A Nation Of Liars

Work has always been a bug bear for me. Being pretty sure of what I want to do, I resent wasting my time doing something that isn’t it really; it’s pretty simple.

Of course there is all the attendant pish that goes with a job, the stupid rules, the requirement to defer to idiots and nothings etc, etc.

But at least there used to be dignity in honest work. That seems a rarity these days. Waiting on the bus the other day, a guy and a girl walked past talking about their jobs, saying stuff about how they had to “lie to customers” to get them off the phone. This is a frequent complaint where I work, mainly due to the fact that the fairly crap product we offer is aggressively sold to people as if it were a cure for cancer. It seems that most of us have a job that requires some element of dishonesty these days and as a workforce we just have to take it because it’s all that’s going. We used to make things as a nation. Now it seems we make up things, sell them to people and fail to deliver. Thus a vast tranche of the workforce are now employed to mop up the eventual and inevitable fall-out: customer rage, disappointment, complaints etc.

I don’t want to sound like a hippy here but cosmically, it can’t be good for individuals or society in general to have so many of us employed as sops for the let-down and defrauded. If you work in a call-centre all day, the accumulative effect of having dozens of people express rage and disappointment toward you all day long can have a devastating effect. I know that for a fact. 8 months at Scottish Power turned me into a gibbering, joyless shell.

But I’m straying from the point, which is that we have drifted into dangerous waters as a society by allowing large companies to employ offices full of apologists and liars, there simply to shield the top brass from the ire of customers they have conned and deceived.

The dilemma is obvious. You take the work that is going when you’re skint and when trying to run a country, companies creating jobs (any kind of jobs) are a Godsend.

When I complain about the hollow, avaricious cynicism inherent in our society these days; when I complain about being asked to lie, I’m often told to “grow up” or come to terms with “the real world”, but reality is merely what we create for ourselves.

It’s just a shame that this seems to be all some of us can manage to come up with.