This is a story about the undead...

I got sick. I stopped blogging. I'm sad I broke my daily writing routine. I would have hit 365 blog posts by now, if I had kept going just a little longer.

When people say "keep going, you're doing really well" the sentiment is lovely. Keep going where though? Have I been there before? Is it a good place to keep going to? Also, what does it mean to be doing really well? Does it mean superficially? Is the most important thing to look like you're doing really well, on the outside? Are you doing really well even if it's all an act?

I'm no faker; no actor.

I do however have to do something that I can keep going with, while genuinely doing really well. My last contract could not keep going. I was not doing very well.

Perhaps getting sick wasn't an inevitable consequence, but it takes more than letting off steam through personal writing to harmlessly neutralise the 'toxic' build-up, due to months of stress, boredom, lack of stimulation, lack of social interaction, no new challenges, no creative outlet etc. etc.

Equally, my solo hack-a-thons have been challenging and creative, perhaps a little over-stimulating, and have made me sick through social isolation and stress.

There must be a cool project with a team here in London that ticks the other boxes.

Anyway, I need to get well again first.

Tags: #career

This is a story about milestones...

There are so many people who either "don't smoke" or call themselves "social smokers". People say "I only smoke when I drink". There are so many people who claim that they are free from drink and drugs, but they're actually popping Xanax, antidepressants, Oxycontin, Solpadeine, Co-codamol (codeine), Vicodin and tranquillisers. There are so many people who sneer at substance abusers, but they drink, smoke and consume lots of tea, coffee and energy drinks, without realising they're dependent on alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, just to cope with normal everyday life.

In 6 months, I got through those 59 tablets - a combination of diazepam and nitrazepam - in an attempt to avoid a nervous breakdown and to survive an extremely stressful situation, where my whole career, solvency, home and life as a respectable member of society, hung in the balance.

If you take benzodiazepines continuously for over 3 months, you have probably become physically addicted. What that means is that you might have a seizure and die, if you were to abruptly stop taking the medication.

I've run out of benzodiazepines today.

I'm not worried about this.

59 tablets, of 2mg to 5mg strength, spread over 180 days, is a piss in the ocean. There's no way that I'm going to have withdrawal symptoms from stopping taking benzodiazepines. I might be a little anxious; I might have a little insomnia; I might feel a bit panicky. However, I'm not going to die.

A couple of years ago I took myself off to rehab. For over 3 months I had been swallowing a little cocktail: 6x 10mg diazepam tablets, 4x 2mg Xanax, 2x 10mg Ambien, 2x 15mg Zopiclone. Maybe it wasn't quite that much. I have no idea. Benzodiazepines cause amnesia. All I can remember is that I used to fill up the palm of my hand with various pills, and swallow them all in one go. Lights out. Wake up 2 days later.

You're in a hell of a mess when you're mixing uppers and downers; stimulants and tranquillisers; but that's what we do every day, when we have our morning coffee and a glass of wine when we get home from work. If you have a strong coffee after a boozy dinner, you're basically having the middle-class equivalent of a speedball (cocaine & heroin, injected).

Obviously, I'm irreverently mocking your self-delusion, when you tell yourself that you're not "hooked" on anything.

I've used alcohol and the occasional tranquilliser tablet, in order to limp through the last 6 months. I haven't been having tea, coffee or other caffeinated drinks.

I've actually tapered off the alcohol and the benzos, to the point where I only drank 2 days in the last 14. I didn't take any benzos all weekend.

The thing is, if you're smart and you're disciplined, addiction is something you can master. It is possible to give up anytime you want. It is possible to become really good at quitting drugs and booze. I'm a fucking expert in abstinence.

Almost like an alarm clock going off, my subconscious revealed that I had simply been waiting for 6 months.

School was absolute shit for me. Getting through the long school days of bullying was awful. Getting through the long terms of bullying was unbearable. Getting through year after year after year of bullying was absolutely dreadful. All I was doing was waiting for the end of school bell, the school holidays, and the day that I could finally leave school and get the fuck away from the bullies.

Family life was absolutely shit for me. I couldn't wait to move out of home, and get away from my arsehole parents. I've loved paying my own rent and bills. I've loved being independent. I do have all the fucking answers. I went out into the world, got a place to live, got a job, and never looked back. Up until then, I'd just been waiting for the day I could finally leave home, and it couldn't come a moment too soon.

So, I spent 17 years, just waiting. I was biding my time. I know how to suffer patiently. I'm an expert in suffering patiently.

Then, I applied my expertise in deferred gratification to the working world. I took shitty entry-level jobs and worked my way up. I stuck with shitty projects, and shitty companies, so that my CV would look good. I stuck with shitty bosses and put up with glass ceilings. I stuck with idiots who couldn't see my potential, and I just suffered because I had a game plan.

I can patiently wait anything out. I've had to spend about 16 weeks with very limited liberty, being treated as an inpatient. That's not including the time I've spent in hospital receiving emergency treatment. In theory, I could have discharged myself, but there would have been consequences. I spent 7 weeks with somebody who'd been in prison twice, and he acknowledges that I have a mindset that suggests I know how to do time.

I mean, Christ, I spent the best part of 5 years working for one damn company, in one damn building, with the same damn people. Day after day, month after month, year after year. I've done 19 bloody years on the IT gravy train, solving the same damn problems again and again and again, and seeing the same damn mistakes time after time.

And so, I wondered to myself, why didn't I have a packet of drugs to tear open, in celebration of the fact that I have so easily completed a 6-month period of abstinence?

What you'll find with many addicts, is that they're liars. When they say that they're abstinent, they're actually lying to themselves and others. I've done "6 months clean" before, but that hasn't counted "the occasional weekend" and one or two "lapses" (note: a lapse is a 'small' relapse). In actual fact, you're still addicted, but you're limping yourself along by hiding your habit, from yourself and others. You start to believe your own lies.

I've arrived at 6 months "clean" and it really is clean. As clean as anybody in the history of anything, ever.

Most people who quit smoking will drink more, have more coffee, eat more. Most people who quit anything, will find some way of compensating. It might be exercise; it might be work. Basically, humans need shit. We're not fucking robots. Humans have always had intoxicating substances. Wine was being made 6,000 years before Jesus Christ was even born... that's over 8,000 years ago!

Anyway, I started looking at websites of awful toxic Chinese "legal" highs. Then I had a look at the Dark Web. The amount of drugs that are available to order over the Internet is just staggering. Prohibition has spectacularly failed. The designer drug industry is enjoying such a boom time, thanks to ridiculous laws that force chemists to get creative. Technology's answer to the eternally insatiable human demand for mind-altering substances has created a whole swathe of online marketplaces stocking every drug under the sun.

There's something for everybody in the cornucopia that has been created by the war on drugs.

My finger hovered over the "Buy Now" button, because I've damn well proven my point. Pick some arbitrary milestone, and I'll hit it, easily. But, what do I have? My life is miserable. All I have ahead of me is stress and loneliness; insecurity and pain; suicidal thoughts and a sense of abandonment. Fairly easy to justify a relapse, isn't it, when you work so hard and you're not getting anywhere.

Then, I thought, what could I do that's slightly more sensible?

With a bit more searching around on the Internet, I found that you can consult a doctor online and have a prescription despatched next day. In the space of 7 minutes, a doctor agreed to prescribe me a fast-acting antidepressant called Wellbutrin. I needed something because I felt certain that I was either going to commit suicide quickly by cutting an artery, or commit suicide slowly by relapsing back into drug abuse.

Wellbutrin is a wonderful medication, because it's fast acting, it doesn't make you drowsy, and it doesn't ruin your sex life. Have you experienced the boredom of patiently fucking somebody who takes an SSRI antidepressant, waiting an absolute age before they possibly cum, but probably won't be able to? Who wants a sex life like that? I don't want my emotions blunted. I don't want 'brain zaps' and uncontrollable crying when I try and stop the damn medication.

Yeah, who knows what the fuck happens next. Tomorrow, I have a 2-month supply of a fast-acting antidepressant that you can't get on the NHS being delivered. Maybe life will look a bit less hopeless when I'm drugged out of my mind, like virtually everybody else I know.

It feels like selling out, but it's nearly killed me having to fight tooth and nail just to have a roof over my head and a job, while also being nearly stone cold sober. I don't have kids to remind me why I get up and go to work. I don't have pets to look after. I literally have no reason for living, except to achieve some arbitrary goals.

I thought, as an added bonus, that I would also be celebrating one year of blogging today, but it turns out that happened a couple of weeks ago. Today is my last day at work, and I've had a couple of leaving dos, which is nice, but I do of course have to go though all the stress and hassle of applying for new jobs, interviewing, making a good first impression etc. etc. How ironic that things seem to have conspired to happen today.

As luck would have it, a colleague has recommended me for another job, which I might end up interviewing for tomorrow and could even be asked to start a new contract as early as Monday. If I do that, I'm damnwell going to need a few happy pills to carry me through, because I had been thinking that I was going to have a minor nervous breakdown.

Anyway, a milestone of sorts. Nice to leave work with a few slaps on the back and "well done"s. Nice to know that I didn't 'cheat' with my 6 months of abstinence from addictive stimulants. Where's my fucking reward? Surely I should feel better than I do, but I'm depressed and anxious. I'm overwhelmed by the task of having to hustle again, to keep the momentum going.

But really, is there momentum, or did I just wait for 6 months, in order to have a well-earned breakdown?

Is that what life is? Just waiting to die, miserable as fuck?

Tags: #depression #suicide #addiction #drugs

This is a story about prescriptions...

Are you underemployed? Are you unchallenged? Are you jaded? Are you disillusioned? Is your existence meaningless? Are you lacking purpose, goal? Are your ambitions, creativity, ingenuity and resourcefulness being thwarted? Are the prime years of your life draining away, washed into the gutter?

I want to write 3 times a day, at least.

I need to write 3 times a day.

I get to work, nearly an hour late. I have a quick 10-minute call with my team. Then, I have nothing to do until lunchtime. If anything is going wrong I try and fix it, but my whole job is to try and steer the ship strategically so we don't ever get into trouble. I'd love it if a big crisis kicked off, but I've managed things effectively, so everything runs itself with little drama. Sensible, but boring.

So, I need to write something in the morning to get me through to my mid-day break.

I take a 2-hour lunch. I get away from my desk and go and read a book somewhere. Sometimes I sit in the park. Sometimes I sit by the river. I'm only supposed to take an hour for lunch, but who's going to question it when my team are so far ahead of the project deadlines and the client is happy?

Then, I need to write something in the afternoon to get me through to home time.

I stay on top of any queries. I'm watching like a hawk in case there's anything I need to deal with. One strategy that I've employed in the past is to let things build up and build up until there's an artificial crisis that I've created, and then I deal with the backlog in a flurry of activity. Through this strategy of putting things off I made a depressing discovery: most 'work' is unnecessary and can be forgotten about. Nobody's going to die if the crap that I do doesn't get done.

When I get home, I have pent-up frustration that I haven't been productive. My energy and enthusiasm for completing tangible tasks with meaningful output, has been completely unmet during office hours.

Sometimes I draw. Sometimes I make music. Sometimes I make a video.

What I really want to be doing is writing. There's nothing nicer than relaxing on my sofa with my laptop, brain-dumping. I have so much to say, and there's so little time. Words come flooding out of me. There's no shortage of things I want to write about. Researching what I want to write about means that there is even more to write about. Research sets off a chain reaction. The number of topics that I'm passionately interested in grows exponentially.

When I get home, I take off my suit and hang it up. I put on my civilian clothes. I relax, but I'm still not quite in a relaxed mood. It's not like I want to go out for a run, or to go out drinking or dancing. I'm not quite able to shake off the shackles of the rat race, despite the fact that the last thing I would ever think about doing is flipping open my work laptop or giving my project a moment's further thought.

My thoughts revolve torturously around "how am I going to get up and do it all over again tomorrow?".

Drawing, music composition, video editing... these things require a considerable amount of effort. Writing is something I'm compelled to do. Freedom of expression is important, and I've allowed myself to be completely free to write, when time allows. I do not self-censor. The only people whose identity I'm careful to protect are my friends. The only people whose feelings I consider are those who care whether I live & breathe. It's remarkably liberating, not caring if some mean judgemental family member takes offence. It's terrifying thinking that every word I write could make me unemployable, but so exhilarating to thumb your nose at a job you have total contempt for.

A simplistic analysis might conclude that I have transferred my 'addictive personality' to writing, but doesn't our society applaud the workaholic? The serial entrepreneur who puts him or herself through enormous stress is lauded as a captain of industry, an engine for growth, a valued member of the economic community. Whatever I do, I'm unlikely to approach it half-heartedly. If I'm going to work a job and make money, I'm going to work as hard as I can, and make as much money as possible. If I write, I'm going to write until my fingers bleed and I have to be prised away from the keyboard.

Society applauds my bipolarity. Not so much the depression, but the fact that I can achieve 'overnight success' during my hypomania means that I have no shortage of achievements in my portfolio. My shrewd opportunism means that cash windfalls have always carried me through the inevitable crash in my mood.

In fact, the whole working world is structured to celebrate the person who does the heroic big push to meet the deadlines. The steady eddies who just quietly get on with their work, have nothing remarkable to help them to stand out from the crowd. Even the idea of working at the level of intensity that we do in academia and employment, is destabilising. Cramming for exams, dealing with unrealistic workloads, and then collapsing during the holidays, barely recovering before the next painful bout of work or study. Who cares if your nerves are frazzled, as long as you're getting the "A" grades, right?

The project I'm working on is being cancelled, because it's failing. My team is way ahead of the deadline and our part is the big success of the project, but the other 7 teams have failed. It's a big mess. An expensive white elephant. A big embarrassment for the consultancy and the end client.

My attitude has been completely different to the projects I have worked on in the past. Normally, I don't care what my official role & responsibilities are. Normally, I go and find the biggest fire and try to help put that out.

I decided to adopt the attitude of focussing only on my responsibilities. I decided that I would concentrate on the job that I'd been originally been asked to do. I didn't go looking for trouble. I didn't tread on anybody's toes.

The net result is that I have happy bosses who are overjoyed with my work and I'm getting a good reference, but the overall project is a failure. Whether or not I would have been able to make a contribution to the success of the wider project is debatable, but I do have a track record of helping to turn around late or failing projects. I've made a habit of running into the burning building when all others are fleeing for their lives.

It's so bizarre and surreal that I've spent 4 months keeping a low profile, writing, doing as little as possible, and I'm far more appreciated than when I was working 14 hours a day, 6 days a week.

I used to get rung up routinely every weekend, to run conference bridges and orchestrate things on the failing project I worked on before this one. When shit was hitting the fan, I was there rolling up my sleeves and at least trying to be a calm head, even though I obviously claim no credit for the hard work of my colleagues.

That previous project ended with me finding out my security pass and access to email had suddenly been revoked and I was persona non grata with the senior management team who had previously been begging me for my help.

This current project is finishing with the work that my team have produced being lauded as some kind of 'jewel in the crown'. I'm being hailed as some kind of amazing manager, when in truth all I've done is sit unobtrusively in the corner of the office and write my blog.

I'm certainly one of the highest paid writers that you're ever likely to meet, but yet I was hired to run a software project, not to write.

For all those people who say "art is just a hobby" you're wrong. I spend the bulk of my time and effort writing, and being an IT consultant running a software project has been a little side project for me.

People walk up to my desk to ask me a question, and I quickly minimise what I'm doing. I then give the first answer that pops into my head. My whole body language seems to suggest that I'm very busy and my time is precious, so there isn't really a culture of lengthy discussions and debate in my team. It might sound horribly autocratic, but it certainly seems to get the software built and my team report a high level of job satisfaction. There is actually a great level of teamwork and mutual support in my team. The language we use with each other is very positive and complementary. We spend time applauding each other's efforts and celebrating our achievements.

So, I'm torn. Clearly I'm doing something right. It just feels so wrong.

Imposter syndrome means doubting your skills and abilities. I feel like a double imposter, because not only do people tell me I'm doing a good job, but I know that I spend most of my time writing my blog.

Things are coming to a head even more in my final week. My team are pulling together pieces of work that I asked them to do as part of a strategic plan, and it's working. In the final analysis we will finish up with a piece of software that's amazing quality and yet neatly packaged up to be thrown in the garbage. My team will all go off to new projects, knowing how to follow industry best practices and having seen them successfully implemented.

So many things in software get hopelessly botched: Agile project management, test-driven development, code quality, technical debt, continuous integration, release management, production stability, automated regression testing and intuitive user interfaces. Even for me, it's felt like a dream to see that some of these things can be achieved in a corporate environment.

My usual attitude of agreeing with bosses - "yeah yeah yeah" - and then just doing things the way I was going to do them anyway is unchanged. The only difference this time is that I've used my spare capacity to work on a personal project - this blog - instead of trying to think about the wider project.

It's quite exhausting - faking it, looking busy, watching out for anybody who might look over my shoulder - while also attempting to alleviate the boredom and fight the uncomfortable feeling of knowing that you're being unproductive, wasting time.

On the face of it, it looks like a good prescription for stability, financial success. I've turned up to work every day. I got paid every week. What more could you want?

However, how sustainable is it really, to live such a lie?

Tags: #bipolar #career #agile #writing

This is a story about shutting down conversations...

Why don't we complain more? When things are going badly and luck is not in our favour, why don't we speak up about how unfair life can be? Why are we not allowed to discuss how hopeless we feel? Why aren't we allowed to say that we feel overwhelmed and that we can't cope?

There are numerous ways of shutting a person down, and ending any conversation before it even gets started:

• "Life is hard"
• "Life is unfair"
• "Deal with it"
• "Get over it"
• "Other people have it so much harder than you"
• "Look on the bright side"
• "You'll find a way to cope"
• "You'll get there in the end"
• "Look how far you've come"
• "You're a strong person"
• "God wouldn't give you anything you couldn't handle"
• "This will pass"
• "It gets easier"
• "Keep going"
• "Don't give up"

All of these phrases have the same objective: to shut the person up who is in distress. We seem to believe that talking about our distress is somehow wallowing in self-pity. We seem to think that the best way to deal with problems is just to pretend like they're not there and that they'll go away on their own. It's akin to saying "LA LA LA! NOT LISTENING!!".

This cultural programming is so engrained that we repeat the useless mantras to ourselves. When stress, anxiety and hopelessness are overwhelming us, we say the very same things to ourselves. It's like we're trying to bully and abuse ourselves into happiness. "Get happy or fuck off and die" is the unequivocal message that is being sent.

Talking about depression is now permitted, but the message is very much the same: go to your doctor, get a therapist, take some medication, take MORE medication. I can't believe how many people would say "have you taken your pills today?" or "maybe you need to increase your dose" when you're having a bad day. This is part of the reason why I don't tell my work colleagues that I have struggled with mental illness, and it's part of the reason why I don't take medication. It's too much of a cop-out to medicalise a situation which might be brought about by circumstances, rather than pathological brain chemistry.

There was an experiment where mice had to run across an electrified floor in order to get to their food. The mice were obviously pretty stressed about this, and would exhibit all kinds of symptoms of anxiety when they were getting hungry. The mice knew that the only way that they were going to get fed would be to have painful electric shocks jolting through their feet as they crossed to the other side of their cage, where the food was.

The mice would get more and more stressed, until finally they were so hungry that they had to dash across the electrified floor as fast as they possibly could, getting zapped the whole time. Pretty stressful circumstances, right?

When the anti-anxiety drug diazepam was discovered, they were testing it on these mice. The mice who were injected with diazepam would exhibit none of the symptoms of stress and anxiety, and would wander across the electrified floor in an unhurried manner. The mice who were under the influence of diazepam still felt the pain, and their faces winced with each painful electric shock that was delivered to their feet. The mice just didn't give a fuck anymore.

Pain exists to condition our behaviour. You don't stick your hand in a fire more than once. You're careful with a knife because of that one time you cut yourself. Pain tells us about our environment. Pain gives us our list of dos and don'ts, without them having to be extensively listed in some kind of compendium of things that fuck you up.

Anxiety exists to tell us to avoid pain, when we can see it coming. Without anxiety, we would stand in the middle of the road, watching a truck hurtling towards us and think "oh, this is going to hurt" but not actually be bothered about getting out of the way.

We now have a society where pain and anxiety seem to be accepted as facts of life. We can see the onrushing disaster of climate change, but yet we just stand there in the middle of the road waiting for it to smash into us and obliterate most life on Earth. We know that our jobs are utter boring bullshit and are destroying our physical and mental health, but we still continue to work them until we're too old and infirm to continue any more.

In the oft-quoted example: a frog is put in a pan of cool water, and then the water has been slowly brought to the boil. Nobody has sensed just how deadly the situation has got. Nobody is jumping out of the pan to save ourselves. We're all just sitting in a pan of boiling water saying "this is fine" like the cartoon dog in the house that's on fire.

Image credit: K C Green

If things get too hard to handle, and the danger that you sense - which is very real, tangible and rational - can no longer be quieted by telling yourself "everything's going to be fine" then you can trot off to your doctor and get yourself some happy pills to mask your symptoms.

How much depression is due to demoralisation, demotivation, boredom, stressful bullshit jobs with never-ending makework? How much anxiety is due to job insecurity, financial uncertainty, hand-to-mouth existence, well founded fears about terrorism, violence, rape, murder and paedophilia?

For sure the media rams the world's problems down our throat 24x7 from all corners of the globe, but fundamentally, even in our little local communities shitty stuff is happening. Even on the streets of wealthy London, there are awful things being perpetrated against innocent people.

Saying that life is a fight for survival, and that we are doomed to some kind of Malthusian catastrophe is disingenuous. Blaming people for their own misfortune is just an excuse for inaction. What we're basically saying is "at least I don't live in Africa" even though our lives are hardly peachy.

I would imagine that this put up & shut up ethos is trickled down from our ruling elite. While wealth is not trickling down at all, we are told that we should be grateful for a few crumbs from the table of the fat cat plutocrats. Bullying and drugging us into submission, our whole culture is one where we criticise anybody who dares to voice their discomfort and dissatisfaction with their lot in life, even though we ourselves are living with nearly unbearable stress.

It's as if we are all eating handfuls of ground up glass and razor blades, and somebody whose mouth is dripping with blood suddenly says "what are we doing? why are we doing this? we should stop!" and then everybody else rounds on them and says "we're all getting on with it without complaining, so you should too" and "take some painkillers if the pain is too much". It's as if the peer pressure to keep suffering the pain and eating the sharp glass and blades is so great that we continue to act irrationally and kill ourselves.

Food for thought, anyway.

Tags: #depression #anxiety #mentalhealth #suicide

This is a story about living a double life...

I don't know if you know this, but I've been working again these past 3+ months. I've been putting on my suit and going to the office and pretending like everything's just peachy. When I put on my professional clothes, I also put on a mask. "Hi! How are you? How was your weekend?" I cheerily ask my colleagues on Monday morning, instead of saying "this place makes me want to kill myself".

I like my colleagues and I like the project I'm working on. There's nothing especially objectionable about the company I'm working for. Every large multinational corporation has skeletons in its closet, and my current end client is no exception. But, I don't have a deep-seated concern that I'm propping up some too big to fail organisation, like I did at HSBC. The global project I'm working on is the number one IT project for a FTSE 250 company. It's a good project and it should be enjoyable.

When I was looking for work I was feeling pretty insecure. I had a run of short contracts that didn't end particularly well. Every job I took, I was inadequately enabled to make a difference. In every role, I was frustrated that I had very little decision making power. I was frustrated that my bosses weren't listening, and instead my Cassandra-esque prophecies came true while I was helplessly kicked to the sidelines.

So, I swapped from a purely hands-on technical role into a managerial one. I knew that I'd be able to ace the interview, and that it's virtually impossible to get sacked from a managerial job just so long as you keep your head down and do a reasonable job of organising your team.

I made a calculated gamble. I knew that I find purely managerial work totally soul-destroying, but also that I've made a reasonable job of running the projects and teams I've been given in the past. I knew that the interview process would be a lot less painful than the current crap that you have to do to get a developer job these days.

And so, I joined a failing project with a programme director on his last legs. Things were just as desperate as they were at HSBC, with total numpties in management whipping people to go faster and faster while the deadlines loomed ever larger, and it became clear that the software was going to be delivered late, and the performance and stability were going to be crap.

The project had - and still has - a huge staff turnover problem. People leave after just a few weeks because the atmosphere is so toxic. Almost every member of the original project team has left. Other IT contractors had warned me to actually stay away from this project. However, the job was offered with a fairly immediate start, and I could get my invoices paid weekly. It dug me out of a financial hole very quickly. It totally made sense to just shut up and put up with it for a little while. That was 3 months ago.

Now, a new management team have been installed. The old programme director got the boot, and we moved from totally crazy deadlines to a properly Agile project. In terms of the task ahead, things looked a lot more hopeful, but I still get shouted at by the grumpy customer every day, literally.

I have no idea if there are any happy projects in IT.

With my team, I throw a protective bubble around them, set them realistic deadlines, and shower them with praise for their hard work. My team have delivered all the work that they committed to doing for 12 weeks in a row now. My team is the most successful team on the project. I've had no problems with sickness and staff turnover in my team. Everybody who works for me is pretty much happy to come to work, and fulfilled in their role... apart from me.

I sit at my desk, and I'm bored.

It's actually quite easy to manage a high performing team. I've set them up to succeed, and my team members relish the opportunity to do a good job. People don't need micromanaging.

For sure, most of my job is pointing out where corners have been cut, or things that developers don't really like doing haven't been done. The code is never the problem. Instead, development is about giving everybody enough time to think about all the things that aren't code. Being a good developer isn't about being a good programmer. Good programmers are not necessarily good developers. Good programming means that something is logically correct. Good developing means that I have high quality features in an application that I can actually use in a meaningful way.

I should be able to have a lot of pride in my work, but instead I'm frustrated that I'm running just one of 8 scrum teams, and that any attempt to help the wider project would see me treading on toes and getting into trouble again, like I did at HSBC. In the interests of my own job security, and that precious cash that replenishes my damaged bank balance, I'm not rocking the boat. I sit there, quiet and miserable, while the whole project goes down the shitter.

My team is a diamond in the rough. It's not that my colleagues are necessarily doing things badly. There are historical reasons why everything is fucked. I'm sitting pretty with a happy motivated team who consistently hit their targets and deliver high quality software. I'm the golden boy, with the customer very pleased with the work we've done.

The difference between this contract and my last one, is that I'm listened to. I sat down with the new programme director and told him I was deeply unhappy that the project deadlines were so unrealistic, and that our end-client was so unreasonable in their expectations. He listened, and he even took the time on Friday to tell me that he's grasped the nettle and told the bad news to the customer. My previous boss would never have done that. I actually risked my job a couple of months ago by telling the customer that there was no way in hell they were going to get everything they wanted by Christmas. Although I got in trouble with my boss, I also impressed the client, so when shit went bad they got rid of him and kept me.

However, the pace of change is awful. It's taken forever to put a decent set of managers in place who have enough of a backbone to stand up to our stroppy customer. It's taking forever to change the toxic environment of the project.

The whole time at work, I'm bored. I can't bury myself in work. I can't roll up my sleeves and fight the biggest fire. Nobody would thank me for wading in, where others are struggling. Things are so siloed. I couldn't get involved without treading on toes. So, instead, I sit quietly, letting my team members get on with doing a good job. "I'm alright, Jack" is not my style. It's totally unlike me to just think about my own role and responsibilities, and try to ignore the bigger picture.

It's killing me, working like this.

I'm damned if I do, and I'm damned if I don't. If I had a regular developer job, I'd be frustrated that the team wasn't being run the way I like to do things. If I had a programme director job, I'd be frustrated that I couldn't help to manage individual teams. I want to be all things to everybody. I want to be in all places at all times.

It's frustrating that I can't just bury my head in code, and entertain myself learning new technology skills. It's frustrating that my hands-on skills are getting rusty, as I sit around doing manager stuff, which is mostly just being the punchbag for the grumpy customer at the moment.

Sit back and think of the money, right?

Well, yes, to a point. But the working day goes so slowly, that by the time I get to the weekend I'm filled with pent-up frustration that I haven't gotten to work on anything meaningful. I have almost zero chance of doing anything creative during the week, except for the odd blog post. Even writing short stories at my desk is hard, because there are enough interruptions to ruin my flow. I could try to learn some new technical skill, but it's so hard to do when you can't sit down and concentrate for a block of time.

My life seems remarkably easy on the face of it. Put on a freshly laundered shirt and dry cleaned suit. Put on my polished shoes. Grab my laptop bag and head for the tube. Rock up at the office. Have breakfast at my desk. Count down the hours until lunchtime. Go sit by the river and eat a sandwich. Count down the hours until I go home. Collect my cheque at the end of the week. However, it doesn't feel like a week. Every week feels like a year. A year of pain and boredom.

Yes, I'm probably sick. I seem to be suffering from persistent anhedonia. I get no satisfaction or enjoyment from anything. I have no energy or enthusiasm to do anything. I just write and I drink, and I wait for the next time I've gotta go to work. Day after day, week after week.

I'm grinding out the hours, in the hope that things will get a little easier every day, but they don't. Every day I'm questioning what the hell I'm doing, and then like stretched elastic, I snap. Every day when I get home, all the suppressed parts of my personality come rushing out in a complex tangle of mixed emotions, which I try to deal with by writing.

People at work have little idea that I'm dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts every day. People at work have no idea just how much I hate my day job, and how much it's destroying my soul and sense of wellbeing.

It makes no sense to an outside observer, because what they see is a capable member of the project who comes to work and manages to get the best out of the team. On the face of it, I'm succeeding: I'm well paid and I'm doing a good job. My bosses are happy. My team members tell me they're pleased to be working with me. I've managed to shield the developers and testers who work for me from the toxic atmosphere that's pervasive throughout the project. I've managed to wear my mask so well, that I doubt anybody at work suspects just how desperate I am, inside.

Maybe things will change. Maybe they won't.

I've been waiting for my depression to lift for so long now. I've been waiting for things to get better at work for months, and they haven't, although there is always hope on the horizon. I literally live in hope.

But you know what? It's exhausting, leading this double life. It's so exhausting, telling your team great job, and being sunny and upbeat about everything, rather than letting the whole toxic atmosphere and hopeless deadlines cause a morale problem for the developers and testers who I manage. "Take one for the team" is literally what I'm trying to do. That's literally my role: to be a human shield to protect my team from the stroppy customer.

It's also exhausting leading a double life where you're so depressed you can barely function, but you need to put on the corporate mask of being the reliable high-powered decision maker. I need to turn up and be consistent every day. The whole reason why I command a good daily rate is that I don't take time off sick or bring my problems to work. I'm not allowed to have an off day. That's the point of using contractors: they'll drag themselves into the office even when they're desperately sick.

If I was my doctor, I'd say stop, what are you doing? Give yourself a break. You can't continue like this. This job is making you unwell. However, how can I do that when I need to get a stack of savings in the bank so I can afford to have a nervous breakdown.

I've been bumping along at rock bottom for as long as I can remember. I never recover, because I'm always trapped in a corner. I'm forced back into work too early, and I'm forced to work stressful shitty full-time jobs, because I need to dig myself out of a hole. It's a Catch 22.

It's quite possible that if I can stick things out for a couple more months, my fortunes will change. Things won't look so bleak when I'm no longer working to simply keep a roof over my head and service debts. I'm going as fast as I can, and yet it's somehow still not fast enough. I'm trying as hard as I can, and yet it's somehow still not good enough.

Sure, my bosses are pleased. Sure, my team members would tell you that I'm doing a great job. But it doesn't feel sustainable. I'm living too much of a lie. It's too much of a compromise on my identity and sense of wellbeing. It's too demanding, having to wear a mask all the time.

I'm bloody good at it: hiding my problems. That's really what this whole blog is about. I've spent so many years covering up my problems and maintaining a blemish-free CV, and making sure that I always get a good employment reference, that it was inevitable that I would one day decide to burn it all down. You just can't live a lie forever.

It's not like I'm hiding a drug habit or alcoholism. It's not like I actually have anything active in my life that I need to keep secret, unless you count having to appear like some kind of perfect corporate specimen of a man, who never gets sick and never has any personal problems.

Would it really help, going to my bosses and coming clean about my low mood, boredom, depression, suicidal thoughts? Of course not. Nobody wants to have to treat somebody with kid gloves. Fit in or fuck off is the mantra of corporate life.

Fit in or fuck off. It's fucking me up, living this double life, just to be able to fit in.

Tags: #career

This is a story about simplicity...

A compressed spring is heavier than an uncompressed spring. When you lay down on your mattress, the springs of the mattress are actually getting heavier. When you get in your car, the springs of the suspension are getting heavier. When you wind up a clockwork watch, it weighs more. Wait, what?

Yes, it's as simple as I just said. When you squash a spring, the spring gets heavier. Any questions?

Probably just one: whaaaaat?

Well, it's because of E = mc² you see.

Oh, boring. It's one of Nick's crazy rants about physics. Perhaps he's gone nuts again. Perhaps he's having another hypomanic episode. Well, in some ways you're right. But before anybody shouts "BANANA" at me [it's my 'safe' word] you should really read on a little further.

The reason why I race off on those hypomanic episodes is that most of the time, some evil passenger in my car keeps putting the handbrake on. People keep climbing on my back and making me carry them. People keep putting rocks in my pockets and getting me to drag their shit along for them. I'm basically frustrated as hell the whole time at the endless monotonous boredom and not being able to get on with my projects because of absolute bullshit. I just like to work on things and finish them, you see. If you tell me that you need something building, I'll get on and build it, and give you a completed project, instead of sitting around with my head up my butt. I don't really like sitting around with my head up my butt. I like getting on and building shit.

And so, I become a compressed spring. The more that I'm held back, the more that I become coiled and squashed and full of energy, ready to spring forwards when I'm released. The time windows are very short, but I build a lot of cool stuff very quickly. I built iPhone apps that reached #1 in the charts in a matter of weeks. I built a gigantic summerhouse in my garden in the space of a few days. I don't generally fuck about.

"But why do springs get heavier when they're compressed, Nick?" I hear you ask. It's really easy to explain.

Energy and mass are equivalent. Therefore, if you apply a weight to the top of a spring, and it squashes down, the energy that is stored up in that spring is stored as mass. More mass means the spring is more heavy. When you take the weight off the spring, allowing it to uncompress, the mass is converted back into energy, and the spring gets lighter again.

That's all that the equation E = mc² really says. It says energy equals mass [times the speed of light squared]. Energy-mass equivalence.

OK... the speed of light squared is a pretty big number, so the amount of mass is pretty tiny compared to the amount of energy. So tiny that there isn't a set of scales accurate enough in the whole world to measure just how much heavier our spring got, when we compressed it. The amount of mass that we created from energy, by compressing the spring, was teeny tiny.

Equally though, you don't need to turn much mass into energy to create lots of energy.

When people talk about splitting the atom and nuclear weapons, I'm not sure what your average person on the street imagines. Perhaps they think that atoms are actually being destroyed to create the explosion. When a chemical explosive is detonated, the chemicals are rapidly being turned into gas, which is many many times more voluminous than the size of the solid or liquid explosives. This is not what's happening during a nuclear reaction.

The nuclei of atoms are held together by the strong nuclear force. Think of it like a door latch. The door latch holds together particles with similar electrical charge. I'm sure you remember playing with magnets, and you know that like poles repel each other. So, when you put the red end of magnet towards the red end of another magnet, they don't want to touch each other. The strong nuclear force holds those two red ends together, stopping them from flying apart. This is much akin to our coiled spring.

When the nucleus of an atom is split by being bashed into by another particle, a bit like a wrecking ball smashing into a house, then the 'latch' of the strong nuclear force is broken, and the particles with the same charge repel each other. The different parts of the atom fly apart because of this repulsion. It's like those coiled springs are uncoiling.

This means that energy is being released. Lots more energy than it took to unlatch the strong nuclear force that held the nucleus together. It's a bit like a room full of mouse traps, all sprung-loaded and waiting to go off. It only takes one light little touch to cause one mouse trap to go off, and before you know it, they're all setting each other off in a great big chain reaction.

And that's how a self-sustaining nuclear reaction works. A small amount of input energy is required to start the chain reaction, but once it's started, there's plenty of energetic particles flying around to smash into other nuclei and cause them to break apart. Less energy input was required than the amount of total energy output, and only a very small amount of the mass is actually being released, by the strong nuclear force being overcome, allowing the subatomic parts of the nucleus to fly apart.

The same cascade reaction is used in a nuclear power plant as was used in the atomic bombs that blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's called nuclear fission.

So, how does this relate to anything? Well, whether it's reading a stack of books about nuclear physics (this, by the way, was only the most basic introduction I'm afraid) or writing hundreds of thousands of words, I'm kinda a bit like that coiled spring, ready to unleash my energy on whatever I can when I'm given my chance, and I'm unlatched.

I just need a small opening, a small opportunity, and I'll run headlong at it. I'm so desperately bored by having to go at snails pace because of the limitations of the world around me. I live with constant frustration that I can't go at a natural pace, and so I go twice as quick as I should do when I'm finally given the opportunity to get on with something.

Had I ever gotten the chance to study theoretical physics at university, I would have read half as much in twice the time. Had I ever gotten to write at my own pace, with enough money behind me to keep a roof over my head, I would have taken twice as long and written half as much.

I'm now wrestling with the problem that I'm pretty much working two jobs, and in one of them I'm trying too hard at to compensate for the lack of fulfilment in the other. My day job doesn't challenge me. My day job gives me zero job satisfaction. And so when I get home in the evenings, I write and I write and I write. I've even taken to rattling off a couple of short stories every day while I'm at work. The one I wrote this morning was 6,000 words. That's right. I just rattled off 6,000 words because I'm so damn frustrated and bored, but I'm still working a full time job as well as producing some 14,000 words a day. It's too damn much and I'm going to burn out, but my day job is utter bullshit. My life is utter bullshit.

It's such a fucking rush, a hurry. It's such a fucking struggle. Trying to put up with enough boring bullshit that I've got a lump of money behind me to allow me to take a break and work on something I love and I'm passionate about. Either that, or I just take the tiny windows of opportunity where I find them, and work as hard as I can and as fast as I can, before the bullshit catches up with me again.

I honestly thought to myself that prison wouldn't be so bad. So much time to read and write, and ponder stuff. Really, I'm a fucking prisoner at the moment. I can't exactly get an interesting book out at my desk. Even when I'm writing, I'm doing it while looking over my shoulder. I've got to keep one eye on the boss, and be on my game in case I get asked to do something or somebody has a question for me. It's so fucking tense you know? It's compressing me. It's squashing me. It's making me dense and dark and heavy.

I fantasise about living in a tent, unencumbered by having to make rent payments and keep the electric and gas switched on. What would I really need, in this day and age? You can do so much on a smartphone.

I'm coming full circle. In a little over a month I will have been writing every day for a year. This whole thing started with me writing about some research I did on a public bench at a railway station. I think how different my life was then, and somehow I had much better quality of life, even though I was destitute.

Do I want this? This life? This life of commuting on the morning train, and office chit-chat and the daily grind, and of looking busy at my desk and saying clever shit to impress the boss, and hiding in the toilets browsing the Internet, and writing short stories in a really small font to disguise what I'm doing, just to pass the endless boring hours, and watching the clock, counting down, counting down, down, down. Down to what? My premature death from the stress and anxiety of it all?

Plenty of research has now proven that working a boring shitty office job is more unhealthy and lifespan shortening than smoking. Famously, people are suing their employers for the mind-numbingly dumb work they're asked to do. It's almost physically agonising. I'm being squashed. My very life force, my energy, my dignity, my passion, my personality... it's all being squeezed out of me like I'm a tube of cheap toothpaste.

I feel so sick and anxious. I don't know how to continue. I know that fiscally it makes perfect sense to continue. It's easy money, but it doesn't look that easy when it seems to be the root cause of my mood instability. People either ask me to work too hard for too long, so I burn out, or they bore the shit out of me, so I eventually explode with frustration. The pyramid scheme of corporate life is destroying lives. My life is being destroyed.

Oh God I want to throw up. This isn't just a job you fuckers. This is literally fucking me up. I can't do it much longer. I'm going to have a motherfucking breakdown. I can't cope and I'm waving the white flag in surrender but yet the gunfire does not seem to pause.

"Everybody needs to work"

"You have a great job"

"You're so well paid"

"People would love to have your opportunities"

"Count your blessings"

"Just another few decades and you'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams"

"Not long now"

"C'mon it can't be that hard"

"You should try my job"

"You've got things easy"

"I'd love it if I was bored all the time"

"You spoiled bratty bastard"

"You earn 6 or 7 times as much as I do"

"Why don't you follow your dreams"

"You've got nothing to complain about"

FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF

Argh! I can't deny my feelings any longer. I fucking well did what I have to, to get out from a fucked up situation, and I got somewhat out of the way of the oncoming collision, but it's been at great personal expense. I can't express how much it's killed me to put myself in a position where I might as well put my brain in a pickle jar and wheel my cryogenically frozen body into position at my desk.

Imagine if I picked fruit and vegetables for a living, and I slept in a barn on the farm where I worked. I could keep some of the fruit and vegetables that I picked, and eat them. My labour would provide my contribution for my space in the barn, as well as enough beans, rice, pulses and meat to keep my protein and carbohydrate intake at a healthy level. I would be able to see, quite literally, the fruits of my labour each day.

I live a life that could not be more opposite. I will never meet the people who use my software, and I don't even create the software anymore. I manage a bunch of people to create software for me. And I don't even see the people I manage face to face. They live thousands of miles away in some developing world country. I don't even know what management is. I pretty much just say "you're doing a great job. Keep going!" over and over again, to these poorly paid people who toil away, on the other side of the planet. Then some money is digitally credited to my bank balance, and I digitally credit it somewhere else to pay my rent. I never see actual physical money. I don't ever carry cash. Coins are just an antique novelty to me.

Modern life is making me unwell, I can sense it.

I have embraced technology and science, and I understand it better than 99% of people. In abstract terms, I'm doing really well, and it looks insane to be dissatisfied with my lot in life, but how do I really define my existence? Can I define myself as a father and enjoy family life, when I have no children? Can I define myself as a builder or a soldier, when what I do is so ethereal and intangible? Can I define myself as a farmer or a gardener, when what I do is so unnatural?

I'm a spring. That's what I am: a rusty spring.

I'm coiled up and compressed, ready to unspring, ready to bounce and boing.

It's fucking awful, let me tell you, being so unable to apply yourself to some useful mission, project or productive endeavour. It's fucking awful, feeling so trapped and imprisoned. That's why my thoughts turn dark and brooding so often. That's why suicide is so often on my mind.

Tags: #physics #writing #suicide #bipolar #career

This is a story about storytelling...

Doing the sane and sensible thing when you're being driven insane is hard. I'm having to think creatively, in order to stick with a job that I hate because it's really easy and really boring, but it pays the bills and it's low stress (if you don't count the boredom that's driving me insane).

I was writing my blog at lunchtimes, to break up the day, but I found that took away the thing that I look forward to doing when I get home in the evening. I also found it frustrating, being at my desk during lunchtime, when people could wander over and distract me. The City is not a relaxing place for those on their lunchbreak. Crumbs on the keyboard is the best you can hope for.

So, I've decided to write short fictional stories once or twice a day, to fill the time. My blog is my therapist, patiently listening and never interrupting, while I pour my heart and soul out. My blog is where I work out all the mixed-up shit that happened in my life. My blog is a non-fiction record of who the hell I am and why I do what I do. My blog sets the record straight.

But, I need a creative outlet. Writing my blog is kinda creative, but there are certain needs that have to be met. If something is bugging me, or coming to the surface from my subconscious and memory banks, I've gotta get it out, I've got to put it into words and start to make sense of everything. Writing creatively is different. Writing creatively is scratching that itch that I never get to scratch, as a software developer or leader of software development teams. Software is a science at the end of the day, and for sure it's a black art, but it's important that I don't rely on my job for everything that I need.

And so, today, I wrote the first fiction that I have done in my adult life. I don't know why I've shied away from it. Perhaps it's because I had seen it as childish, juvenile. Perhaps it's because I was afraid that people would laugh. Perhaps it's because even I would laugh, when I read it back again in future. So, it seems sensible that I would hide behind humour, satire. It seems sensible that I would use elements of fantasy, rather than trying to write anything serious, earnest.

I don't do role play. I don't play Dungeons & Dragons. I don't do any kind of fantasy at all, and wearing the corporate mask the whole time is very draining. It's important to not take yourself too seriously sometimes. Wear fancy dress. Pretend to be somebody, something you're not, just so long as it's for fun. I don't really do fun. My life is very simple: work, sleep, eat, repeat... plus some blogging.

I'm not going to publish every one of my stories. In fact, until I know what to do with them, I'm unlikely to publish any of them. I'm going to publish the first one I wrote, in the vague hope that anybody's reading and might have some feedback, but until I find my particular sweet spot, I'm going to keep things mostly under wraps.

Anyhoo, if you've persevered reading this far, I shall cut to the chase and introduce the first short story I ever wrote in my adult life.

It's called The Sysadmin:

The users were scared.

 

The office expanded almost as far as the eye could see, with row upon row of birch veneer desks, in two large columns. The room was cleaved in half by a walkway running down the middle. The polystyrene ceiling tiles were dirty and many of them were broken. Fluorescent lighting bathed the room with a dim yellowish flickering illumination, which harshly lit the people and furnishings, whilst somehow not being bright enough to bring out the colour or definition of anything.

 

Identical swivel office chairs each had their own character, through the damage they had sustained. Some had broken backrests, some were missing armrests, some had their once colourful fabric, hanging frayed from the edges of the jagged black plastic that was designed to conceal stained foam and how cheaply made these pieces of furniture were. Each chair had indecipherable markings that identified it to its owner. Some had initials scratched into the plastic of the backrest using a sharp implement. Some had letters or symbols daubed onto them using Tipp-Ex correction fluid. Some had rectangular sticky labels that were half ripped off, with a name now longer legible, written in felt-tip pen.

 

The grey carpet was almost uniformly patterned with brown patches from spilled instant coffee, which had become so trodden into the floor covering that they were almost unnoticeable in the context of the shabby decay of the office. There was a stripe that was slightly browner, running down the walkway in-between the two columns of desks, that led to the coffee vending machine, water cooler, and a door marked “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS”.

 

Clearly unnerved, but silently huddling together in the walkway and all looking towards the man who had just entered the office, the users were no longer at their desks. The users now stood wide-eyed, clustered in front of the man, but unsure what to say or do.

 

“Hi, I’m the system administrator” the man began. “Did somebody phone IT support?” he asked, addressing the group as a whole, unsure of who to direct his question towards.

 

The users mumbled to themselves almost inaudibly, but didn’t seem to be communicating with each other or the system administrator. They were nervous. Nobody wanted to speak up. Everybody knew, but nobody wanted to say.

 

The users mostly looked the same, men and women, despite subtle differences in appearance. The women wore flowery blouses in muted pastel shades, sensible flat shoes and rimless glasses. Their wavy hair was tamed by hair clips and cut to a uniform length somewhere above shoulder high. They were all overweight and with slightly reddish cheeks. They looked flustered.

 

One of the users spoke up. It was a man. You could tell he was a man, because he wore an off-white button-down shirt with a blue biro in the front pocket, like all the men. His shirt was wrinkled and half-untucked from his bulging waistline. His neck crumpled the soft collar, so that his head and body were just one bulging mass. There were coffee stains down his front and he had clearly wiped his hands on his trousers many times after eating. The hem of his stained trousers didn’t reach the top of his black scuffed shoes, and his white socks were showing.

 

“It.. it.. it’s the… the...” he stutteringly began.

 

The user looked around, with slightly wild eyes. He was desperately hoping that one of the other users would now speak up, but they all looked away and avoided his eye contact. Somehow, a gap had formed in the group around him, as if everyone had stepped away from him without anybody noticing. The user seemed to be attracting all of the inadequate light in the room. It was as if a spotlight had picked him out, and he now stood, floundering, all on his own.

 

“I.. I… I… I’m not in charge here” he continued.

 

“It’s OK, just tell me what’s going on.” said the system administrator.

 

“I didn’t do it. It’s not my fault. We were all here, just getting on with our work” he started to protest.

 

“Don’t worry, I’m not here to blame anybody. Just tell me what the problem is” the system administrator offered, as kindly as he could, putting on his most understanding and approachable face. “You can tell me” he said.

 

“It’s the… it’s the…” the user haltingly continued, struggling to get a handle on his rising sense of panic, almost choking. He felt a sense of responsibility that he was totally unused to.

 

“Please just tell me what the issue is. Somebody logged a call with IT support” the system administrator pleaded, now losing his patience.

 

“It’s the MAINFRAME” the user blurted out. There was a sharp intake of breath from all the other users, as the man spat out the final word, even though they all knew.

 

The system administrator rolled his eyes. “Really? What’s wrong with the mainframe?” he asked, as if a practical joke was being played on him. His face now betrayed a deep skepticism and the impression that his precious time was being wasted by a bunch of low-brow imbeciles.

 

“It’s angry” the user said. “Yes, it’s angry” many other users now quietly agreed, in defence of their colleague. “Angry” and “it got angry” they all muttered, not really addressing anybody except the room they were all stood in.

 

“Right, get back to your desks. I’ll take a look” the system administrator said. He stepped forward, having to push people out of the way, as clearly nobody was in any mood to return to their desks. The users were stood in a trance-like state, just muttering “angry” below their breath, and staring at the system administrator as he tried to pick his way through the crowd and make his way down the walkway in-between the two columns of desks, where all the users were still clustered.

 

Walking through the office, up to the door marked “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS” the system administrator glanced back towards the group of users, who were still crowded together on the opposite side of the room, near the exit. They were all looking at him, in perfect silence and stillness.

 

Reaching for the door handle, the system administrator was about to twist it and enter the restricted area behind, but he hesitated, and instead put his ear to the door. It sounded like… footsteps. But these were not the footsteps of your average light-footed person. It sounded like deep thuds of metal and rubber on concrete. DUSH! DUSH! DUSH! Would come the thumps of heavy machinery hitting a solid floor in a slow rhythm, and then stop, and then repeat again.

 

In a moment of calm rational thought, the system administrator decided that perhaps one of the air conditioning units had failed, and the motors that drove it were now causing some kind of mechanical fault to create this racket. Immediately, he twisted the door handle and opened the door a fraction.

 

Inside the restricted area, it was dark. Almost pitch black. This was unusual. The restricted area should have been well lit.

 

The system administrator craned his head through the doorway. It looked as if the glass doors that allowed entry into the temperature controlled housing for the mainframe, were open. The doors should not have been open. The vibration absorbing shock mounts, that the mainframe sat on top of, were in the housing, but the mainframe was nowhere to be seen in the darkened room. The system administrator couldn’t see the whole room because he was just peeking in through the gap in the doorway. The thumping had stopped, and everything seemed eerily quiet. Where was the hum of the cooling fans and the chatter of the hard disk drives? Where was the bleep and crackle of the networking devices? Where were the blinking LED lights that signified the activity of the mainframe? It seemed like the restricted area was empty and lifeless.

 

Then, a gigantic shape lunged out of the darkness. A humongous black box, big enough to fill a quarter of the room, suddenly thumped forward out of the corner, where it had been previously unseen due to the poor lighting. DUSH! came an earsplitting sound, as metal crunched into the reinforced concrete floor. A sudden scattering of red lights lit up across the front of the object as it thrust towards the door where the system administrator stood.

 

Quick as a flash, the system administrator slammed the door shut and ran down the walkway in-between the desks. Almost scattering the statue-like users who were still milling around near the exit, he left the office. Just before the office exit door slammed shut behind him, the users heard him call back to them: “I think it’s hungry”.

 

The users appeared to wake up, and now a mild kind of panic spread amongst them. They started to talk amongst themselves, while also shooting nervous glances towards the door to the restricted area.

 

“Should we get out of here?” and “it’s dangerous, I don’t want to be in here when that thing escapes” they said to each other, in hushed tones. The users were quite calm in their indecisiveness. They mumbled to each other in low voices for several minutes, with no clear plan of action emerging.

 

Then, the system administrator threw open the office door again. He struggled, getting stuck in the doorway. In his arms were bundles of grey cables, like a great mass of tangled rope. The users cleared the gangway for him, but nobody stepped in to help him. Finally overcoming the obstruction, the system administrator burst through the doorway, and made his way to the restricted area door, while tripping up and dropping cables along the way. He dumped the tangled mess next to the “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS” door, and then made several trips back up and down the walkway, picking up the cables he had dropped and adding them to the pile.

 

Grabbing handfuls of cables, and massaging them into a giant knot, the system administrator now took hold of the door handle in one hand, while holding the beach-ball sized lump under his other arm. With a single fluid motion, he flung open the door to the restricted area and threw the cables into the room.

 

The mainframe roared with a bloodcurdling mixture of computer fans that were spinning at maximum revolutions, hard disks that were clattering, network devices that were chattering and the screeching sound of the twisted metal of its frame. The front of the mainframe was an angry mess of red LED lights, that flashed furiously in the darkness. It lunged for the door, but the system administrator was too quick and slammed it shut, before diving to one side with his back flat against the wall, panting heavily.

 

There then followed a graunching, crunching, high-pitched sound of plastic being stripped, broken, and metal being bent and torn, and then the low hum of fans and hard disks spinning. There were a few thuds and crashes, as the mainframe stomped around, and then things went quiet again.

 

The system administrator repeated the procedure, of rolling up balls of cables and tossing them into the restricted area several times, before the pile was exhausted. The users watched nervously from the other end of the office the whole time, although they craned their necks in interest, trying to see what was going on.

 

There was a moment of calm when the pile was gone. The system administrator and the users momentarily relaxed. Perhaps the mainframe was satisfied?

 

Then, a roaring and stomping started, many times worse than it had been before. The speed of the steps was rapid, and it sounded like the mainframe was tearing the room apart.

 

The system administrator looked worried, then pensive, and then he appeared to have a eureka moment. He sprinted energetically towards the office exit, hardly breaking his stride as he flung the door open and disappeared. Just as the door was closing, he called back to the users: “I think it wants dessert”.

 

Some time went by, and the users were getting very nervous, as the mainframe set about destroying the restricted area. Several times, the door seemed to vibrate and rattle in its hinges, as if it was going to be blown wide open at any moment. The users started to back up against the opposite wall, trying to get as far away as possible, but still unwilling to leave the office.

 

At last, the system administrator returned. He strode into the office carrying a brown cardboard box of modest size. He walked down the walkway, looking back at the terrified users with a cheeky grin. With a twinkle in his eye he produced a flat object, about 4 inches square, from the cardboard box. “I think it’ll like these” he said.

 

The system administrator proceeded to slide floppy disks through the gap at the bottom of the door to the restricted area. The floppy disks came in various sizes. The bulk of them were 3 and a half inches, with a metal sliding part that protected the black plastic magnetic disk inside. A lot of them were 5 and a quarter inches, and had no metal protective part. The mainframe gave a grunt of approval each time that it was fed a disk, but its satisfaction was audibly less pronounced each time.

 

However, the system administrator had saved the best until last. Producing some 8 inch and 3 inch floppy disks from smaller white cardboard boxes that had been concealed in the bigger brown cardboard box, he now fed the mainframe these rare delicacies. It didn’t take many before the mainframe started to sound positively delighted, with a crescendo of modulated digital signals gracing everybody’s ears.

 

The system administrator disappeared into the restricted area, opening and closing the door quickly behind himself. Soon, soothing noises and words of encouragement could be just heard outside the room, and there were a few thud-like stomps, and then the sound of computer fans and hard disks whirring back into life. As he stepped out of the restricted area, the lights in the room were back on, the doors to the glass housing were closed and the mainframe was back on its anti-vibration mounting. The LED lights on the front of the machine flickered in ordered patterns, and a thick trunk of network cables that hung from the ceiling had all been plugged back into the gigantic black box.

 

As the “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS” door closed behind the system administrator, hundreds of terminals blinked into life on the desks of the users. The office was now bathed in light from the computer screens that were displaying lines and lines of green text on a black background. The green glow seemed to soothe the nerve-jangled users, and they all went “aaahhh!” in unison, and started to slowly file back to their desks without prompting.

 

The system administrator ambled up the walkway for the last time that day. Most users were now seated back at their terminals, busily performing calculations for the mainframe, happy again. He paused at the office exit and looked back over a sea of green screens, with users hunched over their beige plastic keyboards. The natural order of things had been restored.

The end etc. etc.

Anyway, I noticed that my story was 2,500 words, which is about 3 and a half times more than what I normally write. If I write two stories like that every day, plus my blog, I'll be producing over 4 novels a month. That's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) on steroids. I think I'll burn out.

So, it remains to be seen what the sweet spot is for the length of the stories, and what I'm going to write about. Maybe I will be struck by the infamous writer's block. Maybe my enthusiasm for the whole endeavour will fizzle. Maybe I will never find anything that I think people will enjoy reading.

Let the games commence.

Tags: #writing #shortstories

This is a story about having too much of a good thing...

Pills, pills, pills. A pill for every ill. We have so much faith in modern medicine at the moment, that we have medicalised boredom, depression, stress, when clearly these are as much a product of our environment, as they are a sign of anything pathological.

The very process of going to your doctor and getting sent away with some unnecessary pills, is well known to have a placebo effect. With the Internet and the possibility of self-diagnosis, we have turned into a society of hypochondriacs, who attribute every tiny discomfort to symptoms that require medical attention.

We have now overprescribed to the point that we have super-resistant strains of bacteria that can't be killed even with our last-line-of-defence antibiotics. Going running to your doctor because you've got a cough or a cold, and being fobbed off with magic beans that you believe can cure your viral infection, is just downright stupid, and now it's biting our arse.

It's the same thing with antidepressants. Because over 60% of us hate our boring stupid stressful crap jobs, we've been dishing our psychiatric medications like they're sweets. Over 60 million antidepressant prescriptions got written last year in the UK. That's enough for every man, woman and child in the whole country.

The number of people taking antidepressant medication for their clinical depression has doubled in a decade. There is a mental health epidemic that is driving so many other antisocial trends: alcoholism, drug abuse, isolation and loneliness, insecurity and anxiety, loss of productivity, loss of motivation, loss of drive to exercise and socialise.

What are you going to do if you work some dreadful zero hours contract for rock bottom wages and can barely make ends meet? What are you going to do if there's no hope of you getting on the housing ladder, or escaping from the financial situation you find yourself trapped in?

Of course people are going to turn to drink & drugs, to try to numb themselves from the painful monotony of working as hard as you can but never getting ahead. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for so many people. You just work, and then you die. None of your dreams will ever come to fruition. None of your hopes will ever be realised.

There's a disrespect for addicts and alcoholics, like they're taking the easy way out. Because there is supposed to be instant gratification in a pill, powder or liquid that contains psychoactive substances - uppers & downers - then it doesn't seem as worthy as those who physically toil for their fix of endorphins. However, how many 'legitimate' routes to happiness are there in the world, really?

There used to be a formula: get married, buy a house, have some kids, die. The first 3 you can't really do anymore, without cash handouts from the bank of Mum & Dad and/or the state. Who can really afford the lavish wedding that society expects us to have? Who can afford the deposit on some crappy tiny little flat, and afford the mortgage repayments, when you earn barely enough to survive? Who can afford childcare and all the other associated costs of childrearing, when you already don't have any disposable income?

All the hard work, industriousness, austerity, careful financial planning, saving, budgeting and diligent application of yourself to furthering your career, is likely to result in what? Maybe a few percentage points of a pay rise, if you're really lucky. Are you going to get promoted? Are you fuck. They're going to promote somebody incompetent and lazy, because they're older and they've been with the company for longer. Merit and hard work will get you nowhere.

So, pretty soon, you're going to get tired & depressed about it all. You tried hard at school. You turned up for your exams and gave it your best shot. You stressed yourself out and went to those interviews and got that job, and you worked your hardest, day after day, even though you could sense it was all utter bullshit by now. And for what? Where are you? What have you achieved? What are you ever going to achieve?

The enormity of it all hits you: you were sold a lie. You can't be anything you want to be. You're not special. You're not unique. You're not different. We're all just so much meat in the mincer. Turn the handle and out comes yet another drone just like you; prepared to do the shittest, most mind-numbingly boring and pointless work imaginable, for a salary that doesn't even buy you the basic essentials in life.

Why wouldn't you go running to the doctor, and ask them to dope you up to the eyeballs, so you don't have to live with the crushing realisation of the pointlessness of it all anymore? Why wouldn't you need happy pills, when you realise that the only way you're ever going to get the things that you were promised that hard work would bring, is by being given a council house or a cash lump sum from your parents. The only way you're going to ever be self sufficient is if Mum & Dad or the state top up your income... like you're some sort of fucking charity case... going around with your begging bowl.

How undignified. What an affront to human dignity it all is. Our parents and grandparents proudly tell us that they're "self made". They make loud proclamations that "nobody ever gave me a handout. I worked hard and I earned my keep". How shameful it is that we're twice as smart and work twice as hard, but we have nothing to show for it, except for a sneering generation telling us that exams are getting easier and that we're lazy and stupid.

Crippling debt and the crippling shame of not being able to live independently, not being able to be self sufficient and feel like we too are earning our money and contributing to the growth and wealth of the nation. It's all so crippling, so debilitating. Of course we need to turn to medications, drink and drugs.

You think it's about having a good time? Happy pills, and lashings of beer & wine? You think people wouldn't rather be happy by natural means, because they're fulfilled by normal things in their life: walking the dog, kissing their kids goodnight and paying the mortgage on their own home?

Antidepressants are a sticking plaster over a gaping wound. We have attempted to cover up the steady decline in the standard of living of young people, and mask the problem using happy pills, but the soaring suicide rates are just the tip of the iceberg.

Unless we face up to the reality that those who are suffering from many mental illnesses are the canary in the coal mine, we will reach a crisis point where most of the population are unable or unwilling to continue to maintain the status quo.

The mental health epidemic is the true breaking point, not immigration.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #depression #politics #capitalism

This is a story about self healing...

Does brain damage mean game over? Is it right to write off somebody who has suffered brain lesions, neurotoxicity, a stroke etc. etc.?

At one time, my left eyelid had started to droop and I had a pretty bad facial tic. My body jerked and shook with pseudo-Parkinsonian symptoms. My speech was slow and slurred. No wonder I was treated as if I was as good as dead, right?

But you know what? With good diet & sleep, you can quickly recover your heath, depending on the severity of your situation.

Bizarrely, I was able to get a job and get through an eventful and highly stressful re-entry into the working world, while my poor brain was busily trying to repair itself. How is that even possible?

I've done the same job for the best part of 20 years. In fact, my friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were 12 years old, and I'd been messing around with computers since my first forays onto my friend Joe's Dad's Apple Mac, in 1985.

With repetition, your brain lays down pathways that become more permanent with age. Neural pruning - the loss of less used connections between brain cells - makes your brain into something that has become well adapted for the common tasks you perform. Some people call this "muscle memory" but of course it's your brain, not your muscles, that has the memories. Practice makes permanent, as they say. Just like riding a bike.

So, I relied on instincts and techniques, knowledge and experience that has been unchanging for my whole working life. I still use the same job search technique, the same interview technique, and the job of developing software is unchanged, despite the constant creation of new acronyms and jargon for things that do exactly the same job in exactly the same way.

Just like riding a bike, I was able to navigate the corporate landscape and just about get away with a day job that involved my damaged brain pulling the levers to operate the battered mince-puppet that was my body, in a vaguely convincing way, to cover up the fact that I was basically at death's door.

With physiotherapy for the body, your recovery can be improved, and I'm sure that brain training exercises would be useful for those with brain injuries, but the stimulation of trying to get myself off the streets and escape bankruptcy and destitution was challenging and stimulating enough.

Fundamentally, time is the great healer. The brain is a homeostatic organ that will try to restore itself to a stable base state, once external forces are no longer pulling it hither and thither. I was able to have nearly 6 months abstinent from stimulants and over 3 months abstinent from alcohol, in order to give my brain a fighting chance of finding equilibrium again.

But, just as important as cessation of putting powerful narcotics into my body, was stopping drinking tea & coffee, as well as other caffeinated beverages. Even though my brain screamed out for stimulants, because it was going through withdrawal, they are terrible things when your brain needs to adapt and heal.

Caffeine is very bad for your neuroplasticity. That is to say, the ability of the remaining undamaged neurons in your brain to try to compensate for whatever trauma it has suffered, and repair itself. Caffeine impairs your ability to recover.

If you have some boring repetitive task to perform again & again, then caffeine is your drug. Once you've mastered the simple steps that most jobs require, the boredom becomes unbearable. Caffeine solves this problem, and allows us to maintain concentration on the most mind-numbing dumbarsery that ever disgraced the working world.

Most of the world is just doing stupid shit, time & again, because they're in a trance-like state performing repetitive actions and making the same old mistakes over & over, because they've medicated themselves up to the eyeballs with the powerful stimulant called caffeine.

By stopping my caffeine intake, I was able to recover from the symptoms of fairly harrowing neurological damage, spot patterns in my behaviour and even re-learn new healthy behaviour. I genuinely believe that this would not have been possible, with caffeine in my life.

I did supplement my diet heavily with amino acid building blocks:

• 5-HTP to help my serotonergic system
• L-Tyrosine to help my dopaminergic system
• Phenylalanine to help my adrenal / epinephrine system

I ate vast quantities of biltong (dried beef) and other protein supplements, to give my body everything it could possibly need to repair itself, and replenish its stores.

In theory, I should have been left in a permanently psychotic state, with delusions, paranoia, inability to emotionally regulate, facial tics, poor concentration, poor memory, nerve damage on one side of my face etc. etc.

However, I put out the fire before it consumed me. When somebody is sick, you don't write them off and watch them wither and die. That's immoral!

I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary, and one hospital patient they followed was declared brain dead after he asphyxiated from a heroin overdose. The doctors were absolutely certain there was no hope, and that the life support systems should be switched off. I agreed, and I thought it was madness that the family were holding out any hope at all. After 37 days, the young man in a coma woke up. His family saved him from a premature and unnecessary death, by refusing to cut off his life support.

My life support has come in the form of kind strangers, policemen, nurses, doctors and indeed unwitting work colleagues, who have been willing to overlook the immediate situation and imagine that things can and will get better, given time and opportunity.

I'm physically, neurologically, a completely different beast to who and what I was a little over a year ago, when I was totally fucked.

Tags: #drugs #addiction #recovery #mentalhealth #bipolar #career

This is a story about helping each other...

How does one go about putting Humpty Dumpty back together again? The idea of some patriarchal figure - e.g. a king - has largely failed. Instead, we see that complex psycho-social problems are better solved by a community that is filled with mutual support and respect.

In order to get me to the point I am at today, it's taken a social worker. But not a social worker who was employed to help me, but instead a loveable Kiwi who was sleeping on my couch, who took it upon himself to think about my welfare.

It's taken a psychologist. Not a psychologist who I pay to sit on the couch of, while I pour my little heart out, but actually my beloved flatmate, who listened to me while I brain dumped in the small hours of the morning, or coaxed me out of whichever corner I was backed into, suffering almost PTSD-like symptoms.

It's taken a bunch of fellow people with mental-health problems, who "get it". They know that a "positive mental attitude" is just utter bullshit, and you can't just snap out of a severe depression or whatever ails you, when you already know that what you think and feel is irrational, and you would really rather not be feeling the way that you do, if it was a simple choice.

It's taken a bunch of addicts. Not necessarily needle-wielding junkies in the throes of active addiction, but people who aren't so holier-than-thou that they don't admit to their own fallibilities and judge you, lest they acknowledge the demons within themselves. Non-judgemental support is essential, for any way forward.

It's taken all my friends, from all corners of the globe. You might not think that a simple 'like' on social media would mean much, but the implied support has been my lifeblood. To say that I've been attention seeking is plain wrong. Everybody needs to feel that they have people that like them, support them, wish them well.

It would be massively premature to declare things a done deal. I need to make it through a winter somehow, without incident. Current thinking is simply to take off for the Southern Hemisphere for a while... follow the sun.

The plan has always been the same, since I decided to cut and run from my ex wife and Bournemouth: get back into IT contracting for the banks, go kitesurfing. Obviously, you also need a place to live and be on top of your finances. Obviously, you still need the occasional bit of midweek socialising to get you through to the weekend.

Am I some Goldilocks type character, who demands that everything is "just right"? No. I don't think that's true at all.

I accept that there is going to be loneliness, boredom, stress. I accept that things are going to take time. I accept that things are going to go wrong. I accept that it's highly improbable that everything will be going OK all at the same time. However, my basic life formula is pretty simple: work & play.

I tried to take direct action in somebody's life - Frank - when I returned to London. That was a relatively short burst of time & effort, and I can't tell you precisely how things worked out there, although I did see Frank about 18 months later and he was doing really well.

To round off my own story in a satisfactory way, I need to show that things are sustainable, I need to show that I'm not just mooching off people in order to continue on a reckless and irresponsible path through life. I need to close things out neatly: with integrity.

I know people are rooting for me, and it's nice to say that presently, I have a great place to live, a well paid job, and I'm getting back into the hobby I'm passionate about. I'm also increasingly getting back in contact with long-lost friends, as well as hopefully improving the tone of my communication: from bitter and negative, to philosophical, positive & hopeful.

My friend who drove me to the coast today, and has consistently been a pillar of support for me this year, always reminds me that recovery is nonlinear. I know that bad days and setbacks will follow an amazing day at the beach. Monday morning will be miserable, and life has a fully stocked arsenal of slings & arrows... but things seem a little bit better when your skin is salty from the sea and glowing from the sun and the wind.

It's oh-so clichéd, but that Beatles lyric seems apt:

I get by with a little help from my friends 

If it doesn't seem like I've acknowledged your help & support here, I apologise. Every little message, text, email, comment... it all adds up. I do appreciate it. I do appreciate, respect and love every one of my peers. Thank you.

Tags: #friends #kitesurfing #frank #mentalhealth