Training

Like most writers and poets, I have to do a money job to put beer and sandwiches on the table. And like most people who do a money job, I have to attend training. Every three weeks, actually, with my present company. Every third Friday we troop off down to a rugby club house in Northampton and learn something that makes us better, more efficient, more obedient workers--in theory.
It's not a bad thing. You're getting paid and you're not actually at work. You see people from other parts of the company, catch up, hang out, drink coffee. But then there is the training itself.
Corporate training represents, in microcosm, the way society is, how it sees itself, how the people working the levers think we ought to function; it is, like science fiction, where we'll end up if we don't take a stand. Individuals, in theory, you sit and hear about a succession of parliamentary acts telling you what to do. Like the code of conduct care workers are governed by which says you represent your company whether you are at work or not. B****CKS, I say: didn't Henry Ford practice something similar when he started car production? I protested against this in a training course once, saying my only responsibility to my employer was to give what I had while I was at work and not intentionally break any of the million-and-one rules dictating care practice, but my manager--a massive Rolling Stones fan and former earring-wearer ironically--shouted me down. And none of my colleagues backed me up or seemed even to care two hoots. There is not much passion in modern England for intellectual discussion, much less ideation as radical as my proposal that a free individual owes nothing to any one.
Training courses (and workplaces in general, and the bodies that inspect them), are obsessed with Health & Safety too. The phrase itself is thrown around like a threat, a curse, an invocation of Jesus, a moral reminder. Don't transgress this mysterious guiding principle of Health & Safety or somehow you will be revealing yourself as defective, drowned in turpitude, worse than a drunk. And what absurdities it fosters: paperwork to direct staff in the safe usage of the workplace toaster, reviewable every three weeks. Trust me. I am the guy who has to review it. Or the recorded voice in Greyfriars Bus Station in Northampton that plays on a continuous loop all day and into the night from speakers at the top and bottom of the escalator: "This is a safety announcement: would you please hold the handrail."
As a worker, I am not allowed to change lightbulbs because the company can't insure its care team against injuries sustained from lightbulb-changing accidents.Personal Protective Equipment--that's gloves and aprons-- must be worn when cooking, providing intimate care (hands to be washed before and after the gloves are put on); and heaven forfend that anybody should handle laundry without them. One person even suggested, at training, that the staff should wash their hands before using the kettle in case they deposit any germs on it that somebody else might pick up, and the trainer didn't advise her to get therapy.
We are turning into a nation--and possibly a world--of scared, personality-less puritans who live small lives, the perameters of which are dictated by unexamined fears, idiot suspicions and external authorities whose right to control us we no longer have the brains to question. And every time I go to a training course I confront the reality of this in a little greater detail. Sitting there--as near to the back as one can get in a convivial discussion circle--I feel a kind of nausea about the dreadful failure of the human race to live up to its colossal potential: we have minds capable of spanning universes in a micro-second, and yet we are racing blindly into a future defined by cowardly obedience and puritanism. Every time I learn again about not sharing my workplace problems with my lover because of Data Protection or The Correct 20-Second Hand-Washing Method, I think of my other life as a poet and (in Ginsberg's words) "an unofficial bastard of nature" and wonder what in god's name I'm doing there.
And then I remember. Money.
The notion of the divine human takes another kick in the balls.