Author Archives: deedeedoke

Hair with intent

Posted on by deedeedoke

A glint in the eye, a slight flare of the nostril or a half smile that threatens — these all signal that a character in a film or TV drama may have villainous intent.  But I’m here today to tell you that I knew from the first time the character of Pastor Tim made an appearance on the fabulously addictive TV series “The Americans”, that he was up to no good. And all because of his hair.

Forget Javier Bardem’s bad boy bowl haircut in the Coen Brothers’ film “No Country for Old Men” (which, sadly, later seemed to have been emulated by Dylan Roof, the suspect in the 2015 murders of worshippers at a Charleston, South Carolina, church).

The frothy, reddish-blond, whipped cream coiffeur of Pastor Tim (portrayed by Kelly AuCoin) is hair that aims to deceive. In its 1980s TV drama context, it’s the hair of a man who wants to suggest he’s down with the kids and that being a man of God doesn’t mean he can’t pay attention to his looks.It’s also meant to show the older men in his congregation that he’s superior, by virtue of having a fine full head of hair. (Ironically, the actor AuCoin playing Pastor Tim has either very little hair or no hair.)

And it’s also meant to disarm, as in, how could someone with hair like that have any secrets? Dealing with the hair alone would take up too much time to allow opportunity for pursuits outside singing “Kumbaya” with his youth group and going on bus adventures. But no…

The hair is lying to us all. Frankly, it’s pervy hair. The hair of a twisted view of life, hair that is intended to tempt potential victims to run their hands — or a comb — through it to catch them off-guard. Yes. Truly pervy — for perverted — hair.  Whoever dreamt up this hair is an evil genius.

Now why does this fascinate me? Ok, pervy hair is interesting on its own — it interests me, anyway, and I’ve been intrigued by Pastor Tim’s hair for some time now. Just ask my husband. However, there’s actually a strange twist to this tale. Let me take you back to my very early years as a journalist in the US state of Oregon.

Even as a very junior reporter, I had the pleasure of covering Oregon politics at both state and local level. One of the first politicians I interviewed regularly was a dashing US Congressman who represented Oregon in the US House of Representatives. This guy epitomised the idealistic, Kennedy-esque Democrat who made you believe in a better America, a better Oregon. A former marketer, he was highly skilled in making the right gesture at the right time for the cameras, expert at sound bites — he was damn near perfect at communicating an image and message. He was also a pretty sharp politician. I enjoyed reporting on him.

And he had perfect hair. Slightly long but not too long for a Congressman, well cut. Hair that never was out of place. His hair was simply a work of art, a true gift of nature. My ultimate moment of truth with regards to his hair arrived when I reported from an outdoor event at which he spoke, the heavens opened with heavy Oregon rain, and his hair remained perfectly coiffed. It didn’t get wet. It didn’t plaster his head. It was actually as if the rain had gone around him or if his hair had been waterproofed. Not quite believing what I had seen, I later confided this vision, if you will, to press colleagues. Apparently I wasn’t alone in thinking I’d seen this; other press colleagues admitted they had had similar experiences with this same Congressman at outdoor events doused by rainfall.

I hadn’t thought about the Oregon congressman’s miraculous hair in some time. However, about a week ago, after watching a particularly dramatic episode of “The Americans”, I did an online search on Pastor Tim to find out about the actor (and his hair) playing the role. His surname, AuCoin, rang a bell. “Oh, no, he can’t be…” I thought. A bit more of a search revealed that this actor, who sports the worst hair in television, is actually the son of former US Congressman Les AuCoin, whose perfect hair was the former object of my abject amazement.

I checked out the former Congressman online, to see what he is now up to. His hair is silver now, and it’s shorter. And it doesn’t look as perfect as it did way back when; yet it looks natural and healthy. Real hair, without an agenda. But I suspect that he and his actor son have had interesting conversations about hair with intent. The son has learned from the master.

 

 

 

The sheikh’s daughter

Posted on by deedeedoke

Whatever happened to the daughter of my host in Saudi Arabia back in the 90s?

Was she one of the first women to run for election in the Kingdom just a few weeks ago? Is she discreetly learning to drive behind the walls of her family’s gated estate? Or is she working today outside her home, with a career and a profession that mean something to her?

Saudi Arabia wasn’t my first choice for a remote reporting assignment as a journalist working for The Stars and Stripes in Europe during the 90s. It wasn’t my second, either.

However, when my editors assigned me to be both the first woman from Stripes to report from the Kingdom and Saudi bureau chief in Dhahran, in the country’s Eastern Region, I mustered my courage, queued up for some minimal training in the use of a gas mask — just in case — and packed jeans and long-sleeved t-shirts for a tour of duty that was supposed to last from four to eight weeks.

Initially on arrival in the Kingdom, my Stripes colleagues and I holed up in a hotel. I liked it. I had my own space, and it was air-conditioned, with a TV and a small refrigerator to stock my soft drinks and water. Looking a bit on the exterior like some highway motel in the US West, our hotel was centrally located in Dhahran, not far from a mall and the local Safeway supermarket.

Problem was, it was fairly expensive to base a few reporters there on a daily lodging rate plus pay for meals eaten at restaurants. So a Stripes editor was tasked to find a house for us to live in and work from. Not a good idea, actually, because men and women who were not married or related to each other were not supposed to live together, no matter how platonic the relationships. Nevertheless, the visiting editor was told to find a house to rent. The accommodation he found was owned by a sheikh.

He was always referred to as “the sheikh”. If I ever knew his name, which I doubt, I’ve forgotten it. My first meeting with him was at his own home, where we drank tea on short, elegant sofas placed about a rectangular reception room. From our first meeting, he was always kind to me, exuding a gracious hospitality and warmth. At that first meeting, he introduced me to his young daughter, who was between eight and 10 years at the time, and he asked me to talk with her.

She was a beautiful young girl, bright-eyed and sweet, dressed in clearly expensive children’s clothing. I had no idea what to talk to her about; I did not understand how little girls were raised there. I only knew that they grew up to wear black and hide their faces, and they generally were hidden from the world. In our brief conversations, she told me about trips her family took to Dubai, and how they could go to the cinema there. She said little about her life in her home during our brief conversation.

I was to meet her two or three times more during my stay in Saudi Arabia. Our chats were a little stilted, but I told her about my work, about having gone to university and about my husband, sisters, brother and pets, loving to see films and plays, and being fond of music. I waited for some sign that her father disapproved of our conversations, but he encouraged her to speak with me, and always brought her to me first thing when my colleagues and I visited him to discuss rental business. He obviously adored her, and seemed very keen for her to be exposed to someone unlike the other women she would encounter at home.

This sheikh was attuned to the world outside his — not only did he welcome me into the rental home along with my male colleagues, but he arranged for my colleagues and I to enjoy not one but two Christmas dinners with different families during our stay, and saw to it we each received a present. Considering that the practice of other faiths outside the strict Wahhabi strand of Islam is discouraged there, these were acts of great generosity.

I wish I had been cleverer about being in touch with this little girl after my tour of duty was over and I left the Kingdom. I’ve often wondered about how she grew up; never more so than in the late months of 2015.

I hope she is well, happy and fulfilled, wherever she is, and whatever fulfilment means to her. And I am grateful to her father all these years later not only for his kindness to me, a stranger in a strange land, but most of all for his love and respect for his daughter. And for wanting her to live a life with eyes wide open.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fixing the UK economy – a grass roots approach

Posted on by deedeedoke

Reporting and writing about recruitment inevitably lead to thinking about the economy. While high finance isn’t exactly my thing, high finance may not hold all of the answers to the economic problems that continue to plague the UK now.

Personally, I tend to agree with those who predict that small businesses will drive the recovery. I’d take that a step further and suggest that smaller cities, towns and villages must play a leading role in achieving a balanced economy and creating a business landscape where technological advances and innovations give individuals, communities and small businesses a platform for sustainable local growth.

Recently, I signed on to participate in my little city’s town centre forum, to strengthen the business/consumer heart of our community. The biggest issue for many other participants is the future of free car parking. My view is, if you don’t have something interesting-useful-unique to offer, who cares if there’s free parking or not? I’m willing to pay to park my car (once I’ve earned my UK driving licence!) if the trip is going to pay off with a good customer experience. On the other hand, if there’s nothing at a specific location that I want or the customer service experience is crap, I’m not going to use it.

So what does this have to do with fixing the UK’s economy? Here are my thoughts on grass roots local rejuvenation.

1) Give business and home owners tax incentives to improve their properties. Mortgages are hard to come by, so let consumers ‘improve instead of move’. This will help get the local construction sector working. They’ll need additional help to carry out the new jobs, adding to the local ‘in employment’ figures.

2)  Take VAT down to 10% on materials required in these small-scale construction projects.

3)  Allow local authorities to impose a bottle-and-can bill. This would see consumers paying a 5p returnable fee for metal cans, 10p for plastic bottles and 15p for glass bottoles at point of purchase. When returned to the store, the fees would be refunded to the consumers for the number of cans and bottles returned. How would this generate revenue? What this would do would create financial incentives to not litter, potentially saving local authorities’ street and pavement cleaning spend, which they are tightening up on anyway. Instead of pitching or ignoring empty cans and bottles on pavement and on grassy park lawns, everyone from vagrants to school children raising money for projects could come to see these vessels as sources of potential income. This might also require additional jobs to be created at local stores for dealing with the returns.

4) Tax incentives to encourage landlords to allow pop-up and start-up businesses to use their empty properties at radically reduced rents and rates. Capture the energy of the ‘recession economy’ by providing new entrepreneurs — the crafters, the cupcake makers, etc — a place to build their name and their businesses! 

5) Tax relief/incentives on commuter public transport fares for home-to-work distances over 30 miles. This would promote greater consumer spending, probably at the very local level, on an extra meal out, new clothing, and so forth.

6) Tax incentives to people who use their taxable redundancy money to retrain or earn a qualification. Encourage people to learn new skills!

7)  At the national level, government should reward local authorities who encourage entrepreneurship, local environmental pride and small-scale construction. Celebrate the UK’s glorious tradition of small business and ownership!  

The grey market exists because the tax structure is at times so onerous and punitive for the straight shooters, and at the same time, so filled with loopholes for the sophisticated rich. There is an opportunity to use tax relief as an enticement to the middle class to better their quality of life and their communities. What would be the worst that could happen?.  

 

 

  

       

A micro view of recruitment – early 2012 in the UK

Posted on by deedeedoke

Ten days off, and I spend more time on the high street, shops and stores of my small home city, Ely, Cambridgeshire, at this time of year than I do i nthe previous 11 months. But recruitment is never far from mind. And there’s good news to share: even in a small city like Ely, recruitment hasn’t come to a grinding halt, in spite of the doom mongering about what allegedly lies ahead in 2012 and 2013 in economic terms.

Two businesses on Ely’s High Street have recruitment notices posted on their doors. One is a ‘value’ shoe chain, seeking a manager and an assistant. The other is Lloyd’s Pharmacy seeking both experienced and trainee dispensers. “Experience and qualifications less important than attitude,” the Lloyd’s notice announces. That’s a sign of the times, isn’t it? An open mindset toward potential and capability, not a tick box list of requirements. These notices tell me two different stories. The need for workers at the value shoe suggests that a steady stream of customers are seeking out bargain shoes to save money, ie, life in the new austerity. The need for dispensers and the willingness to seek out potential tells me that the war for talent in this field still rages amongst the pharmacy companies such as Lloyds and Boots, as well as the relative newcomers to pharmacy — Tesco, for example.

Speaking of Tesco and recruitment: a galloping lack of recruitment savvy on display at my local Tesco, again in Ely. From the checkout counters, a large board entitled “Staff Vacancies” at the front was visible. This board had holders for as many as nine to 12 cards, and each holder held a card. “Wha-hey,” I thought. “That’s a lot of jobs.” After paying for and bagging my groceries, I sauntered over to the board to see what jobs were on offer — you never know where you might find a story. Each card in each of the holders announced that there were no vacancies currently, no jobs whatsoever. (Yes, I read each card.) Did I feel misled?

Given the number of job seekers everywhere at the moment, filling each holder with a card that says there are no jobs is not only cruel but has the look of a ‘make work’ activity. (Remember the film “The Shining”, in which a crazed Jack Nicholson types “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again on each of 500 pages? That doesn’t bode well for the Tesco employee assigned the task of crafting these particular cards.) Leave the holders empty, for heaven’s sake; then job seekers can reasonably infer, no listings, no jobs.

On a larger, national scale, I’m sure I’m not alone in being delighted for Bombardier about their massive £188m contract win to build trains for Southern Rail. What this means for Bombardier’s recruitment is unclear at the moment — although it’s been exciting to follow Bombardier’s recruitment team’s online efforts in recent months — but the win does mean jobs for the Derby-based carriage maker. And jobs are what count for cities like Derby and smaller ones such as Ely in the months and years to come.

Sweet charity: PSR and professional guilt

Posted on by deedeedoke

The message will read something like this: “Dear You. I will soon be running naked alongside the Amazon River bank for five days and nights without food, water, clothes or bug spray to support X cause. This cause has personal meaning to me because of X. It would be a big help if you would sponsor me through this perilous adventure. Go to X web site to support me.”

A sincere and hearty ‘well done’ to those who spend a day, a night, weeks, months or even years in undertaking a grand adventure or merely physical exertion in the name of a cause that’s close to their hearts. With all my heart, I wish you the best.

Now let me impose upon you for a minute or two.

Causes I care about spur me to personal action. Take litter, for instance — the detrius of convenience market food, drink and smokes and all-too banal evidence of the world’s casual carelessness about the environment, about both natural and man-made beauty. On Saturdays and Sundays, you’ll see me bagging and binning the swirls of ciggie butts, fag and crisp packets, bottles, and more that get dumped around the beautiful greens of nearby Ely Cathedral. Sometimes I get a little teary. Sometimes I snarl. Sometimes I despair. But have (doggie) bag, will bin. It’s my small contribution to celebrating an adopted home I love.

In a related vein, I’m a recycling fiend. A weekend without recycling is well, less of a weekend,

And I’m ashamed that in these rather recessionary times, I can’t do more financially to help many causes I care about: respite for animals from a cruel world, helping a child get his or her deformed mouth repaired or keeping our waterways clean. But instead of putting my hand in my pocket at the moment, I dig into my closet and donate to my favoured charities items that I might have otherwise tried to sell online, the CD I never really liked, or the shoes that always hurt a little. That’s another way I try to give back.

This is my PSR, my personal social responsibility, and I don’t want a medal. But what I’m uncomfortable with at the moment is a personalised form of charitable bullying that is on the rise. Probably like many others, I am receiving an increasing number of requests via email or personal social media channels from professional individual contacts to support their efforts to support their charity of personal choice or that of their organisation. My response at the moment varies. I either write a (hopefully) polite note to the requestor saying that while I hope they succeed at helping their cause, I have my own causes that I support. Or I simply, awkwardly ignore the request.

When that second request lands in my inbox, it feels like an intrusion — and a demand. The strong-armed suggestion is that if I value this business relationship, I’ll cough up some money.

To me, these requests also suggest that either a) I don’t have a favoured charity or b) causes that are important to me are secondary to someone else’s. I guess there’s also Option C, that someone thinks I make a lot more money than I do. If only.

When you attend a charity event, you know what it’s about. When you’re invited to donate to a particular cause at a business function, that’s part of being in business. When your organisation is hit up for donations, I understand. Where I object is when the request is highly personalised — you the individual are being asked to contribute to an individual.

Swim the Amazon. Write out a cheque to the charity of your choice. Give up your time, your money, your hands and your heart to causes that are truly meaningful to you. Let’s talk about your cause, and I’d be happy to discuss mine with you, if you’re interested. Show me the photos you took while you followed your personal odyssey. We might even find we share some of the same concerns. But please don’t assume that I don’t have a cause, or two, or three, of my own. And also, please don’t assume that your causes are more important than mine.

Call me shallow — Dave, a non-brush with “His Greatness” and me

Posted on by deedeedoke

Ok, I admit it: I’ve been holding a grudge against David Cameron (yes, the Prime Minister). I’ve told my husband about it, perhaps a few friends here and there. But I’ve mostly kept it to myself because I thought it might seem a bit, well, petty. But in light of recent revelations about his penchant for friendships with those at the glamourous end of the media as the phone hacking scandal at News International refuses to go away, I’ve decided that my little grudge may have more validity than I thought.
I belong to an organisation of people who work on UK magazines. Like I do. Occasionally this particular organisation features interesting guest speakers and topics at its sort-of regular get-togethers. One such occasion was an event at the Tory HQ at Millbank, an evening of drinks and canapes with “Call me Dave” before he could tell anyone to call him “Prime Minister”.
Typically at these events, you’ll find more of the glossy handbag-shoe-and-celebrity magazine brigade (the “Call me Xanthe”s) than business-to-business magazine types sucking up the wine and orange juice. But to meet Dave, well, we B2B geeks were out in force, naively expecting the chance to shake hands and say a few words about the concerns and issues of our respective industries — in my case, recruitment.
Dave began to cut his swath across the crowded room from the back, spending a few minutes in light chit-chat with each cluster of attendees before gracefully moving onto the next. Finally, he arrived at our group. A sentence or two in about running along the Thames, an aide moved in, whispered to Dave and delivered the editor of a leading handbag-shoe-celebrity title into our midst. Ah, how Dave lit up and turned on the charm. Oh, how a “she” (the fragrant Sam Cam, no doubt?) had “loved the article”, he raved. He and the lady at the forefront of the UK’s fashion-and-Cheryl Cole reportage (no doubt a perfectly nice, capable, intelligent woman) chatted animatedly for a good 10 to 15 minutes. She made her apologies, he then made one more stop, a brief one, at another group and was gone.
So here’s where the grudge comes in. A bit of an ego sap? Maybe just a bit. But that’s not all. Consider this: no fashion mag is going to ask the tough questions about the economy or individual business sectors. (Well, let’s not completely dismiss the often campaigning Marie Claire on that one, but it’s unlikely.) Readers of fashion mags may want to know when the PM’s lovely wife is going to design another world-beating bag in the wake of the “Nancy” but that’s not Dave’s turf. In this one little vignette, the chance to rub shoulders with the glossy, luxury fashion world won out over tapping into a nodding acquaintance with the minions of British industry news — a rich tapestry representing niche industries, sectors and businesses that I’m proud to be part of.
So are politicians immune to the dominance of “sleb” and fashion obsession that cheapens our culture? Not one soupcon. Should we be concerned? Yes.

Hello world!

Posted on by deedeedoke

Welcome to WordPress.com. After you read this, you should delete and write your own post, with a new title above. Or hit Add New on the left (of the admin dashboard) to start a fresh post.

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