Essential Snobbery 101: The Slow Death of Proper Address

A Stringent Beginning

It was almost a decade ago when I underwent a stringent vetting process with all the officialdom that extracted more information from me than I would willingly have volunteered. This process was supervised by a department within the organisation to which I was contracted to offer professional services.

When the process was completed, I received a notice from a member of staff confirming that I had passed all the requirements. It began with "Hi!" Just "Hi", without a name, stripped of all formality, dignity, and function, as though we shared the familiarity born of mutual friendship going back decades, rather than mere acquaintance.

I was reeling and altogether taken aback; this could not seriously have come from within the company with which I held a formal contractual engagement.

Insult and Injury

To add insult to injury, the person who signed off the message bore names suggesting a common Nigerian heritage, where the expectation is that a modicum of formality should greet those with whom you have never interacted before. Only after you have introduced yourself and established communication through a cordial response and acknowledgement should informality be considered.

This was analogous to an ingénue who had abandoned the sophistication of speech for grunts and howls.

From that day, I wanted nothing to do with that individual, and I made a point of expressing my displeasure at such an approach to their manager. My own manager attempted to apologise on her behalf, then suggested that we might have become old-fashioned.

Manners Never Age

Maybe we were; but good manners, in my view, can never be old-fashioned. They should always be fashionable and properly taught. Comportment, decorum, respectful address, honour, regard, and etiquette make the person and exude character.

I have worked in places where informality is the culture, yet I would still address you by name, and with deference, because I was brought up that way, and what you give out comes back to you in spades.

The Order of Greetings

Whilst I have spent four decades in the corporate world, any first contact with a person would always come with a greeting for the time of day: good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. Good night is usually goodbye.

Then comes the person's name, which might be preceded by a standard, academic, religious, military, royal, or political title. Professions deployed as titles, apart from "Dr" for medical doctors, are an exercise in pompous superfluity and self-aggrandisement.

At other times, it is "Dear" and the person's name. "Hello" is for friends. Then I close my messages properly, with a variation of "regards" and my name. In speech, it is formally the greeting for the time of day; I introduce myself with purpose if required, or await a response with names and preferences.

Pronouns and Coherence

On the new trend of pronouns, especially those that challenge the natural flow of the English grammar I learnt from well-appointed schooling, I would rather use a name than defeat the ends of coherence and adherence.

Good and traditional forms of address will always establish the standard of communication and the protocols of language. If someone is too well-spoken to use expletives in any way, it is unlikely others would deploy them when speaking to you; or at least they are guarded, and moderate their language with apologies for any unfortunate slips of the tongue.

The Art of Subtlety

Maybe, indeed, I am old-fashioned. I would rather be that than uncouth and uncultured. From my youth, my mode of address has earned me consideration, respect, and a hearing. Yet if I am overly formal in beginning a message with "Dear Mr Jones", when we have always been on first-name terms, you need not read any further to know that this is an expression of great displeasure.

Subtlety and discretion; the polite turn of expression that, on first reading, seems complimentary, until some thought is put to it. It is the way of the English, an art of communication lost to many for whom a good education might have been a luxury. It is not their fault.

You Do Not Get A Painter to Fix Another's Art

The Value of Vindication

Vindication comes in different ways, not to gloat or to point fingers, even if, after all is said, the concern you raised has been proven true. Good communication, alongside the ability to articulate one's thoughts even in the heat of the moment, remains the most critical skill every time.

In a long-running saga of urgency and wits, from which workplace stress can be the damaging consequence for motivation and wellbeing, withstanding authority and office in the quest to improve a proposed solution, so that it works as intended and engenders confidence, is not a battle for the fainthearted.

There are so many ways to express oneself, and the power of persuasion comes in the form of words that walk people down a reasonable lane of acknowledgement, misgiving, challenge, and requirement, before acquiescing to the notion of a willingness to engage and always help.

A Question of Ownership

In this instance, after a solution did not work as intended, a project manager had the bright idea that it was now the job of the implementor to fix the problem with a complex set of orchestration scripts; scripts that the implementor had long before determined would not deploy cleanly, for various reasons previously given but seemingly ignored.

The truth was that collaboration had never quite been on offer. What passed for it at the outset was minimal, closer to an imposition than an invitation, and it was only our steady, well-argued pushbacks that drew out any real interaction. Even then, we were working with architects whose confidence outpaced their familiarity with the environment in which their solution was meant to run.

The first line of my response was that his reading of the situation was wrong, and I then went on to make the case for why, starting with a simple analogy. Because scripts and programming are an individual's way of thinking and a style of expression for what they want to achieve, and without the full immersion of others in the coding process, "You do not get a painter to fix another artist's work of art."

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I appreciate that there was something I could do, but what was requested was input; it could not be interpreted as taking ownership of the solution. The fundamentals of the intended solution were sound, but its enterprise deployment, so that it consistently works once rolled out, requires the inside knowledge of the implementor to point out why certain constructs will fail, so that the developer takes those ideas seriously when modifying elements of the proposed solution.

Back to the Canvas

The response of the project manager was at first patronising and then emotional, but the artist, the developer, understood the import of my message and got back to work fixing their solution, which is now in its fourth iteration and possibly still a work in progress nine days on.

As far as I was concerned, what I intended was achieved: to draw out the work of the implementor, before the solution was complete, and to inform of the essential changes and improvements needed to make it deployable.

Invariably, I believe the result would not only be fit for purpose; once fully done, all sides of development, through implementation, to the end-users would see the intended benefits the solution would offer.

The whole trajectory now sits in the slipstream of practical engagement with the implementation process, rather than in acquiring accolades from promising the client outcomes that, from the onset, would never have worked, back when the first ideas were put to us over two months ago.

Authority and Consent

One higher management person did interject in the email chain, suggesting we were involved in verbose communication; the same person who used the lexicon of grief to explain the effects of change some months ago. None of these replies required a response once the artist was back to fixing their work of art, rather than hoping another might attempt a dash of graffiti to improve it.

The authority to propose still requires the consent to implement. Badly designed systems tend to be a symptom of the same thing: responsibility placed in the wrong hands, and too little respectful engagement with those who must carry a complex solution through deployment.

Had the environment been understood from the start, much of this could have been avoided. In the workplace, this is the challenge faced by many who need the kind of articulation that ensures a solution has the best set of inputs to work.

We are not seeking perfection, just something good enough to understand, implement, manage, and hand over cleanly, when the time comes.

Related blogs

Blog - Badly Designed Systems Are Just That

Blog - Authority Without Consent

Blog - When Change Borrows the Lexicon of Grief

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Thought Picnic: Confidences, Not Secrets

Confidences, Not Secrets

In the broad scheme of things, we have no secrets; what we have are confidences that too often get betrayed in unguarded yet frank moments to others. 

Much as I hear and listen to a great deal, I am guarded about how I use what I have learnt. I could form opinions about people, but I am very flexible and, hopefully, tenderhearted, making allowances until indifference or unkindness breaks the bond.

Indifference is, for me, the most wicked form of expression in any communication, because it means there is no care, concern, consideration, or confidence. Whatever confidences you might have thought you had in that setting are then ready for the careless abandon of reason and a carefree dissemination to anyone.

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Words have an effect, a great effect, when what should have been kept in mind finds an outlet to others. I am also a believer in the biblical saying, “From the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh.” Even discretion and moderation can scarcely stand in for self-control once you have resolved all inner contention and convincingly arrived at the conclusion you have uttered.

Being Spoken About

From people I trust, I have heard the most hurtful things, sometimes directly, though usually relayed to me through other channels. I bat them away most of the time; yet, in other situations, the covenant is broken beyond redemption, and the relationship sours or is terminated for my own peace of mind.

What we cannot avoid is that we will always be spoken about by someone else: in praise, in jest, in commendation, in spite, in jealousy, in rancour, or much worse. That is a given.

I have the outlet of my blog to reflect on these many things, and perhaps to limit the impact of malevolence whilst maximising that of benevolence.

Words That Wound

Perhaps decades ago, it was a guardian relating to someone else that I had been picked up off the street. I am grateful that my story, which has had many failures, has been greeted with amazing successes.

Another, whilst I was in the throes of personal angst and the loss of confidence to project myself, grew fed up with the process I took towards rebuilding character and purpose. Out of nowhere came words to the effect that my inability to produce results was inimical to their social standing; I was the illuminant of a bastard.

To them, that was a kind of radical intervention to jar my senses, but it did the opposite. It fell into that rubric of dripping criticism, the kind that strips you of your dignity to force a reaction and their view of the right result. It is about them, rather than you.

Shedding Old Skin

For me, there was no second instinct; I ceased initiating communication from that point. It is the kind of talk the speaker believes is necessary, but which the listener, with an appreciation of nuance and the use of language, would find, basically, unforgivable.

Yet these examples might tempt a recipient to deem such incidents forgettable, until you are broadsided by the notion that you are living a fake life. I do wish a whole lot of things were fake: the losses, the cancers, some experiences, a few tragedies. But what kind of a life would that be?

Perhaps, for once, I am not remotely my own harshest critic when I allow myself the pleasure of living, of loving, of existing, and of doing my own thing, unbothered by what others think, because that is their problem and not mine. Yes, the words do hurt, but they must not dampen the spirit of the joy of living. Like moulting, or the shedding of skin, some old bonds need breaking for the renewal of self.

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The Ghosts We Author Ourselves

A Late-Night Encounter

A while ago, on a walk late at night, I unwittingly wandered past a disused cemetery. It occurred to me that I was looking at tombstones left unkempt in grounds untended, ensconced between a road junction and a cluster of residences.

I was immediately in a heightened state of anxiety, expecting, through the power of mental suggestion, to see something, and yet dreading whatever it might be. My rational mind insisted there was no reason to run; and on reflection, I determined there was none to be afraid either.

An Impressionable Mind

Even so, I know how my impressionable young mind, in the past, has conjured apparitions, visible only to me, of dreadful things I find difficult to talk about.

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For this reason, I avoid anything that invites paranormal phenomena, including horror films, since I am perfectly capable of dreaming up anything without the need for a prompt.

Back in March, when our apartment overlooked a Jewish cemetery from the seventh floor, we would close the windows and draw the curtains once it grew dark, refusing to let our avoidance of the unknown take hold.

Why Fear the Peaceful Dead?

There is a strange irony here worth pausing on. A cemetery is, by any rational measure, among the most peaceful places we might ever be; quiet, still, and given over entirely to rest. And yet we fear it.

That fear, I have come to think, is not something the ground itself emits; it is something we bring with us, inherited from the tales, fables, and stories we absorbed long before we could question them. We frighten ourselves with a script written by other hands.

The unknown, in many senses, is precisely that: we have no inkling of what is out there, or of who that patch of land once harboured or memorialised. But that very lack of knowing should work in the opposite direction.

If I have no association with these graves, no bond with those who lie beneath them, no shared history at all, then why on earth would the dead, or any other world, take the slightest interest in me? Why would they trouble to cast me as the leading player in some living horror film, with themselves as the supporting cast?

Nothing Buried Here

Put plainly, the less connection there is, the weaker the hold it should have on us. Then I found myself wondering about the humorous placebo effect of a tombstone planted as a prank, with nothing buried beneath it, yet still exerting the full graveyard effect on anyone whose imagination readily runs wild. It is proof, if any were needed, that the fear lives in the beholder and not in the stone.

The least association, then, should leave no true affinity, only a sheer, willing victimhood scripted by a fearful mind. How hard it is to unlearn the tales, fables, and stories of ghosts, ghouls, and banshees. On that night, I also knew that if I were confronted with anything, I would engage with it and stand my ground.

The Voice in the Dark

Then, out of the recesses of a nearby building, someone appeared and said hello. This time I had the presence of mind not to jump out of my skin, and as I made sense of it, I realised it was a homeless man. He most certainly had not come from the graves; and if he had, it was nowhere near as bad as I had imagined.

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Twenty-Seven Years and a Day

A Manchester Eclipse

Time is measured in epochs that put our ephemeral existence into insignificance. I have been in the path of a few celestial events, solar eclipses that, without the explanation of modern science, would have left us in total dread and foreboding.

Today in Manchester, we witnessed a partial solar eclipse. Things did not really go dark, but everyone was looking up to behold this once-in-a-lifetime heavenly sight.

I could not get hold of eclipse glasses, so I improvised, making a pinhole camera. I probably needed a bit more depth to the box, but it occupied me enough that I did not dare to look directly at the sun.

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Finding a Better View

As I live in an urban city centre with many high-rise buildings, getting a good view first entailed standing by the roadside, before I made my way to Mayfield Park, which we as residents sometimes forget is so close and quite vast.

I watched it well beyond the maximum before a lady offered me her glasses, and I then looked directly at the majesty of our universe.

Twenty-Seven Years Earlier

Twenty-seven years and a day ago, we had another solar eclipse. This one was quite prominent; not totality, but you saw and noticed the dimming of the light. As the light dimmed, it took on a sepia hue, almost like being inside a photograph from the 1940s.

It was also a different place. I was visiting a friend in the Netherlands, who lived out in the countryside at Doorn, and what a spectacle we saw in his garden.

Doorn is also the town in which the Kaiser of Germany spent his last days. Wilhelm II abdicated in 1918 and lived at Huis Doorn until his death in 1941; fittingly, he seems to carry that same feeling of the 1940s that the sepia light evoked.

The House at Doorn

My friend's mother took me on a tour of Huis Doorn. As her father had been the groundsman, their house stood on the grounds, and she, with the other children, would run around the house having tea with the Kaiser.

She showed me the chutes they slithered through to get from one part of the house to another: a historical monument, visited with a guide whose own history was formed within its walls.

A Turning Point

I cannot tell why an eclipse could be both momentous and auspicious. I did not see the future, for I had just come out of a seven-year relationship. We remained friends and planned a short holiday to Brussels.

As he returned to England, I headed north to Holland. Nine months later marked the beginning of a new life in the Netherlands, twelve and a half years of it. No, it was not to enter a relationship, though I remained in contact with my friend in Doorn.

Written in the Skies

And God said, "Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. [Genesis 1:14-15 NIVUK]

I do not do things by chance. This might be a harbinger of things to come; the least you can do is to be ready for when change and opportunity come.

Life is like a story written in the skies, sometimes clear, at times cloudy, and even, on occasion, in the dimness and haze of sepia. It comes as experience, to be written into memory and history.

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No More Fucks to Give: On Experience, Rejection, and Self-Worth

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The Weight of Experience

I have met, read about, and heard from people who tell me it is tough out there. This is not for any want of skill or expertise; these are people who initiated, executed, and commissioned projects and programmes in-country, abroad, and within global conglomerates, bringing function and functionality into existence.

Yet, for all that wealth of experience, along with continuous adaptation and change, a keenness to keep abreast of developments, and a depth built over decades, the market for talent seems to have closed its doors. It offers little opportunity for the kind of knowledge and insight that would profit any organisation daring enough to venture from the packaged to the rugged.

Six Hundred Applications

My own experience of this came through posting around 600 applications for jobs I not only believed I could do, but for which, at times, I was overqualified. Still, you stick your oar in for the prospect of being seen and recognised enough for what they might think you can do.

At this point, it is not a case of looking for achievement. While we can set new goals for the circumstances in which we find ourselves, there is little else we need to prove to anyone, apart from the excitement we feel in doing things, doing them well, and then being given a platform to pay it forward through mentoring, coaching, and helping others grow.

The Toll of Rejection

Each application went out on the wing of hope that the response would not be one of rejection, but an invitation to have a conversation. Those who do not know you might subject you to unconventional questioning that borders on interrogation. You half bite your tongue at being patronised, belittled, or even humiliated, because they seem to hold all the cards while you are trying to be seen beyond what your CV says about you.

This process is not without a toll on your confidence and self-esteem. You begin to measure yourself according to what you are offered rather than what you are worth. It becomes a gradual, humbling climbdown; the high they think they are offering sits at a low you had never countenanced, perhaps not in two decades, but that becomes the price for being, unfortunately, out of the game.

Stooping to Conquer

Invariably, we stoop to conquer, resetting our expectations and redefining our horizons as our laurels begin to hang on the walls that deign to accept us. Perhaps some recognition comes with it, once they realise we were more than a bargain snapped up by a market less astute.

The corporate world might forget one thing. Where others are still in pursuit of hierarchical reward, we, after almost four decades in this sphere, probably know all the machinations of office politics, the power plays, and the egos that so easily toxify an otherwise conducive workplace.

A Word to the Weary

Indeed, I encourage those who have been denied prospect after prospect not to relent; perhaps some recalibration is all that is required. I remember all sorts of things said about my old CV. It was rewritten, redesigned, and refurbished until I could almost no longer recognise myself, my work, my voice, and what I could eventually defend. In the end, it was the old and trusty CV that won it.

Finally, I enjoy what I do as a senior sort of geek. I will not be disrespected, and I will speak my mind. I do not need to be confrontational, but if circumstance demands it, the challenge will be met. And heck, many like me have no more fucks to give; annoy us and we are gone. Thank you.

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Badly Designed Systems Are Just That

Learning to Laugh

Life can be a rather humorous existence, or at least, I tend to laugh at myself more than I berate myself. It is a healthy disposition to have. What fools we have been in too many things, though hopefully we have refused to allow those things to define us.

Consider the pressure to deliver a product that was less than ready for primetime, yet pushed towards deployment by the powers that be. This came after misgivings and concerns that eventually became valid and were proved so too.

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A Premise That Failed

I found myself testing a premise that did not work. Every time I made an adjustment, I did not see the expected result. When I was asked to put it out immediately, I had one inescapable point: what is not working cannot be deployed. I had a slight window of protest, insisting that until it worked on my system, it could go nowhere.

When I eventually got the working parts to work, I realised my error had been using a similarly named old component when the new one was intended. The urge from one end had beclouded my ability to concentrate. Once I discovered what the issue was, I sternly suggested that people should ease off and wait for my update.

Back to the Drawing Board

The next morning, we saw some results, along with the proof of why the other parts would not work. We had the knowledge, but the architects, in their wisdom and hubris, thought they knew better.

Did I not write about this last month, when I set out why technical authority without social consent produces brittle solutions? The whole process returned to the drawing board, yet once again it missed the essential part of engagement that would take a great concept to a successful deployment.

Then came another issue. I had written a letter to express my frustration at being unable to secure a slot for a review. The website presented a user experience you barely wanted to relive once, let alone many times over a couple of weeks.

An Unwinnable Lottery

As I recorded all the issues that fed what had looked like an unwinnable lottery for access, I clicked on another link within the interface, only to find that a slot had already been booked on my behalf, though I could find no record of being informed of that appointment.

I did, however, find one message that allowed the rescheduling of an earlier slot; but I attributed that to another booking I had received a few days before. What was missing from the information exchanges was any indication of what each message particularly pertained to.

When Systems Forget the User

How much better it could have been if they had not assumed they were the only ones communicating with you, and that the possibility of multiple appointments scheduled within a short timeframe might exacerbate the confusion about what was what.

This discovery meant my letter of frustration did not have to be sent. It was also a relief that the said slot had not passed, as the alternative arrangements made would not have been realised for almost three weeks.

The Wry Smile

Essentially, badly designed systems are just that: badly designed, no matter how they seem to work. The end user is simply left with concerns, frustrations and misgivings, entirely out of the frame of what affects them the most, because they are not properly considered as part of why, and for whom, the system was designed.

Then, for each of these episodes, when things are not as bad as they once seemed, there is a wry smile, some mirth and laughter, and even that urge to step out for a walk for having been so worked up earlier.

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