those who thought those comments would harm Mr George W. Bush’s re-election plans.

One sees fear of being found out by all those who have brought peace, stability, freedom, instability, woe, democracy and destruction to Iraq but dissembling about the presence of weapons of mass destruction as a premise for invading Iraq.

It is arguable that only the ones who had direct contact with Saddam and his henchmen suffered more seriously at his hands.

What the majority suffers now in the continuous bombings, hostage-taking and lack of amenities belies the fact that things were probably a lot better with Saddam.

Basically, the naivety of the US is exemplified in expecting a pliant and submissive public the day after the war only to be greeted by sophisticated insurgents that have claimed thousands of lives from all spectra.

Legal advice

What was most striking about it all was the interview with John Howard the prime minister of Australia who is presently fighting a re-election campaign.

Having tried to denigrate and castigate the Secretary General, probably with the intent to belittle, discredit and besmirch his good name the commented about the fact that Mr Annan’s view was contrary to the legal advice Australia, the UK and the USA had taken before the war.

Wait a minute! What really constitutes legal advice? It is a position in law that you take regarding an issue, situation or circumstance where those topics are presented to give you confidence in the position you have taken.

Legal advice does not suddenly imply you are right; whilst you might want to think you are, it can be challenged by interested parties in the court of law and found to be wanting when an alternative view is offered. This is how the whole court system works.

A lawyer takes a position on an issue and advocates that position in adversarial stance to the challenger of his views with the judge to moderate and the jury to pass judgement.

Mr Howard, your legal advice hardly past the first hurdle of due diligence in having those views challenged in a court of law, they can hardly be used as corroborative facts to support the case for Iraq.

I think we have all grown weary of politicians telling us they about faceless experts who have said food is safe, mobile phones do not fry your brain, genetically modified crops know their place and would never move out of their enclosure and now that the Iraqi escapade was for the war against terrorism.

For now, I have no time to analyse the quality of legal opinion that informed the war in Iraq, but I do wonder what opinions they now have of the precariously life-threatening situation in Iraq that the cost of insurance is astronomical.

By and large, on face value that statement was valid, but thankfully we analyse everything thing we hear, especially from people of Mr Bush’s political persuasion.

No Sir! I am not fooled.

Foot in mouth disease

Classic Foot in mouth

Living in the Netherlands for me has brought many benefits of settling down, prosperity, lack of stress and a probably sedentary lifestyle.

I have my reasons for leaving the UK and I am glad that my over 4 years here has been fun, exciting and interesting.

However, the Dutch have been inflicted with the worst kind of political representation in living memory.

After the shake-up of Pim Fortuyn’s considered right-wing stance that lead to his unfortunate murder in May 1991, one would have thought the Dutch would be more politically sensitive in weighing the consequences of exercise of franchise.

Unfortunately, I regret to report that that hope has been twice dashed, squandered on the ignominy of voters who are lacking in both a conviction and ideology; and there is no sign of it being shifted for a while.

Anyway, we have this government whose most imaginative plans have thrived on penny-pinching and the intelligent use of circumstances to conceal more sinister intentions. See Tolerance as a mindset of choice, prejudice and hypocrisy - Part 2

Penny-pinching aside, one is quite amused that the news that the Prime Minister and his government which happens to be the uneventful president of the rotating EU presidency for just another 3 or so months has only been about to tactfully question the happenings in the Russia with the slant of blame on the Russian government.

Then he went on about the Netherlands remaining Christian even if people stopped going to church. Sometimes, it makes one wonder about how people think. Profound as that might sound; one is not impressed by half.

This is a government trying to be both right-wing and conservative, but failing miserably as both - they neither have ideology, identity, vision nor goals - they are as listless a ship navigating the throes of Hurricane Ivan.

Well, news reaches us that he has a foot infection which is not healing as fast as it should, hence requiring another week in the hospital. I wish him no ill, perhaps he might return from hospital with genuinely ground-breaking ideas – you can be infected with all sorts of bugs in hospital, he might just catch the Statesman bug.

Like the foot and mouth disease of a few years before, one is tempted to hope that he is quarantined from government for new ideas to evolve.

Lacking sight and vision

Pass on these charlatans

Touchily in touch

Despite the lull in activity on this blog life has been quite eventful since the end of July. If you had read the previous blogs one can agree that the inability to see the beyond one’s immediate circumstance does contribute largely to the stress and despair that envelopes people’s lives.

Now, I can say my last job is history, though news does filter through that much of my painstaking work is being castigated by people who have no understanding or appreciation of what one left behind.

Basically, if a complete overhaul has to made of what was effective and working as at the time one left the company, it beggars the question, what were the successes so well highlighted when one was there, and how did those suddenly disappear at one’s leaving?

It is probably sabotage or the sheer understanding of how the system works and knowing what to do, considering one was given just two days to transfer knowledge of that system and the wealth of experience to complete greenhorns, the face-saving grace for those involved could only be suggesting a complete overhaul – even one could not begrudge them that, if there is an audience listen.

Proudly humble

In my humble opinion, the system is such that implementation is easy, designing to the specification of an enterprise setting is the difficult part and you do not pick that up on an afternoon of basic mouse-clicking.

The unfortunate situation of complex systems is that wizards are provided to simplify the implementation of unwieldy and unmanageable monsters to the detriment of good understanding of the fundamentals and praise of 2-page reviews in magazines.

Do not get me wrong, no system is impervious to modification, change or improvement, sometimes it should be replaced on the proviso the personnel involve know what they are doing and know what they really want to achieve.

One is willing to submit to constructive and knowledgeable peer analysis and criticism; it is part of the validation process; both healthy and competitively rewarding.

Not yet personally

However, just because you can drive a car does not make you a mechanic, many cannot even change tyres, in this case, one is afraid, and knowing that a cigarette lighter pops out once it is heated up is of course Rocket Science 101.

Why bother about this whole debacle which at first is a result of crass and incompetent management and visionless blundering?

Nobody wants to hear news that one’s well thought our work is being rubbished by charlatans after you have left, it is underhand, uncouth and ungentlemanly conduct, not to say beneath contempt. Do not even accuse me of taking this personally.

Be warned!

Mr Nice-Guy.