Category: Not Games

1697: Adjustments

I am very tired. This is a side-effect of my new routine, which necessitates getting up at some point before (or, more commonly just before) 7am, going out, doing some work for a normal working day, then coming home in time for about 6pm, eating dinner, then doing something relaxing and pleasant in the evening.

This may not sound all that tiring to those of you who have happily been holding down nine-to-fives for the last umpteen years, but it’s been something of a culture shock to me.

Actually, that might be a slight exaggeration. But after four years of working from home, often in my pants, there have been a number of adjustments I’ve had to make. And, you know, aside from the whole “getting up early” thing (which I still loathe thanks to my body’s uncanny ability to be extremely tired in the morning regardless of whether I go to bed early, timely…ly or ridiculously late) these adjustment haven’t been all that bad — and I think they’ll have a positive effect overall.

The biggest change is, of course, the fact that I am no longer working from home and consequently have to 1) put clothes on and 2) travel to work. The former’s not really an issue — I joke about working in my pants, but in reality more often than not I did get dressed to do work, because it put me in the right mindset to do useful things.

The latter, however, is a noteworthy change. I have a drive of about 45 minutes or so to my place of work, followed by a 10-15 minute walk from where I park my car to the actual office. This means that I’m getting a bit of very light exercise every day, which is probably a good thing. I can’t say it’s particularly strenuous exercise, given that I tend to walk quite slowly — a trait I have apparently inherited from my mother without noticing at some point — but it is exercise of sorts, and it’s every day.

There’s also actually a gym on site at my new workplace, which I will probably join at some point soon, since it’s a lot cheaper than the one I’m currently a member of. (Plus I walk past it on the way out of work every day, so that makes it a lot more difficult to ignore… and it has the advantage of meaning that if I stay late to do even a short workout, I’m less likely to run into rush-hour traffic on the way home, which will be very nice indeed.)

The fact I’m working in an office rather than in my own house, which, to put the following in context, is approximately 5 minutes’ walk from a Tesco Express, means that I’m less inclined to wander out and purchase various snacks and sugary drinks when I’m feeling hungry, too. Instead, I’m drinking a lot more water, I’ve cut down a fair bit on the lattes — no more than one or two a day, usually just the one to pep me up a bit in the morning — and I’ve almost entirely eliminated fizzy pop from consideration when I think about what I’d like to drink. I take my own lunch when either Andie or I remember to prepare it the night before (because let’s face it, neither of us feel inclined to do so at that ungodly hour in the morning) but even when I don’t, the work canteen is pretty good, with a selection of decent food rather than the usual “chips with everything” situation I typically associate with the word “canteen”.

So on the whole, then, things are going well and I hope they will have a positive impact on both my physical and mental wellbeing. It’s too early to say right now, but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on things as I continue to settle in.

1696: Side Effects

One of the side-effects of 1) having a job that doesn’t involve staring glassy-eyed at the Internet all day and 2) being in the middle of a self-enforced social media blackout (it’s going great, by the way) is that your priorities and even interests change.

Oh, don’t worry, I’m not about to stop boring you with tales of obscure video games any time soon, but what I have found is that I’m in no hurry to keep up with the latest news in gaming and related spheres such as technology.

This was really driven home to me today when someone asked what I thought of Apple’s new announcements.

Eh? I thought. I haven’t heard anything about those.

Apparently Apple announced a new iPhone and a smartwatch, whatever the fuck one of those is. And I was surprised to find how little of a shit I gave about either of them. My current phone is a functional workhorse at best, though without Facebook and Twitter demanding my attention every few minutes it stays in my pocket or drawer a lot more than it used to, and is largely being used for a bit of lunchtime Web browsing and playing music in the car. As such, I find it hard to get excited about the latest piece of shiny, pretty and overpriced tech that Apple is coming out with. My honeymoon period with “smartphones” is well and truly over: I’m not interested in playing games on them, I’m rapidly discovering the value of not having social media in your pocket, and for organisation, frankly I’d rather use a paper notebook and calendar. Get off my lawn.

It was the watch that particularly bewildered me, though. Before I left the games press, tech writers were just starting to get excited about “wearables”, and I couldn’t fathom why. I still can’t. It just sounds like an unnecessary step in the process of consuming digital content, and a way for the ever-present menace of notifications to be even more intrusive to your daily life than a constantly beeping phone already is. A little computer on your wrist is something straight out of sci-fi and a few years ago I’d have been all over it, but on reflection, now? That’s not what I want. Not at all.

I’m not writing about this to be one of those smug “well, I don’t care about those things you’re excited about” people — though I’m well aware it may well come across that way. Rather, I’m more surprised at myself; I always had myself pegged as a lifelong gadget junkie, and the trail of defunct-but-useful-at-the-time technology (Hi, Palm!) my life has left in its wake would seem to back that up.

But I guess at some stage there’s a saturation point. You see something, and see no way for it to possibly fit into your life; no reason to own one. I already felt this way about tablets — I barely use our iPad even today — and I certainly feel it about Apple’s new watch. Smartphones still have something of a place in my life — if nothing else, it’s useful and convenient to have things like maps and a means of people contacting you (or indeed contacting others) in your pocket — but their role is much diminished from what it was, and I’m in no hurry to upgrade to the latest and greatest.

It’s another case of, as we discussed the other day, solutions to problems you don’t have. All this technology is great, but it convinces us that our lives would be an absolute chaotic mess without it — when, in fact, it’s entirely possible that the opposite could be true. After all, the human race survived pretty well before we discovered the ability to photograph your dinner and post it on the Internet, didn’t we? While I’m not ready to completely let go of my smartphone — not yet? — I’m certainly nowhere near as reliant on technology as I once was, and I’m certainly not obsessively checking news feeds to find out the latest and greatest news about it.

And you know what? It’s pretty nice and peaceful. I could get used to this.

1694: Spinning Some Tunes

When I was growing up, I wasn’t massively into popular music — my peers found it hilarious that I bought my first ever album, Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, literally a single day before (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory came out — though I did, on occasion, purchase an album containing a song I particularly liked. (Sometimes I inexplicably also purchased albums containing songs I didn’t like, though this sometimes led to surprising discoveries.) I would listen to music while I was doing things like homework or reading, and later, when I could drive, I’d record albums onto tape so I could listen to them in the car.

At the time, I didn’t feel like a lot of the music I was listening to was particularly “iconic” or defining of the era. I certainly didn’t feel like I was living in a particularly noteworthy era of music in the same way that those who grew up listening to, say, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones would have been able to. While my tastes were initially defined by what everyone else liked, I gradually started the pattern that I continue to this day of exploring a wide variety of different creative works, and sod what anyone else thinks. Consequently, my CD shelf contained everything from The Spice Girls to Bernard Butler and all manner of things in between. I enjoyed it, indulged in it and, like most people these days, gradually migrated my music library from a collection of CDs to a vast iTunes folder, 95% of which I never listen to.

Just recently, I’ve been starting to feel nostalgic for some of this old music. This can be attributed at least in part to the fact that both Andie and I have taken to listening to a lot of Jack FM, which tends to play a lot of the songs we grew up with, plus some earlier stuff from the ’70s and ’80s, too. While Jack FM has its annoyances — most notably its repetitive adverts and truly dreadful attempts at humour — it’s led me to rediscover a lot of the songs of my youth, songs that, in some cases, I haven’t listened to for literally years now.

I’ve long since parted with a lot of the original CDs — Music Magpie took a whole load off my hands a couple of house moves ago — but thanks to services like Google Play Music, I’m able to call up old favourite albums with the click of a mouse and enjoy them on my phone, in the car, on my computer. It’s pretty great.

And I’ve been discovering that many of these tracks were a lot more “defining” than I thought. Or perhaps it’s just that I have good memories associated with them. Either way, spinning up a copy of something like Prodigy’s Fat of the Land or Mansun’s Attack of the Grey Lantern is like slipping on a comfortable pair of earmuffs and losing myself in times past. If I listen on headphones, it’s exactly like that, in fact.

I’ve never really been one for just sitting and listening to music as my sole activity — I prefer it to be an accompaniment to something like driving or working — but it’s been kind of pleasant to rediscover a lot of these old favourites recently. I anticipate that my drive to work each morning will be accompanied by a lot more singalongs in the near future.

1692: The Blackout

I’ve decided to go through with a week-long social media blackout. (By “social media” I mean “Twitter and Facebook”, just to clarify; I’m not breaking my own rules by posting here.)

I was originally intending to start it off on Monday, but then yet more nonsense in the whole Zoe Quinn thing kicked off this morning and I just didn’t want anything to do with it whatsoever — either the inevitable abuse she would receive for the things she was posting, or the unbearable smugness of her supporters.

So I started it today, cold turkey. And I’m serious about it. I deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone. I logged out of the sites on all my browsers. I removed the bookmarks from Chrome, the browser I use most frequently. And I haven’t looked at either all day.

While I won’t pretend I haven’t felt a few urges to pop my head in and have a look, I haven’t acted on these urges at all. I haven’t felt the need to. I know that, going by what I saw this morning, something would just irritate and annoy me. And I don’t need that.

I’m not going to cut myself off completely, though. For the week, my online socialisation will be through email, instant messaging (Google Hangouts), comments on this site and the Squadron of Shame forums. All of these are environments where I have much greater control over my socialisation, and which are populated by far smaller groups of people. And they are all people with whom I know I get on and can enjoy conversation with.

One may argue that there’s a danger of creating an echo chamber when you simply surround yourself with people that you’re 100% comfortable with, but in reality it’s actually rather desirable to have a friendship group that understands you. It’s an admirable goal to attempt to understand and ingratiate yourself with groups that you don’t know a lot about, or whom you probably wouldn’t hang out with in “real life”, but eventually it just all starts to feel a bit high school, what with all the cliques, cool kids and groups that end up being the butt of everyone’s jokes — often without justification.

Ponder how your friendships work in real life. Chances are that over your lifespan, you’ve met a significant number of people. Some of these became friends because you had things in common or enjoyed spending time together. As time passes, the number of true friends you likely have has probably dwindled as everyone’s lives start to move in different directions. That’s a bit sad when it means you lose touch with people with whom you used to spend a lot of time, but it’s also part of the natural “filtering process” our real-life social lives go through over time.

With social media, this filtering doesn’t happen automatically, so unless you take the time to actually go through and prune your friend and follower lists every so often, over time the noise just builds and builds and builds, often with disparate groups ending up butting heads with one another in your timeline or news feed. If you stand on the periphery of a few groups that, for whatever reason, end up at each other’s throats, it can put you in a very awkward and undesirable situation, as we’ve seen with the whole “Gamergate” thing over the last week or so. To use my own personal situation, I identify with the games journalists who are undoubtedly frustrated at the constant accusations of “corruption” being levelled at them, but at the same time I also identify with the gamers who are sick of journalists talking down to them as if they’re some sort of superior moral arbiters. Both sides say and do some regrettable things, and even if you’re not directly involved — as I’ve taken care not to be — it can be anxiety-inducing to see what’s going on.

That’s not what the original promise of social media was. I recall signing up for Facebook for the first time and being amazed by the prospect of being able to easily stay in touch with people. Twitter, meanwhile helped me make a ton of new friends and discover people with common interests all over the world. Since I first signed up for both of them, though, their place in society has changed; Facebook has become little more than a link repository for endless “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!” clickbait bullshit, while Twitter has become a place where they who shout the loudest get to be “right”, and whoever is right gets to declare anyone who disagrees with them as some sort of awful deviant.

As such, then, we come to my blackout. I feel positive that it will have a good effect on my mental health. And when it comes to next weekend, I’ll make some more permanent decisions about my online existence.

I may have already made up my mind. But we’ll see.

1691: Reborn

I had one of those curious epiphanies on the way home. You know the ones. Or perhaps you don’t.

Anyway, I digress.

My epiphany was that I felt like a new person today. I felt like I was in the middle of a new beginning, like I was getting a chance to pretty much “start over” and try again.

Of course, this isn’t strictly true, what with me being 33 and thus on that ever-downward slope towards middle age, old age and eventual death rather than a fresh-faced (I’m not sure I was ever fresh-faced) youth in my early twenties looking forward to the future. But I’m glad I did get this new chance to start again, and I don’t intend to squander it.

The trigger for feeling this way is, of course, the fact that I really have made a new beginning by starting a new job and hopefully a new career. In just two weeks on the job, I feel like I’ve made some new friends, learned some new skills and made a good first impression.

And it’s put a lot of things in perspective, too. Most prominently, my feelings surrounding the echo chamber of social media.

My typical working day now looks very different to how it did when I was working from home. I no longer have Twitter perpetually open on screen or on my phone; I don’t check Facebook at all; Google+ has fallen totally by the wayside, particularly since the Squadron of Shame jumped ship to its own forum a while back; and I spend most of my time either actually doing work, interacting with people through internal emails or speaking with them face-to-face.

And it’s blissful. Blissful, I tell you. You might call it wilfully shutting out issues that need to be addressed; I call it a haven of calm, and I can already feel my mental health improving because of it.

Being constantly bombarded with the noise of social media at all hours of the day — as I voluntarily subjected myself to when I was working from home — is actively stressful, anxiety-inducing and even depressing. It shouldn’t be — it should be a positive thing — but it is.

Part of this is down to who you follow, of course — like real life, putting the people you interact with regularly through a rigorous filtering process until you’re left with the people you genuinely like is important — but with the nature of modern social media, sometimes you get things thrust in your face without you going looking for them. The clearest example is Twitter’s Retweets, which can expose you to people and opinions so far divergent from your own as to create genuine anxiety (and also people who go on to become firm friends, it must also be said), but it also happens whenever Facebook makes one of its inexplicable decisions to show you a post from someone you don’t know that one of your friends commented “lol” on forty-seven comments back from where the argument is now raging.

This is why I’m enjoying the peace and quiet of not being permanently plugged in to social media, and why I feel like a new person. I can switch off, focus on the people around me and the work I’m supposed to be doing, and I can enjoy it. It’s pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. And it makes me wonder why the hell I’ve been voluntarily putting myself through all this for the last few years.

And this doesn’t mean that I’ve lost interest in the things I previously immersed myself in. On the contrary, it means I can just enjoy them for what they are. I can enjoy games purely on the virtue of them being great games; I don’t have to give a shit about whether The Internet thinks something I enjoy is terrible and wrong, or whether I find the latest indie darling to actually be rather tedious.

In short, I feel like my rebirth has been a wonderful thing all round, really. I’m still in the honeymoon period, of course, and I’m sure my new life will bring with it a torrent of new things to be anxious about, but for now I’m enjoying it very much indeed; long may it continue.

1687: A Jack Too Far

One of our local radio stations is called Jack FM. Jack FM has two “unique selling points” as a radio station: firstly, the fact that they “play what they want” — in practice meaning that they have a playlist just as repetitive as the fetid crap played on more pop-centric radio stations every day, only it consists of actually good songs from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s — and secondly, the fact that, outside of a couple of special shows, there don’t appear to be any DJs — just regular, prerecorded voiceovers from actor Paul Darrow of Blake’s 7 fame.

This is Paul Darrow, if you’re unfamiliar:

(No, he is not the same person as the narrator from The Stanley Parable, if you were wondering. That is Kevan Brighting.)

This latter aspect marks one of Jack FM’s strangest characteristics — the fact that it appears to be trying as hard as possible to be deliberately shit, at least between the songs which, as previously mentioned, tend to err on the side of “actually pretty good”.

The reason I say this is that Darrow, bless him, is forced to read some of the absolute worst “comedy” material that has ever been broadcast via any medium — seemingly every few minutes.

The trouble isn’t necessarily with the jokes themselves — some of them, particularly those which poke fun at notoriously shit town Basingstoke, will elicit a genuine chuckle — but rather the fact that they tend to go too far. Not from a taste perspective, but from a “you should have stopped talking a sentence ago” perspective.

Mostly this happens in a futile attempt to make something mundane appear more funny than it is, or indeed at all. I’ll give you an example.

“Jack FM news with [company name I can’t remember — great advertising, guys!] bus services. Forget about parking and travel costs, travel by bus! The wheels on the bus go round and round!”

Every time I hear this I find myself wondering who signed off on that last sentence. It serves no purpose. It’s not funny because it doesn’t make a joke. It’s little more than a reference to a well-known children’s song that’s been shoehorned in for no apparent reason other than to say… something. Darrow’s voice stands by itself — a distinct, rich, fruity voice that is like caramel melting in your ears — and thus there’s really no need to add anything more than the simple marketing copy prior to that stupid last sentence. But no.

Here’s another.

“Jack FM travel with Happy Hot Tubs. New hot tubs now in stock. Stock! As in gravy!”

This one suffers a similar problem, albeit to an even greater degree. The “gravy” comment really does have nothing to do with the words that came immediately before it, leaving it dangling there like a stubborn… well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Not all of Darrow’s contributions to Jack FM’s distinctive sound are that awful — as noted previously, some of them are genuinely amusing, particularly when he decides to turn on the sarcasm, as he frequently does. (“Our buses have wi-fi. And seats. And poles. And buttons that ding!”) I can’t help but think that he might be taking the piss a bit, having been given some utterly lifeless marketing copy from one of the numerous sponsors of the station and choosing to spice it up a bit with a bit of thinly-masked disdain. His contempt for Basingstoke also seems remarkably genuine — and anyone who has ever visited Basingstoke will happily back him up on that.

But I can’t shake the feeling that Jack FM’s jingles could be something genuinely special if they actually employed someone who knew how to write proper jokes. As it stands, Darrow’s delicious voice makes for a distinctive identity of the station — but his talents are somewhat wasted on material that regularly falls flat on its face.

1686: Sunday Night

Back to work tomorrow, and after a rather gentle start last week I’m actually hoping I’ll be able to get stuck in and make myself useful a bit more this week. I have a full-day company induction on Tuesday, I believe, but all being well the remainder of the week will see me actually doing my job, which will be nice.

Yes, that’s right, I said “nice”. I know in modern life it’s fashionable to be cynical about your job and to merely tolerate it rather than enjoy it, but for the moment I’m actually relishing the prospect of having something to do each day — and that something being part of something bigger.

I’ve had this to a lesser extent when working on websites, of course, but when working remotely from a different timezone to the rest of your colleagues, it’s easy to feel somewhat justifiably isolated at times. The advantage of what is effectively working “solo” alongside a bunch of other people who are also working “solo” on the same thing is that you can turn things around pretty quickly — more often than not, I’d have an idea for a feature on a website and be able to research, write and publish it within a space of a day. (Obviously things that require longer to research — by playing a whole game through for a review or walkthrough, for example — take a bit longer, but these can be worked on alongside other things.)

The downside of this I’ve already mentioned: you feel like you’re kind of going it alone, even when the people you work with make an effort to get together online in some form or another and swap ideas.

Conversely, having switched work environments from working solo at home to part of a team in a big office, I’ve noticed two things related to the shift: firstly, things take a whole lot longer than if I was doing everything myself as in the past, and secondly, you’re a lot more reliant on other people.

These things are a mixed blessing at best; it can be frustrating to be waiting on an important piece of information from a specific person and they simply don’t get back to you for weeks at a time. On the other hand, it means that things are — theoretically, anyway — a whole lot less stressful, since the workload of getting something done is spread between several people, each of whom can concentrate on their own specialisms rather than having to dip their toes into unfamiliar waters on occasion. It also kind of means you can work on a lot more things at the same time — do your bit, pass it on to the relevant person or people, then get started on something else, only returning to the original thing if you have to go back and fix something.

None of this is news to any of you who have been happily chugging along in office jobs for years now, I’m sure, but this is still quite a new experience to me. Those who have known me a while will remember that my past lives have included being a teacher, a salesman, a software trainer and a video games journalist — all jobs that tend to involve you dealing with things by yourself, whether or not you’re part of an overall “team”. It’s actually kind of nice to know that now, for the first time, I can share out some of the responsibilities a bit more as well as helping other people out when I can. I foresee it being a much more pleasant way to work — let’s just hope I keep feeling that way after the initial “honeymoon period” is over!

Anyway. In line with my new responsibilities as a cog in the corporate machine, it is time for me to disappear in a bedwards direction. I hope you have a pleasant week.

1684: Honest Living

If you’ve been paying attention and/or know me, you’re probably curious about how my first week at my new job went, right? If not, well, tough, I’m going to tell you anyway.

I’ve enjoyed it for the most part, though there have been frustrating hiccups, chief among which is I’ve spent a significant part of the week unable to actually, you know, do any work due to the fact that my access to the company’s network wasn’t, umm, working.

As of close of business today, my email still wasn’t working, though I at least finally had sufficient access to be able to get a proper taste of what I’ll be doing on a daily basis. Turns out I can do the job I was hired for, which is always good to know.

Over my first couple of days, I had the opportunity to sit down with the members of my immediate team and the related people with whom I’ll most frequently be working. Without exception, they were all really nice folks, and I didn’t get the impression any of them were putting on their “best face” for the new guy; they all seemed to be genuinely nice people.

I haven’t found myself freezing up with social anxiety, either, which is something I was terrified of. Rather, I’ve found myself able to chat with my colleagues — including using their names without feeling weird — and generally relax about interpersonal reactions; no-one seems to think I’m a wanker, at least, which is nice, and my immediate team even seemed to be genuinely interested in actually getting to know me properly, which was nice.

The other interesting thing I found was that pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to over the course of the last few days has been with the company for numerous years, with many having moved around quite a bit during their time there. This suggests two welcome pieces of news to me: firstly, that it’s a good place to work, and secondly that there’s plenty of opportunity for development, advancement and sideways movement. (It may also suggest that people wanted to hold on to a stable job during the economic downturn, but I’m not one to judge; I took this job because I wanted financial stability.)

The lady who serves coffee on our floor is very nice, too. She’s writing a book and a screenplay and decided to tell me all about it while she was brewing my latte this morning. We bonded somewhat; I confessed that I’ve had a book in my head for at least the last ten years or so and still haven’t quite managed to tease it out in a finished form. Maybe one day.

So in summary then, it’s been a good week. Now it’s the weekend, I can simply switch off and forget about work until Monday morning. I won’t lie, it’s a good feeling. Whether or not it will last remains to be seen, but for now I’ll take it.

Living a normal life, eh. Who’d have thought it.

1683: Peace and Quiet

At my new job, I don’t have full Internet access yet — I only just got access to the office network — and thus I can’t spend all day gazing at Twitter. Fiddling around with mobile phones during working time is also somewhat frowned upon — not that this stops some people around my area doing it — and so I haven’t been tempted to sit there pulling-to-refresh all day. In fact, my phone spent most of today locked in my desk drawer.

My God, how pleasant it is to be free of social media, and in a three-dimensional environment filled with real people who are nice and pleasant and have senses of humour and don’t spent every waking hour filled with an all-consuming rage about something, anything, everything. (My manager claimed to be “in a rage” with the IT department when I arrived at work this morning and my login credentials still weren’t working, but it was one of the most mild-mannered rages I’ve ever seen, particularly compared to the worst the Internet has to offer.) I can feel an improvement to my mental health already, which is confirming something that I’ve suspected for a while:

While social media is great, I also think it has great potential to be harmful.

I’m not just talking about the “everyone, even hateful idiots, being given a voice to broadcast their opinions” thing here. I’m also talking about, from my own personal perspective, the frustration, annoyance, anger and feeling of impotent helplessness that stems from seeing other people being so utterly, wilfully stupid and being unable to convince them that yes, they are, in fact, being a bit of a dick.

This is my own issue, of course; I take a lot of things personally, particularly online, and when someone disagrees with me aggressively — as many people tend to do on the Internet, because respectful disagreements are rapidly becoming a thing of the past — I feel like I’m being attacked. Hell, I’ve seen friends of mine get attacked for something innocuous they’ve said, and, of course, there’s that horrible incident I suffered a while back that actually led to me leaving Twitter altogether for a while.

For people like me, though, this isn’t a healthy mental attitude to take, and it’s here that social media’s biggest benefit — the opportunity to expose yourself (not like that, pervert) to people you otherwise would never have come into contact with in a million years — is also its biggest drawback. The reason you would never have come into contact with those people in a million years without social media is because you move in completely different circles and you are fundamentally incompatible with one another. And, you know, that’s sort of fine, really. If coming into contact with these people leads to nothing but arguments and aggression, that’s not a valuable social interaction. No-one is learning anything from that experience; there’s no “cultural exchange” going on.

This isn’t to say you should only ever surround yourself with an echo chamber of people who feel the same way as you, of course. Work somewhere with a large number of people and it’s likely you’ll come into contact with at least a few people you simply don’t get on with, for example — but when dealing with those people face-to-face it’s much easier to just simply either stay out of their way or at least be polite to them; online, meanwhile, there are no filters in place, which means there’s nothing stopping people with fundamentally different ideologies from calling each other every name under the sun. And not stopping until it escalates into full-on abuse and harassment.

I’m still keeping Twitter around for now, since it’s my main means of communicating with a lot of far-flung friends around the globe. But my few days of going “cold turkey” during the daytime have all but broken my habit. And that, I can’t help but think, is a good thing.

I promise I’ll stop writing about this shit tomorrow and write about something more cheerful and/or interesting instead.

1681: New Start

So it was my first day at my new job today. I can’t really judge a lot about what it’s going to be like as yet, since as a sort of “induction” day coupled with the fact that my company network access isn’t set up yet meant that I’m yet to do any actual work, and it might even be Thursday before I get to really “do” anything.

I’m cool with that though, not because I don’t want to do any work, but rather because this is giving me the time to try and settle in a bit, learn all the rules and regulations (of which there are many — my new employer is very safety-conscious and consequently there are a lot of common-sense rules you have to make sure you follow at all times) and get to know a few people.

I spent most of today with my team, who all seem like thoroughly pleasant people. I felt mildly awkward to be sitting around watching people work over their shoulder, but my teammates all seemed more than happy to allow me to do so while talking to me almost constantly. I was glad that they were so open, helpful and honest with me because it made me feel like I was already welcome in the group rather than excluded as “the new guy”. I realise it’s probably irrational to expect to be excluded from a clique on one’s first day but, well, it’s happened before: one of the schools I worked at in particular very much had a number of established cliques, and I didn’t really fit into any of them for a while — most notably the one that consisted of my head of department and her friend from Maths — until I somehow managed to strike up a friendship with members of the English department in their top-floor hideaway far from the trials, tribulations and, well, bitchiness of the ground floor.

I don’t doubt that there will be cliques and friendship groups at my new employer. It’s sort of unavoidable given that there are several thousand people working there — it’s literally impossible for everyone to know each other. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in an organisation of that size, however; so long at the members of a team all get along with one another and with members of the teams with which they have the most frequent interactions, all will be well. And so far, that appears to be the situation, which is nice.

I’m up early again tomorrow for more training, e-learning and sitting down for some time with the people outside my team with whom I’ll most frequently be collaborating. From there, who knows? Either way, I’m feeling good about it so far; most people I spoke to today had been with the company a good few years and didn’t seem to feel like they were “stuck” — there appears to be plenty of opportunity for training, advancement and even shifting around to completely different departments, so who knows what I’ll end up doing in a few years’ time?

Hopefully it won’t be panicking over where my next paycheque is coming from. I’m hoping those days have been left far behind me.