Eh? What was that?

Image by Yaron Jeroen van Oostrom

Today is not a good day in Rosaland.

The Old Git has always given freely of his professional expertise to help me in my work. He is a gift to the consultant who works in a profession allied to the building trade: A builder willing to answer any technical question, no matter how stupid, who will take you to sites to show you installations and develop your technical expertise before you are let loose on the paying public, and who will tell you all the little sneaky cost-cutting tricks builders get up to that might explain the problem you are trying to troubleshoot for someone.

When he never heard the oven timer going at home, I started wondering why. When he couldn't hear the background jungle sounds I was playing on my internet radio to keep me company while I wrote, I got worried. The Old Git is not really that old; only 47. It was time to pay him back for everything he has done for me professionally.

I hauled him into my audiometry lab for a hearing test this morning, and established that he has noise induced hearing loss.

This is a very unpleasant discovery. Hearing lost through noise damage will not come back, it is gone for good.

Now the Old Git is more careful with his health and safety than most self employed builders who have to arrange their own health monitoring. He owns a pair of high spec. ear defenders and wears them whenever he thinks he is around very loud noise.  The problem was, the Old Git didn't think his noise exposure was significant because he already couldn't hear how loud it really was. I played him an example of the highest level of noise you should be exposed to without ear defenders, and it wasn't that loud to him.

Existing hearing damage, whether it comes from occupational noise exposure or an Ipod turned up too loud, means that you cannot trust your ears to tell you that they are being damaged.

"I know not to play it too loud" doesn't work if you can't hear how loud it is.
I know from experience that most self employed builders don't want to hear about protecting their long term health, especially when a test will cost them money and they don't have any option but to stay in the trade, but really, truly, if you have a family member in the building trade, *make* them go and get a hearing test before it is too late.

And if you are in the south east of England and need a hearing test from someone who understands the building trade, I can help with that.

You know you want to do it

Photographs from thisisphotobomb.com

When I finally get around to writing, I find myself fascinated with the primal parts of human nature; the parts of us we can't control. Fear, lust, desire for power, parental love, photobomb.

Yep, photobomb.

A deep, primitive desire, a base urge that screams into your hindbrain the moment you see a camera pointing at you by accident.

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Knightsbridge today, steaming slightly and complating the meteorological misfortune that had governed my site visits all winter. My last three site surveys had gone: snow, sleet, thunderstorm, and I was stuck in a touristy part of London paying inflated prices for a lunch whose main purpose was to entitle me to get out of the rain for half an hour. Okay, the tea and tuna melt were to get me out of the rain. The almond croissant was down to sheer bad temper.

So I sat on my tall stool facing the window, expecting my pocket to get picked any minute and glaring at the sullen grey sky that London does so well as I shoved overpriced calories into my mouth disguised as flaky pastry. My attention roved around the crowds, playing 'spot the worker' among the tourists--you know them; the fast walking ones whose body language says, "I wouldn't dream of saying anything because that would be rude, but please be so kind as to read my thoughts and get the hell out of my way because I actually know where I'm going"--when I realised that a woman over the road was pointing a little white camera right at me.

My first thought was: is any London tourist's experience entitled to pictures of a tired, grouchy daylight consultant looking like a waterlogged hamster? My second was: she's not actually pointing it at me. I'm in it by accident. She's pointing it at her man, who's standing outside Costa Coffee under a union jack umbrella.

I don't know what made a picture of Costa Coffee with an umbrella so appealing, but whatever floated their boat. Much more rain and they would be floating down the Thames on it like Winnie the Pooh, but that was beside the point.

And it was at that moment, staring into a little white camera belonging to a stranger, that I realised photobomb occupies a place next to rage and lust and hunger. A building block of human nature. A basic need to respond.

They'll find out when they upload their photographs whether I gave into it or not.

Big things in disguise

Image by Free-StockPhotos.com
Sometimes big things happen that feel like little things. Sometimes it's the fact that they are little that makes them big.

Today I walked into a big meeting feeling calm and relaxed. I walked out feeling the same. Which in itself is nothing. Millions of meetings happen every day and no-one dies. Usually. I hope.

The difference today was, that's not me. Any occasion where my professional skills must stand on their own without back up or someone senior to defer to is preceded by insomnia, panic, shaking and nausea. Afterwards comes the adrenaline let down. It is fight or flight, every time.

So why not this time? The job was in a new discipline that I've only been doing for a year and a half, and I had to step up to the plate on the highest profile job I've done yet and stand or fall.

And yet... calm. Confident. Happy, even.

As I walked out without the hint of a tremor, I asked myself what had changed, and the answer is, my boss. My new boss.

He has built me up into someone new without me even realising it. Five years ago I made a career move that nearly broke me. It destroyed my confidence, my motivation and left me a self-doubting, responsibility-avoiding wreck. A lot of that was down to the person I ended up working for, for whom I could do nothing right. When I transferred out of his team and into a new role he asked me what made me think I could do the job if I couldn't even do the one I had despite holding a master's degree in the subject.

I went anyway.

And I found out that when you're walking the narrow bridge of your life, some people are the banana skins in front of you. Some are the cushions that break your fall.

Some are the trampolines.

And I am grateful.

Um... oops?

The workplace mystery of who made 200 photocopies of the same map and left them in the tray of the new copier has been solved. Note to self: If you press the number keys and you don't get the 200% magnification you expected, you are probably about to print 200 pieces of scrap paper.