5 “plate-spinner type stuff” and “i’ve already missed all my meetings”

00:00

I'm very rarely the key decision maker or the kind of director responsible for decisions. I will often declare something above my pay grade and shift it up to someone that is responsible and has a clear designation of being accountable for those decisions. What the hell is my job? So it's definitely project management, not project decision making. But no, it's nice to have a finger in every pie and...

00:28

see the full work of the department, which might not be the case for some of our more specialist staff that do the kind of meatier, more complicated member casework for example, because they are laser-focused on those very specific member issues. Because to be very clear, I'm not a physiotherapist, I'm not a CSP member, I don't hold an elected position, so I guess my role isn't on the front line because I went and visited some pick lines, but...

00:53

I weren't in the picket line and I'm also not in our members' staff rooms when their staff room is suddenly taken away without notice or their re-app spaces are taken away or their NHS paycheck can buy them only 90% of the stuff that it could buy them last year kind of thing. So I'm very close to the action but very, very conscious that I'm not on the front line and I'm not the person that the industrial action is really for and it's an interesting tension to take.

01:22

I sometimes do wish we had a bit more of that kind of member voice inside the day-to-day of the organization and not just at the kind of elected leadership level because with all the will in the world you can lose track of that member voice sometimes. So the trade union movement is obviously in a big uptick in industrial action within the last year and that's obviously affected

01:51

late 2020 to 90 ish percent of my job role has been that of a, I guess, project manager. So I've been supporting our pay consultations that we do with members around pay, facilitating our industrial action ballots, and for England also facilitating the strike action that our members elected to take in pursuit of a better NHS pay deal.

02:18

So that correspondence is often quite procedural, make sure our balloting company has all the right assets and correspondence that we want sent out from them to our members, and kind of dotting all with those i's and crossing those t's. A vanishingly small amount of my role is more directly kind of member-facing, so when members have an issue in the workplace that they need a

02:48

should be and usually is their workplace steward or safety rep but sometimes they might not have a steward in the workplace or the health and safety rep is unavailable and then those queries come in to the full-time staff on a voter basis so I do some confidential casework kind of on a member by member basis but it's never been the entire focus of my role and isn't my strength or passion and it's on a when voter needs basis really.

03:17

So actually where I'm weakest is on that member level casework stuff, because I'm personally prone to hypervigilance and there's rarely a definitive right or definitive wrong way a member who might be facing a disciplinary, might be facing a redundancy, should behave. It's more one of kind of mentoring them, coaching them to behave in the right way without a very clear algorithm of what that should be.

03:47

and I just get so wound up in my head about how my advice could be bummed and could be hypothetically seeing a member facing serious harm to their professional career or their livelihood and their mortgage etc etc that's when I kind of tend to freeze and panic and I just have to be quite open about that and when a really complicated member casework comes in I pass it along and say it's beyond my beyond my scope or beyond my understanding.

04:15

I guess that the bigger picture kind of plates billiards stuff, I revel in more because you can always revisit and if something's not working well, it's very rarely too late to come back and tweak it and kind of put it back on the right path kind of thing. So as I'm a home worker, I go into a London office every now and again, and I go around the country to conferences and stuff every now and again, but 19 days out of 20, I work from home.

04:42

as a desk job, so a lot of team and zoom calls and the like is pretty much standard. It is a lot of email based work, a lot of it is kind of working through a to do lists, getting emails out the door, responding to emails is a large part of it, which I know doesn't sound very exciting.

And then I woke up at half past 11, I was like, oh, shit, I guess I'm taking the day off work because I've already missed all my meetings. What the hell is my job? It would be nice to be by the sea, but I'm working in Battersea Power Station on Minna, which is a six-minute cycle, and I'm still late. They, I don't know if they help pay for the complete renovation of Battersea Power Station in London.

05:45

And I think it's the biggest brick structure in Europe. So it's got like two cinemas, a food hall, and then a high-end shopping center underneath it with Cartier and Rolex and...

06:00

and Nike store or whatever. So it's quite fancy. And it's got this huge atrium, which is gorgeous. It's adjoined to these like super high end penthouses. You've said like Sting and Gordon Ramsay have some of the penthouses and you can see like Sting's grand piano. I know that a lot of people are grumbling because I think during the pandemic, they bought houses in like Kent and now they're having to come back in. But they're always like, we've just spent $5 billion on this giant fucking building. Please, can you come to it? So I planned accordingly and just like, you know,

06:30

a ludicrously overpriced small apartment because I thought it would be nearby and it is. But I like it because I just like getting lunch with random people and being like, what do you do? And I'm like, whoa, tell me about that. It's nice I think also because it's like Stockwell and your Brits scenario, the racial diversity in the office is way, way better than it was at Oxford Street. It was like, my team are nice and everything, but they are primarily like middle-aged, managed, cis-hacked white guys. So it's nice to be around different types of people with interesting stories.

06:58

I mean, like, it's tech, right? So it's really not that diverse. I think there's that meme. I've seen that it's like, our company's committed to diversity and this is like the diversity and it's just like white guy, white guy, white guy, white woman, white guy, white guy, white guy, brown guy, brown guy, brown guy, brown guy. And it's like, yeah, that's pretty much it. Not terribly diverse. Definitely not a lot of women. I see my friend who I'd met externally just out in London. I was like, oh, I work for this company and I can't tell you who. And I was like, oh, is it?

07:28

fancy and then she told me and I was like oh that's where I work. I was like that's not that fancy. So there's like two trans people I think that I know that was like you know f***ing 3 000 people in the building but it's nice to be in this new big building where there's lots of different types of roles not just tech and as a result way more diverse and interesting.

07:50

I've got like six, seven years of experience. Went to university in Manchester, did a bunch of internships, worked at Microsoft, then was a senior engineer at Booking.com. So my current salary is like 72,000 as a base salary. And then I get a bunch of stocks and bonuses and stuff like that. Honestly, like transition has taken over so much of my life.

08:13

that until very recently, if not still, I've just been in survival mode. And obviously there's a reason a lot of trans girls end up being software engineers. It's because we need so much fucking money to transition. And that is a means to do it. I just, you know, got heavy into psychedelics and in classic tech yuppie fashion, like Wanker discovers LSD and becomes a Buddhist. After the point that, hmm.

08:39

you're comfortable and my money has removed the discomfort from your life. More money does not make you happy and usually the stress accompanied with making extra money will just make you more unhappy. So I'm earning, I mean, it's London so everything's f***ing crazy expensive and I have huge loans to pay for all my transition and stuff. But even then I'm just like, I don't need more stress. Like, I can make the deal on this very, very well, very fine. I'm not like rich, rich, you know, I can't like buy sports cars and stuff, but...

09:08

I can afford a one-bed apartment, which in London is madness. I can like do nice things on the weekend. If I had the organizational skills and the energy, I could probably go on holiday, even though I'm terrible at doing that. So I just think I don't have a lot of ambition to get more money or get more influence or whatever. It's like, I'm kind of happy just vibing, like doing my bits. I just worked really hard to get here, to get relatively stable, you know, all the therapy and this and that and the other. And I feel so lucky that I've got a job that is...

09:37

for the most part relatively chill or at least chill enough so that I can have mental health things like today. And it's not gonna be end of the world whilst also paying me enough money to like have a decent life. It's just like, I've got enough. I'm good. I just wanna try and enjoy my life now after having worked so hard to get here.