BlackMan Time

Archive for 2007

It is midnight or later. You are still on the internet checking your emails.

You then surf over to a music related site. It could be MySpace, YouTube or even Hi5. It doesn’t really matter: they all function the same way.

Without warning your silence and sanity is violated by loud music coming from the site you’ve just visited. You scramble madly to turn off the site sound. You can’t find the volume button on the site. In fact there isn’t one.

By the time you eventually turn down the volume on your computer the peace has been disturbed by a good minute or so. But at that time of the morning it seems much longer…

Don’t you just hate it when people with personal websites don’t ask your permission before inflicting their content onto you?

It could have been worse, of course. You could have visited a porn site with two consenting adults getting it on. Then your neighbours would either confirm you for the pervert they think you are!

The motto of the story is never surf the web with your volume on early in the morning.

It is a hard concept to grasp that sometimes you cannot hurry the pace of change or progress. Every businessman is taught to plan things, set (achievable) goals, monitor progress and then evaluate as necessary.

But sometimes the correct thing to do is to just sit and wait while market forces or nature takes its course!

I won’t go into the specifics but a couple of incidents over the past few months have shown me this to be so. When you first discover this it initially makes you feel weak when in reality you are being strong to resist the temptation to flex your own entrepreneurial muscles.

Even when one’s conscience and vibes is telling you to just chill you find it hard to do that because in your mind you may feel that unless you are actually controlling things, things are in fact controlling you!

Surprise yourself by discovering this phenomena soon! It’s liberating!

Imagine a natural man from rural Bangladesh on the phone as the customer service representative for an internet service provider.

Then imagine Peter Sellers (or any other comic European for that matter) imitating what he thinks is a natural man from rural Bangladesh. Now, imagine you being on the phone to such a person and they are actually trying to advise you on your bank balance…

The very last thing I want to do is to denigrate anyone from Bangladesh, their accent or culture. But having anyone who is not as familiar with English as they should does not inspire confidence, particularly when you are discussing private and/or confidential services.

No amount of polite chit chat can compensate for the extreme frustration you feel when you have to repeat something as simple as a postcode to such a person who under the circumstances may be trying their very best.

But, you have to concede that such best as they are able to deliver is simply not good enough. So, what do you do in such circumstances?

The easiest thing is to hang up the phone and redial hoping you will get a better quality of operator. The next thing is probably to switch accounts to a service where you don’t have to deal with people who are not familiar with your language.

This is the reality we have to consider in an environment where businesses are looking to save money so that they can keep most of the profits. Maybe they spend that profit on trying to retain the customers they already have.

I’m sure we can all understand that concept!

There is a grave danger that England, inventor of soccer, will not qualify for Euro 2008 and all patriotic English supporters are bracing themselves at the prospect.

England football heads are torn between doing the right thing and doing the thing that will underpin English pride.

Doing the right thing means getting the right coach regardless of his nationality, as long as s/he’s a proven winner. Sven was a proven winner but in the end he was removed amidst a clamour for an English coach.

Enter the doing right thing coach Steve McClaren, the right man for restoring (and maintaining) English pride. But it has not worked out that way so now the FA and others are considering replacing their manager. And the choice is still doing the right thing or reinforcing English pride.

For whatever reason England is and has been incapable of achieving both, not since 1966. This suggests that winning the world cup in 1966 was a fluke!

How else can one explain the 40 year trophy famine?

It is very easy to misunderstand someone who is not afraid to speak their mind. To the meek and mild this kind of person will either appear as a loud mouth, arrogant, pushy or simply over-confident.

To others this person could also represent a good speaker, representative, spokesperson or rep.

Now, all of these assumptions may actually be wrong, especially if the accused is actually quite mild mannered but adopts this confident person only to get through whatever journey or obstacle s/he faces.

But it’s no use telling some people not to judge a book by its cover when they’ve already started to print the first 100,000 copies of that book! What should the accused do?

Should he change his/her ways so as not to give others the opportunity to form a wrong opinion? Or should s/he continue just being themselves and don’t give a damn about the consequences?

I favour the second option because at least being oneself is easy to repeat. Living up to other people’s expectations is always an impossible conundrum to solve.

What do you think?

The secrets of some scams very often reveal themselves to you without you having to do anything special to attract them. This was a thought which popped into my head the other day when a job agency called me up to find out my interest in a particular job.

Chance would have it that a rival agency had called me up a month before about the say job but they had offered twice as much as the current agency for the three month contract. It suddenly came onto me that it was possible the second agency was trying to scam me by offering a lower rate and pocketing the difference for themselves while still taking a 20% commission out of the amount the company would pay me.

Of course I have no way of knowing whether any of this is true. It’s just an accusation but this is one of the reasons why I particularly don’t like agencies but I use them because they do sometimes get me work.

They are a necessarily evil. This in itself sounds like I’ve surrendered my soul to the devil!

I’d rather eat molten rock than let this happen!

Somewhere, deep in the heart of many people lives the belief that you are only a Christian only if you go to church. But, try as hard as I might, I can’t get round to the idea of loving going to church. So what does it make a believer in God who doesn’t go to church?

If I am honest what I hate the most about going to church is mixing with people who aren’t really Christians at all but are in fact just Sunday Christians. They live for going to church only a Sunday, with or without their belief in God. They are in their elements on this one special day because during the week you see them acting like the devil’s special envoy.

They give good examples, of course, of being hypocrites!

Prerogative is probably too strong a word to describe such people but it’s the most apt word I can think of. Being the kind of person I am it is hard for me to square such a circle of deceit. But, these kinds of people are everywhere: not just in church. The main difference is that I don’t choose to spend any time with them.

In the back of my mind I keep thinking that being a believer in God is all about the personal relationship you share with God, whatever one’s concept of God is. But for some people going to church is more important than belief in God.

I am not sure if that’s right, somehow…

There is this angelic woman I like very much; she floats my boat just thinking about her but I don’t know how to reach her.

She hardly communicates with me and is so deep into herself that I sometimes have to send out raiding parties to find her!

On those rare occasions when I do find her she seems glad and happy to see me that it makes the wait so worthwhile. If I had doubted that she even knew I existed, when I find her all the doubts disappear. Until I don’t hear from her for a few days. Maybe a week or so…

When I first met her I told her how I felt about her and she didn’t run! All she said was: “I hear you…”

These days I just give her as much space as possible and hope one day she’ll be ready to run with me, but as the days turns into weeks and the weeks into months I am beginning to doubt anything is going to happen.

Maybe this is the way things are meant to be because my own philosophy is if you have to chase someone so hard after you’ve told them how you feel about them then maybe you are wasting your time.

It’s a shame if this is true, but such is life.

I had to write down the names of all the people I wanted to thank for helping me in my life for a BBC-organised comedy course I attended earlier this year. The list was long and contained the names of people who were actually quite negative towards me at the time I knew them.

But I put them down because their negative vibe actually influenced me to rise above their negativity. However, their negativity wasn’t their uncanny effort to motivate me: it was because they were actually quite negative!

Now, I know a few people who were traumatised by being singled out for this kind of treatment. All I knew was that regardless of what some teacher or other person said about me I was always going to proceed in the direction I felt comfortable with, God wanted me to go or was in my plans to visit. I reasoned that since I wasn’t responsible for what other people said or thought about me, I was going to take control, as much as I could, about the direction of my life.

The only problem with this is that I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to go with my life, particularly immediately after finishing school! So I drifted for two years – well, actually I found work and that gave me a focus. Then I decided I was going to re-educate myself because I somehow felt I had been mis-educated at school!

I remember deliberately going out and buying a few key books, reading them on my own initiative and feeling a great sense of achievement because I had done that. In the process I discovered I liked photography so I enrolled on a full-time photography course, got a full maintenance grant and studied at a Yorkshire college for two years. It was a major turning point in my life because it introduced me to my future vocation: communicating with people on a grand scale!

I was taught to see photography as a way of communicating and to look at design as a way to solve problems. But as my interest and local notoriety in photography grew I realise I also liked film making and writing too! So, I added these elements as part of my communications tool.

For me, it seems, life gets really interesting when you make a conscious effort to do something and follow through with it regardless of the obstacles you may find. But I also still give thanks to those who have motivated me with their negativity!

Another key thing I’ve learnt this year is the strength of determination and goal setting in achieving. At the end of last year I realised I needed to move in a new direction because I wasn’t happy with the course my life was taking.

So I sat down and analysed where I was, what I had achieved and calculated where I wanted to go. This little exercise showed me a lot because I was able to see where I had been going wrong. Then I prayed to God and asked for help!

It’s amazing what something so simple like taking a step back and examining your path, can reveal! I did what I call a friends audit: where I looked at the people around me and asked “who is really my friend?”

In the past I had gauged a friend as anyone who was willing to go the extra mile for me. Or those who would do simple things like call me up to ask how I was without using the occasion to ask me to do something for them!

The ultimate friend, of course, is someone who would give up their life to save yours, but I wasn’t asking for that criterion in this instance!

From this I saw that I did indeed have far more people I could really call friends than I realised. This realisation made me feel blessed and so one of my resolutions was to maintain good relations with people, especially those who showed by their actions they were in my corner.

I have felt happier since that time. Although its not directly related to achieving the emotional security you get from feeling loved by people around you is immeasurable!