Still directionless but this is starting to become less like falling and more like freefall… so we’ll see how things come up as I have to rethink my approach to life for the umpteenth time in the last quarter.

So I had to drop by with my inevitable tuppence about the conclusion of the YA magician-based literary series that dare not speak its name.

All I can say is kudos to Rowling for actually producing the goods in a spiritually satisfying way. Obviously, I like to remain spoiler free so I can’t discuss any more Dathly Hallows here but suffice to say it all works out for the best in the end. Yay.

This was by no means a foregone conclusion. There’s a lot going against such a lengthy writing exercise coming up trumps. There’s the pressure of the past success, the expectations of the baying masses and, of course, the fact that an author only gets to be a better author by writing and once they’ve written a little way down the line they start to understand why what they used to write stunk so bad.

Not that if we cast our minds back HP & The Philosopher’s Stone was so bad. It was serviceable children’s literature at a time when such a thing was not. It had several things going against it being an epic spiritual and mythic journey, however.

It’s mostly that a few things ended up being shoehorned in rather than elegantly placed. In the end it would be churlish to poke too much fun at these things as the slight elbows have been turned into servicable story points. The thing that still grates on me is that the centre of the universe is still a secondary school, its headmaster and one of its students. But what can you do about that? Only cheat.

One of my upcoming projects takes place on a school campus. The classic cheat to such a tricky setting is to forget the rest of the world exists. A feat best exemplified in the wonderful video game Canis Canem Edit (Bully in the US) there all the areas outside the school campus exist merely to shadow the campus itself. Even Bullworth Town Hall is a geographically lower, smaller and generally inferior shadow of the Bullworth Academy’s main building.

That cheat, of making the school centre of attention by virtue of ignoring everything else is fine and dandy, as long as you don’t want your main conflict to have more global impact. That was always HP’s sticking point. The whole central conflict is between a schoolboy and the most wicked being the world has ever known. Great drama, tricky to implement.

But in the end, as I say, it all makes a little bit more sense than it ought to instead o a little bit less, that would appear to be the best result for any author, irrespective of their audience, constraints, and expectations.

Life, it seems to me anyway, routinely defies any sensible attempts to predict or shape it. If the fact that the favourite of any given horse race loses often enough to make a bet on the favourite a risk more often than a safe win should tell people this, but it seems not to.

Perhaps I spend so much time dredging around the sea of disappointment and hope-in-vain that is the world of the self-published because then the people worth knowing are the ones who know there are no truly deserving winners or safe bets. Once you get into the arena of what should be more certain, when it turns out not to be so certain, it can be downright terrifying.

One of the true tests of human character is not just how a person behaves in the face of adversity but how they act in the face of an adversity that is not only not expected but also, on paper, unlikely.

On paper my life shouldn’t be where it is. When I first started looking for new work I all but walked into a position within a week. It was only at the very last hurdle that the employer reneged and in the end like a house sale where the contract exchnge day goes by without an exchange all you can do is cry tears of rage and frustration at the bad luck. I didn’t at the time. I had some stopgap survival plans (which barring the physical assault it got me may have worked out, but I don’t think I really need to be beaten at work unless it’s a position with more long term security - not a joke), I had many more interviews lined up, tot his day I can routinely expect seven calls in a day from agencies all with surefire employment opportunities I should be happy to have served up in front of me. And indeed I was.

The only problem is this. Employers, by and large, rarely have an idea of what it is their IT/IS manager is going on about when they come with a “need to recruit”, they only have the haziest idea of what an IT/IS strategy actually entails. In the end they have to trust “the eggheads” to have the final final say on whether a member of the team gets accepted or not.

I’ve always found, with the greatest respect, that IT/IS people have the EQs of 8 year old boys, generally speaking. This is why they often come across as intolerant, petty, short-tempered, alien weirdoes with only the vaguest relationship to the real world. Am I claiming any greater skills in this respect? Well, frankly, yes.

For a start I’ve had to be a peer professional in a non-related field for a law firm. Lawyers only measure themselves and others by how senior a lawyer they are. Everyone who’s not a lawyer or a client usually occupies a space below any given legal professional. That makes it very difficult for them to work with people who know as much as them about some other topic. I’ve heard lawyers talking to doctor’s receptionists and the anger, petulance, sarcasm, mockery and vitriol hurled in their direction must surely be intended for the doctor, after all the receptionist is a mere underling. The thing is a doctor’s vast array of non-legal knowledge is an unknown quantity to a lawyer and lawyers are not very good at dealing with people who could, in theory, be “better” than them in some way they are paid large amounts of money not to understand.

To write IS systems for lawyers is the first hard lesson in customer service. You have to be nice to their ego and get the work done and juggling the two is not so easy.

There are other lessons I have learned about how to deal with people in the years since I worked for the law firm and they have been in many cases much harder. In short I have learned about people. I know people. I know a bit about how people work. And I know that knowing these things is scary to a lot of others. Particularly people who work in my industry sector.

I don’t know why. Knowing people, and knowing myself, means that I know exactly what kind of work I would be best suited to doing at this point in my career. I need a solid two years or so in doing some day to day C# development at a mid-junior level, e.g. not a beginner but not a guru either. I have outside interests and long term plans incompatible with serious ambition but I am serious minded about my work.

On paper I am the perfect candidate for an intermediate developer both professionally and politically. I just want to do my time and move on. I am begging to be told what do by whom and when for money.

So what stands in my way? Stupidly constructed unfair tests (in my professional opinion as a qualified secondary ICT Teacher) written in five minutes by petulant spoiled 8 year old lads in the bodies of men in their mid thirties. Unreasonable demands that pay no heed to the vagaries of life, issued by people who use the unfair way life has treated them to indulge their own megalomaniacal narcissism and vindictive need to control those they perceive as having kept them down so long. And people who have dealt with business scenarios so often they have forgotten that all activity carried out in our civilisation involves the participations of human beings, with lives, to whom they owe a responsibility to be ultimately and scrupulously fair-minded and thorough.

In business, we are told, there is not always time to be scrupulous, fair-minded and thorough.

Well, forget scrupulous. Forget fair-minded. Forget thorough. What if a smart guy who is acceptably knowledgable, nicely witty, reassuringly a little arrogant (so not sickeningly perfect), has all the right pieces of paper and a wealth of experience walks through one interview at your organisation and waits to sit the technical exam. Do you not owe him the chance to prove his worth? After all in the standard two interview setup you’ve kept the guy hanging around for a fortnight waiting for an answer. If you were paying him a wage that would be a couple of grand’s worth of time. Given that you have both invested so much of your time and effort in trying to get this thing working don’t you owe that candidate something more than some arbitrary, unfair and contrary dismissal?

Apparently not.

There is no reason on earth that a man with two university degrees and four and a half year’s commercial experience in the latest technologies should be incapable of getting a job. And there’s certainly no reason for employers to keep not only being dismissive of that person but actually seeming to go out of their way to shit all over him.

It runs contrary to everything that we teach our children. If going to university, paying our fees, working hard, using our talents and climbing up to prove ourselves is worth nothing then what’s the point of any of it? If you were to ask me now where a child should go for the brightest future I would point to an ex-student of my very own. George.

George was a great lad, very emotionally intelligent and fully aware that he was a fifteen year old lad in secondary school in a system where 6th form prevented him earning proper dosh, university would cost him proper dosh and the entire economy seemed pretty brittle and liable to collapse in strong breeze. He was aware of these things through intuition, not from empirical knowledge.

As a consequence George spent a lot of his time at school not working above the bare minimum and spent much of his time talking to his ICT teacher about what was good on the PlayStation at the moment. Not that he was closed minded. Quite the reverse. One day he actually came to me and asked me to explain this ICT coursework business to him properly and then he promised he would do his best to understand it. He listened, I explained. Being a rational human being and not a teacher he didn’t really understand what relevance any of it had to reality at all.

Now you’d think that this disaffected young man would get into binge drinking, become a hopeless dropout and be on the scrap heap by 19.

I saw George when he was 19, he was assistant manager at a sports clothing retail chain. Relatively unscarred by the schooling process. Not in debt and if he’s kept at it probably doing reasonably well by now.

And you know what? People are probably stupid enough to be telling him he’d have made something of himself by now if he’d gone to university.

I’ve gone to university twice and worked my bollocks of for half a decade. What have I made of myself? An unemployed debtor.

This society can take that piece of information and shove it up its condescending attitude. There are no sure things. No safe bets. Unless you get a guarantee of a return on your investment you should think twice about spending money you haven’t got chasing something you’ll probably never get.

At this point my faith in humanity has never been lower. I read that 50ish universities in the UK are in danger of closing because they don’t make enough money. Good. The qualifications they issue are less useful than toilet paper due to their low absorbency rate. This country is bunch of arseholes pissing on the weak and the unfortunate in order to satisfy their own egos. The dreams you are sold are made of crap and acid and will kill you faster than swallowing a bottle of paracetamol with a quart of vodka. No one can be trusted. No one should be liked. Everyone will crush your face into the mud if they think it will make things better for them. People are quite happy to play headgames with you for their own amusement.

And my job is just to point that out.