Piss Up in a Brewery

July 3, 2025July 3, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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“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.

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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…

Inside a Boomer and Assumptions

June 2, 2025June 2, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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.