Excuses, excuses

A combination of a heavy cold, some extra time with my wonderful daughters and what felt very much like another mini-stroke last week have conspired to limit my posts recently.

It got me thinking about those macho Lem-Sip adverts that seem so 80s in their outlook. “Yeah, I’m a man, I took one of these Lem-Sip pouches and now I can conquer the world”. In Japan, the culture of working until you quite literally, drop dead, is called karoshi. Closer to home, Sid Watkins, a paediatrician, self-adminstered anaesthetic in an attempt to cope with his 100-hour-a-week workload. This begs the question of course, why was he taking anaesthetic, doesn’t that put you to sleep? Perhaps he should have tried Lemsip Max Strength.

To many of you, the hard work culture is no surprise and you don’t need me to tell you how hard you work. You’re the one reading this from your desk when everyone else has gone home. It’s just an unpleasant fact of life that we work so hard in the UK. We just blithely assume that it’s like this everywhere. It isn’t. Granted, an Indonesian teenager would think we live a relatively easy life. Hard to imagine that people have it tougher than us, right?

I won’t go into the arguments here about why working too hard actually accomplishes nothing. That’s for another day and something I used to go into at great length years ago. What I will say is that all this Lemsip crap drives me nuts. If you’re ill, you’re meant to go to a pharmacist, get some drugs and get on with it. Now I’m all for working hard, been there done that for 20 years. I’m also all for putting work before family when it counts. I’m also for working through illness. Been there, done that, got the operation scars, brain damage and scarred retinas to prove that too. But there’s a time and place for all that - the 1980s.

So seriously, what next?

“Hey John, you sound shit!”
“Brian, it’s this cancer thing, it’s kind of dragging me down”
“No worries, try this” (Brian, John’s boss, hands him a small sachet, John raises his eyebrows and exclaims)
“Hmmm! Chem-Sip! Restores flagging work drive and burns you out at work before the cancer kills you? Looks great! Says it’s faster than chemo, at curing and killing you! Great!”

Fast forward to another day, John is bald, albino white and has lost half his body-weight, and wears the smile of a skeleton
“How’s that report coming along John?”
“It’s on your desk Brian, thanks to Chem-Sip.” (John taps the box twice to accentuate the “Chem-Sip”)
Cut to Chem-Sip box. End

Taking work too seriously is ridiculous. Life is far too important. Work hard. Be ethical. Pay your dues, but no more. The Work Ethic is noble. But don’t kill yourself. Have you ever tried doing a day of work from beyond the grave?