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filler@godaddy.com
All the stories we share here are from case files of referrals to our advisory practice. They give real-life, real-person examples of how to identify, and to respond to, the onset of mind-loss in the workplace. This environment presents multiple drivers, triggers, and conditions for mind-loss on an endemic scale. With careful guidance, however, you can survive and thrive in a modern commercial setting by losing your mind - responsibly.
For clarity of reference, in each story, our own contributions to reported speech, observations, and conclusions, are shown in bold type.
Andrew
I had this job. Had it – I’ve still got it. It’s slightly different now, what I do, but when I started, or at least when I’m talking about, my job was to research and write reports about companies, markets, regulatory systems, business conditions, key individuals in businesses and regulatory systems, and things including elections, currency devaluations, sanctions, and the chances of being invaded by China or Russia, or unexpectedly bombed by North Korea or Iran, that fell under the loose category of ‘political risks’. There were essentially two types of information. One is what anyone could find from Googling; if they were really keen, they could do some public record searches, read company accounts filings and disclosures to stock exchanges. All done on computer. Nobody has to leave their desk. In extreme cases, we would search a paid-for database which showed things like criminal proceedings or insolvencies in jurisdictions which don’t automatically put all this stuff online. This was what I did. I searched the internet for information, then I wrote it up using my own words, like a school project. Then there was the information that the company I worked for claimed it dealt in. High-value, sensitive, commercial data. Not bin-digging phone-hacking or bugging businessmen’s hotel rooms, but the type of information that not many people know, and would take a major effort to find out, including having face-to-face conversations with people, and actually going to locations far from the desk. Is the committee that awards building permits in Tashkent, for example, effectively if covertly controlled by the owners of real estate company A, or real estate company B? This is what we sold, but as long as I worked there, never actually did.
I’d studied some sociology, some psychology, some pol-sci, political economy, classic liberal stuff. I could see when things we did - activities and practices – were kind of rituals, workplace rituals. And I realised – or at least, it seemed clear to me - that the substantive content I was producing did not matter at all. Nobody was reading it. The people who were paying the company I worked for to make these reports, did not read them. Thirty, forty thousand dollars. The only feedback I ever got, either from the editors and directors at my company or from the client via my directors, was about the appearance of the document. The colors I’d used in the charts. The placement of sub-headings. Formatting. Sometimes they would get a 20,000-word document and they’d come back and say, please check line spacing is uniform 1.15 points!
Or they would want more charts, more graphs. My directors always wanted that. More pictures. Can we not find a non-textual way of presenting these findings, they would suggest. Tabulate / graphic / dashboarding?
After a while – maybe 18 months or so at this, when it was clear that the only things anyone was even remotely interested in was how it looked, I started fucking with it.
I started with things that I figured I would be able to explain as innocent mistakes if anyone saw them. It wouldn’t look good, but it would look like I had screwed something up, not deliberately sabotaged my own work. Maybe the editors would be instructed to keep an extra close eye on what I sent them, maybe I would have to go on a corporate standards training course. In a project about the outlook for the alcohol-free spirits market in Latvia, for example, I included a page of statistical information, repackaged as pie charts and bar graphs, about Lithuania, clearly marked Lithuania.
I waited.
I sweated. I lost sleep.
I drank. I did drugs. I worked out, a lot.
I still don’t know whether I hoped it would be found, or hoped it wouldn’t, maybe you can tell me that-
- (I said nothing)
We submitted the final report. The company was paid. The client came to our office for a formal follow-up discussion in which we talked about future work we might do for them if they decided to go ahead with their low-alcohol Latvian investment plans. Days … weeks… nothing. Nothing.
Next one. Same kind of ‘mistake’ but bigger, worse. Less easy to explain. And on and on.
-You must have known you were taking a risk. You could have lost your job.
I know. I mean, I know now. At the time…I guess I didn’t think that far ahead. Or maybe I must have thought, I’m young, I’m smart, I’ll get another job, but looking at it now it looks like a mad risk doesn’t it
-That’s not really the kind of language-
Was it a cry for help?
-We'd say, a bid for attention
I must have been losing my fucking mind.
Andrew
I had begun to drink heavily, I know that. I got to feeling that whatever I was doing, however meaningless, however useless it was, however much I could mess it up with nobody noticing because nobody was reading it, whatever I was doing I could tolerate, I could even start to enjoy in a perverse kind of way, if I was drinking while I was doing it. It was OK if I was drunk. It was when I wasn’t, that it was difficult. But I also knew that I’m not built to be a drunk. Not a real one. There are guys who can drink morning til night, seven days a week, and they’ll be drunk, but they can function, they turn up to work, they get about, they meet people, they do everything they have to do to live, they’re just drunk while they’re doing it all. I could do two days, three max, of steady drinking, then I’d just be ill. I’d throw up, couldn’t eat, couldn’t talk, couldn’t really move, definitely couldn’t drink any more. But then after a while I’d start to feel again how awful what I was doing with my life made me feel, so I’d start drinking again after maybe a day and a half, two days, and I’d drink until I got ill again. So it wasn’t a good routine-
-We’d probably call that a negative behavioral cycle.
I’d agree with that, fucking negative is what it was. So I thought, at this stage I’m probably not going to be able to train myself to not get ill, so let’s see if I can stop drinking and see if I can learn to live with my life in another way maybe, I wasn’t really sure what the plan was, I don’t think I really I had a plan-
-There’s no obligation to have a plan. I’d like to be able to say this to more people, to everyone. In general. There is no obligation to have a plan.
Right. Right, there’s not is there? I definitely didn’t have one anyway, I just decided I was going to go to a meeting. AA.
-OK.
And look, the important thing I have to say here is that I’m not the guy. I’m a guy who the guy met. At this AA meeting.
-I’m listening.
So we’re all sitting round in the circle, and you know, the idea is that people stand up and say something and everyone claps and says well done. So this guy stands up and he says, hello, my name’s Guy and I’m an alcoholic, and everyone claps and says hello Guy, except I didn’t think he was. I thought he was something else. I thought he was what I was. So after the meeting had finished, and all these drunks are bobbing tea bags in mugs or stirring four or five spoonfuls of sugar into their coffee, I took a risk. I went up to this guy Guy, who was shaking a sachet of hot chocolate powder, and I said, -I saw the strangest thing in the tube station the other night.
-That’s brave.
It felt like the biggest risk I’d ever taken. I genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t believe I was going to do it, until it was done.
-And what did he say?
He looked at me, and I looked back at him, and he said, -follow me. So we leave the meeting, him walking a few paces ahead of me all the time, we get out of the community hall or whatever the building is where the meeting’s been, and he leads me around a couple of corners, and this is in a part of town I don’t know, I never go there, and he goes into a bar. And I’ll say this, AA must fucking work, because I saw him go into this bar, Mulligan’s Irish Speakeasy it was called, and I actually stopped walking out of shock, and I think, what the fuck’s he doing, we’ve just been at an AA meeting and now here’s this guy taking us to a fucking bar, and it took me a couple of seconds to realise – it’s OK. We’re not actually alcoholics. Or we’re not primarily alcoholics, at least. So we each get a Guinness, and we sit down, and he says, tell me what you saw.
[Here I have condensed, for ease of comprehension, Andrew’s recollection]
The image is conventional almost to the point of self-parody: a young, attractive, heterosexual couple, holding hands, beaming into each’s faces as they run along a beach, their feet splashing through breaking waves. The colours are polarised: blue sky, clear turquoise sea, golden-orange sand, verdant green blast of coconut palms in the middle distance. An airline logo, a list of desirable tropical destinations, prices, deals. All-inclusive. Family-friendly. Early-bird. Everything’s there, perfectly faithful to formula. Except: someone has, in thick but precise black marker pen, drawn rings around his and her grins, and from those rings, conjoining lines that lead the eye to three lines of text, hand-printed with much care over the terms and conditions:
YOU CAN SMILE NOW
BUT THERE’S NO HOLIDAY FROM YOURSELF
YOU CUNT
Andrew lets one, then two trains come in, stop, spew out one glob of passengers and suck in another, then leave the station while he stood and looked at the defaced poster. As he looked at it, he tried to slow down his thoughts enough so he could parse them. What he arrived at was:
1) This must be spoof ad. It’s for a TV show, or something on the internet. It’s a fifth window or whatever the term is, a self-conscious piss-take; the text that looks like subversive graffiti is as much of the marketing piece as the grins and the palm trees. I don’t know what it’s an ad for, but I guess it’s for a target audience that doesn’t include me.
2) It’s a social media / meme-sphere thing that’s somehow generated or been converted into a physical poster. I don’t understand what it is, but it’s quite funny.
3) Someone has done this. The graffiti. Someone has either planned this then done it, or has spontaneously had the urge to do it and at the same time has had the right equipment to do, and has actually gone ahead and done it.
[The file now reverts to verbatim transcription]
All of this, everything I’ve just told you, is what I told this guy Guy. And Guy didn’t say “that was me” or “yes! I did that!” or “this is what I do” or anything like that. What he said was, -and what did you think about that? So I tried to think of an answer, but while I’m doing it I start to get this feeling less that I was telling him a funny and quirky little story that he was interested in, and more that I was trying to remember something that someone else had asked me to tell this guy Guy, and Guy was checking to see if I’d got the details right.
-Like a code? Or a password?
Kind of. But not exactly. I’d never spoken to Guy, never even seen him until then, so why would I feel like I was passing on some kind of message to him? It was weird.
-And what did you think about that?
You see that’s what he- oh, OK. You’re listening.
-I’m not entirely without humour, Andrew.
No I know. I-
-Go on.
I thought. I thought – what I thought was, this guy isn’t reacting like most people would. Most people would have just laughed, or been like oh my God that’s insane or even I wish I’d done that, but he sounded like he was my therapist. The way he was, it made me think of you.
-And how did you feel about that?
[Andrew looks at me; appears to be internally debating whether to formulate a response; instead, we laugh together. This note will be
redacted for professional readers.]
-The poster, though. The defacement of it. You sensed that you were talking to someone to whom what you saw might not have come as a complete surprise?
Yes. That’s what I sensed.