Fantasy CEO - Round 1

This is really hard work! I know that business is complicated but it is another thing altogether to get your head around an entire (simulated) manufacturing company in a weekend, and around the skills that are usually spread right across the marketing, operations and finance functions and beyond. I know it’s my own blame that I’m cramming this weekend, and that I am doing it on my own, but I’m still feeling a little cabin crazy.

I’ve asked myself a few times, ‘why bother?’ It was a lovely day this morning - I really fancied going for a walk. I’ve concluded that I want to do this for a variety of reasons. As I mentioned yesterday, the first of these is bloody mindedness: it was making me nervous, therefore I have to do it. Call it personal growth: feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Another reason is that I am enjoying using the simulator - it’s the most sophisticated set of spreadsheets I ever expect to come across; it’s so sophisticated it doesn’t even look like a spreadsheet. There’s no getting away from it, the simulation and the training material are cool.

I am also aware that as I work my way through the eight ‘year’ cycle I’ll learn things I don’t yet know I don’t know; things about how decisions are made in each function, about how tipping a lever here will impact on the figures over there, about just how important good data really is, and that will be interesting. It is also good practice for me to work with a P&L and a Balance Sheet, rather than staring at them and saying “oh look - that’s a Profit and Loss Account and that’s a Balance Sheet”.

So all in all, my motives are not competitive. I am using this as a chance to study and learn; as a training course provided courtesy of the Times. I know that the Times have set it up as a competition and there will be some immensely competitive folks doing exactly the same thing as me this evening, and I suspect that they will be taking better decisions. This simulation was developed for use in Business Schools where each “company” is played by a number of students each of whom takes a different role - marketing manager, production manager, finance director, etc. I’m just incredibly thankful I’m not having to discuss every single decision I take. It’s hard enough as it is.

So although it’s hard and there have been several times today that I’ve really wanted to stop, I’m carrying on. Besides which, I think the attrition rate will be pretty high; I very much doubt there’ll be 3880 of us by 5.01 pm tomorrow, when we should all have pressed “enter”. But I don’t submit my decisions tonight I’ll lose the chance to participate over the next few weeks, and that would be a shame.

I suspect my decisions are pants, though.

A better class of computer game

For no good reason that I can think of, I signed up to play Fantasy CEO with the Times. Essentially, you make the decisions which run a manufacturing company - one year’s worth per week - every week for eight weeks, and at the end I guess they see who’s a billionaire and who’s bust.

Why did I do this? The first round of decisions have to be in on Monday and I haven’t even finished reading the effing manual. There are a lot of manuals to read, tutorials to watch, and practice runs to try. I’m impressed by the slickness of the whole thing, even if I did have to install MS Excel because their seriously fancy spreadsheet wouldn’t work in OpenOffice.

I do know why I did it - I did it for a dare. I dared myself to do this complicated, competitive thing. There are, apparently, 3880 of us. The problem is that it’s already stressing me up - the first round closes on Monday, and I haven’t read the manuals, watched the tutorials, practised with the spreddy, considered a strategy or anything. And I was given the whole week to do it.

It’s making me nervous, and that’s why I have to do it. Which I guess is an interesting learning in itself.

Popping one’s Google cherry

Google is 9 years old and, yesterday at least, it celebrated with one of its famous Google Doodles.

It has seemed to me for a while that the defining technology of our age is not the computer, not the PC, not even the internet. It seems to me that the defining technology of our age is search.

The history of humankind has been about progress in three basic areas: transport, labour and information. There was little difference between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance in terms of how goods were moved, how things were made and how information was stored and transmitted. Then, in succession, we got the printing press, the steam engine, the railway, the telegraph, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, the telephone and air transport. Computers, PCs and the internet are just steps on the path to making it possible for anything that is in the public domain to be findable in a fraction of a second at any time. Information is becoming friction-free.

If we are in the Search Age then Google are the acknowledged and demonstrable Kings of Search, and I have been trying to remember for a while when I first used Google; when I popped my Google cherry.

Yahoo was there from 1995 of course, which was roughly when I started using the Internet, but it never really did it for me. However, it is hindsight that makes me scornful of the idea of manually reviewing and categorising websites. MSN was pants from the beginning, with Bill Gates trying to create a parallel internet ignoring the one that was there already. My how we laughed. By 1999, I was recommending Wired Magazine’s Hot Bot to colleagues, and throughout 2000 I was using Alta Vista’s useful little Babelfish translation utility though their search engine was rather too biased towards academic science for me. Sometime in 2000 or so my ex recommended Ask Jeeves as a search aggregator but its failure to fulfil on its promise to answer free text questions irritated me. I was google-whaking by 2002, though. My maiden name was a google-whack for ages.

So as near as I can make out, sometime in the 15 months between the summer of 2000 and the early spring of 2001 I googled for the first time.

It’s a cherry I wish I could remember popping.

How about you?

Nothing to laugh about

I’ve recently shifted offices, and the building where I now work houses the man with the most annoying laugh I have ever heard in real life. I am sure there is a cartoon character somewhere that would beat him and I know a kookaburra could do it, but in terms of your actual people, he’s easily at county level and should be taking national trials. He also makes astonishingly inappropriate remarks, frequently involving buggery. The other day he was explaining his approach to dealing with noisy, disobedient or dangerous dogs and I realised I could cause him trouble any time I wanted by grassing him up to the RSPA. He explained it away with the comment “that’s growing up on a farm for you”, to which I replied “more than that Dai, it’s growing up on a Welsh farm”. I am, as my grandmother used to warn me, so sharp I’ll cut myself.

We bumped into each other by the loos today, and we started talking about the holiday he’ll be taking in three weeks time. Then he told me that he’d taken his son to school the other morning and found he’d driven himself straight home afterwards. He said “that’s wrong, isn’t it?” and I thought, yes, it is.

Once, many years ago, my then partner was a nervous breakdown about to happen and I got a phonecall from a colleague which started “it’s alright, but….” The “but…” involved A&E and a cardio clinic. The thing was, he hadn’t had a heart attack; he’d been so obsessively focussed on his work on a completely impossible project, that he’d brought on a combination of hyperventilation and palpitations so severe he thought he was having a heart attack. Hence his visit to A&E, his overnight stay in hospital, the barrage of tests and wall of monitors. The attacks didn’t go away immediately, and they scared him enough, and slowed him down enough, to stop him working for 4 or 5 months. What fun that was.

So I told this rather personal story to Dai, and his face changed. If it were a cliché I were fond of, I’d say the mask slipped for a moment or two. Then a colleague came up and started talking to him and the mask clicked back, but before they went off Dai said “thanks for the meeting, that was useful”. His laugh rattled out across the office about 20 minutes later.

Autumn evenings and new beginnings

It seems to me September has much more of a sense of new beginning to it than the middle of winter: January 1st feels like a nadir not a beginning. March and April put a spring in the step because new beginnings are easy when the world is full of daffodils and lambs. But September puts a boot up the backside and life picks up again with a different kind of impetus. A month ago it was light in the evenings, it took me half an hour to drive to work, and I didn’t have any classes or chores. Now it’s dark and chilly, it takes me nearer an hour to get to work, and I’ve a course to study for, Pilates classes to go to, books to read for the Book Club, and I’ve just signed up for The Times’ new online game: Fantasy CEO.

Fantasy CEO seemed such a good idea at the time: a supplement to my other studies, a mix of a game and an exam, and a positive distraction from time-wasters such as Travian and blogging. Having started on their material, I really am not so sure. There’s a lot to read and the game hasn’t even started. And it’s all rather grown up, competitive and - well - technical. I ought to know instinctively that EBIT is Earnings Before Interest and Tax, but I don’t. “Oooh”, as they say, “er”.

Pilates, on the other hand, is proving to be enjoyable. There are only two of us in the class and it is hard not to improve in those circumstances. Since I am not my body’s best friend (hey, don’t blame me, the feeling’s mutual) I am having to make the acquaintance of muscles I don’t know I have. It’s like learning to hear the line the violas are playing in a pastoral piece when you are habitually tone deaf. I’m finding it mentally stimulating as well as physically challenging. I may have to resort to filling in my copy of The Anatomy Colouring Book. Oh, look! Another way of wasting time.

The book group, however, seems sadly beset by Quality Fiction. Fortunately I’ve been invited out for a curry at the time of the next meeting and the book for November is humorous. However, it worries me that the group discussed their departure into frivolity so earnestly. We shall see. They are interesting and intelligent women, it is just that I don’t really like fiction.

September is an odd time to start gardening, but having spent much of the weekend up to my wrists in weeds and compost, I’ve realised it is in fact a good time to start. There’s lots of satisfying clearing and tidying up to do, you can get a splash of instant colour with pansies and chrysanthemums and reliable deferred gratification by planting bulbs. I am a big fan of bulbs: minimal effort now and lots of splash in the spring, just in time to get one all geed up and enthusiastic again after the winter. September’s also a great time to score lawn-mowers off freecycle - two emails and I got offered half a dozen of the things.

So all in all, a snap in the air, a boot up the bum, and a time of new beginnings.

Fish, barrel, gun

I do wish my nice organic box scheme wouldn’t assume that I’d like to read a copy of Ethical Living Magazine just because I am too lazy to buy my veg in a supermarket.

It’s a very nice, well-meaning magazine, printed with organic dyes on paper made out of recycled hippies but the poor darlings really cannot think. Ok, I am lying about the dyes and the paper, but the printers apparently have a wormery and a cycling initiative, and I couldn’t make that up.

Here are a few gems:

Lily Lolo Mineral Foundation is “made from pure crushed minerals [and] contains no dyes, harsh chemicals, fillers or oil”. Oh no. It’s made from soft minerals like, er…. well not the nasty harsh sort like flint or caustic soda.

From the letters page, a correspondent quite reasonably describes the difficulty in dealing with the increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere, saying: “the carbon cycle is fixed and the influx of hydrocarbons [into the atmosphere - ? - AB] cannot be reversed by planting trees”. This is certainly what some of the current research suggests. However the editor replies: “where emissions are unavoidable we use carbon offset projects to help balance out the impact” quite missing the point that her correspondent is making. Planting trees is nice in all sorts of ways and probably a Good Thing. Some of my best friends are trees. However a worrying amount of current research suggests that trees do not, in fact, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The editor does go on to “accept that the terminology may be misleading”. Bless.

I was rather struck by the jeans made from 99% certified organic cotton and 1% spandex. Oh, and they are £134. Which kinda sums it up really. Being green is really expensive. And if we are going to get the kids interested, we’ll have to use spandex.

However, it’s not the ludicrous cost of the things they advertise which irritates me, it’s the abuse of language. Oh, and the fact that saving the planet is going to require lots and lots of really coherent thinking and a damn good evidence-base.

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On t’other hand, they do have an advertisement for www.hattitrading.co.uk which appears to be an organisation selling handbags made by women who have escaped from human traffickers. Since I’m not immune from woolly thinking myself, I intend to get my next bag from them.

A turnup for the books

There I was, listening to a recent radio programme about the NME, and I wondered whatever happened to the girl I was at University with who applied for a job there. I couldn’t remember if she’d got it.

When I knew her, she was one of the sharp post-punk glam-girls; there were three of them who stood out iconically that year: Jeanette had black hair and looked like Julie Burchall without the pout, Helen was a bottle blonde and looked like Courtney Love without the pout, and Catriona was a natural red-head and looked like herself. She was stylish and arty; slightly BoHo, I guess. At this distance I cannot remember the clothes she’d wear but I do remember her energy, good humour, kindness, nervousness and above all her sense of musical and visual style. She arranged her books by size and colour. She wrote and laid out the music pages of the student newspaper and I knew her because I edited the forthcoming events page. This was in the days of letraset, scalpels and cow-gum.

I met up with her a year or two after we’d both left, and she was still using letraset, scalpels and cow-gum but being paid to do it by an insurance paper. Anything less like Catriona was hard to imagine, but it paid her London rent, and she was clear working with the Suits was a job which could get her a job which could get her a job.

So here I am, listening to the radio programme about the NME and wondering whatever happened to Catriona. Nothing easier than to google her. I put in her name and get pages and pages of guff about an MP. A Blairite MP. A Blairite MP who voted for the gulf war and against an investigation into the gulf war. An incredibly unstylish Blairite MP with shaggy unmanaged hair and Diedre Barlow glasses and a “please like me” grin.

The hair is red. She went to the same university and studied the same degree as my Catriona. She came from the same home town. She had a career working on women’s magazines.

Shit.

Someone, sometime, took this attractive, stylish, sexy, sharp, FUN person, and replaced her with your earnest rather geeky kid sister, extracting her ability to think for herself, her brains, integrity and wit in the process and making her vote for Tony fucking Blair.

It could be worse, I suppose. She could be Patricia Hewitt.

Putting the Me in MeME

I said I wouldn’t do another meme but I have been thinking about the whys and wherefores of this blog for the last few weeks and worrying about NaBloPoMo slightly, so this is particularly a propos. I picked it up from Charlotte, who gracefully credits yogamum.

1. Do you promote your blog?

No.

2. How often do you check hits?

Two or three times a week, maybe weekly. When I remember. It varies.

3. Do you stick to one topic?

Absolutely not. The blog is where I blart out whatever is on my mind at the time, be it a haiku about birds, photos of places I’ve been, rants about the government, or attempts to understand my own reactions to something I’ve read.

• I have wide-ranging and eclectic interests
• You have a butterfly mind.
• They are completely unfocused.

It’s an indulgence.

4. Who knows that you have a blog?

Well you do, obviously. Most of the friends I’ve made online, many of whom are real life friends now. Colleagues and family don’t.

5. How many blogs do you read?

Not enough, which is bad blog karma. I do read the ones in my blogroll, but intermittently. I keep links to some closed blogs for sentiment’s sake.

6. Are you a fast reader?

It’s a Sunday game; I couldn’t read for my County.

7. Do you customise your blog or do anything technical?

Sure.

8. Do you blog anonymously?

I blog pseudonymously, which is different. Aphra Behn is a pseudonym I use more or less consistently across the internet at the moment.

9. To what extent do you censor yourself?

I don’t talk much about my emotional life, my relationship, living family members, my employers, books, my studies or my finances. I do talk about my sexuality, my medical situation, my politics (such as they are) and to some extent about my job. Basically you have a certain amount of access to the inner Aphra but less access to the outer Ms Behn.

10. The best thing about blogging?

Feedback. In the words of Chrissie Hynde: I want some of your attention.

This seems to be a self-tagging MeMe, so feel free to post about YouYou. If you link to me, I will certainly read it.

Lines and Curves in Morecambe Bay

Morecambe Bay has a structure called “The Stone Jetty”; I was blown away by the colour of the sky and the lines and curves of the structure and the wind. It was a perfect day for taking photographs - even the sky and the sand were full of lines and curves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pop goes the weekend - Consultation document on MMC available

The following has just arrived in my inbox from Mums for Medics - I guess I’ll be spending the weekend reading the damn thing and trying to work out what I think of it, and where and how best to comment.

The document to which this link will take you -http://www.mmc.nhs.uk/download/consultation.doc - arrived in my inbox this morning. It was published yesterday. As you’ll see, it’s the product of a DoH consultation, which has included RemedyUK, about interim arrangements for recruitment in 2008. Remedy have a copy and will let me know their reaction to it in due course.

The Tooke review will make recommendations for 2009 and beyond and Tooke has been consulted on this document.

Despite the fact that it advertised its availability on the MMC website, as of this morning there was no link or other reference to it. It will have been sent to all those groups, like Remedy, who participated in the discussions that led up to its production but, failing immediate publication on the site, other interested parties may not have been aware of its existence never mind its contents. Certainly Peter Bottomley MP, to whom I sent it first thing this morning, was not aware. This is worrying, as the consultation period is incredibly short: it closes at 10am on Tuesday 25th September. The fact that the link appeared after Peter Bottomley emailed Martin Marshall, the Deputy CMO, to ask why it wasn’t there may, of course, be purely coincidental!

I have alerted Morris Brown, Gordon Caldwell and Andrew Lansley MP and Norman Lamb MP as well as Peter Bottomley. Peter has alerted David Cameron and some press, including the Press Association and I’ve emailed a copy to Victoria Macdonald at Channel 4 News.

This document is not, in my view, one on which it would be appropriate for Mums4Medics to try and form a collective view, but many of you, I know, will want to check its recommendations against the experiences and concerns of ‘your’ doctor and may wish to make individual representations.