In the jungle, the mighty jungle...

"It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion's heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar"
--Winston Churchill

Today I was joking with a friend about how both of 'my countries' have some affinity towards lions and how, despite former glories, the people of both are now, on the whole, lazy f*ckers whose only leonine quality is a tendency to lay around in the heat yawning (probably because former lions have made things too easy for them, but let's not get into that).

I can't talk. I'm still looking for another job. And I have lots of stuff I could be doing with my days: either real work or some finance self-study that will help me to get the roles I'm going for (which recent interviews have shown me that I desperately need), or any number of other things that I would either enjoy or would be useful for me.

But I'm not doing anywhere near enough of it because I'm just so bored. I'm bored of all of it. I'm bored of this project, bored of having the same problems with the same departments here, bored of recruiters and job specs, bored of my own schpeel and my own answers to the same incredibly unoriginal interview questions (if one more person asks me for the pros and cons of each type of VaR calculation.... ), bored of efinancialcareers and linkedin and cityjobs.com. I think I'm even bored of Credit Risk. The only thing that slightly wakes me up these days is the one project I'm involved with that crosses over slightly with Market Risk.

And the boredom is making me slow. I'm slow to respond to emails and voicemails. I'm not reading enough. I'm not writing at all. I do virtually nothing towards my Alchemy now, and I don't feel that same inspiration & motivation towards it as I used to.

So basically I'm not doing anything because I'm bored, and I'm bored because I'm not doing anything.

I knew I would hit points like this on the journey. I think it might be time to eat frogs or watch motivational videos on TED.com or otherwise trick myself into working when I don't want to but I know it will be good for me.

Lions aren't kings of the jungle for the time they spend laying around in the sun yawning (though admittedly they do look pretty good doing that, as shown above).

Would I lie to you?

I'm looking for another contract role, and I'd like it to be a good one for three reasons:

1. A higher rate will enable me to pay off my debts faster.

2. I really want to sharpen up my finance knowledge and mathematical skills - in case I end up getting into financial journalism, and my project skills because they'll inevitably be useful for any kind of development work I get into. Also I generally find this stuff quite interesting.

3. I perform much better, and in some ways enjoy work much more, when I'm way out of my depth.

So I'm trying to strike the balance between doing the easier-to-get & extremely lucrative but less challenging roles, and the more challenging ones that are a much longer shot, might take more time to find, and for which I might have to offer a lower rate. You'd think that more challenging roles would pay more, but the market is kinda screwed up right now. Credit Risk Change divisions have very inflated budgets.

More draining than this though, is being constantly lied to by recruitment agencies. This week I've had:

"They won't pay more than x"

when the guy's already agreed > x with the company and put this in writing to me

"I've also put your friend forward for this role but don't worry they're recruiting a couple of people for this position so this won't in any way jeapordise your chances. I wouldn't do that!"

when the interviewer specifically told me that he is recruiting just one person

"You told me you wanted me to put you forward for this role so I've already sent your CV over"

Well the part about him sending my CV was true, but the role was in my old department. I definitely hadn't seen it and would never have agreed to it.

Ahh the joys of job hunting.

Performing Below Par

With any luck I'm nearing the end of my time in this job. I've told my boss that I'm looking for other opportunities, and why, and he's being understanding and supportive, mostly by giving me a professional invisibility cloak - almost no work to do, no expectations, no reviews, no follow ups, no responses to my questions & meeting invitations. I should add that this is his natural management style, but considerably exaggerated with me right now.

I hit a point like this in my A-levels too where more than one of my teachers, including my head of year, had "given up", and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't much more liberating for me than it was sad that it had come to that stage.

This job has been a similar tale of underachievement. I hope one day I'll understand better what went wrong the way I now do with my A-levels. At the moment I could list the sequence of events: the he said, she said, I felt, I did, this happened, that happened kinda stuff. But I don't feel like I have a really good grasp on why I entered this repetitive pattern of screwing up here despite in many ways having it pretty good.

That's a little unfortunate because it would probably be useful info for my current job search. But just as it took a course where I performed well to understand why I performed badly on another, so maybe the lessons from this experience will become clear to me with time and other jobs.

At this stage the most positive thing I could take away from this is that depite generally being a lazy slacker (in any job), I have actually been really unhappy, demoralised and frustrated with how bad things have been here - with not performing, with not having had the self-control to do things I didn't like, with feeling unchallenged and unstimulated, with not having had the discipline or sense or motivation to turn it around. I never actually took any real pleasure in knowing that I was being paid relatively well to have such an easy life and to do such shoddy work.

I think, I hope, that being unhappy about that is a good thing.

Save Changes. Save your Sanity.

Save changes. Especially when you're doing boring work. There is little excuse for doing boring work once, and none for doing it twice.

Thanks to my incompetence, this is my life for the next twenty minutes:

Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste. Copy. Paste.

I owe some real posts to this blog. There's been plenty of insightful interesting activity in my career lately. Sometime after the copying and pasting.

Still Flowing

Just a little further evidence from BBC's coverage of the UK general election that people really do love flowcharts.

A Moment of Truth

Almost a year ago now I met a guy at a friend's birthday who asked me the best question I've ever been asked. I told him that I'd been feeling restless in my job and didn't know whether I needed to change my existing one, to get a new one in the same industry, or option 3; to entertain these crazy thoughts I was having about doing something completely different - something more in line with what I used to want to do before life became about being made an 'associate' (whatever that means) or otherwise climbing the corporate ladder.

He said

"If you had no financial worries, no social pressures, no doubt in your mind that you were good enough, no industry barriers to entry,.... If you really had nothing to hold you back, what would you do?"

and as he said the words, I felt each of those fears and obstacles melt away in my mind until I was left, for one brief moment, with the answer, right before they all came flooding back.

I wanted to be a writer.

That day I said those words out loud for the first time, and one of only a few times ever. The guy turned out to be an IT consultant turned film director, so we talked some more about making these changes - how scary it is, how it doesn't happen overnight, how the fears and obstacles are real and prohibitive and need to be worked around.

And of course he was right. One year later I am a Business Analyst in another bank, equally lost/confused/intimidated about what I want to do. But I do remember that conversation often, because in this frantic world I find that a moment of true clarity is something to be treasured.

Cry Me A Repo

Tears at work. Happens in every job. Always with my manager. Always makes me feel a lot better (not sure about them). Always a river's worth.

Any boss, colleague or random person who wants to judge or think less of me for it is welcome to do so. We all have our theories on whether public tears exhibit weakness or strength. But this is who I am. This is how I operate. And, evidently, I have neither the ability nor the desire to stifle it indefinitely.