By Biggest fuck up
I fucked up really badly when I stayed at my first workplace too long.
The Talent team told me I had to leave and get experience somewhere else before I'd progress, and they were right - but I was too scared of being unemployed, and then too scared to be jobless with a baby. I watched other women struggle in that workplace, though, and after I had my daughter, I realised the company narrative that they'd settled in and were comfortable was bullshit.
It was maternity discrimination, plain and simple, in a workplace dominated by men and by women without children. The minute I had my child, I was put on the back burner and ignored, just like all the rest. Because I'd been there too long, recruiters wouldn't take a risk on me - they'd seen too many people back out of roles at the last minute, scared to leave their comfortable job in a high-profile organisation.
I quit anyway, desperate, and never looked back. But I wasted over a decade of my life in that place and got very little out of it.
Rant
It's the wanky bollocks that pisses me off, actually. People not using plain English.
"Synergisation" instead of talking; "round tables", "huddles", "town halls" instead of meetings.
I went to see Wankernomics live recently, and they're so right - people use this language to hide their incompetence, and it spreads like the plague. I used to collect it in a spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet got unmanageable; I was going to start a website, maybe 15 years ago, where people could put in an email from their boss and calculate what percentage of it was bullshit. I might ask B3ta if anyone's up for making that now, but not with the people-eating machine (AI) because that there is where all the wanky bollocks merchants are at right now.
I long for the days when it was all about blockchain and NFTs; what halcyon days those were.
Useful advice
One boss once told me, when I asked to write a blog entry for her, "I know you have a journalism degree, Helen, but that doesn't mean you can write."
That was the worst advice ever. But a year or two later, the head of the department called me into a meeting room and told me that every day I didn't spend writing was a day of my life I was wasting. I liked that advice; it was sincerely given, not shouted across an office, and I believed her.
I'm planning on quoting both of them in the acknowledgements of my second novel, but only if my first one, The Regency Switch, does well - I don't plan on having to wipe any egg off my face! Both my debut and my follow-up are being published by HarperCollins, with the first coming out in February 2026. So yeah, screw you, J.
What can anyone else take from this?
That every day you don't spend doing what you love, what you're good at, what calls to you late at night - the thing you'd regret on your deathbed if you didn't finish it - well, that's a day wasted.
Don't fritter your life away on wanky bollocks; do better.
And no excuses - I wrote my second novel this year whilst working full time on two high-profile government projects (not one day off, either), looking after a 10-year-old, selling my house, and fundraising for my terminally-ill five year old niece. So hell yeah you can write that book/climb that mountain/film that scripted docudrama about the mating cycle of poison dart frogs.
I believe in you, dear reader.
