beck and call

People can be complacent, imagining that others will always be around even at their beck and call. People do not imagine that another might disappear into thin air, either with or without a puff of smoke. If you are institutionalised in say academia there is an assumption that you will remain therein and readily contactable, on tap. No-one foresees that you will go off into the wilderness to live as a yogi. They can’t treat you just how they see fit and you must suck it up. You can be the “dependable”. One click of the fingers and you are always there.

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We are accustomed to watching “24 hours in A&E” and the interviews with relatives bang on about how important family is and that it is unwise to take time and people for granted. They are clearly prompted by the interviewers with scripted questions. The answers are formulaic, fairly repetitive and preachy. When I hear people say that they must not take things or people for granted it does not ring true to me. What they mean is, “Phew, when this crisis is over, we will endeavour to go back to pretty much how we were.”

You can work out if I am being cynical or simply accurate. What is your take on human nature?

So many people do take others for granted perhaps to be picked up and used as and when. I know from my own experience that many people have used me and, in my desire to help, I have actually done them a massive dis-service. I have disempowered them and robbed them of the lesson of using their own efforts.

If I have any regrets in this life, this is one of them, disempowering people by trying to help and make their lives easier, doing things for them. This leads in many cases to being taken for granted.

Grants however can be withdrawn…the complacent and entitled rarely expect this.

There is a type of person who imagines everything, everyone is at their beck and call…They can get upset and have a tizzy when this proves not to be the case.

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What happens when you snap your fingers, metaphorically or otherwise?

Do you get?

Do doors open?

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A while back when we were trying to sell our house the young estate agent commented that we had loads of DVDs just like his parents. They were umbilically connected to their devices. Their default was to use a search engine instead of think. As an old git I can comment that they had no inkling as to what may or may not be inside a boomer, what that essence may be.

Around 40 years ago at Durham University, during a conference on high resolution spectroscopy of van der Waals molecules, I gave my first oral presentation concerning the paper-worthy results from my first year experiments. It was a tad precocious to speak amongst all those professors dressed in my black ripped 501s with buckled suede Doctor Martens, a short spikey flat top haircut and a Smiths t-shirt.

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My moderate hangover had to be negotiated. I made no mistakes and the talk went well. Later that evening I was “chatted up” by various profs perhaps looking to recruit in due course. My punk “fuck you” attitude was reeled in.

To use the time honoured phrase, the youth of today have no idea what it was like back then. How protest and rebellion were a rite of passage. People do not expect residual punk attitude. I was soon to become an evangelical vegan at that time. Meat is murder!

Last night we watched a short documentary on the Smiths who provided a sound track to various aspects of life, including my mid-nineties depression. “Heaven knows I am miserable now…”

People make shed loads of assumptions; they always have and they always will. There is an expression that “assumptions are the mother of all cock-ups”. {and clusterfucks} I have extended the vernacular so that it is up to date.

Even when people know that making assumptions is foolhardy, it seems that they simply cannot resist making them and assuming their accuracy and applicability. Checking assumptions is for many an anathema. People will assume how others might behave, what they will do.

My mother when asked to come to my second wedding said that it was too far away and difficult for her to come. My assumption was that her assumption was that she would be cajoled into coming. After sufficient cajoling she would yield as if she was doing us the greatest favour in the entire world. Instead, I said OK fine and left it at that. She may have been waiting for me to change my mind and start cajoling. I did not. The wedding went ahead without us having to cater to her insatiable drama queen tendencies.

Sometimes assumptions can backfire “biggly” to quote Herr Trump.

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One of the assumptions in our modern day is that everyone is contactable, that they have contact details and because of the fear of missing out, they will never be incommunicado. People are eternally at “beck and call”. When I say that I do not use ‘phones people do not believe me. They think I mean “much” but I don’t. My mobile has had two calls in six months both of them test calls by the wife. Someone once said to me, that if I had any questions, I could call them. He may have imagined that I might. I “filed” his card without even looking at it…In my mind we would never speak again.

I suspect that in a cross generational sense we do not understand nor appreciate the difference in essence. Even within a generation a beige or a plastic may not get a goth, a punk or an indie. As part rasta in orientation I may not subscribe to the 80s “Wolf of Wall Street”. When I sat in the board room at Fleming Family and Partners in Dover Street Mayfair to discuss million pound funding deals none of the suits knew where I was coming from, nor did they care overmuch.

It is funny your true colours are on the inside and not the outside.

Tag: beck and call

Inside a Boomer and Assumptions