it's been a while ...
...but better late than never as they say. Taking up the narrative again in the very beginning of 2019, after an eerily mild December and the best UK summer ever in 2018.
To properly fill you in on my exploits, I need to take you back to the beginning of 2015 and my departure from a particularly nasty project, political and filled with the sort of queen bees, tree weasels, troglodytes and naked emperors that one rarely sees clustered together. Life as a day-rate change monkey can sometimes be fraught; occasionally those permanent employees detached to work on a project are the lame, indolent and maliciously incompetent that the business can well do without for a year or two and this makes it tough to actually deliver a meaningful, sustainable and well-designed business transformation.
This project was one of those ever-so-rare conjunctions of massive egos, imposter-syndrome afflicted kids and spreadsheet jockeys, all producing a cloud of jargon-speckled slide decks carefully designed to obscure their serious lack of understanding. Of course, I was simultaneously afflicted with the repeated bouts of post-surgical infection mentioned earlier, and must have had as many courses of antibiotics as the number of months I lasted before fleeing the building. That allowed a feverish haze to soften the edges of the glares and jibes from the chief bee and her henchdrone, and I probably looked as bemused as I felt, observing these two posturing, conspiring and manipulating their way around a misconceived project, a dispirited team and a mish-mash of methodologies cobbled together in no particular order.
With relief I shambled my way from the building, surgical drain strapped to my thigh and sweating lightly. A few weeks at home resting and polishing my cv. would do me good.
You're probably wondering what happened to the lymphocele, right? The softball-sized swelling on my upper thigh ... well after all the various surgeries, medications and injections failed I had given up hope. A brace of private surgeons in Oxford offered to anastomose - splice - all the leaky lymphatics individually into adjacent veins, the procedure taking around 7 hours with both of them working simultaneously and costing £17k. I couldn't afford that so limped home to await death. Even the admiring (if mistaken) glances my bulgy inguinal region received from young ladies failed to lift my mood.
As is usually the way when I am wallowing in self-pity, the Good Lord sent a solution that was elegant and slightly ironic. All the previous infections I had experienced were cellulitis - meaning a diffuse non-localised spread of bacteria through the tissue of my leg but not into the lump itself, which had continued producing beautiful clear lymph like a village well. This time, however, the lump itself got infected and I frankly refused to do anything about it, being by now tired of the whole thing. After an uncomfortable while, the infection subsided and marvellously, the lymphodema had gone. The scarification caused had closed the leaky vessels and I was mostly cured.
Buoyed by that we took a decent holiday - a staycation in the UK - and I took on the next contract role with a large organisation as a result of my stellar performance in an assessment centre they ran. This was on a Wednesday, the funky and engaging change lady who had sat cross-legged on a table in a purple tracksuit and supervised the assessment centre hired me on Thursday, I linked to her on LinkedIn on the Friday and Saturday was appalled to see from her profile that she'd resigned. I started work on the Monday already somewhat leery and sure enough my suspicions were soon confirmed when I encountered yet another and more venomous queen bee with an even more toxic minion in tow. Tossing her curls she buzzed around the building and cast glances of disfavour on the peons, usually transacted into terminations by her henchdrone. By dint of hiding in the top of the multi-storey nowhere near Queen Bee central, I managed to survive my contract year before leaving in disarray and swearing never to return. Any mention from a recruiter of a change role within 2 miles of this well-known London postcode gets an automatic no from me even now, 3 years later.
2016 saw us taking a holiday in Zimbabwe which was emotional, thrilling and strangely disturbing. I'd not been back since my Dad's funeral in 2006 and my wife and kids had never been there. Of course Harare was a right mess, with potholed streets and chaotic traffic, but once on the road driving south towards my birthplace the roads became perfect, empty of traffic and surrounded by lovely trees. The occasional police roadblocks were perfunctory and unintrusive, disarmed by my production of a metal Zimbabwean driver's license from the window of a functional pickup truck. The 300 kilometres of old familiar road worked its magic and set up a resonance in my soul, and the warm autumnal weather sent a mellow glow through my bones. Home again.
To properly fill you in on my exploits, I need to take you back to the beginning of 2015 and my departure from a particularly nasty project, political and filled with the sort of queen bees, tree weasels, troglodytes and naked emperors that one rarely sees clustered together. Life as a day-rate change monkey can sometimes be fraught; occasionally those permanent employees detached to work on a project are the lame, indolent and maliciously incompetent that the business can well do without for a year or two and this makes it tough to actually deliver a meaningful, sustainable and well-designed business transformation.
This project was one of those ever-so-rare conjunctions of massive egos, imposter-syndrome afflicted kids and spreadsheet jockeys, all producing a cloud of jargon-speckled slide decks carefully designed to obscure their serious lack of understanding. Of course, I was simultaneously afflicted with the repeated bouts of post-surgical infection mentioned earlier, and must have had as many courses of antibiotics as the number of months I lasted before fleeing the building. That allowed a feverish haze to soften the edges of the glares and jibes from the chief bee and her henchdrone, and I probably looked as bemused as I felt, observing these two posturing, conspiring and manipulating their way around a misconceived project, a dispirited team and a mish-mash of methodologies cobbled together in no particular order.
With relief I shambled my way from the building, surgical drain strapped to my thigh and sweating lightly. A few weeks at home resting and polishing my cv. would do me good.
You're probably wondering what happened to the lymphocele, right? The softball-sized swelling on my upper thigh ... well after all the various surgeries, medications and injections failed I had given up hope. A brace of private surgeons in Oxford offered to anastomose - splice - all the leaky lymphatics individually into adjacent veins, the procedure taking around 7 hours with both of them working simultaneously and costing £17k. I couldn't afford that so limped home to await death. Even the admiring (if mistaken) glances my bulgy inguinal region received from young ladies failed to lift my mood.
As is usually the way when I am wallowing in self-pity, the Good Lord sent a solution that was elegant and slightly ironic. All the previous infections I had experienced were cellulitis - meaning a diffuse non-localised spread of bacteria through the tissue of my leg but not into the lump itself, which had continued producing beautiful clear lymph like a village well. This time, however, the lump itself got infected and I frankly refused to do anything about it, being by now tired of the whole thing. After an uncomfortable while, the infection subsided and marvellously, the lymphodema had gone. The scarification caused had closed the leaky vessels and I was mostly cured.
Buoyed by that we took a decent holiday - a staycation in the UK - and I took on the next contract role with a large organisation as a result of my stellar performance in an assessment centre they ran. This was on a Wednesday, the funky and engaging change lady who had sat cross-legged on a table in a purple tracksuit and supervised the assessment centre hired me on Thursday, I linked to her on LinkedIn on the Friday and Saturday was appalled to see from her profile that she'd resigned. I started work on the Monday already somewhat leery and sure enough my suspicions were soon confirmed when I encountered yet another and more venomous queen bee with an even more toxic minion in tow. Tossing her curls she buzzed around the building and cast glances of disfavour on the peons, usually transacted into terminations by her henchdrone. By dint of hiding in the top of the multi-storey nowhere near Queen Bee central, I managed to survive my contract year before leaving in disarray and swearing never to return. Any mention from a recruiter of a change role within 2 miles of this well-known London postcode gets an automatic no from me even now, 3 years later.
2016 saw us taking a holiday in Zimbabwe which was emotional, thrilling and strangely disturbing. I'd not been back since my Dad's funeral in 2006 and my wife and kids had never been there. Of course Harare was a right mess, with potholed streets and chaotic traffic, but once on the road driving south towards my birthplace the roads became perfect, empty of traffic and surrounded by lovely trees. The occasional police roadblocks were perfunctory and unintrusive, disarmed by my production of a metal Zimbabwean driver's license from the window of a functional pickup truck. The 300 kilometres of old familiar road worked its magic and set up a resonance in my soul, and the warm autumnal weather sent a mellow glow through my bones. Home again.
posted by Shane Hodgson at 11:33 am
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