what is life

It's work, is what it is. So tonight's ramble through the spaciously vacant back recesses of my brain has been inspired by a few conversations over the last couple of days as well as the fact that work is just flat out at the moment. But it didn't always used to be like this. Time was, the lead-up to Christmas used to mean lunches at the pub rather than wall-to-wall meetings. And similar stuff.

This week I've caught up with both the current mentoree and the one from 3 years ago. The current one and I are booked to do some promotional work for the 2007 round, which will be fun. Her conclusion is that I've been able to deliver some genuine value, for example by providing some context for specific situations she finds herself in. I suppose one of the benefits of having been around since manual typewriters were new-fangled, is that you can draw on many quite diverse experiences to help explain whey large organisations are the way they are. That said, one of the traps is to simply say "well that's the way it is - like it or lump it." On the other hand, it also seems wrong to suggest to new young person in the workplace that if they feel strongly enough about something, they can change it. As always, it seems to me that the answer is in the middle.

So I hope the advice I've been giving has been along the lines, "well here is how and why situation x might have come about." "And here are some things you might want to think about when you come to decide how you're going to respond or act."

This is pretty much the standard operating procedure in the articles and other references I've seen on mentoring including, fortuitously, one I ran across in last weekend's Australian, that we were able to discuss this week. Much more useful than most stuff you find in the Oz I must say (the old man used to call it the Troglodyte Times).

And while there's countless forests being cut down to pontificate about the work/life balance, work is a microcosm of life. Particularly in that what you get out depends on what you put in; and it all centres around human relationships. Mrs VVB and I were fortunate to live in some quite exotic places overseas for a few years. How much we enjoyed some of those places depended immediately on the state of relationships between the people in my office. In a couple of places, one poisonous relationship informed every other work and private relationship in the community - who you socialised with, who you talked to, whether you could get anything done. Utterly toxic and because of the remote nature of the place where we were all thrown together, it affected partners and was on 24/7.

In a big office the effects may not be quite so devastating, but they can certainly take the gloss off an otherwise attractive job.

Then today I caught up with mentoree from 3 years ago, who has just chucked in her job and is off to do some very different things. The situations that this mentoree and I dealt with during that year were a bit different: she got a couple of job offers from companies so we had a lot of fun thinking about the implications of accepting one or another or of her staying put. That's eventually what happened but she left the organisation shortly afterwards and has been through a couple of jobs since. So I always like listening to her and discussing what issue or factor has driven the latest decision. I can't relate - expect intellectually - to having that flexibility in terms of (relative lack of) commitment to a particular job, but I certainly admire those who do.

Back in the mid '70s - 1975 to be exact - I moved to a new organisation and I clearly remember the leadup to Christmas. I made friends with a bloke with whom I had a lot in common and we'd be off to the pub for lunch nearly every day during that December. Couldn't happen now and in fact my little fiefdom is busier now than we've been all year. How did all this come about?

I'd speculate, but this bench is not set up for typing and my neck is tingling or throbbing or something, I've enough typing (was doing some work before this) so I'll leave it up to anybody who wants to comment.

I suspect this little story doesn't hang together all that well, but I'm sure one the many thousands of people who lurk at rancho VVB can fill in the gaps. Such, f'rinstance, the two unnamed people in the story????