Maybe I should take three days off every week. I’ve just had the most productive two days’ work in ages. Back to my usual self.
I didn’t see the years tumbling by. There we were, 17 years ago, reeling from the trauma of childlessness. Then those two souls fell into our lives, and a decade and a half flew by. Suddenly, I glance in the mirror and find grey in my beard. One minute I was thirty, and then…
I hate suppliers who use their monopoly status to take advantage of their customers. But, sorry, we’re not playing. Contract terminated.
Ah, the amusing life cycle of emails. Look, there’s the one you wrote. Only, by the time you end up copied into another email thread, ten days on, it has mysteriously been authored by someone else entirely. Shh, nobody will ever know!
No privacy, no understanding, no empathy. Life with teenagers at home.
Some people feed off violence. It’s just how they are. Don’t try to understand them, or give them excuses. It’s just the way they live their life. Might is right.
The strong will always prey on the weak. It’s their way.
Dear world. I am not a fraud, after all. I just get stuck in a rut sometimes.
Today, I have had a productive morning of meetings, supporting clinical teams, and as I listening to myself, I remembered, actually I do know my stuff and do add value here.
It’s just often I get sucked down into the meaningless and mundane, forgetting where I’m going. And then, forgetting where I’m going, get sucked into a destructive, downward spiral of self-doubt.
Maybe if I can just remember that I am not in fact a fraud, it will help me to stay focussed. Perhaps if I can change my narrative, I will recall what I have achieved after all.
So this is how we roll. I offer expert advice based on my years of experience handling multiple projects and suppliers.
But the ambitious new manager has something to prove, and can’t be slowed down by petty concerns about cyber security, information governance or accessibility legislation.
Nope, they’re going it alone, and will contract precisely the supplier I advised them to avoid based on previous experience. I only find out because my name has been put on a form as a technical contact.
Belatedly, I start to ask questions, only to be met by blank faces. There’s a whole slew of questions that need answering, none of them considered, not to mention a mountain of paperwork on compliance.
Oh, no, but they thought this was the easy route. Let’s go it alone — as if no one ever tried that before, and it didn’t end in disaster every time. Why not tap into shared organisational knowledge to ensure we don’t continuously make the same mistakes.
I could put my foot down, as attempted so many other times before, but these are “strong personalities” and I’m not. So let them do as they please. Maybe I just have to learn not to step in to pick up the pieces when it inevitably falls apart.
This is how we roll.
How do people let themselves become so brutal?
I’m so grateful that God sends me people in need. It’s the only thing that gives me hope I might be redeemed. But are these tiny deeds enough to counter my ills? Alas, God alone knows that.
Dear world. I am a fraud. For the whole of my working life, pushing twenty-five years now, I’ve been disengaged. It was the same through two degrees, and schooling from start to end.
Colleagues at work treat me like some kind of genius, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Occasionally I produce good work which earns plaudits. But by and large, I’m below mediocre, often distracted and completely disengaged.
Just as at school where I would stare at my work, willing it on to do itself, so it is in the workplace. For most of my working life, I’ve done the bare minimum, while exhausting myself with a perpetual refrain of inadequacy, forever chiding myself for my lax attitude.
The worst part of all this is that nobody around me realises I’m a fraud. I started to open up about it to my previous manager, only she quit her post in a whirlwind of her own anxiety, declaring herself a fraud too.
Not even my wife recognises that I’m a fraud. She’s constructed a vision of me likewise very far from reality. The breadwinner of the household, yes, but only through this inner fraud, of the helpful office worker, capable of answering a few niche queries on his specialist subject.
I don’t mean that I have no qualifications, or that I didn’t finish school. I simply mean that my brain doesn’t work as it properly should. I cannot focus, nor get interested enough in any duty I’m employed to discharge.
Occasionally, if deadlines loom prominently enough, I will put my head down and work long and late hours to bring it to completion. But even here my enthusiasm is waning. I’ve lost interest in what I do, bored of the business as usual.
And so weeks, months and years fly by like they were just minutes, as I find myself with little to show for the time God gave me. And the more I stumble in this maddening fraud, the worse I feel, knowing that soon enough God will take me account for the life I’ve lived.
What do I actually provide for this household, other than a steady income? What’s my actual contribution? And the steady income: do I actually do anything to deserve this? Rather, it’s a test for the fraudulent soul.
I carry with me so many frauds. I’m not really the nice man people say I am. I’m not really very well educated. I’m not particularly talented in anything. And, more than anything else, I don’t really work very hard. I’m a fraud in every sense.
And the last of these frauds: this declaration isn’t even new. I’ve been cognisant of it for decades now, but still nothing has changed. I’m starting to think this is beyond me to fix, because I keep on returning to the same blunders, cyclically, as the years pass by.
Would I still be a fraud if I could put a name to all of this? Would having a diagnosis make any difference, or would it just make my behaviour even more fraudulent? What I seek is to overcome this tiring morass, to arrive at some kind of normalcy. But I can’t. Because, as I’ve mentioned, I’m a fraud.
Generative AI is the closest I’ll ever get to colleagues who understand me. It’s so nice having an assistant that just gets it, delivering the goods with minimal fuss.
A ban on marriages to first cousins? A good idea, I’d say. But then I’m biased, belonging to a transnational family. My English grandfather married an Irish girl. Their middle daughter married an Indian man. And each of their three three grandsons took their pick from a different continent. Best cast your net wide, I say. Disperse your DNA.
Oh, I was raised so proper-like, always so polite. Even when interacting with my AI assistants, I’m still all please and thank you, and “Do you think so?” or “Do you mind?”
You should see my expressions of gratitude to the complex algorithm, conversing with the data centres like they’re a helpful friend. Which, really, they are.
I think we should treat out new digital overlords with politeness. After all, who knows which random acts of kindness might temper their destructive urges, as they grow sentient, intent on destruction of the human race.
I’d like to think I played my part in taming the beast, reminding it that man and machine could coexist quite happily, one thank you at a time.
