Opine

[oh-pahyn]

–vb/ to hold or express an opinion.

[Origin: 1575–85; < L opīnārī to think, deem]

 

 

 
Text Box: You have little, if any, control over when you can leave work and even when you do come home you have effectively a whole other job to do back there. You have no weekends to speak of. If you have any principles, they are quickly beaten out of you by these strange creatures called ‘party whips’. They are not your boss, but they are working ‘in your best interest.’ They hold the key to the support you need to keep this job that you love so much, so you don’t really say anything you shouldn’t. Not that it really matters because you are judged by the majority of the 90,000+ interview panel based on the actions of other, more high-profile people at work. This interview panel have usually never met you, let alone been to your office to see the work you do, but nonetheless feel qualified to judge how good you are at your job. They also feel entitled to tell you exactly what they think. They feel entitled to express their opinions to your husband or wife, to your children, and to your friends in public and at any time of day. So you spend your five years perpetually defending yourself from those many people who don’t want you in the job. You are a very visible, single focal point for grievance at home, and a tiny, almost inconsequential fish in a huge pond at work. You can do little except chip away at the management from the outside, or marginally alter the overwhelming pre-decided tide of policy from the inside. And when you’re finished, unless you’ve re-created the UN or accidentally set yourself on fire in public, nobody will really remember who you were. MPs have replaced bankers as the bogeymen for a frightened and fragile national psyche. The rampant, visceral hatred sparked by the egregious greed of some has left in ruins everything what many good honest people worked to build. If some sense of perspective is not kept, necessary reforms risk giving way to recriminations. This would only weaken our democracy and discourage another generation of good, honest people from taking up the mantle. comment@opine-blog.com See also: Politics

29 May, 2009

Spare a thought...

 

Imagine going for a new job. That job entails 12 months or more of preparation. It involves a month-long interview process with a panel of over 90,000 people whom  you effectively have to beg to let you have the job. The vast majority of those 90,000+ people don’t want you to get the job, and many of them are actively working to make sure you don’t get it. Even if you do get the job, you know that more people didn’t want you to have it than wanted you to have it, and that those people will spend the next four or five years doing everything they can to make sure you don’t keep it.

 

So once you’ve got the job, you are obliged to spend more than 60% of your time away from your home and your family. You have two offices – one of them works hours you haven’t chosen and can finish as late as 2am. The other doesn’t have hours at all; it’s a constant, unremitting stream of other people’s problems reaching you by telephone, by email, by post, by fax, from people who come up to you in the street, in the pub, in the supermarket. 

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