Category: personal development

Shunning Ostracism & Excommunication – Historical Precedent

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I think it both accurate and fair to say that there is much historical precedent for the “human” practices of shunning ostracism  & excommunication. The practices may be official or unofficial, sanctioned by the hierarchy or simply via the social practices unspoken by “they”. Often the shunned is/are way ahead of their times, avantgarde or simply unwilling to submit and comply with some edict or other. Many who refuse to kowtow are ostracised. At the time the ostracism or excommunication is considered thoroughly justified. Imagined divine right is on the side of those doing the exclusions. The hindsight of years or decades looks back in disbelief. “Really? They did that?”

The shunners do not imagine for one moment that shunning is what they are doing, it does not even occur to them and is rarely overtly discussed. There is no thought or empathy for the shunned or ostracised.

“They are not us. We are right!”

Shunning ostracism & excommunication are cult like practices which continue to this day. The threat of these is used to coerce compliance. In Scientology one can even be declared “fair game”! The person ostracised and shunned is the subject of gossip and hearsay, in absentia. No prodigals are allowed.

Someone might read an article on say Galileo in the Inquisition and tut-tut, then talk of Martin Fleischmann or Ranga Dias. One is a hero the others not. If your reputation is tarnished it is very hard to get a research grant funded, the so called objectivity flies out the window. People are way more fickle than they are prepared to admit. Every church, including science, has some form of shunning practice.

Shunning ostracism & excommunication are tools of coercion and manipulation favoured by the status quo, used to assert power over. The fear of these can stifle any dissent. A church “elder” can claim it can prevent some god-fearing person from entering heaven. That is a manipulative mind-fuck of high order.

The historical precedents are extensive and these practises continue to this day, in churches, organisations, political parties, clubs and societies. They even occur in peer groups.

Humans are prone to repeat rather than learn from history. They keep the same old manipulation playbook, Grimoire, and use it over and over…

—-

—-

Blaise Pascal a dit…Citations – Quotations

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Blaise Pascal, né le 19 juin 1623 à Clermont (aujourd’hui Clermont-Ferrand) en Auvergne et mort le 19 août 1662 à Paris, est un mathématicien, physicien, inventeur, philosophe, moraliste et théologien français.

—

Se moquer de la philosophie, c’est vraiment philosopher.

—

Il est bien plus beau de savoir quelque chose de tout que de savoir tout d’une chose.

—

Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.

–

Personne ne parle en notre présence comme il en parle en notre absence. L’union qui est entre les hommes n’est fondée que sur cette mutuelle tromperie.

—

Le vrai se conclut souvent du faux.

—

Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.

—

Que sert à l’homme de gagner tout le monde, s’il perd son âme ? Qui veut garder son âme, la perdra.

—

Dans une grande âme, tout est grand.

—

Deux excès : exclure la raison, n’admettre que la raison.

—

La dernière démarche de la raison est de reconnaître qu’il y a une infinité de choses qui la surpasse.

—

Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous, que ce serait être fou, par un autre tour de folie, de n’être pas fou.

—

Douter de Dieu, c’est y croire.

—

Je n’ai fait cette lettre-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

—

Les belles actions cachées sont les plus estimables.

—

Nous souhaitons la vérité, et ne trouvons en nous qu’incertitude.

—

C’est une maladie naturelle à l’homme de croire qu’il possède la vérité.

—

Les hommes se gouvernent plus par caprice que par raison.

—

Significant and Normal

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Many people might wish to fit in and be “normal”. That is comply and not be the sore thumb of life. These may seek to blend with a peer group if they are not normal in the populace at large. Geeky McGeekface is more at home with others of similar persuasion and not comfortable being with the popular plastic fantastic.

–

–

I will speculate that I am not within two standard deviations of the peak of the normal distribution of intellect. By this I am already slightly abnormal. It is not really significant because there are many way further out. They will have a higher IQ according to how these things are measured and be much better at conventional examinations than me. I am not normal but not significantly abnormal either.

On other metrics I may be more of an outlier or anomaly. It is not my ego or desire to be weird which is suggesting that, rather a detached observation. I don’t particularly want to be special or different, but I am or appear to be, a bit odd. Socially I am not a mixer and socio-politically I do not play the itchy back game so enamoured of by many. Because I am less easy to leverage by “what is in it for me” people may deem me less tractable to control and/or ready manipulation. I do not play “the” game. I am not one of “US”. I am not “good people”.

My bones have osteoporosis so they are among the 0.5% too thin for my age and sex. This is significant enough for the medics to want to medicate me in case I end up in A&E with another fracture.

What each of us finds significant depends upon our terms of reference and the world which we perceive and assimilate. Thousands watched “the Lionesses” on The Mall this afternoon. They are mostly normal in this respect. I watched a bit on TV. Does that make me normal?

Life circumstance has me/us where we are, living the way we do. Our impact on the outer world is minuscule because we do not interact overmuch. In the grand scheme of things human we are not significant. Though in the past we have both changed and facilitated many lives. Our life circumstance and health in particular, limits us. Because there is no fairy godmother our life circumstance is very unlikely to change and even it did, there is no dynamic reserve of time and energy to offer. To an extent we are spent.

Put me in a car on the M25 and I may not cope. I can no longer hack the outside world. A few glancing interactions perhaps and that is about it. Even if someone wanted it otherwise, it isn’t and cannot be. I have not been in a proper city for more than a week or so in the last six years and that for hospital / health reasons. I am a bumpkin these days…Life circumstance has me away from the crowd. It is better for me and probably for them too.

Here is an aphorism pertaining to the rule of the three pronged nagal from the Toltec Teachings by Théun Mares

–

–

This is not a normal example or tract of text. The question might be, “is it significant?”.

As is so often the case, it depends upon context. It sounds grandiose and might fleetingly captivate the attention. To the vast majority of people it has no personal significance and at best might be a curiosity. People are concerned with Facebook, Insta and TikTok. This type of thing would be abnormal to them. It is not abnormal to me.

I think it fair and accurate to speculate that what is normal and significant for/to me is abnormal and insignificant for others.

Thus we are in the subjective. Normality and significance are not objective, people make {personal} judgments which may or may not be rational concerning these notions. At the moment its seems normal to bomb the fuck out of Gaza and starve the people. This is normal for some but abnormal, brutal and evil to my eyes. The Palestinian death toll is more significant on Al Jazeera, less so on the BBC.

So-called normality is not always a strong recommendation for being better. Significance can depend upon prejudices and alliance.

If I was a mosquito, I would be grossly insignificant, unless I were in your bedroom of a hot summer night, and a bit peckish. Then for a few hours I could be significant.

Significance has a temporal component. It was once normal to have slaves. Slavery was more significant for the slaves than for the masters. That normality is now shunned and people are asked to accept the significance of their past slave ownership. Nothing can undo the abuse and torture.  A few quid here and there, a public apology, does not change one single lash of the whip.

Being normal may not be all that it is cranked up to be!

Normality has a checkered past…

Who knows what is normal for you, right now, may in time be seen as a misguided travesty. But for the time being you have the comfort of your peer group to tell you, “We concur old chap” and that everything is just dandy.

I am not sure that anything normal has brought about progress, ever. In that sense being normal is largely insignificant.

The Introvert Switch Off

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

It is not uncommon for an introvert to remain silent when someone is talking AT them. They can wait until the other person stops talking eyeing the door just to get out of there. They have long since stopped listening to and processing whatever the other person is saying. All they hear is “blah, blah, blah” all they think is “how can I get out of here.” Very often the person with verbal diarrhoea may be completely unaware of the introvert switch off. They may even interpret the lack of argument as agreement and support. The person they are talking at has completely disengaged. The person talking may even imagine that they have had a good chat and an exchange of ideas. The introvert is looking to get the hell out of there and will probably avoid any future contact unless they absolutely have to. There has been a huge miscommunication.

On “First Dates” last night there was a classic example of introvert switch off and complete disengagement in a 1:1 dating scenario. People have got to seriously lack self-awareness and any hint of empathy to/for others if they fail to see an obvious switch off. They may continue to rabbit. They may be lost in their own little world, oblivious.

There may be social elements too. It seems to me that people like to discuss things in France. Some kind of discussion is anticipated and expected. I do not often need any form of discussion to come to my own conclusions or ideas. I tend to research. People used to discussion may anticipate someone talking over them in disagreement, which in my book is rude. They may expect an ebb and flow of conversation. When there is none, it can confuse.  In my case if I want to understand spoken French I have to concentrate. If for example the wife and I are talking with someone and they start to speak to the wife. I switch off because it is not for me, I do not have to engage with whatever it is that is being said. People may be unaware assuming that I am still participating in conversation when I have already opted out. They may assume they are talking with both of us, I have switched off.

I have recall of a large number of conversations mostly in English when someone has said something which is wrong and which I disagree with. I have not felt the urge to verbalise. There has been no “push back “ from me. I have no idea what the other person has made of it. It is not my problem. I have a few anecdotes when some have reported me saying something when I have said nothing. The mind can do weird things. The lack of negation may have been seen as affirmation. It wasn’t. I was bored and disengaged. I was hoping for the “conversation” to finish quickly.

I suspect that there are a quite a few introverts out there who recognise some of the above. There may be quite a few extroverts who are completely unaware of the introvert switch off. After all the sound of their voice is magnificent and the world benefits enormously from their erudite opining.

Information and Context

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Because people are lazy, they tend to treat information in a monopolar way, without actually acknowledging that. We have monopolar information. They are very confirmation bias oriented. The red caps might hear gospel from the don, the green caps from The Guardian and the anti-brown-Islam-o-phobes might want to hear Uncle Nigel pontificate. People perceive according to how they want to perceive, they believe what they want to hear. Perception is monopolar and not balanced or heteropolar. Bias is pandemic.

Taking a monopolar information source out of a wider context is rarely wise. Newspapers are sold to their biased audience and articles are targeted at that bias. Tell me what I want to hear and I will buy your newspaper, or clickety-click it on line so that you can get advertisement revenue.

–

–

I could say that I have a fair general knowledge. Out of context that is a lie. I would be shit at normal pub quiz general knowledge, because a) I don’t like soccer, b) I have no idea about current soap operas and c) I know nothing about package holiday destinations nor who is hot on social media. I would be a middling team member on a University Challenge quiz team.

I can say with a fair degree of confidence that I understand how academic science is enacted and reported. I may be rusty on nuance, but I have a good gist. I can read a Nature article and know to what extent I understand and if there are gaps in understanding which I might need to follow up on. If I watch a video on YouTube, I know that it is almost always surface and that people have a click generating agenda. Pass the Saxa salt, please.

I have read widely in the esoteric – occult – new age bookshelves of the library, the one with actual books in not on-line. I have intellectual access to that context something your common or garden scientist will not have. Many so-called scientists are disproportionately fearful of being labelled “whacko”. The gossip around “cold-fusion” is exemplar. Yet I have discussed over a cigarette on the steps of the Chemistry Department at Imperial College with a practising homeopath and staff member. We talked and speculated on quantum effects in water memory. Homeopathy is derided by many a sceptic yet demonstrably erudite scientist.

People are scared of the occult. It actually means “difficult to see” as in “an occult fracture of the T3 vertebra”. It does not mean that I am going to bite the head off a bat, spit blood to anoint the bone of goat and point that at you whilst chanting incantations for your demise.

People can and do get the wrong end of the stick.

–

–

It is possibly not illegal to file a patent application on “Quantum Telepathy” using the name Whacko McNutjob at the Intellectual Property Office in Newport, less eye catching perhaps at the European Patent Office unless the examiner was a Brit. One could ascertain if there was prejudice against Nut-jobs. We could define a new term, nutjobphobic.

I am confident that I can write an application of sufficient plausibility. I have three granted patents already.

People can over and misinterpret just about anything which they read on the internet. Rarely do they check understanding nor can they be arsed to read around or do further research. The gospel according to SEO optimized Google search returns is a highly skewed and paid for version. People forget and rely.

The informational fodder is not always the best fully nutritional meal for an avid clicker.

The Shoe Horn of Ought & Should

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

————-

————

When things don’t turn out how you think {and insist}, they ought to be, how they should be, it can fuck with your head. The sense of order is perturbed and a cognitive dissonance can set in. One can ignore the “data” before your eyes and try to fit an interpretation of “reality” to how it should be. One can invent stories to try to shoe horn notions so that the {sacrosanct} narrative of life does not get upended. Reality can be avoided because it does not match the fairytale.

A while back I had an “A” level physics student for whom I was a private tutor. The young man was very fluid and he was quick on the uptake when I used circular intuitive as opposed to linear list teaching. He was bored shitless at school, but we had some fun. He was a bit of a rebel. Run forward a few years and he was upset that his sleuthing skills had been unable to find much of an internet trace for me. It was a challenge for him and we eventually reconnected. His view was that people with my background do not disappear into the aether, there should be some institutional paper trail of my career. He could not find my contact details at Bedlam or Friern Barnet Mental Hospital.

In the UK alone there were ~313,000 missing persons reports in 2022-23 for England and Wales. More males went missing than females. And 0.3% of all missing persons reports had a fatal outcome. People can and do fall off the radar, slip over the edge of the world and otherwise disappear with few traces. It is harder these days because many carry a GPS monitoring device AKA ‘phone. It is pretty unlikely that anyone filed a missing persons report for me, though they might have. In which case I have not yet been found. The charities have pages devoted to individuals who are missing with entreaties for them to get in contact. I did not find a page dedicated to me. Maybe I should keep searching.

Sometimes the sense of should & ought is more subconscious than fully present in awareness.

About twenty years ago I used to give personal development courses for science Ph.D. students. I had quit {a travesty} a tenured position. Although not overtly stated I sensed that this renunciation of something to which many of them aspired was a big subconscious black mark against me. I was a suspect. They could not take me seriously because I had shown myself to not be aligned with their view of how the world {and things} should & ought to be. It was a non sequitur of elephantine proportions in the room.

In other cases people invented scandals as a driver for my exit. Perhaps I had been caught on kiss-cam with a junior at an Oasis concert. The truth, simple and unconvoluted, was against the perceived order of how things are, how they play out and how they should be.

I have no idea what stories, narratives and other bollocks may or may not have been in circulation. People can need some ersatz to keep the sacred should & ought intact.

People make assumptions often and the quality of those assumptions is generally a lot poorer than they assume it to be.

If the wife and I died quietly one night, nobody would raise an alarm here. It would only be when the post box started to fill up that anyone would suspect. We don’t get many letters and if there was no Amazon delivery due, it could take months before postie noticed. Because we are isolated nobody would smell our demise.

Maybe that shoe horn is important for a happy life with 2.2 children and a white picket fence. I suspect that many people are kidding themselves, a lot. The effort to fabricate a demonstrable outcome aligned with how things should & ought to be according to the omniscient THEY, is perhaps aback the so-called mental health crisis. It is my thesis that should & ought are in fact toxins which we socially enforce upon ourselves and one and other.

The pressure from that shoe horn squeezes the life out of us….

The Cubic Centimetre of Chance

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

———————————————————————

“All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.”

― Carlos Castaneda

——————————————————————–

With this quote who has the chance / opportunity can be down to perspective. Some feel that they may be holding and offering the chance to others unaware that it is they who are in fact missing out. The perception as to who has power may have more than one interpretation. It is not always obvious.

–

–

I have noted elsewhere in this blog that in general I observe that people feel the need to “teach” me. They tend to extrovert and I do not often argue because my assessment is that there is little or no point. Rarely, very rarely, do people inquire.

When we have the chance to profess or the chance to learn, many choose to profess, often from their soap boxes. People like to be heard and sometimes admired. They like to be seen as knowing, expert even. There is kudos therein.

In the common view of the world opportunity is seen for advancement and material success. Applying for and getting a job at a top university, although difficult to achieve, could be seen as seizing the cubic centimetre of chance. Quitting the highfalutin could be seen as the opposite, though it could be the chance to get off the endless hamster wheel of the slippery pole rat race.

It terms of perspective chance differs. What is on offer, what is the opportunity, what is in it for me? Is philosophically opposite to emptiness and not striving. In the respective frameworks one offers material success and social kudos, the other a kind of pared back freedom. Many would struggle to seize such a gap to freedom were it to materialize. They would not like a life so lacking in accoutrement.

Inherent in the cubic centimetre of chance is the 99% rule. The rule states that 99% of people think only of themselves 99% of the time. People caught under the umbrella of this rule are nearly always unaware of the cubic centimetre of chance when it appears fleetingly before them.

Castaneda stresses the need for speed, for quick and decisive action, carpe diem on steroids. Afraid of looking foolish and worried by risk, many throw away cubic centimetre after cubic centimetre. In trying to control every aspect of life they fail to grasp that which might be of most  benefit to them in the long run. The problem is that effort and hard work are often unattractive though nearly always the most fruitful at harvest. Short termism wins out frequently. The gift horse is examined and found dentally wanting, it is wastefully jettisoned. Convenience is often detrimental to evolution. That which is familiar and convenient cannot bring change. This 7/11 choice is the most commonly made, stay the same.

The blinkers of expectation and desired outcome can often hide these cubic centimetres. They do not look like they should or ought according to rigid preconceived ideas. They may not have the fancy clothes of institutional affiliation; their track record or CV may be non-standard. That is why exactly they may be the cubic centimetre of chance. The wrapping is however unacceptable. The potential gift remains unopened.

People are often not very alert and as the saying goes, “Britain needs lerts”.

——————————————————-

Have you ever failed to seize a cubic centimetre of chance offered kindly to you by the universe?

Did you only notice in hindsight?

——————————————————–

How We Are Perceived…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

…never look a gift horse in the mouth

———————————————–

I’ll speculate that there is a good chance that I might be perceived as a quasi-Jurassic old fart.

The estate agent recently said that we had a lot of DVDs just like his parents. I do not know most of the protagonists in Wimbledon, I have no idea what music “stars” are popular with the exception of Taylor Swift, on celeb Goggle Box I have no idea who some of them are and I could not name more than a few of the Labour party cabinet. I recognise a few players in the England cricket team and am perhaps the most up to date with northern hemisphere rugby. I do not use a smart ‘phone and have never done “face time”.

Science fiction can predict with sometimes uncanny accuracy future trends. The detailed match is not exact but the scoping predictive. We have Orwell’s 1984 and now webcams and microphones driven by fibre broadband in most homes. The Trumpian “ministry of truth” publishes edicts to millions over the internet. The propaganda wars are on. We have the “new-speak” of wokeism and offence at pronoun use.

In the film “Logan’s Run” the young and the beautiful have an expiry date before they go to “Dignitas” for recycling. When the time comes, they are expunged. Everyone must be young and sexy and beautiful. Fat crippled old men are not allowed. Books are an antique artefact of the past.

–

–

Now you can get Turkey teeth, a Brazilian bum lift, liposuction, a bionic penis and a designer vagina. You can get lip filler so that you look like a pollock who has bitten a stinging jellyfish and get plastic bags full of chemicals sewn into your tits. You can take weight loss drugs instead of heroin to lose weight. And of course you can buy Sino-Mexican fentanyl at bargain basement prices for a few pesos.

Not all “progress” is uplifting or good.

There is a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water.

The summer of 2003 was pivotal for me. I had just gotten divorced and went on a PADI advanced open water diving course, on my own, at Sharm El-Sheikh. I was partnered with a young woman who was intelligent and a cardio-fit dentist. She was also a fairly high level rower, only a little younger than me. She was on holiday with others of the rowing “Henley” set and there was some talk about some of them preparing for Olympics. She represented two things I did not understand, the choice of dentistry as a profession and competing in rowing. I could not and still cannot understand dentistry as a profession. Yes, it relieves pain and is financially viable but isn’t it a tad repetitive and boring.

We got on fairly well and worked OK as a team. We were both a bit anxious. It turned out that she was single and looking to change that. I understood that she was attractive according to how these things are perceived. I saw her mostly as my diving partner. She talked a lot. Then one day on the bus she looked at my recent root canal work, which was not up to scratch according to her professional opinion. I knew at that moment her orientation towards me had changed from mild interest to “no, this geezer has bad teeth”. There was a slight cooling on her part. I had been scratched off a mental list.

When we finished the course, I climbed Mount Sinai on the night before my birthday and saw dawn of my birthday atop said hill. It was for me a truly transcendent experience. Something very powerful started that day and I was “off my trolly” for most of the journey back to London.

In this inane example she looked in my mouth and did not like what she saw. A perception was based on a single variable. It was a show stopper for her.

Nowadays where everybody has to be plastic-fantastic with their own PR and propaganda anti-social media platforms it is difficult to find a non-embellished reality. The drive to subscribe and adhere to a faux-perfection is said to be a driver for poor mental health. It is difficult to know who or what we really are or may be.

Cosmetically my appearance to the young is not appealing. I have yellowing teeth with several gaps. I am portly and hirsute. My below belt grandpa-garden is untended. I have not had a crack back and sack, ever. My teeth, which remain, are my own. There is no dental mortgage. I do not dress fashionably and I waddle when I walk, like a duck. I have never had an umbilical cord to my iPhone or Galaxy. If I were to attempt to type a text it would be snail pace and error strewn. I am a bumpkin, a yokel even pikey. I have zero power or kudos by association

I am in a package which would be unappealing, no doubt some might seek to educate me and bring me up to date. Were I to have things to share and impart, many would not be able to see past the gift wrap.

“What can that crippled old man with gappy yellow teeth possibly have to offer me? He is such a success, he has done so very well for himself, not.”

How we are perceived may differ substantially from how we actually are. People can squander opportunity based on prejudice about how things ought to be…

——————————————

…beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Failure to Piss & Moan or Whinge & Complain…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

—————————————————————————————————

From the Urban Dictionary:

whinge

Verb To whinge

A British/Australian/New Zealand (possibly South African and other commonwealth) English word which describes incessant complaining. A behaviour commonly associated with poms/pommes/pohms/pommies (people from England).

If you want to get anything done in this country you’ve gotta whinge till you’re blue in the face!

Aw piss off ya blardy whingin’ pommie!

Whinging pom

An joyless English person who complains incessantly.

See Piers Morgan.

That Piers Morgan is such a whinging pom oh my god.

———————————————————————————————

This morning whilst trying to go back to sleep I was reflecting on a phenomenon of non-plussed. This is when I observe other people being non-plussed when I fail to piss & moan or whinge & complain in line with their normal level of their expectations. They seem not to know what to do when I don’t bemoan my lot or plead how terrible life is and how much miserable pain I am in {poor me, pass the feather boa.}


People are accustomed to hearing high levels of whinging and moaning and therefore expect these.

I have an idea that the medical profession don’t take me as seriously as others because I am not complaining endlessly and asking of their deity for help with my suffering. They can’t gauge things on the whinge / complain / moan scale.  I am too close to the zero-whinge state to be taken seriously.

As a rule most people like to have others hear there whinges and go, “there, there, poor you”. They seek someone to join them in their misery and seek affirmation of how terrible their personal suffering is, Bless.

If you observe, a fair percentage of so-called conversation is about complaint and woe-sharing. If people stopped whinging there would be a lot less. One is supposed to offer succour to the woe-sharer. If one does not woe-share people can be non-plussed. They do not know what to do or how to behave.

A very large amount of woe-sharing comes from the notion of how unfair the world is imagined to be. It is very victim and poor me in source. It is a bit sandpit or nursery, toddler like.

Who said that life is fair? Why do people have such an expectation?

Anyway, is seems to me that my failure to piss & moan, whinge & complain sufficiently leaves people non-plussed. It is a non sequitur which does not make sense. It can cause unease.

Piss Up in a Brewery

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

—————

—————-

“Trompenaars’s model of national culture differences is a framework for cross-cultural communication applied to general business and management, developed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. This involved a large-scale survey of 8,841 managers and organization employees from 43 countries.

This model of national culture differences has seven dimensions. There are five orientations covering the ways in which human beings deal with each other, one which deals with time, and one which deals with the environment.”

From Wikipedia.

———————

The last course, which was in design phase when I dumped it, was to address problems of cross cultural communication and the tensions inherent in it. I {we} have had plenty of instances of Franco -Britannic cultural differences. If one side imagines that the way they do things is right and dandy it can be very difficult to show to them other ways. They may get ultra-defensive and imagine themselves more highly organised and efficient than they actually are. One might have to learn new ways and adapt to the system in which one lives. These “growing pains” can cause premature baldness. One can be seen as pushy and not “sympa”.

There is a balance between nanny state control and last minute.com freeform. There is also a need to decide and stick to said decisions without continuous flexing. Making shit up on the fly can cause clusterfucks of considerable dimension. Preparation and planning prevent piss poor performance.

One of the things I never put on my CV as a bullet point was

  • Able to organise a piss up in a brewery.

It does not sound like an important life skill but it is. One of things that I am good at is organisation which needs contingency. Organisation should be, wherever possible, simple and clear. The person who has oversight needs to be updated and exercise that over sight. Although not my natural team role I have ended up being Monitor Evaluator on a number of occasions to keep things on track. Slippage is a real problem.

Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner identify France as a diffuse culture in which so-called responsibility is spread out and it is not clear who has oversight or indeed if there is any. Process has been developed and used but rarely questioned and updated. Demain, quinze jours, are not as bad as the Jamaican “soon come”. But time is vague like many other things.

As a INFJ timing is important to me and sticking to what you say about time is vital. I can’t help it but people running late irks. I have literally thought while waiting, “shall I just go home, fuck it!”

I am anticipating a hip-replacement operation. It is down to us to organise a pulmonary and cardiovascular screening before a meeting with the anaesthetics geezer / geezer-ess. We have to order and provide crutches and compression stockings. We have to organise full blood tests including blood typing. The surgeon will have blocked out a space in his diary. No bugger has yet done an assessment if it is safe for me to return home. There is a quasi-magical assumption that everything will fall into place. A couple of cardiology outfits have suggested a screen a week before the operation!! Really?

If there is a problem and the operation needs cancelled there is no lead in time and the slot will have to be abandoned. This kind of “planning” makes me nervous. It lacks foresight. It may be the way things have always been done but that is not good logic.

The possibility for fuckwittery is huge and the probability of things which are time critical going wrong, high.

In the UK no civilian would be given responsibility for collecting very expensive granulocyte-colony stimulating factor from the pharmacist and giving it to a district nurse for injection prior to a harvesting of stem cells. The factor is temperature sensitive. To trust this kind of thing to joe public is in my opinion unwise. The key thing could go very badly wrong and everything need re-scheduling. Do normal people really understand temperature dependent reaction kinetics?

“But that is the way we do things….”

The feeling that I {we} have to be on this is an unnecessary added stress.

Am I a control junky?

Am I sane?

Will this aid my post operative recovery?

Should I just go with the flow in this case?

In my view professional organisational oversight might be a better approach. I could tip up at hospital and have a whole day of tests done a couple of months out. The go / no go question would be answered and, if needed, some interim medical adjustments made ahead of time. Rather than a week before finding out some kind of unknown heart anomaly.

I understand that the summer is in the way and that everything stops for summer. Unfortunately this is not in my cultural DNA.

A bit edgy…