Todays' Strikes - Food for thought

I think that people have yet to understand that the party is over, listen to the news, this is not about us,it is the western world as know it.
We will all have to accept a lower standard of living in the end. Nobody seems to understand how well off they are at the moment.

Roll back the clock 100 years, a tiny speck of time in history. We could not comprehend living as people did then, children without shoes, wearing dads trousers cut off at the knees. no car, no central heating, working to find food for the next day let alone worrying about a pension in 30 years time.

It couldn't happen now could it, its not possible is it. or could it?.

 

The problem is recent generations have got used to being greedy.....and they think everyone else is responsible for what they lose out on, not themselves!

 

Victorian novels are peppered with stories of hardship, as well as the notion that life is fickle. You can slide down the snake from prosperity to ruin in no time. I think we've got a little too used to the idea that we're somehow immune to this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I think there's a chance it could happen again.

My husband's first home was a run down Victorian house which, in its heyday, must have been the home of a well-to-do family. The bell system which once summoned the miserable servants was still in place, and the handsome sash windows were still framed by substantial wooden shutters. In the better areas, most London houses had shutters. They weren't just for decoration and privacy; they were there to prevent the starving rabble from smashing their way into your property.

 

My mum (who isn't that ancient, by today's standards) can remember children coming to school without proper shoes. There was a real fear of poverty, almost as if it were catching. Mum and her brothers and sisters were told not to play with 'the poor kids', which meant most of the children who lived in streets which were on the wrong side of the railway line.

 

The thought of debtors' prison would certainly take the gloss off that car loan ...

Dickens became doubly obsessed with money in middle age, when he was hiding a young mistress and forking out for her extended family, as well as keeping his own large brood. Claire Tomalin has just brought out a new life of Dickens, if you're interested, but it would be hard to beat her earlier book, The Invisible Woman, which is about Ellen Ternan, his secret mistress. Great Christmas reading - in places almost a detective novel, in fact! I won't spoil it for you, but suffice to say that the great man may not of have died at Gad's Hill in the bosom of his family, but in a rather different bosom ...

 

Charles Dickens wrote about debtors prison in 'Little Dorritt' a brilliant read!

 

3 years ago, I lost most of what I had (stupidy) .... was earning big money trading on ebay .... never registered for VAT, and was shut down ... (my last 7 months of trading netted in excess of £137 000)

ended up selling my BMW 740i, Ford transit Van and many of my personal antiques, just to pay rent etc

have no immediate family in the UK, so had to fend for myself and my family, and start from scratch

been a long uphill battle, no more overseas trips, no more luxuries, tight budget and clever shopping

everything happens for a reason, I have become 'wiser' and shop more cleverly ... and have learned from my mistakes, but have become a lot 'sharper'

unless you have been really skint/poor, you can only speculate on what will happen .... what you will do etc

but when it happens, you adapt very quickly (you have no other choice).... at the end of the day, life goes on, and you still smile

 

Hello, Woo!

Not at all! My son went to school there ... have you seen the tunnel Dickens built under the road? He owned land on both sides of it, so the tunnel was his solution to the problem!

 

Just a PS to the job situation: the firm where my husband works has been trying to hire a programmer. The salary isn't stellar, but it's pretty good. Of the applications, none were from women. (On the whole, women don't want jobs like this and aren't much cop at doing them. But it is heresy to say so.) There was one British applicant. The rest were from the Indian sub-continent. If it weren't for workers from India - bright, motivated and hard-working - the firm would be stuffed. I do hope Cameron doesn't decide to make it even more difficult for them to work in the UK.

 

I'm a programmer, and over the years I've worked alongside women. While the software industry is male dominated, I can only see one reason for that. Women are every bit as capable of technical roles as men are. I've yet to encounter a boss that I believe would snub a female applicant, and I've yet to encounter a colleague that fails to recognise that the office needs a bit more of a balance.

The only reason I can see that hardly any women become programmers is that they perceive it to be a geeky bloke's job, which is an unfair stereotype. In fact at my last company, when we recruited our first female programmer, the bosses felt it necessary to tactfully ask her if she would be likely to be offended by 'a bunch of blokes that would not seem out of place on a building site'. When you're stuck in front of a computer for hours at a time, writing pages and pages of "squiggles and wiggles and funny symbols" as my wife puts it, the very last thing you want your office banter to be about is delegates, predicates, statics vs instances and threads and processes. Our 'office woman' fitted right in, and between bantering (which she was just as responsible for as the rest of us), she was a damned good worker and very quickly earned the respect of us more experienced sorts. And she made some good friends. Its nearly a year since we all left that place after the company went pear shaped (due to the boss being a con man), and we are all still in regular contact.

 

Hi Clueless

Yes, I feel women don't apply because the job doesn't appeal to them. However, while there are some excellent women in the field, I also think there is a gender divide in terms of ability. The best programmers often tend to be the type who began their computing careers as children, shut away in their bedrooms for hours with a keyboard for company. On the whole, I think this is largely male behaviour. It strikes a chord with a certain type of boy in a way it doesn't for most girls.

I think there are things which boys are, for whatever reason, better at doing just as there are things at which girls excel (this doesn't mean that individuals can't buck the trend, of course). Years ago OH interviewed the RAF staff who were involved in selecting trainee fighter pilots. They were desperate to get more girls on their books, but the plain fact was that they weren't doing nearly as well as the boys in the aptitude tests - although there was no way the RAF could say so publicly. All the time the schools are telling us that the girls are doing so much better than boys - which rather suggests to me that male skills aren't being valued or tested properly. Hopefully, things will correct themselves. We can't become a nation of people who can only write nice little stories and do Media Studies degrees.