15 December 2006
Your begin your first job in ignorant bliss of the pitfalls ahead, then continue to learn the hard way. But it doesn't have to be like this. Michael Ware reveals his need-to-know list
The problem with being young is that, to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld, you don't know what you don't know. Callow, pale-faced youths are tossed on to the ocean of their careers without a map, compass or even clear complexions.
When I started office life, I thought I knew a lot, but in reality I was like a two-day-old calf blundering about the office. So, in keeping with the spirit of the season, I have revisited 20 years of painful memories to compile a list of things I really, really wish somebody else had told me.
1. Time speeds up when you are late for meetings. Technology stops working, taxis disappear and frantically pushing the lift button shouting 'come on' does not make it come any quicker.
2. People who have lots of pictures of their smiling angelic children on their desks have a greater propensity to have office affairs. This is not necessarily a good thing.
3. Using physical violence against complicated and expensive electronic equipment does not make it work but it does make you feel a lot better.
4. You should never make unscripted jokes in presentations unless you are absolutely sure of your audience. I have a colleague who still wakes up sweating at the memory of his 'David Blunkett and the Blind Trust joke' to an audience of po-faced social workers.
5. E-mail is not a secure medium and should not be trusted. Admitting to shameful and/or possibly illegal acts in an e-mail sent from your work account eventually has the same effect as writing your confession in neon lights on the side of the building.
6. Although the point of working in the public sector is to serve people in the wider community, nobody expects you to like them.
7. You cannot give negative feedback on other people's writing. Prose is a bit like driving, public speaking and sex, everybody has evolved their own style by now, thinks they are pretty good at it, all things considered, and tend to take criticism very personally.
8. Life is a trade-off. You can either understand Lotus Notes or have a personality.
9. People with funny mugs, posters, T-shirts, etc, are never funny.
10. The travails of your journey into work are a bit like your dreams and your children, very interesting to you, really quite dull for the rest of us.
11. Try not to regard your CV as an exercise in creative writing or the chance to award yourself the qualifications or class of degree you would have received if only life were fair.
12. Brokering partnerships between the public and private sectors is a bit like trying to marry a small hippopotamus to a pig. Although they look like similar entities from the safe distance of Whitehall, they are completely different species, neither party really wants to be in the relationship and all three of you are going to get dirty in the process.
13. PowerPoint distorts your thinking. You can fit roughly five points on a slide so you tend either to expand or contract your argument accordingly. If PowerPoint had been invented in 1859, Charles Darwin would have presented The Origin of Species as a single slide, five points, written in Arial 32 font. With maybe a funny cartoon.
14. If your boss asks 'tell me honestly, what do you think', he doesn't want you to. Ever.
15. When it comes to career advancement, only things that get systematically measured matter. Delivering on time and to budget counts for a lot, your boss's view of you is important, your colleagues' views of you are at best marginal, your years of successfully organising the office fantasy football league don't count for anything.
16. If you take 'sick' days to attend high-profile football matches, avoid sitting near the corner flags, substitutes' bench, pretty girls in the crowd or anywhere else where the TV cameras are likely to focus.
17. Your colleagues' range of hearing is highly variable and will increase to bat-like acuity whenever you make difficult or sensitive phone calls to your estranged spouse, urologist or lawyer.
18. There is a negative correlation between the number of organised team-building events and awaydays you are invited to and how happy you are likely to be.
19. If you work in a large organisation, at least 5% of your monthly take-home pay will be creamed off to fund your colleagues' seemingly endless marathon of charity walks, runs, mountain ascents and community work for under-privileged children in exotic locations (never Birkenhead, mind). I have a theory that a significant proportion of office workers are actually infiltrators from Oxfam who live in fear of a Panorama-type exposé of covert fundraising tactics.
20. Totalitarianism thrives in the sleepy backwaters of small public sector organisations. It is a little known fact that George Orwell's 1984 was originally a brave allegory of his life as a planning clerk in a district council in Barnsley in the 1930s.
21. Don't believe the social committee when they promise you that this year's Christmas party will be different. It won't be. You will still find yourself eventually in the same night club, drinking red wine from plastic cups and watching the sweaty, red-faced guy from IT leading a shouty chorus of Bat out of hell.
22. While absolute salary is important, relative salary matters more. Although you earn substantially more than 95% of the world's population, if the guy at the next desk with the Homer Simpson tie and poor personal hygiene earns more than you, you will be unhappy.
23. In any organisation, you can gauge your status and future career prospects by the quality of the biscuits served at the meetings you attend. Anything from Belgium that comes wrapped in silver foil is a good sign. Conversely, supermarket own brand digestives are not.
24. Be sparing with your use of anecdotes that include the phrase 'they eventually let me out of the cells around mid-morning'. Your colleagues will find this funny, your clients might not and, in my experience, prospective employers are unlikely to see it as a positive achievement.
25. Finally, whatever they might promise you, you never get credited if you contribute to other people's work. At least three of my colleagues and my partner contributed to this article but it's my name at the top.
PFdec2006
