Sogger’s Blog

…for simple reasons, i.e., it was cheap and my mate John generously offered to host it, I have got myself a dedicated website. It’s called www.soggers.com. From now on, it will replace the Blogger site. If you are a visitor to my blog, please update your bookmarks. If you use a feed, please update it to point to here.

I started the blog following a visit from John, not knowing what to write about. It seems to have settled down to 4 major themes:

1. France
2. England
3. Epilepsy
4. Nonsense

I thought this would be a good point to take stock so I asked myself, “Is anyone actually reading this stuff?” and if they are, “Which are the most popular posts?”. Luckily, Google Analytics is there to help me, so I am happy to inform you that, yes, much to my surprise, people are visiting the blog - it seems that I have had 1200 visits since I started, and that 250 of you actually come back for more - masochists!

The list of the most popular pages is interesting (to me) - here are the top 5. Note that most of them were stumbled on via search engines:

1. “Three things I dislike about France“. This was supposed to be an amusing piece, but has been picked up by search engines from people who really don’t like the French. I wrote “Some Things I Love About France” as a response when I saw that Google picked it out as the number one link for the search term “I hate French people”.
2. Saturday “Night Fever“. A classic film and a classic post
3. “Generic Medication Considered Harmful (By Me, At Least)”. Conspiracy theorists unite.
4. “Ca plane pour moi”. Lots of people out there still want to know the lyrics to this song!
5. “Epilepsy: it’s all in the mind“. Worried people wanting to know about their ailment?

I looked back through the posts (43 in 7 months), and decided to pick my own top 5, based on whether I enjoyed writing it and the reaction it provoked:

1. Saturday “Night Fever”. Makes me smile and cringe at the same time.
2. “Three things I dislike about France“. I just thought it was really funny and it was something I wanted to write well before I had a blog. I toned down the title after discovering that xenophobes loved it.
3. “Mon Pere, ce Héros“. Words never to be expressed aloud and one of the reasons I tell very few people about this blog - I’m just a frustrated, mono-syllabic northern lad at heart.
4. “The Brian Robson Experience“. A major turning point for me.
5. “Heisenberg’s Bicycle“. Concocted on a bike ride home from work, this post generated the most comments and seemed to amuse people.

Actually, there are several more that I really like, so the blogging experience has been a positive one. Interestingly, it seems that there is some crossover between the ones I like and the ones that readers most liked too. I guess that this should be no surprise really - birds of a feather flock together and all that.
Anyway, I have a few more posts up my sleeve yet, so stick around. See you in the new world.

How many real friends do you have? I am talking about the type of friend who you might not see for 5 years, but, as soon as you meet, you pick up right where you left off. This is the friend, who, if you were to turn up on their doorstep late at night, suitcase in hand, tears streaming down your face, would invite you in, put the kettle on, and not ask questions or look slyly at their partner/watch/TV.

Chances are, you won’t have many. In fact, people can count themselves lucky if they have any friends like this. Friends come and go: “we used to go mountain-biking together”, “he was a good laugh”, “we went to the football together”, that sort of thing.

I reckon I have 3 friends of this “calibre” - I’m a lucky guy. The problem is that because I live in France, seeing them once every few years is a reality. In the spirit of “New Year, New Resolutions”, I decided to call one of them over the holiday period. He’s as phone-shy as me, so it wasn’t our best medium. However, I gathered that he hasn’t had a great year. Some of the details I will omit (even though he will never read this) ,but some of them, viewed from the outside (i.e. by you), are quite amusing and ironic.

My friends wife is great; off-the-wall and extremely funny, although often it is unintentional. She has a sister. Her sister is nothing like her and they have always found it difficult to get on. Her sister is extremely career-oriented and became a highly paid management consultant. It was at work that she met her husband, another highly paid management consultant. Unfortunately for both of them, getting to the top invariably entails sacrifices. In their case it was the ability to relate to other human beings on a personal level.

However, once they had a child, her husband changed and realised that maybe there is more to life than downsizing other people’s businesses (or whatever it is that management consultants do). Given that they were rolling in money, at the age of 35, he decided to retire to look after their child. From then on, weekdays were spent playing golf, punctuated by, no doubt, inconvenient school runs. However, it seems that after a couple of years of this, the school runs became more and more interesting to him: so much so that last year he left his wife for one of the mothers that he met every day at the school gates. He’s now gone back to work as a highly-paid management consultant and his new partner has taken over childcare duties during the week. Ironic don’t you think? I do.

Anyway, my friend’s wife’s sister (still with me?), as I said, sacrificed the ability to express herself. This has left her incapable of coping and she has, over the course of the year phoned my friend’s wife for at least 3 hours a day. This is OK - everyone needs a shoulder to cry on. However, 3 hours a day for a year can get tiring for the person who has to listen, especially when is is a single-subject monologue. My wife has now started phoning her on a regular basis in order to let my friend’s wife let off steam, something she appreciates - the chance to talk to another female about her problems and not somebody else’s. Ironic also, don’t you think? I do.

A second, and completely unrelated event happened during the year as well. After 45 years of marriage, my friend’s mother met up with an old boyfriend, left my friend’s father and went to live in Canada. Devastating I would imagine. He seemed quite phlegmatic about it, so I ventured the question, “Did they meet on Friend’s Reunited?”. “Senile Old-Age Pensioners Reunited, more like.” he replied.

All-in-all, it was what the Queen would call and “Annus Horribilus” (which doesn’t translate from the Latin as “an ugly backside”. At least, I don’t think so).

To finish, writing this, I struggled with the question, “If these are such great friends, how come you could never envisage telling them that you have a blog?”. Maybe, like my friend’s wife’s sister, I am unable to connect to people on a personal level and can only express myself anonymously? If this is the case, like my friend’s wife’s sister, it would have been nice if it went hand-in-hand with a successful career. Ironic don’t you think? I do.

I recently received a CV from a Canadian national, Fisher Scott. Two things struck me about the CV:

1. The name seemed a bit strange: I would have thought Scott Fisher was more likely
2. The technical capabilities weren’t quite right, but it may be worth an interview anyway.

I therefore gave the guy a call and left a message asking him to give me a call for a phone interview.

It was only much later that I admitted to myself that a third thing had struck me:
3. It would be nice to have another native English speaker around the place.

The following day, I received another CV. One thing struck me about this CV:

1. It was identical in every way to Fisher Scott’s CV, except that the name of the applicant was Mohammed and the native language was marked as Arabic rather than English.

This engendered feelings of both panic and amusement and I showed it to my boss. He displayed only feelings of panic: journalists or worse still, the government, were testing us to see if we were racist employers. He asked me to call the Algerian candidate and invite him for an interview.

I have to admit that I felt like I had been stung and was against calling, and, when he arrived, I asked him if he was here as Fisher Scott or Mohammed - a low blow. When I pressed him on why he had sent two versions of his CV, his reply shocked me, “When I apply as Fisher Scott, I get about 25% replies (either positive or negative). When I apply as Mohammed, I am lucky if I get a single reply.”. When I asked him how he expected to get a positive reaction when a bogus Fisher Scott turned up, he replied, “I just hope that the interviewer can put that aside and that I will be judged purely on my technical and personal aptitudes.”. He explained that this was a common approach for north African job-seekers.

We hear often about the plight of what they call the “visible minorities” - unemployment levels for the 30-39 year-old African-descent population is running at >30%. What a terrible state of affairs and one that I had never had brought home to me so clearly.

Now I have to ask myself whether I am equally guilty of racism: would I have called the guy if the first version I received had been the Algerian version? Deep down I have to admit that I might have passed over it if it hadn’t been for the Anglo-Saxon name. As a minor consolation, I can say that this means that I might also have dismissed it if the CV had come from Monsieur Blanc. I wonder how many times my CV has been rejected because of my name? One thing for sure is that it is less often than the poor Fisher Scott.

If anything positive came out of it, it is that I have learnt my lesson. I just hope that France as a nation can do so too, but from what I see around me, I fear it won’t be any time soon.

As to the glaring question, “Did you hire him?”, the answer is, “No, he was rubbish”. And that is based on purely objective reasoning.