WORKING HARD OR HARDLY WORKING?

I think it’s time to stand up for an increasingly oppressed minority.
Those of us who – whisper it – like to work a lot, a lot.

Recently it seems like every day someone else posts a link on Facebook or Twitter about the cult of overworking and about how it’s so harmful to your health.
Inspiring messages about how on their deathbeds, people never regret spending time with friends and family and always regret spending it in the office, flood social media. It’s all very moving.
Apparently.
I get it. I get that friends and family and stuff are important.
But you know what? I like working.
There, I said it.

There are lots of people I know – some of them extended family – who don’t appear to have actually worked a day in their lives. I feel sorry for them. They’ll never know the sweet, silent satisfaction of rising while the world sleeps, simply because you need several hours run up to the day in order to get everything done. They’ll never understand the feeling of driving home, exhausted and exhilarated at the amount of work you’ve manage to do.

In the tradition of these inspiring posts about Why You Should Slow Down and Stop Working So Hard, I’ve done my own five point list in praise of working your backside off.

1: There is Nothing like the Feeling of Working Really Hard.
You know you’re at your limit. You know that the deadline is speeding towards you. And you know that when you hit that deadline with all your work done, the rush of adrenaline is going to be awesome.

2: Working Really Hard makes you value Every Minute.
My first job was working in a DIY store. I was 13 and I did not work hard. I was bloody awful at my job. I used to watch the clock when I wasn’t spilling paint or giving bad DIY advice. That clock played mind games that Guantanamo would reject as too cruel. An hour would look like five minutes on That Bloody Clock. In my life as a journalist I watched the clock a lot too. Always wishing I could squeeze extra minutes in the day because all the ones allotted were full. I know which state of affairs I preferred.

3: Earning It.
In that DIY store I worked 8.30am to 5.30pm, with half an hour break for lunch. I got paid twelve quid. I bloody loved being handed that money at the end of the day. I had really, really earned it.

4: Effort and Reward.
I like platitudes. I like inspiring quotes. Quotes like ‘Nothing worth having was ever easily won’ and ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get’. They are both totally true. I’ve worked harder than I ever have in the last five years and I have lost count of the number of people who call me ‘lucky’ to get to present radio shows, write in newspapers, and create scripts.

5: Work is its own Reward.
Maybe it’s because I’m the son of an immigrant father. Maybe it’s because I’m the son of a proper old-fashioned working class mum. Work in my house wasn’t only a means to an end, it was an end in itself. If work is its own reward, then the more you work, the more you get rewarded, right? I’m not saying that the family and friends aren’t important, but the ones that are important, get it and they will support you if you are working to better your position, to create something brilliant or simply because it is What You Do.

Is it easy for me to write this because I am one of those lucky people who genuinely absolutely loves what he gets to do for a living? You’re reading someone who has worked in a fish and chip shop, delivered pizzas, worked in a university kitchen (only job I ever got fired from. Turned up drunk. Amusing) been a waiter, worked on a traveling carnival (true story), literally cleaned out drains and sold photographs door to door.
This is not a perspective from an ivory tower.
I just like working.
I think my perspective is worth hearing too.

We The Positive

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes, Mark Twain.

Last weekend the Tour de France came to Yorkshire and I was in the insanely privileged position of reporting on it for BBC Leeds.
Our coverage – of which I am justifiably proud – was uninterrupted. Unlike the British television coverage for ITV4, which I later discovered was suspended for an advert break as the riders entered Keighley – and reappeared when they left.

Qu’est ce qui se passe?
Keighley folk wanted to know, what happened? Why had our town been edited from TdF history!?
Oh yeah, the genteel Ilkley got their moment. The picturesque Yorkshire Dales didn’t miss out. Yet when it came to Keighley, quelle surprise, we were ignored.
A friend had, the previous day, described my home town as the ‘unruly child’ of Yorkshire and wondered if we might spoil the two day long, thus far, perfect party, with ASBO worthy behaviour.

Well, the minute the peloton passed and Keighley had never made it to camera and it appeared that we had been roundly ignored, the rumour mill cranked into action.

The reason it cut away from Keighley was because someone had painted a rude word on the road. Apparently.

That was the rumour that spread round town like an STD round The Rat Trap (one for the Keighley folk there).
Now.
Look at the Mark Twain quote at the top of this page again. Right? Good.
There follow two options.

1: It’s true. Someone wrote a four letter epithet on the road. And the cars, motorbikes and helicopters, all carrying cameras, some hundreds of feet in the air, to relay the event around the globe, found it impossible to film from an angle that wouldn’t show the rude word as the cyclists charged through the middle of Keighley at 50 kilometres per hour. And even though the commercial channel ITV has to take advert breaks on a regularly scheduled basis it was much more than a coincidence that they took one when the tour was passing through Keighley, even though the fact is every time a commercial break came up the riders were passing through somewhere and that’s the way the cookie crumbles as they say…or

2: Someone’s making stuff up about a rude word being scrawled on the road.

In a way, I sort of want it to be true (it might be for all I know, that isn’t the point). If it is true, then it goes to prove something that I’ve started to believe just recently.

I became a journalist and a cynic at the end of 1998. The journalism bit, I always loved, still do. But the cynic bit never came naturally. Don’t get me wrong, I am as far from a happy clappy, San Franciscan ain’t-everything-fabulous-type.
I’ve even been called a grumpy / angry little man, thanks to my occasional rants at useless PRs on Twitter.
But looking at the world through an ironic sneer just isn’t me. It’s why I enjoy the radio presenting I’ve been doing for the past year, cynicism doesn’t really work on the airwaves, I reckon. Positivity on the other hand is a fairly useful thing to bring to your ‘sound’.

So if some people did scrawl a rude word on the road in Keighley and scuppered the chance of our town being seen by billions around the world, leave them to it.
Why am I not angry at someone who may have done that?
It doesn’t matter. We don’t need to be angry because we, the positive, still win.
I stood for four hours on Sunday on the roundabout at the end of a bypass, waiting for the moment the peloton arrived when the Tour de France came through Keighley. I was joined by thousands who lined the road and we can say we were there, we brought something wildly positive to the streets of our little town and no-one can take that away from us.

We, the positive, were the winners.