Everything was better in the old days

 Steve was the Staff Association representative on our floor and came to see me on my first morning at work. This was in the springtime of 1988 when I had embarked on my first step out into the big bad world. With an Accountancy qualification in my back pocket and a head full of dreams, I had boarded a one-way flight for London and landed at a desk in a large insurance company.

I didn’t really know what a Staff Association was. In my teenage years, I had become obsessed with the work of Trade Unions and considered myself an expert on their role in the class struggle. Staff Associations seemed to be a watered-down version of that. Steve begged to differ. They worked in cooperation with Management. It was a consultative process and the threat of strike was never used.

He left a membership form on my desk, along with details about the sports and social club, discounts for local shops and services and an invitation to go to the pub every Friday lunchtime. I stayed there for five years and never had to negotiate a pay increase or promotion. The staff association did all this for me.

It was years before I realised that I was on a collective contract. Apart from anything else, this meant that redundancies where transparent and fair and poor performance was managed.

These days we’re all on individual contracts and can be tossed aside with the casualness of a roman emperor discarding olive pips.

Back in those early days of my working life, I remember a staff meeting where the boss explained that we had three stakeholders. Staff, Customers and Shareholders and that the company ranked them in that order. The logic being that if you treated your staff well and kept them happy, then they would provide a great service to customers. This in turn would increase profits and the company share price.

We had a subsidised canteen which was a blessing to someone like me who couldn’t boil an egg at the time. We had sport fields with tennis and squash courts and a clubhouse selling tasty food and cheap beer. Even our training courses were held in a stately country home with silver service lunches and sumptuous bedrooms.

These days, the ranking has been reversed. Sometime in the 1990s the world was realigned. The Soviet block had collapsed, China was an emerging power and the US spread globalisation and the culture of the individual.

Every job I’ve had since has brought with it an individual contract and the feeling that you are only a useful idiot in the race to maximise shareholder return. We no longer consider staff to be people. They are just numbers on a spreadsheet. Numbers that change to red when the shareholder return is threatened.

I fell victim to this in 2014 when word came from New York that 20% of the staff needed to go and I fell below the line on a distant spreadsheet. I was literally marched out the back door of the building and my feet barely touched the ground. There was no staff association to represent me, no arbitration process. Nothing in fact, apart from a fat paycheck, because money is all that matters these days.

I have done well materially since the change to globalisation. I got on the property ladder in time to surf the bubbles in the boom years  and got off in time when it collapsed in 2007. Even though I’m not ambitious, I have managed to get promotions and pay rises through hard work and playing the political game. But I would swap all of this for the culture of the 1980s and early 90s.

One of my memories of that time was a guy called Alan who was about the age I am now. He was worn down by years of work and probably the laziest and most cynical person I knew. But he had years of experience and a knowledge of the building and the departments within it. So, they gave him the task of re-arranging desks which he embarked on gleefully. He did a good job, but one feature he built in was to place his desk as far a way from the rest of the team he worked in as possible. In those days, there were no mobile phones or email. He then stopped coming to meetings and when we tried to call his desk phone, we would get an engaged tone. Everybody knew he had taken the phone off the hook and nobody wanted to walk to the other end of the building to check if he was there. Later, he would say that he was busy talking to an unnamed branch manager and couldn’t make the meeting.

Everyone knew he was taking the piss, but it was tolerated. The company had got thirty five good years out of him and if he wanted to coast out the last few years, then this was a price they were willing to pay. They worked around it, finding relevant things for him to do, rather than discarding him, as they would today because he doesn’t fit into a cooky cutter version of what they expect from a model employee.

For all his flaws, Alan was a member of our community, and we wrapped our support around him.

Now we are all individuals swimming in a shark infested pool. While we get to enjoy Netflix, international travel and luxury goods, it comes with a price. We now live with uncertainty and stress. We don’t build relationships at work because we suspect we or they won’t be around for long enough for it to flourish. And most importantly we are less productive as we don’t feel a connection to where we work and it’s hard to concentrate when you are uncertain and stressed. So, we spend time looking at our phones or writing blogs. Which might explain why I have a meeting with HR at 4pm.             

First World Problems Volume Two

 I was at the gate in Charles De Gaulle airport recently about to board a seven hour flight to Doha. Our flight was about to leave when I noticed that Qatar Airlines had seated me, my wife and twelve year old daughter in three separate rows. I also noted that they had put all three of us in central seats. These are the runt of the seating litter. You lose the benefit of being able to rest against the side or have easy access to the toilets.

Apart from this, my daughter is anxious about flying at the best of times. The prospect of being wedged between two strangers for a significant length of time did not appeal to her and she put on a good tearful performance in front of the Qatar representative. He relented and got at least two of the seats together. That left me on my own. I would normally enjoy a break from the demands of parenting, but my heart sank when I noticed who I’d be sitting between. It seemed to be the two largest people on the flight and they can’t have been cheered when they saw me rumbling down the aisle.

I wedged myself in and didn’t move until we landed in Doha.

I’ve mentioned before that everything about long distance travel has gotten worse. The queues to check in, the food, the endless add-ons that they try to sell you, the time you wait for baggage, the courtesy of the staff and most of all the width and legroom in the seats.

In the 1990s, seats were typically 46 cm wide and legroom was 90 cm. These have reduced to 41 cm and 71 cm in the meantime. And of course, I’ve got bigger in that time. While I except that this is my problem, the average person has also grown in the last thirty years. It’s now a battle to get in and out of the seat and god forbid you need to go to the toilet on a 17 hour flight and you’re not in the aisle seat.

In addition, airlines seem to have figured out their capacity issues. Up until 2010, there were usually empty seats at the back of long haul flights which led to a lolly scramble once the plane took off from weary travellers who wanted to lie out over four seats. Since 2010, every flight I’ve been on has been packed.

I understand that airlines want to make money and squeezing more people into planes, reducing frontline staff so queues are longer and providing cheaper and tasteless food is part of this relentless chase for dollars.

But does it have to be like this? Surely, if Capitalism worked in the way it’s supporters claim, then there should be choice to customers like me. Some airlines could compete on cost and some on quality. But I’ve flown with all the providers who fly from Australia/New Zealand to Europe and they all have the same shit quality standards. And they all compete on price. Why can’t one of them offer more legroom at a higher price?

The answer may rest in one of the other developments in airline travel in recent years. Inflation has increased prices by about 100% in the last thirty years but airlines prices are roughly the same. That means there is a far higher demand for travel now. Back in 1995 it was only highly paid accountants and trust fund students who could afford to travel to the other side of the world. Now, every Tom, Dick and Harry can make that trip.

To counteract this, airlines have introduced Premium Economy. This essentially provides the same level of service that you would have found in economy back in 1995. The extra legroom means that you don’t have to tuck your knees into your chest. The seat width means that you can sleep without resting your head on the shoulder of your neighbour and the food has flavour and taste. It seems that it’s aimed at people like me, who are nostalgic for the good old days.  

And funnily enough the cost of Premium Economy is 100% higher than Economy. So, airlines have figured out that you can have 1995 quality if you’re willing to pay the equivalent of 1995 prices.

This race to the bottom in pricing is part of a bigger problem. My first job after I qualified was with an Insurance company in London. They explained to me during induction that their priorities were staff, customers and shareholders in that order. Their logic was that if you looked after staff well, they would be nicer to customers and this would improve profits.

They were true to their word. I’ve never had a job since where my salary was automatically adjusted to the market rate but never downwards, that offered a subsidised and plentifully canteen, that sent me on regular training courses, that provided a sporting facility that had football and rugby pitches and a clubhouse that offered cheap food and beer.

I realise now that I had arrived in London and at the end of a golden age. When tea ladies would come round with tea and biscuits at 10am and it was understood that no work was done on Friday afternoons. I spent five years there and never worked late or at weekends. The view was that if you couldn’t get stuff done in your normal hours, then there was something wrong with the process.

Everything has now changed. The shareholder is king and staff and customers are irrelevant, apart from when it comes to squeezing them for more profits. I’m sure if any of my colleagues are still with that Insurance company, then they are probably no longer on collective contracts, or have defined benefit pensions.

Capitalism is a rapacious beast of course and it will ultimately destroy everything. And on that cheery note, I will say goodbye and hopefully find something more uplifting to write about next week.

 

 

 

The Tale of the Westport Belle

Bobby was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He came from Edinburgh and had made his way to New Zealand in 1995 for much the same reason that I had. We had both been dumped unceremoniously by long term girlfriends and sought solace in the rarefied air of the South Island.

I was sleeping on a friend’s sofa and Bobby was a lodger staying in the spare room. I passed him in the corridor on my first night and we shared the sort of suspicious hello that occurs when strangers who have a common friend meet.

The next day, I took a walk through the pretty streets of Christchurch. This was sixteen years before the devastating earthquake destroyed that city. Back in 1995 it was a delightfully quaint place with the faint air of a provisional English town. I strolled around in the sunshine and picked up some postcards to send home. It was lunchtime and I found a corner in a city centre pub to fill them out. It was Monday and the only customers in the pub were sad old men staring into their beer like terracotta soldiers and the occasional tourist like me.

And then I noticed Bob, who was nursing a pint and studying the crossword in the Christchurch Times. I asked if I could join him and we fell into easy conversation. We discussed the vagaries of love and how nobody thought about blokes like us when they claimed that the world was a patriarchy.

Bob had been working on building sites and had finished his contract the previous Friday. He now seemed intent to drink all his earnings. We settled in for the afternoon and toured a lot of city centre pubs that sadly are no longer there.

At 10pm we entered the last watering hole for what we promised would be our final beer of the night. In my memory, it was really busy which seems at odds which my current experience. One of the great disappointments about Auckland is that pubs are mainly interested in selling food and they close up soon after the last desert is consumed. And as Kiwis don’t have a Spanish eating culture, this is usually around 8pm.

We ended up wedged in the corner with a crusty old sea farer called Fred. He had the sort of white beard and belly that could earn him extra money in the run up to Christmas if he was willing to wear a red suit and let small children sit on his lap.

It turned out that Bob could get a conversation out of a corpse and he was soon quizzing Fred on his life on the high seas. Fred claimed that he was from the West Coast of New Zealand and was reluctantly in the ‘big smoke’ to settle a court case related to over fishing. His boat, the “Westport Belle” was moored in Lyttelton Harbour, which was just over the hill from where we were drinking.

We told him we were at a loose end and in search of adventure. So, he invited us to accompany him on his voyage back to Westport. He even offered to lash Bob’s beat up old Holden station wagon to the deck so that we could drive back across the Southern Alps. The trip involved navigating Cook Straits, which is one of the most treacherous seas in the world. But I was young and dumb at the time and that didn’t faze me. 

We returned excitably to our digs, explained to our hosts that we off early on an awfully big adventure and that we would see them in a week or so.

The next morning, we turned up slightly hungover at the pre-arranged meeting point. A few rusting fishing boats dangled from the pier. However, none matched the description or carried the name we were looking for. We searched for a while and then headed to the Port Authority office. A kindly old man sat behind the counter, round rimless glasses perched precariously at the end of his nose.

We asked for the whereabouts of the “Westport Belle”. He looked up ominously and stared at us for a minute, as though we had mentioned words that would release demons. “The Westport Belle sunk twelve years ago”, he muttered. “With the loss of all four lives on board.”

Bob and myself exchanged a nervous look. Were we the victims of an extravagant joke or did we meet a ghost on our odyssey around Christchurch’s pub scene?

We slunk back to Bob’s car and pondered our options. The last thing we wanted to do was head back to our friend’s house with our tales between our legs and admit that we had been had. So, we decided to head off on a road trip anyway. We headed north to Kaikura, a beautiful town famous for whale watching. We arrived around 6pm and found some lodging and retired to the pub. Those were the good old days when I could hold up a bar for two nights in a row.

The next morning, we gingerly made our way down to the pier and boarded the metal hulled whale watching boat. Twenty minutes later, I was chundering into a plastic bucket like a food poisoned child. We did a see a few whales though which kind of made it worthwhile. When we got back to shore we had to decide on our next move. We could sleep in the back of the station wagon, so we decided on a slow trip back to base.

When we finally returned to our friend’s place, they were keen for news. We muttered that we had a good time and claimed to be too tired to talk. We went to bed and the next day we were relieved that the subject was never mentioned again.

I lost touch with Bob after that. I hope he managed to find love again like I did and that maybe like me, he decided to make New Zealand his home.

 

The strange meeting with a Murderer in the night

Leon slid up to our table outside a city center pub, gliding in on one of those electric scooters you can rent for five bucks a minute. Only, the hum of the electric motor was conspicuously absent. Leon had broken the lock and was using it like a skateboard.

Without waiting for an invitation, he parked himself beside us, his heavily tattooed arms splayed across the table, hidden behind wrap-around shades. He smiled, menacingly. He started grilling us about our heritage. In New Zealand, that’s a dicey subject. Full of implication that if you don’t have 100% Maori blood, you’re not a true native. My companion launched into his family history, tracing it back to ancestors on the first ship from Scotland. I kept quiet, fully aware of my status as a guest in a colonized land.

We later learned that Leon’s family hailed from Samoa, easing my invader guilt. Turns out, we were all visitors here.

After the heritage interrogation, Leon began his tale. Born in New Zealand, he left for Sydney at the tender age of two. Fast forward twenty years, and his life was a litany of broken homes, drug addled parents and a school system that chewed him up and spat him out like a piece of old gum. A misstep too far landed him in the clink. Upon serving his sentence, he expected to return to his family in Sydney, presumably resuming to a life of crime, if statistics had any say.

But Canberra’s new right-wing government was on a mission to deport as many brown folks as possible, using any minor offense as justification. Kiwis were caught in the crossfire. Thanks to a bilateral agreement, people with Australian passports, like me, could live and work in New Zealand, and vice versa. Most didn’t bother with citizenship in their adopted country.

This had two implications for people at opposite ends of the social scales. The first was for those that had children and want to get them into an Australian University. The kids don’t get Australian citizenship automatically and are treated as overseas students when they are old enough to go to College. That extra cost usually forces the parents to swallow their Kiwi pride and head down to the passport office.

Australia’s new hard line on criminals legislation also made no concessions for Kiwis, turning long-term residents into ‘501’ deportees—named after the penal code, not the jeans. I’m sure the Levi marketing department are not too pleased about being connected to such a controversial policy.

Leon fell victim to this. Raised in Sydney’s rough inner-city suburbs, he racked up tattoos and a rap sheet, culminating in a stint at Long Bay Correctional Centre for a murder charge. I shifted uneasily in my seat when he revealed this, noticing for the first time the teardrop tattoo under his right eye—a symbol of regret, supposedly. Leon, however, was brimming with rage.

He let us sit with that for a while. The knowledge that we were sharing a table with a murderer. We must be surrounded by bad people all the time of course, but rarely do they bowl up to you in the street and promote their badness. But it seemed to bother us more than it bothered him. He was much more concerned about the injustices he’d faced, than any sense of remorse towards his victim.

Upon completing his sentence, he was intercepted by immigration police and detained with Afghan and Iranian refugees en-route to Christmas Island or some other gulag that Australia sends the unfortunate folk who reach its shore looking for refuge.

While in the detention center, he also met his first Kiwi gang members, who promised to look after him when he got deported back to New Zealand.

When that day came, he was flown to Auckland in handcuffs. The Aussie policemen waved good goodbye in the Auckland arrival terminal and he was immediately  greeted by two New Zealand cops who clamped him in fresh handcuffs and treated him like dirt on their shoe. After two days in a cell, being quizzed about his intentions and being regularly reminded about how unwelcome he was in his new homeland, he was dumped into a boarding hostel, a sort of half-way house for 501s, isolated from his family in Australia and Samoa, and stuck in a limbo that has lasted four years.

He hadn't worked in that time, the 501 stigma branding him a hardcore criminal. But it seemed his detention buddies were keeping him afloat financially. Two states, the land of his birth and the country he had lived in for most of his life, had abandoned him and he found friendship and support in the criminal world. It seems so obvious that this would happen that you wonder why the authorities don’t try to do something about it.

But then, there are a million things the authorities don’t deal with, climate change, income inequality, corporate tax evasion etc. Not sure why I’m naïve enough to think they’d do anything about hardened criminals arriving in your country with no prospect of work and established links with the drug industry, while in detention.

The real beneficiaries of the 501 process were airlines who get the contract to fly all these over here and the New Zealand gang industry. Gangs, who love their motorcycles and drug trade, found a steady influx of muscle in the deportees from Oz. New Zealand complained about Australia dumping its criminals, but we also deport Samoans, Fijians, and Tongans by the busload. It’s a revolving door: as they leave, they're replaced by 501s.

Leon hopped back on his scooter and vanished into the night, leaving us to wrestle with our guilt—products of white privilege, untouched by the tattoos we so abhor. But it also makes me think I’d better get my Kiwi citizenship, in case I do something naughty and get sent back to Melbourne in shame and condemned to a life with a biker gang over there.

St Patrick's Day in the rare ould times

When I was a young fella growing up in the dreary smoked smothered streets of Ireland, St Patrick’s Day was an island in the stormy shark filled seas of Lent. Whatever penance you had imposed on yourself, giving up sweets or sugar in your tea or back chat to your parents, could be relaxed for that single day. This was an allowance given by my Mother so that she could also indulge in a few glasses of wine, having set herself an abstinence target until Easter.

Apart from the chocolate and sugary tea, my only other memories of March 17^th in my youth were dreary parades in the rain, dressed only in a polyester scout uniform. There was nothing particularly Irish about these processions. The army dominated events, so it had the air of a May day parade in a small and impoverished Communist state.

We wore fresh shamrock and school reinforced that it was a religious rather than a Nationalist holiday. Mind you, at that time, flag waving was dominated by Irish Republicans who were blowing people up and generally being a menace.

That seemed to change by the time I left Ireland in 1988. Ireland qualified for Euro 88 and it became normal to feel proud of your country. The World Cup in 1990 accelerated this and the very act of me leaving the country seemed to release it from years of backwardness.

I do remember my first St Patrick’s Day outside Ireland. I was in London and desperate to get into a pub in Covent Garden to celebrate the great man’s day. Luckily the bouncer was from Kerry and let us skip past the English people in the queue. He wasn’t just being patriotic. Experience had thought him that Irish people go out to have a good time and if they get drunk it’s a bonus. For English people, it’s the other way around.

Once I’d moved away, celebrating my Irishness became important to me. I remember festivals in Finsbury Park, all night sessions in the Black Stuff in Luxembourg and cramming into a field in Melbourne with hundreds of back packers.

But I’m older now and less able to keep up with the young ones. This year I went with a more sedate approach. Auckland prides itself in having the first St Patrick’s Day parade in the world, as the rest of the world is still in bed by the time festivities kick off here. They ask for 32 volunteers to carry their counties banner and for the second time, I had the honour of walking down the city’s main thoroughfare with Louth’s name and crest held proudly aloft.

The street was thronged by girls in GAA tops, boys in Irish Rugby tops and people from Asia, Africa and everywhere else, who came along for the colour and craic. It made me think of our little island of 7 million souls. No other country gets to shut down the main street of capital cities across the globe. No other country has a guaranteed annual audience with the American president and no other country is honoured by famous buildings and rivers being decked in their national colour.

Ireland certainly punches above its weight around the world and makes you wonder why it took the Irish government so long to harness this soft power. While many foreign companies set up in Ireland for tax reasons, there is a lot of old time sentimentality involved as well.

St Patrick’s Day fell on a Sunday this year and the bars in Auckland were full of people wearing green hats or jumpers who would happily admit that they have no Irish heritage but love to join in when a party is going on. We are known as a fun bunch of people and most of the best pubs here (and in most of the world) are Irish pubs.

It seems a long way from the 1970s when we saw the world through our narrow internal prism, with the only portal to the wider world being provided through British TV. This regularly portrayed Ireland as stupid or backward. Irish jokes were popular, and every Irish character on British TV was either an idiot or a terrorist. Once I moved to England, I found a warmer reception. I noticed that many English people have Irish relatives and while there was gentle ribbing about my inability to pronounce my ‘th’s’ I was generally treated well and the English envied our easy ability to have fun.

It would be hard to find a country that engenders as much good will as Ireland. I guess the fact that we have never invaded another country or gone to war with one, if you excuse our on-going struggle with perfidious Albion, helps in this regard. So, we’ve never really annoyed anyone and we’ve sent out 70 million ambassadors to the world to spread the good word.

I work for a company where 50% of the staff are kiwi born and the rest of us come from about thirty different companies. Lots of them passed my desk in March and wished me a Happy St Patrick’s Day. I don’t remember that happening for any other country. Not even New Zealand, which treats its national day with a large amount of embarrassment and shame. Celebrating a treaty that essentially stole the land from the people who were here first is not a smart move.

Most New Zealanders just take the day off and try not to think about it too much. Which is pretty much how I felt about St Patrick’s Day when I lived in Ireland. There is a paradox that you become more patriotic the further you live from your homeland. I live as far away as is geographically possible. So, I’ll raise a toast to old St Pat again this year and feel a flutter of pride when do we well at sport or culture. It’s a great wee country except when you have to live in it.

 

Do we actually exist?

I used to go drinking with a friend, who after consuming seven or eight pints, would bring up the same question. Do we actually exist? This was usually his get out of jail card when he was failing in other arguments. He had studied philosophy and could polish his opinions with quotes from Aristotle to Wittgenstein.

I floundered for years, instinctively believing in our existence, but unable to prove it. Then Google came along and I was able to do some interesting research. When we next met for a drink and the subject came up, I puffed out my chest and announced, “I think, therefore I am”. The very fact that we were even having the debate proved that we existed. At least, I think that’s what it meant. I tried to argue from a scientific perspective, which became more difficult with each pint I sank.

I’m not a scientist, it should be said. I’m an Accountant, due to an accident at birth. The accident being that I wasn’t born into a family that could afford to send me to university. I envy those people who dreamed of being a doctor, an actor or a scientist. There is a bullshit idea that can be found in many self help books and motivational videos. “If you follow your dream, one day you’ll find it’.

That might work for people with parents who can fund you during your dream chasing phase, but it doesn’t work for people who have to buy food and pay rent. I went down the path of getting any job and then using the money I earned from that to pursue the interests I have. Most of those interests turned out to be beer and curry related.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve wondered what career I would have ended up in, if my parents could have afforded it. If you look at my bookshelf you’ll see that it is dominated with History tomes. Most of these relate to Ireland. It’s troubled relationship with England and the origins of the Irish race in particular. I’m now in my late fifties, so Second World War books are becoming more prevalent. I’m not sure why men of my age become interested in that topic. Perhaps it’s a throw-back to the comics we read as Children and the games we played in back gardens with imitation machine guns fashioned from tree branches and where everybody inexplicably wanted to be a German.

I’ve gotten to the age now where I want to visit a WW2 re-enactment festival, drink real ale and count the rivets on a replica Sherman tank to assess its authenticity.

But I notice that another subject is slowly worming its way onto my shelves. I chose biology over physics at school on the advice of my older brother. Like most of his advice (how to chat up girls, source underage alcohol etc.), I now wish I’d ignored it. The world, the universe and all that is in it is something I’d like to understand.

If I look at the science books that I have, they lean towards physics rather than biology. One in particular has fascinated me recently and I’d like to explore it further.

Scientists would have you believe that the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is on a par with the  unearthing of penicillin or the first moon landing, although the God Particle, as it is known, is unlikely to ease the pain of venereal disease or create conspiracy theories about its dark side.

In fact, it’s not a discovery at all, more a confirmation of what scientists already theorised, or perhaps it is just a simple justification for all the money they spent on the large hadron collider at a time when they should have been investing this money in the more honourable adventure of bailing out banks.

Science is the art of studying the behaviour of 15,000 people to discover what you already know or suspected. For example, you will never see a report on research by the University of Arkansas into childhood obesity, which says that to their great surprise, sugar and a lack of exercise is actually good for kids.

The major achievement of Higgs Boson appears to be the proof that mass can be created out of nothing.  Energy shares space in Einstein’s famous little formula with mass, dangling out there on the left, like a hallucinating drug trying to get into a rave party. Energy can also be created out of nothing. Imagine you are tired after a hard week at work. You want to hit the sofa with a takeaway and a brain numbing night in front of Love Island. You feel like you don’t have the energy to make it to the toilet and contemplate fashioning a colostomy bag from the various crisp packets that litter your sitting room.

Then a text message arrives from a friend inviting you the pub. For the formula to work it has to be a particular friend who makes you laugh and encourages you to have one for the road at 3am. You will find that an instant infusion of energy results and before you know where you are, you are skipping down the road like a Duracell battery on acid.

So if mass and energy can be created out of nothing, then the speed of light must also be nothing. This means that the sun doesn’t exist and this is all a dream. If somebody will give me 10 billion Euros and a large round hole in Switzerland, I’m confident I can prove this.

And perhaps it also proves that my old drinking buddie was right. That science can also prove that we don’t exist. But that would also mean that history doesn’t exist and I’ve been wasting my time reading all those books. But if we don’t exist, then this is all a simulation and I’ve been programmed to be a history reading, blog writing Accountant. I pity the guy who wrote that code.

 

My Podcast Life

On the morning of my 40th birthday, I stopped outside an Apple store in London and looked scornfully at the products within.

I've never been fond of their products, and I made this clear to my friends who were with me at the time. One of them held a senior position within Apple and he chuckled conspiratorially. Later that evening I found out why. I opened the tightly wrapped present they had purchased me and inside was a gleaming new iPod, adorned with an inscribed message from my friends.

That device was the one I listened to my first podcast on. After I had copied all my CDs onto iTunes and transitioned from music to the spoken word. When I left Australia all those CDs went to an op shop and I presume somebody in Melbourne is now enjoying that collection of mournful American female country singers and soft rock. The iPod has also gone to God, so all I'm left with is an electronic copy of 25 years of obsessive music purchases. It's on an old laptop and I'm not even sure I can access it.

I can't remember the first podcast I listened to. But one thing I'm pretty sure of is that I'm not listening to that series now. Over the years my tastes have changed and every time I get a new device, I use it as a chance to cull my library and start again.

My current list is an eclectic mix of politics, sport, comedy and history as well as the occasional one-off series such as Serial. I enjoyed these as interlopers in the normal dreary routine of my weekly episodes. “13 minutes to the Moon” remains my favourite.

One thing that troubles me though, is the business model of podcasts. Increasingly they are becoming the main income source for artists. Many of the ones I listen to are free, subsidised by licence payers in Ireland and the UK.

The others are commercial to one extent or another. Some depend on advertising alone. This suits me as a resident of New Zealand who tends to listen to northern hemisphere podcasts. Advertising is local and few Kiwi companies bother advertising on the obscure Irish podcasts I listen to.

As a result, I'm not tempted by these offers of an ad free experience in return for a small monthly stipend.

Neither am I tempted by the offer of additional episodes in return for cash. I already struggled to get through the list I have, not helped by an OCS compulsion to listen to everything I've downloaded.

So, I'm left with the ones who make a shameless plea each week for nothing more than a guilt free listen. Podcasting must be the only product that is initially offered for free before they try to guilt you into paying for it.

I have a problem with paying for something I don't have to. If offered a view over the fence rather than paying at the turnstile, I'll choose the fence every time. I don't think it's because I'm tight, I just don't like the idea that I'm paying for something that others are getting for free. I also wonder about equity. I have about five podcasts that depend on voluntary contribution and if I paid for all of them, it would be more than I used to pay for Sky Sports at the height of my hedonistic TV watching.

Most of the ones who plea for money are comedians. Historians and economists are usually more circumspect. They know that the product they produce would previously have been on radio. They might have been paid for this but it's unlikely it was more than the advertising they manage to attract for their products now.

Comedians never admit it, but they are the ones who benefit most from the development of podcasting. Most of the stuff I listen to is too sweary to have ever made it onto mainstream media. They can find an audience now that was never previously available. In the old days, they earned an income by touring the country and playing in as many venues as possible. This would involve travel costs, hotel costs, venue rental, promotion and all the non-financial hassle of being away from your family for a month.

Now you can sit in your bedroom with a cheap microphone and reach a bigger audience than you could with six months of touring. A couple of thousand subscribers would earn the comedian the same income as they had in the past for a lot less hassle and for a lower cost. And when they do want to tour, they end up with bigger venues as they now have a larger dedicated audience to promote too.

Given my experience with podcasts and particularly the fact that I tend to get bored with them after about six months, I'm reluctant to sign up for a payment schedule. Like gym memberships, I’ll forget to cancel and find myself paying for something in years to come that I no longer listen to.

I think that there needs to be a new economic model. Perhaps, a pay per listen process set at a small notional fee. I would be happy to pay for this. And surely technology is sufficient these days to support this.

Of course, on the music side, I now listen exclusively on Spotify. I'm happy to pay a monthly subscription for this that is roughly equal to the amount that I used to spend on CDs. I do think however, that if CDs still existed, there would reach a point where I would stop buying them and be content with the haul I already had.

As things stand, I'll be paying for Spotify until I stop listening to music, which hopefully will be the day I finally stop listening to anything.

Perhaps 2024 is the time to change and finally pay for something. And I might see if I can access those old CD’s too.