This year, during my family holiday, I discovered how Hertz – and many other car hire companies – have crafted a process involving dark patterns to trick stressed travellers into paying far more than necessary for their car hire.
I’ve used Hertz several times over the years, particularly in the 2000s, so I expected good service, a decent car, and straightforward business.
Let’s start with the booking process. It was perfectly fine and straightforward online. The price seemed reasonable, and as the holiday approached, I was actually looking forward to seeing what car I would receive. I even found a potential car upgrade at a slightly lower price when I went back to check some details. Happy days, I thought.
Car collection was quick – no big queue – and the chap at the counter was affable. I was juggling kids and feeling the usual airport stress when he said, “You can have your wife as an additional driver for free, and you don’t have to worry about the excess.” I thought, “Oh wow, that’s great! Romana, do you have your licence?”
He handed me the rental slip, I signed, and at no point did I realise what had just happened.
Great, I thought.
The car, however, was a bit of a disappointment – a somewhat battered Jeep Compass plug-in hybrid. Not ideal when staying at a caravan site. But I coped, thinking it wasn’t worth the hassle to switch cars. Then, midway through the holiday, the engine check light came on. I called Hertz, and they said to drop off the car for a replacement. Brilliant. Except the woman at the counter seemed grumpy about it.
No worries. New car acquired, off we went. It was a Mini Countryman Cooper. Worse spec, but a much better car.
But this isn’t a car review. It’s about how Hertz deliberately created a system that, if you’re not paying attention, can significantly boost their profits.
By my estimation, a rental like mine would typically generate about €40 in profit for Hertz. But through clever design, they turned that into about €450 by breaking the usual patterns.
Step one: when the customer is stressed, offer things that sound helpful but are actually upselling excess waivers and other add-ons.
Step two: sneak in a Fuel Purchase option for €73. I brimmed the car right next to the airport when I returned it, but I won’t see that money back either.
Step three: hand the customer a docket with tiny print (which my ageing eyes now struggle to read without glasses), and ask them to sign here, here, and here – all while chatting away – and with no workflow difference when accepting or rejecting. €430 added there also.
My rental slip that caught me out.
So, because I was busy with the kids, wife, and general airport stress, I signed without paying proper attention. I never usually buy these optional extras.
With taxes, it was just a smidge under €600 in total.
But this time, I accepted the charge. I think I was tricked into it, but there’s nothing I can do. I contacted Hertz, complained, but was told, “No, you signed, you pay.”
And it’s a brilliantly designed system. When you decline, you sign. When you accept, you sign. You get used to signing every time. It’s easy to slip in an acceptance instead of a decline, and then you’re stuck.
So a rental agreement that was supposed to be under €500 turned into €1,133.35 once taxes were accounted for. I’m gutted. Money is already tight this year.
Well done, Hertz and your desk chap. You tricked me out of a substantial amount of money. You win. You’ve increase your profit on this rental by a factor of 10, so even if I don’t use you again for a decade, you’re still ahead. I rarely get tricked, but you managed it.
All I can do now is what I usually do when life hands me lemons—make lemonade, vent on my blog, and move on. I’ve paid my “stupid tax” for 2024. It won’t happen again.
It’s a cleverly designed process they’ve created, clearly aimed at getting people to pay extra at the desk. And it’s not just Hertz that does this—I just expected better from them. They’re supposed to be one of the better firms.
If you were designing the process with the customer not making mistakes in mind, you’d make them specifically write accepted.
The ultimate test as to whether this is sneaky is whether people ever find themselves doing the opposite, and not taking out such cover and extras when they do, in fact, want them.
I lived in a range of places as a kid, partly because my father was a bit of an itinerant who didn’t know what he wanted in life, other than that I mustn’t live with my mother. Go figure.
Eventually I got to settle down with my grandmother, but in the process I learned a lot about life as a child in different places. Where I felt safe and where I did not.
I did not feel safe in large council estates surrounding cities. I did feel safe in a caravan park. I did not feel safe in a city centre. I did feel safe in a built up part of a large city, living in an apartment block.
Right now I live in a mid-sized house, with a decent garden, in the town of Widnes. It’s nice. I genuinely think Widnes is a very lovely place to live in. Where I am, I have easy access to nature, pleasant walks, parks, a GP, a train station, shops and am not too far from a major hospital. It’s getting close to the ideal 15 minute neighbourhood and I’d say it’s one of the better planned areas I’ve lived in. It’s higher density than some old neighbourhoods I’ve been in, but way lower than others.
But it’s not sustainable. It was built on countryside. Soon more houses will be built. These houses will be between 90m² and 150m². Not that big, really, and they’ll take a fair chunk of land up.
Meanwhile, I can think back to a place that I really enjoyed living in as a kid in Spain. It was rented by my father, so it wasn’t unaffordable, and it was bigger and nicer than any house I lived in here in Britain. It was clean, I didn’t suffer asthma there… almost perfect. And within a short walk we had bars, restaurants, a bodega, and sports facilities. I loved it. I could play safely in the playgrounds with friends, and even went to school there as we had a primary school on site!
Here’s a snip from Google Maps.
As you can see it’s a big old building. I estimate there are between 400 and 500 apartments, varying in size from approximately the three bedroom 90m² apartment we lived in and the larger end apartments which I believe are about 140m².
The caravan I lived in with my grandmother can be seen here although in other pictures it seems it’s been knocked down:
Let’s have a think about housing density here, however.
The caravan park I lived on, including internal roads but not the road to the caravan park used about 320m² per home. Some were more densely packed, some more loosely, but it’s a fair approximation. My current house sits on about the same, funnily enough. The apartment block, however, uses about 100m² of land per home and includes playgrounds, two swimming pools, three tennis courts, a basketball court, shops, bars and more! Use the slider below. Both images are at exactly the same zoom level, and see how 400+ homes compares with about 200 homes for facilities and space use. Our towns could be half the size they are, and rammed with leisure facilities, all at lower cost.
Why don’t many British people live in apartments then?
Trust.
That’s it. One word. Due to systemic issues in how the UK treats and manages high density housing, we’ve ended up with a situation where there is very little trust in large apartment buildings.
We have miserable stories like The Decks in Runcorn, where residents have been waiting a decade for resolution and have felt locked in their unsellable apartments.
Historically there have been a number of disasters often down to poor design of buildings so that if something bad did happen, people died. Grenfell is the classic disaster.
By Natalie Oxford – https://twitter.com/Natalie_Oxford/status/874835244989513729/photo/1, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59913134
You had this tower block with a single stairway, no decent quality fire extinguishing system built in, flammable cladding. So many people were let down by the way this country treats high density housing. It was a disaster.
Meanwhile, when I visited family in Poland I noticed there were three stairways in the apartment block – the central one and one at each end of the building. Each corridor also had fire doors at each end, with security access, making it safe but also giving people plenty of options for escape. At the bottom you had a playground, sports facilities, and nearby a park and woods along with good access to public transport and very close shops.
High density housing makes living easier and nicer. You don’t have a garden to tend constantly, and you get a decent amount of space for the money because you’re not handing over a pile of money to wealthy landowners.
But we can’t get from where we are to where we should be without addressing these systemic issues. Meanwhile, we can’t be denying young families genuinely affordable, quality housing. So that means we keep building on land that really shouldn’t be built on. Because we’re scared of towers. And I understand why.
We can build better neighbourhoods, with better facilities, and better lifestyles. It’s possible. I’ve seen how it’s done in other countries. Having family in Spain and Poland, and friends in many other countries has taught me a lot. Being poor up to the age of about 25 has also taught me that we can’t foist middle class solutions to working class problems either. That got us the Southgate estate. It stank of piss.
You know that friend, the one who always promises to help you move flat, or help you fix your mower, but then doesn’t turn up? Yes. Or the guy who goes on a date and pays for the meal and somehow that comes with access to your body? Or the airline that makes you think you have to pay for a seat upgrade in order to take any baggage on board when actually you don’t?
The first two are obvious red flags. We all know people like this, and once we’re done excusing their behaviour we tend to move on. They’re often charming people at first. They have to be. They keep needing new friends and new partners, so they get really good at the introductory gab. But as I always say, the only perfect people in this world are people you don’t know very well yet.
To most of you I’m a suave, sophisticated man of the world. What? No? OK, well at least if you don’t know me I’m probably fairly mid. If I was on a charm offensive you might find me quite nice. Yet I snore, I go off on overly long rants about how a £70,000 car can have a misaligned number plate, and I walk into garage doors that I didn’t bother to put up all the way.
And so it is with companies. They’re often amazing at the introductory gabble. They’re smooth, funny on social media, and charming in their promises. But so many will let you down. Sometimes that’s your own fault. In a way, I kind of admire the Ryanair model because you actually know they’re going to play games and it’s out in the open. It’s a game! It’s a bit like that girl who you know is a heartbreaker but you’re gonna date her anyway because you’ll have fun for a while. Ryanair will be cheap. But sometimes you’re dealing with a business that should be well behaved, is very much business to business, and you’re thrown a curve ball.
Jabra’s survey
I have a Jabra headset I use for all my work meetings and honestly, it’s absolutely lovely. It’s clear, has good sound, and an excellent microphone. It’s also light enough that I can wear it all day long.
I also have the Jabra app, which is a bit annoying in needing frequent updates for something that does almost nothing. So when I saw a survey I thought I could give feedback on this, as well as the headset, so that they can improve.
I worked my way through the survey. It wasn’t especially long, but at the end, I couldn’t submit, because of this:
As you can see, the bit that says “I agree to terms and conditions and that Jabra, its parent company company can contact me by email or advertising…” is a mandatory field in the feedback form. So I’ve been asked to invest time in giving feedback yet here we go… in order to give that feedback there’s a price!
It’s like the Hotel California – it’s a classic case of social entrapment and a breach of the natural human social contract. Akin to being asked some questions at the supermarket then the surveyor saying “but if you don’t agree to let me stalk you, I’m throwing away everything you just told me.”
So I changed my address to one that included a tag* so that I could identify it as being from Jabra and submitted anyway. Because they need to know.
And you could say no sensible designer would build a survey like this. But it doesn’t matter. The survey was designed, even if by a person without the job title of “designer”. They were either careless, or cynical. I can’t be sure of which. And yes, my form entry was harsh. I was annoyed.
What do you think? Is it fair for companies to do this? Have you seen other examples that you’d like to share? Comments are open!
* many email platforms let you format an email with a + such as david+jabra@example.com, meaning you can see where your email went and block it easily if you wish to.
This blog post has now been re-arranged with the manifesto at the top, and the reasoning that led up to it beneath. Because, after all, placing the important content six or seven hundred words in is hardly being pure, is it?
Web Dogma 24. By me.
Content First. All articles, images, and graphics must be there to serve a purpose. Superficial or filler material is forbidden.
Real-world Photography. Photographs should not be bought from stock suppliers, but either provided by the subjects, or taken by a suitable photographer using only natural and available lighting and real life settings.
No AI. AI generated content is highly derivative, prone to errors, and could get you in trouble. It must not be used on any serious website to create content.
Simplicity in Design. Layouts must be clean and simple, with a focus on readability and user experience. Decorative elements that fail to enhance content comprehension are not permitted.
Environmental Care. A website should be as efficient and fast as possible, minimising the economic impact of running it. Where real life products are created, they should be on recycled paper using biodegradable inks.
No Sacred Cows. There are no firms, people, suppliers or institutions who cannot be investigated or criticised in the event that they behave badly or produce poor work.
Transparent Authorship. All articles and images must be clearly credited. Ghost-writing and anonymous contributions are forbidden.
No Advertisements. The website must be free of advertisements. Revenue should be generated through subscriptions, donations and grants.
Timelessness. Content should focus on timeless principles of the website’s subject matter, avoiding trendy or ephemeral topics.
Interactive and Inclusive. The website should encourage reader interaction through letters, feedback, and community events, fostering an inclusive community.
The story behind this
AI is making it much easier to produce content on the web. I could literally ask it to write this article and it’d do a half decent job of it. It might, of course, be a somewhat plagiarised equivalent, because of the way large language models work, but it would be an article.
They’re amazing. They’re also inauthentic and only relate to the past.
Search engines are getting in on this too – taking the content of websites and digesting it in order to provide what are AI generated responses, rather than sending you to the right websites:
Of course, Google created the problem, and is now offering a solution to the problem it created. How so? Let’s take a look at recipe websites. You’ve got a vegan visitor and you want a recipe for, say, homemade vegan sausages that everyone can enjoy. You’ve never made them before, so you search Google.
And you get not a personal blogger who’s landed on such a great recipe they wanted to share it, but a professional and well made site which isn’t a pleasure to use: https://elavegan.com/vegan-sausage-recipe/
If you don’t run an adblocker, the site is clearly set up to serve ads. Which in many ways, is fair enough – they need to make money, and Google provided this easy monetisation channel. By the time you get to the recipe itself you will see, get this, around twenty-two advertisements! And these sometimes rotate, so it could easily be more and rarely fewer. Meanwhile, I can hear the fan on my laptop starting to spool up as it handles rendering the video advertisements on a moving page.
And people are so, so tired of this. The reason they love TikTok and a lot of the newer social channels that come along is because, frankly, it often feels more authentic. It feels like real people giving advice and having opinions. It’s nice, honestly, although of course TikTok needs to make money too, so they do their thing. At least it’s easy to flick past their ads. People are getting their links inside WhatsApp groups. Emails are, incredibly, becoming a channel once more.
So to help people navigate past the advert dross, Google are, instead, going to serve up AI generated renderings. In fact, Bing are ahead of the curve here. Take a look at this block that you get on a Bing search for vegan sausage recipes:
They’re taking away the need to visit a site at all! Which is, I think, terrifying for sites that have entirely generated their revenue through an overdose of display ads.
People have been finding old school search terms less useful and, instead, have been appending site names in order to help get them to more useful content. In fact, it is quite normal to see search terms appended with Reddit, or, in the case of recipes, “BBC” is quite a common suffix. Why? Because we know the purpose of these sites is less to sell a lot of adverts, and more to inform.
People crave authenticity
Designing to hold a reader on your website in order to maximise the value of the reader’s time to advertisers is grating. We all know website publishers have to make money. We all know that it’s hard to do so. Which is why I find myself now subscribing not to the big local newspaper, but to a small, independent one that sometimes scrimps on presentation, but does get deep down into real stories. It doesn’t tell me which tube dress is suddenly selling well in Primark, however.
I don’t think people would even mind some promotional work, but again, only if it’s honest and blended with other genuine, non paid content, just so long as it’s well advertised that it is indeed a paid piece.
The craving for authenticity isn’t just a problem for websites. It’s created new trends in videos, podcasts and reels. This video is a great deep dive into this phenomenon on YouTube:
Of course, to get to where he is, Tom Nicholas above has had to distribute his videos on the YouTube walled garden. Which is favoured by Google’s search engine. Google owns YouTube.
Google in effect has an enormous effect on how the web works, and even how it is designed. But true success now can’t depend on just getting search engine or social media generated traffic. It has to be by being a destination of usefulness for your readers. One so useful, that they feel they’re part of something. Connected to it. Tuned in together.
Which has caused me a lot of navel gazing, and I decided I needed a fundamental set of principles for websites that I think can be the starting point for what is good… And at one point I started to think of Dogme 95 and how influential it was to filmmaking, even if most people haven’t heard of it.
It’s worth noting that Dogme 95 didn’t become the way to make films. Many made in the style were not even particularly successful or critically acclaimed. In large part, because it’s an extreme position that is generally unsustainable. It’s an idea that can season the whole, not the One True Way. So if you head back to the top of this post, you’ll see Web Dogma 24 and that I’m using the same rationale.
But reality will intervene
I don’t think it’s possible to run anything with that sort of purity. Life and the need to make a living means that compromises will have to be sought. But it offers an idea of what’s possible.
What do you think? What would you add or take away? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I hope you haven’t missed the big AI revolution going on right now? No? Yes? YES? You have no idea about it? Where do you live? On Mars? Ah OK, you were kidding. AI is being talked about everywhere, new devices like the Humane AI Pin or the Rabbit R1 are very much about it, and everyone involved is scrabbling around like mad for venture capital to fund their incredible ideas.
Having access to these language models is immense, right? We can sit down, whip out our AI, and enjoy a better than life experience. We can ask it questions and often it can come up with remarkably lucid explains. It seems intelligent. Here’s a conversation I’ve just had with ChatGPT’s latest model, after I asked it to settle into a British conversational style:
Me: The weather’s nice isn’t it? ChatGPT: Oh, absolutely! It’s a lovely day, isn’t it? Perfect for a stroll in the park or perhaps a spot of tea in the garden. How are you planning to enjoy the fine weather? Me: I have to work, sadly. In fact I’m working right now. ChatGPT: Ah, that’s a bit of a shame, isn’t it? But needs must, as they say. Hopefully, you can steal a few moments to enjoy the sunshine, even if it’s just a quick breather by the window. Anything I can help you with to make your workday a tad brighter? Me: Give me a joke to help me get over my vague sense of imposter syndrome! ChatGPT: Of course! Here’s a bit of light-hearted humour for you:
Why did the scarecrow win an award?
Because he was outstanding in his field!
Hopefully, that brought a smile to your face. Remember, everyone feels like an imposter at times, but you’re doing brilliantly!
It’s a decent conversation, although no British friend I know would chat like that. They’d be less polite and more vaguely abusive, to be honest. But it does seem intelligent. Then I can ask it a tricky question:
Me: I’m struggling with a maths question. I have a formula for a parabola, and I need a graph and the location of the y intercept: f(x)=3x²+7
ChatGPT:
No worries, I’m happy to help with that. Let’s break it down.
The given function is:
f(x)=3x²+7
To find the y-intercept, we need to determine the value of the function when =0x=0. Plugging =0x=0 into the equation:
(0)=3(0)²+7=7
So, the y-intercept is at (0,7).
Now, let’s plot the graph of the function and visualize it. I’ll create a graph for you.
Graph by ChatGPT
Here you go! The graph of f(x)=3x²+7 shows a parabola opening upwards. The y-intercept, marked in red, is at the point (0,7). I hope this clears things up for you!
That’s so freaking clever!
Except… except… it’s not actually clever.
Let’s try asking it a question you can use on a seven year old child who would almost universally get the answer right:
As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives who was going to St Ives. How many people are going to St Ives?
I think you’ll agree that this riddle is pretty simple. I’m going to St Ives, the man is going to St Ives, and the seven wives are going to St Ives. Look at this madness I got back:
The riddle goes as follows:
“As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, Each wife had seven sacks, Each sack had seven cats, Each cat had seven kits.”
The key detail in the riddle is the first line: “As I was going to St. Ives.” The person telling the story is the one going to St. Ives. The man with the seven wives and all the others are simply met on the way; the riddle doesn’t specify their destination.
Therefore, only the narrator is confirmed to be going to St. Ives. The answer is:
1 person (the narrator) is going to St. Ives.
And that reveals the weakness of large language models. There’s no inherent cleverness. What it does is to look for what it thinks you’re talking about then infer an answer using a combination of techniques, and it then picks what the most likely question is then creates a response based on what it thinks is correct. If the problem is very well known, it can do some really quite incredible things. But if the problem given to it is a novel variation of an old problem it will absolutely fall apart.
Life is full of novel problems. Don’t be misled by the clever bullshit attitude of a large language model, but at the same time, if you know its limitations, it can be a wonderful tool. Use it wisely and carefully, or there’s a risk it’ll make a fool of you. And yes, the post image at the top is, indeed, AI generated – because I have bugger all budget and this is a personal blog. Bite me!
In the world of transgender rights, the battle for the bathroom has reached fever pitch, especially in the USA. Now, I’m not here to referee in this brawl – because on one side of the debate you have the ‘TERFs”, and on the other, the trans rights activists sometimes labelled “handmaidens”. Both are terms about as socially acceptable as weeing all over the toilet seat, and on the extreme fringes of both you find calls for violence. It seems every modern campaign group needs its villains and its sycophantic followers.
Both sides have got themselves worked up about issues that I’m pretty sure most transgender people would prefer to be handled with a little less shouting and little more thought. I have my own opinions, but that’s not for me to share here. What I’m looking at is how design can make the situation better, by picking on one such contentious issue: public bathrooms.
We’ve all got to admit that the concept of women only spaces wasn’t dreamt up at a lovely cocktail party. They often serve as a refuge from the stormy reality of life that many women face. The abused, the desperate, the traumatised who’ve experienced the worst aspects of a male dominated society are, quite rightly, entitled to seek out a safe space away from men.
Meanwhile, imagine you’re a transgender woman and are about to transition. You’ve got to live life as a woman for at least a year or two before anything permanent happens. It’s an obvious safety precaution so decisions aren’t made in haste.
So out you go on your first night in full femme mode. Nature calls, and you head to the bathrooms. You aim for the ladies, because, well, that’s where you belong now. But for some women in there you might be as welcome as a fox in a chicken coop.
Head into the men’s toilets and many trans women are as vulnerable to the nasty side of men as the traumatised women who want their safe spaces. You don’t feel you belong there.
All you want to do is check your lipstick and adjust the heels.
And there’s a twist here. I’ve met some women who are burly and could beat the majority of men in arm wrestling. They may look pretty masculine too. They’re now sometimes finding themselves being shouted at for heading into the ladies’ bathroom!
About designing loo layouts. The Brits generally build them with two doors going in, and stalls that are pretty private or, as is increasingly common, the toilets are individual spaces with floor to ceiling walls.
They love a gap! You could pass a handbag through that! Nobody wants to make eye contact with someone taking a dump.
So how about work is done to make sure bathrooms accommodate everyone? Picture a row of stalls which are just little rooms with proper walls. Private, no tinkling sounds being shared. Just a nice, lockable door for each person with a sign saying “Thinking Room”.
We can have scents and nice music for everyone, and ladies can compliment the prospective ladies for their make-up skills. Remember – the more people there are around the more likely they are to hear a shout for help. Predators hide in shadows, after all.
Just a thought. Ultimately then, this isn’t a potty problem. It’s a design problem. And that means we can design our way out of this mess, and make sure everyone is happy. Or are we going to just keep arguing until we’re just too old to care what’s going on in the next door toilet cubicle?
Comments. Please. Just remember the one rule on my site. Be kind.
Being very old (or at least, that’s how I feel being in tech!) means that after coming up to nearly forty years in technology, I’ve seen some changes.
My first computer at home, that I owned, that I could truly call my own, was a Dragon 32. It was a small, 32KB computer using the rather lovely little 6809 processor. This CPU ran at 2MHz and the system as a whole allowed me to learn a heck of a lot about computer science as a geeky teenager who was busy ignoring sports.
It didn’t exactly prepare me for my first coding job, working on an IBM MVS mainframe computer handling the payroll of 70,000 people, and distributing over £1bn a year. In fact, it prepared me terribly, because mainframes back then were similar to desktop computers today – powerful, with a ton of security features, online storage and a lot of data pipelines. But still, I knew various algorithms, knew what compilers were (though I’d only used an assembler really, but it got me half way there) and how to do a lot with a little.
That mainframe, when I started, could do about two hundred megaflops.
And today, in the picture above, I have an M5Stack on my desk. It uses the Xtensa LX7 processor. As you can see from the picture it’s absolutely tiny. And it can handle the integrated digital camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB… everything, really. The little CPU can run at low speeds and high speeds as appropriate to workload, and can reach over 1GHz.
Let’s put things into perspective.
The 6809 was addressing 32KB. The S3 Stack has 16MB of Flash and 8MB RAM. So 750 times the onboard storage of my Dragon 32. You can insert a 16GB microSD Card. You could put 200KB onto a C60 cassette tape back then. So that’s 80,000 times the unloadable storage! Running a lot faster too.
In terms of CPU performance, I’m struggling to find comparable benchmarks, but if we look at a 6809 you used to get 2-3 clock cycles per simple instruction – so you’d max out at around one million per second. Complex instructions would be far worse, and moving memory around was slow and expensive. The LX7 seems to get through around 0.8 instructions per clock cycle, so we can see it can max out at over a billion instructions per second. Or at least a couple of thousand times faster than the 6809.
But here’s the thing… the little computer I’m holding in my hand is at least as capable as the contents of the data centre I started to work at in 1987.
And that, my friends, is why I feel very very old in this sector! Things have changed so much.
Yet at the same time, they haven’t. UX didn’t have a name back then, but careful thought into the design of a screen could save people a huge amount of time or reduce data errors. Saving CPU cycles then meant less of a bill (we paid by CPU time on mainframes) and could save tens of thousands a year for our team. Today, it may feel as if the CPUs are endlessly powerful, but using lower power techniques can dramatically cut down on resource use – meaning less environmental damage. I know at work we’ve taken systems running on 32GB, top spec web servers down to 512MB machines! It’s incredibly satisfying to reduce resource consumption by so much.
Let’s look at it another way. The sophisticated corporate payroll, for 70,000 people that I worked on in the eighties and nineties could easily be run today, if suitably considered, on the tiny little computer I’m holding in my hand here.
Which leads me to the real point of this piece – we as software engineers and designers have a duty to minimise resource usage. Yes, that enormous library you’ve included in your project might save you an hour of time today, but if it increases the memory and power consumption of your system so much that you need loads of cloud computing to support your system then it’s not a job well done – it’s a kludge you can hide. We have an ethical imperative to do better in systems development.
Also, low power computing is awesome and fun. Try it!
Having a coronary artery bypass isn’t much fun and comes with challenges. Four years later I thought I’d describe some more of my experiences.
In my previous blog post, I described the adventure of having a heart attack and the five coronary artery bypass grafts that resulted. That procedure saved my life and actually restored my quality of life and fitness, within six months, to about the level of five years before. Today I’m as fit as I’ve ever been as an adult. So everything’s fine, right? Well, it’s a bit more complicated.
Let’s not mess about here, having a heart attack is a traumatic and terrifying experience. So is having a major operation with a risk factor measured in percentages. My risk of death was given as a bit under 2%. Which doesn’t sound too bad, but if you were told one in fifty planes crashed fatally, you’d perhaps be rather scared about flying, right?
With an event like this you come face to face with your mortality. The evening before the operation, Romana brought our chidren to see me. I hugged them hard before they left, but I also wanted them to know I was OK. No tears. But in a way I felt oddly calm. I knew my chances were better with the operation than without. But without the operation I was almost certain to be alive at the end of the next day. You have a fear horizon.
That’s… hard. For me I went into a different mental state. I always imagine it’s that mindset that a meditating Buddhist monk might go into. I was calm and collected. I thoroughly expected, when I was told about the need for a bypass, that I’d be a gibbering mess on the day. Yet most people I met facing this situation seemed to be the same. We know our choices are limited and this is our best chance. So off we go. But let’s not pretend that it also doesn’t scare and scar you. We may seem brave. We may be brave. But what choice do we have?
The ascendance from survival
You can read about my waking up on that previous post, if you like. I’m mentioning it here because it marks the start of the new life. A life which is separated into the before, the after, and the now. The initial week you focus on moving, and managing the pain. There’s a lot of support available, the nurses are wonderful, people visit you. The odd one might nearly faint when they see nearly a metre of stitches.
You go home. My in-laws were staying and helped keep the house bustling during the day, which was honestly a help. We can’t communicate well as they don’t speak a lot of English, but they were always there with cups of tea and help with cooking – stuff that’s still difficult in the first few weeks home.
The operation then changes you. Different people react differently to these events, so I can only really talk about how I felt, and how I still feel at times. Please indulge me, or feel free to ignore me! I do this sort of writing because it’s good therapy for me. It gets those feelings out. Other people have other ways. I’ll try and break up the feelings into types, and describe how they pan out over the four years from the event. I’ve not sought out a diagnosis for any of the following, or treatment, so bear that in mind.
Anxiety
Let’s start with the big one and most common for survivors that I’ve dealt with. The fear. The feeling that every twinge is the start of the end, every bit of shortness of breath is the start of new heart trouble because maybe a graft is failing or new plaques are being deposited. Thing is, having had your sternum pulled apart hard, your pericardium sliced open, your arteries and veins harvested… well, it’s pretty natural you’re going to have all sorts of aches and pains and periods of struggle. You notice everything new. Can’t help it.
So we live in this state of increasingly intermittent rather than constant anxiety. It does get better too. I hold on to that. After a year the panicky moments are every couple of weeks. After four years, they’re every month or two. Still there though. I’d been doing some new exercises with weights. The next day my chest was aching and I had a moment where I thought it was a heart attack before I remembered I’d been working out my chest muscles.
Other things come in to play with anxiety also. I suffered a frozen shoulder following the operation, and that is painful and annoying. It eased off six months later, but you find yourself worrying that you’ll never have a pain free day again. And no, you can’t take ibuprofen if you’re on blood thinners despite it being the usual go-to drug for pain relief for things like this. Ah well.
And sometimes I’ll be puffed out because I have asthma, but I’m never sure… worsening asthma marked the decline of my heart health. Is this asthma or is it my heart? Take the inhalers and see if it improves and when it does you do feel this mental relief kicking in!
Depression
This is a very normal reaction to these events. Sometimes you can work through it, sometimes you can’t. I’m pretty certain I had a period of mild depression as a consequence. I still relapse and seem to have a bout of a week or two every now and again in this weird, empty space – I’m either too sensitive, or struggling to enjoy anything or do anything that is outside of routine. Then I’ll have a period where I’m super focussed and really get stuff done. When I’m in it I kind of resent hearing “let’s meet this week” or “there’s a birthday party for one of the boys’ friends this week and they’ve asked us to go along.” I always say yes. But I don’t want to. I want to be left alone. Half my current life I don’t want to talk to people, listen to them or do anything with them. But I do it, because it’s better for me than being alone, even if I prefer being alone. Mad eh?
I still sometimes like and need to be alone though. Last night it was relatively warm, Romana was studying a presentation she had to give, I’d done my chores, kids were in bed, and I curled up on the bench in the garden, with the cushions, and headphones on listening to some good music for an hour and not even glancing at my phone (which was now in do not disturb mode), and it was honestly one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in a while.
Anger & self pity
I’ve put these two together here. There’s that “woe is me!” feeling which feels like the other side of the coin which is “you’re so f*cking happy and healthy and yet you drink and smoke and don’t exercise and do everything wrong! Feck off!”
These aren’t helpful emotions. But they exist and they’re real. And need acknowledging. And this tendency to anger means that when people get under your skin you have to decide whether they’re actually a positive impact on your life or not. I had a friend who was perfectly lovely and supportive in many ways, but the 2019 general election was coming up. She was very Momentum in politics even if it doesn’t quite chime with her middle class lifestyle, but that’s fine. The problem, the big moment, came when I’d posted something on Facebook about the Lib Dems who I support. She described Jo Swinson as “that vile woman.” And I flipped out. Had a go at her, blocked her, and that was that. She wasn’t the only person I did that to either.
I don’t miss these people I cut out, really. They had toxic personalities to me at that moment in time, and you know what you don’t need when you’re recovering from a major life event? People who are toxic. To you. They might be perfectly lovely people overall. People don’t get into Momentum or the Lib Dems or even the Conservatives, generally, in order to make the world worse. Sometimes they do, but that’s not usually the intention for most people. But those people can be terribly toxic to you. And I’m still recovering, so I don’t have the capacity to cope with that substantial difference of opinion.
I’ve got this! syndrome
Here’s an interesting one, and there’s probably a proper psychological term for it. But I just describe it as “I’ve got this! syndrome.”
A belief that I can deal with all of this. That all I have to do is eat perfectly, exercise perfectly, behave perfectly, care for myself perfectly, take the medication perfectly, be a perfect husband, be a perfect boss, be a perfect dad, a perfect patient, and everything will be fine.
Which is, quite frankly, delusional. There are no perfect people. Myself included.
This knowledge, sadly, doesn’t seem to stop me. I go through phases where I decide I’m going to run faster and further than ever before. Then I realise that in doing that, I’m skipping quality time with the kids, not doing laundry or jobs around the house… or I go camping with the kids and feel that I ate badly and didn’t do my run for the weekend… or I switch to alcohol free beer and then realise that actually it’s still full of simple carbs… or I think sod it, have the chocolate, but now I have to run extra hard, only to find that the extra hard running leaves me sore and exhausted the next day.
It’s probably PTSD
I guess this is that post-traumatic stress problem that people talk of.
So why don’t I get help?
Because I’m functioning, frankly. I’m not so depressed that I can’t get by. I’m not so anxious that nothing happens in my life. My kids are happy. I think my wife is happy. I think my colleagues are mostly happy. But each little setback, even if nothing to do with my health, sets me on a path of questioning and trying to work out how to be better, stronger, smarter, more organised, more caring, more focussed, better at caring for myself, better… better… better. Because that’s how I get over this and make the most of the 5-30 years I probably have left.
About that 5-30 years
All things being well, there’s no real reason why someone who’s had a bypass like me, following a heart attack (myocardial infarction) with relatively little damage to the heart shouldn’t live another 30 years. Maybe more. An active and full life. I’ve come across people in amazing shape, aged nearly eighty, thirty years on. They look amazing.
But I also see some people pass away. Some of my grafts were from veins and they’re just not so tough and have a high chance of failing after ten years. I could get really unlucky and they could block and cause trouble in a bad way. Which could kill me.
Who knows, eh? I certainly don’t. Nobody does. I just keep taking the pills and hope for the best. Speaking of which:
Now the good stuff: The weird disappearance of my xanthelasma
So, xanthelasma are interesting. I had a couple of these. Here’s a before and after shot:
Excuse the ropey shots used – I never set out to document the disappearance of these things, but there you go. I had them, now I don’t.
Xanthelasma are made of cholesterol, and are, in fact, an indicator of risk of cardiovascular problems. The fact they’ve gone is actually reassuring. I can see that my cholesterol levels in my blood, from blood tests, are about half what they used to be. This is potentially great news. I’m hoping it keeps me safe.
With blood pressure, we all know that high blood pressure is bad for the arteries. It damages them, and is linked to stiffening as well.
In this case you can see that I’d started logging my blood pressure in the top part of this chart in early 2019, half a year before my heart attack. Then I kind of lost interest. It was a bit high-ish but not so high as to be of any real concern. I didn’t worry too much.
But the heart attack came! I started logging everything as soon as I came home, and you can see how I did it very regularly by the density of data points. Sometimes I was measuring two or three times a day.
You can track it along until March 2020, when I came off beta-blockers. You can see that the blood pressure readings became a little more varied, with more readings above 120/80 – my target is to keep below that. The trend didn’t really change, but over 2021 I’ve noticed that if I’m over 120/80 it’s by a very small amount. Most typically I see readings around 110/70 which is exactly where I want it to be. Ever since then it’s been much the same, but I’ve zoomed in to show how my desire to measure my blood pressure quite suddenly tailed off. Because I felt a lot better. You get the odd spike, but they often go with a bit of relaxation.
Ten key things I do to try and help recover from the bypass
So now for a little list of the things I try to do to help myself. They don’t always work:
Exercise. I’m told this is the single best thing I can do. So I try and do at least three solid bouts of exercise which substantially raise my heartbeat each week. I also now try and incorporate some more strength exercise – sit ups, press ups, pull ups, etc. So long as my shoulders don’t hurt too much.
Cut out toxic people and walk away from disputes. I always stood my ground in a dispute in order to ensure a negotiated settlement was the end, or the other person would give up. Now, sometimes, I just think “nah, sod it. I don’t need the argument, and I don’t need these people. Step away.” I still need to be better at this, but watch out for it.
Eat reasonably well. Still like some treats though. I’m largely vegan, so I avoid dairy. I really enjoy a peanut bar with a bit of chocolate as a bit of a treat. But the rest of the time it’s wholegrains, plenty of protein, not too many simple carbs, no sugar in coffee, no sugary fizzy pop, no alcohol, no deep fried food, no cheesy food.
On the point of no alcohol, I still allow myself the odd glass. On very very rare occasions I’ve been known to have two glasses of wine. Needs to be a good reason though. Because alcohol is bad for you. Yes, even red wine. I could link to studies, but if you don’t believe me you’ll find the outdated studies that say it’s good for you, and if you do believe me… well, you don’t need further evidence do you?
Break work into chunks. I sometimes use a visual countdown timer, just to get things started. I allocate myself twenty minutes to at least start a task, and see what I can achieve in that time.
Self-care. If I can, I take time to myself. If it’s been gloomy I’ll allow myself six minutes on a sunbed (with sunblock on the scars) to give me a little boost. Not very often, but seems to lift me. Other things can include getting a haircut, going for a walk, or treating myself to something enjoyable.
The pills. Oh the pills. I take them carefully and religiously! Very occasionally I forget one, but it’s rare. They keep me alive. I also supplement with magnesium (it’s a mild calcium channel blocker and can help with relaxing) and some other multivitamins as feels appropriate.
Appreciate the people around me. They matter. They give me the support and grounding that I need.
Try not to think too much about work. You’re either working, or not working. It’s OK to not be busy when working and to be thinking. Don’t work eight hours, then think about work for another five hours, never quite present with other people.
Have things to actively look forward to. Your things, not the things you’re supposed to do. A mild bit of selfishness is OK – in fact it’s healthy. Just don’t make it pathological. If you’re spending more time playing golf than with you’re family you should probably tweak things or deal with why you prefer that to family. But enjoy yourself. Give yourself space for pleasure.
So that’s it. I just saw my word count and 2800+ words is far too many, really. If you’ve made it this far without merely scanning, then well done you! Take care 💖
Have you had a bypass operation? How did you recover? What tips do you have?
Could VW really be in trouble, if they’re cancelling a factory and pushing back a car launch? I don’t think so, but they’re not entirely in the clear…
I’ve seen people commenting in various EV forums and social media on VW Could Delay Trinity EV Until 2030 And Scrap €2 Billion German Factory | Carscoops and concluding that VW are in big trouble and failing in the market. In reality I think it’s hard from the outside to draw any conclusions. VW is a master of building factories and cars. We know that. They provide variety and interest to a huge number of market segments.
The problem they have isn’t really an ICE/EV problem. It’s not a factory problem. It’s not a mechanical engineering problem. It’s the other ICE – in-car entertainment. They don’t have a software culture. No matter how much of a twonk you think Musk is, you might have noticed his contentious statements are never about software. Nobody says “Gosh, his opinions on software are so controversial.” And that’s because he’s a software guy. Tesla’s board is stuffed with software guys. His main weakness is that he thinks more can be solved with software than is always realistic – AI is still as dumb as a worm and easily tricked. So the newer vision only Tesla’s are known for being a bit, well, not great at stuff like self parking whereas the older hardware based ones do quite well. I’ve embedded the video below just to help:
Back to VW. They really need to get their head around the car’s user focussed software, build the right team, and nurture it well. That’s going to take a little while.
As for scrapping a new factory – that just makes sense – we’re moving to a world where people keep their cars for longer and there’s a larger gross margin per car. You can’t grow your market through price competition any more, VW as a group sell cars in one form or other in literally every geographical market too. They have to drive other value.
The transition to EVs *is* dangerous for older makers, but the choices to buyers are still sparse. Tesla make some of the most efficient electric cars out there, with some delightful software, but the cars aren’t to everyone’s tastes and cover a fairly tightly defined sector. I don’t like the idea I’m tied to apps from their store – why not use Android Auto or Apple Carplay as well?
So the legacy car makers know how to make cars. That’s absolutely not the problem. The “hours to produce a car” bit is spurious – you absolutely can’t compare two makers with that statistic. It’s often quoted, but I’ve seen wildly differing values from the same car maker’s different plants and it’s such a complex subject that isolating a single variable is likely to be misleading. Profitability over capital employed is the only real meaningful measure in any business, and even that can be hard to isolate if the business is deep into self-investment.
My own EV purchase considerations
I’m in the market for a new EV next year. I really like the mechanical side of the VW Group EV range, but the software puts me off. Some of their brands implement it a little better than others, but it’s still a problem, and I can’t afford a Porsche or Audi EV.
Honda aren’t giving me something to progress to from the little e, which has amazing styling and is a lovely thing to drive and own, but the limited utility means it sits firmly as a second car… but then nobody else does such an interesting small EV, and the e-Up is gone if I wanted to go for just cheap utility. In fact
Only a few car makers sell smaller EVs with some sense of personality, decent RWD chassis, nice interiors. I don’t yet feel ready for a road-trip car to be electric only either. As a family it can work out more economical and maybe even greener to take a fully loaded and efficient diesel car on holiday than to fly. Although, yes, you can stop and relax with your car whilst recharging it, the stops come every 200 miles, and if you’re driving through the night, sitting in a car park with nothing to do for 40 minutes to get another 200 miles in just doesn’t appeal. In reality, I think Hyundai’s group, with Kia and Genesis, seem to be leading the pack with reasonably affordable EVs on 800 volt systems, decent in-car software, and good options for different types of buyers. I could see myself in a Kia EV6 or a Hyundai Ioniq, but they’re also still quite big, and I feel like we’ll have too much functional overlap between something like that and the old Volvo, with the result that the Volvo only really gets pulled out when we need two cars – something increasingly rare with more home working and both kids about to be in high school. At that point, we may even feel it appropriate to go down to one useful car in the household again, with the Lotus Elise providing last measure status for those rare days when we need to transport six or seven people.
What do you think?
P.S. This is a little experiment. I realised I was tapping out a huge comment in a Facebook group and thought that with just a small amount of extra work I could put the content on my blog instead of giving it away for free, to barely ever be read by anyone else, in a billionaire’s walled garden. I opine on loads of stuff. A lot of it is just that. Opinions. But whole magazines are sold on the back of the opinions of thirty writers: so I may as well put mine out there on the open web.
At 18 I was skint and got made homeless. It took a lot of graft, patience and mistakes to get out of that and into a moderate middle class lifestyle. Here’s how.
When I was 18 I found myself in a weird situation. October 1987. I’d just started my first job, straight from 6th form, and was happy with that. My favourite song the year before had been The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades. I was optimistic and hopefull. I’d done my A levels finally surrounded by people who actually cared about education. I was no star pupil at 6th form, except at computers, but computers were the big thing so I had confidence.
All good then. I mean it wasn’t perfect, but I just had a fresh optimism. I’d lived with my grandmother since I was about 12 (my childhood memories are imperfect and I have few witnesses to refer to. I’d been casually fostered for a number of years prior, was fed up, and had been dumped with her. She was one of the few consistent things in my life and could see I was breaking in front of her. So I in effect ‘divorced’ my father and she took custody of me. She lived in a mobile home type caravan at the time. She was poor, but stability mattered more to me. I got my education. The future felt very bright.
I got through the various stages of ICI (then one of the largest chemical firms around) to get a job in their computer centre as a trainee printer operator, with the idea being to climb into a programming job. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, my grandmother had been in a lot of pain and, within a day of being admitted to hospital (this is another story to tell) where we discovered she had terminal cancer. Very terminal. She had less than a week left.
I was so very alone. My father turned up, signed over to me to handle everything, then disappeared to South America, never to be seen again. In 1986, my mother who I had some mild relationship with, had taken her family to Spain and, for some reason, me being told and having a goodbye seemed to be forgotten… so I’d accepted they weren’t a factor in my life. That was it. Me, alone, in the world.
Things got quite bad, quite quickly. Here’s what I learned, what I did wrong, and what I think I did right.
The world is not your friend
When you grow up, generally there are adults who look after your interests and needs, until you’re old enough to do it for yourself. But often you feel this interconnectedness with everything being generally good. Often in adulthood we discover things can be quite different – especially if we have some failures. I think learning that the world isn’t your friend is important. I discovered, for example, that if you have no cash, you can’t just take over a substantial asset (a house, in this case) and expect to not pay off debts that your grandmother had. The answer should be simple – I could have borrowed from another bank or building society to buy the house off my grandmother’s estate. Except her bank refused unless my grandmother’s estate was up to date on the mortgage payments. And because my grandmother’s estate had debts and no income, it couldn’t make the mortgage payments, and I was advised that if I paid the mortgage it would potentially make me liable for everything. When you’re an eighteen year old that leaves you in a bind.
The bank took the house, and I was made homeless, briefly (I kept a spare key and let myself in at night to sleep on the floor!), and I quickly organised myself and bought a tiny flat. Good job, because the council wouldn’t help me, the bank wouldn’t help, renting privately was almost impossible for me. Thank heavens I was organised and found the right combination of people.
Finance is risky and can be expensive
Because I was young with little credit history, all finance was risky. I figured that with my job and my flat I could now live a little and went stupid, bought myself a small engined sports car – a Scimitar SS1 1300 if you’re a car geek – a tumble dryer and washing machine all on credit, and thought everything was great. But I had nobody around to advise me I was being dumb, remember? No parents, and even most of my friends had gone off to university.
What happened was that when something went wrong with the car, it really stretched my finances to fix it. Then it got stolen and damaged, and I either repaired it myself or my insurance would get really expensive. Every little bad thing that came up, made life harder. But I discovered that I couldn’t just sell the car and forget about the finance – the interest and the way they did it meant that I’d need the value of the car plus another £1k to pay it off. I was trapped.
Toxic parents usually remain toxic parents
My father was still in touch with me, but for some reason thought I had plenty of money. So when he got into financial trouble in South America, he started giving me hard luck stories about how dangerous things were, that he was going blind (or a bit long sighted as we call it now), and he needed £1.5k. Or £3.5k in today’s money. I was 19, skint, and instead he banged on about how I must have had money from my grandmother’s death and my good job. “Yeah, Dad, but you’re not here and you have no idea.”
However, guilt led me to do my best. I sent him all my spare cash for a couple of months, before finally arranging a loan. I used some of it to consolidate my credit card debts, and two thirds went to him. I sent him, if I remember correctly, about £800 in total. He wrote to say he was struggling and needed more and he was in a dangerous situation I didn’t understand.
So I did what I felt was the right thing – I spoke to the Foreign Office, and eventually secured a facility for him to be able to catch a flight home, where he’d at least get benefits.
I called him, told him the good news, he was furious. And that was the last time I spoke to him. Ultimately, narcissistic, self-centred and selfish people rarely understand that other people have struggles. They just don’t get it. And they stay that way.
Stability matters
One thing I did right was to stay at ICI for many years. I kept that job. My head wasn’t in the best place, so I wasn’t the best employee, but I was useful and smart enough to keep it as well, and had some reasonable progression. For a while I’d been renting rooms after financially over-extending when I lived in my flat, and that job gave me the much needed anchor to my life. Eventually I bought a house with my then girlfriend. That stability then allowed me to think about taking a risk again… But it also established a nice final salary pension plan that will still be useful even 40 years after leaving!
I went contracting
Sometimes, income really matters. I don’t think contracting is for everyone. I hated some aspects of it, and it ruined my relationship at the time because I was away from home so much. But it really helped bring in money, which then really helps you to just establish a buffer of more than a month or two of money. Suddenly I felt like I had an actual surplus and proper savings. I got rid of the rust wreck of a Peugeot and bought a three year old Rover. I started to dress more smartly. I had nearly ten years of this solid and high income and it probably made the biggest difference of all to me.
At the end of my ten years, inflation and low interest rates made my mortgage look tiny, I had asset wealth in the house, shares, and low outgoings. When you’re in that situation, as many middle classes get born into, you can start to take risks. I decided to set up a proper web development business, now called Interconnect.
I could have lost a lot with Interconnect, and we came close to giving up. It didn’t ever give me more income than contracting – not even close. But it does give me another source of stability. And that, dear readers, is worth more than you might think.
I learned about how money and how the stock market works
There’s one book I read early one which just opened my eyes to the world of money. I’ve bought it several times, lent it to people, forgot who I leant it to and lost it! Doesn’t matter, it’s worth it. Its called How The Stock Market Really Works and it goes way beyond stocks, shares, and bonds, but into planning, risks, retirement and so on. In reading it, several times, I established a baseline of understanding that stopped me falling for scams, stopped me making bad investments, and generally helped me ensure I could make best use of the spare money I had.
I no longer pushed my finances hard
Now I understood money better, I knew that, for example, if you have assets of £100k and a debt you can’t pay of £50k, you’re in a really really bad situation. If you have assets of £10k, a debt of £100k and some short term cash flow issues, then you’re in a strong position to start negotiating. Why? Because if you have no assets and a big debt, the bank can’t recoup anything much if they send in the bailiffs. Once their costs are accounted for, they lose everything. So they’re more willing to negotiate. If you have loads of assets, you’re stuffed. That was, in effect, what the bank did to take my grandmother’s home from me when I was younger. They had no motivation to negotiate with me.
So you either max out your finances, Donald Trump style, or you very carefully segregate them. Because I value stability and security above all else, I segregate them.
I learned to think like an accountant
After ICI, I spent a lot of time working in corporate finance departments on their software.
Here’s a thought experiment. You have £10,000. You go out and buy a car for £9,000. How much are you worth? The naïve answer is £1,000. You see yourself as £9,000 worse off. But if your car helps you earn more money by opening up a job you otherwise couldn’t reach where you’ll earn £5,000 a year more, then you have two things happening:
First, your balance remains at £10k, because you have a £9k car and £1k of cash.
Secondly, you have a future benefit over, say, the five years you expect to have the car, of £25k. So over the five year period, assuming the car becomes worthless, you’ll end with £26k on the balance sheet. Or you use that £26k to put into a mortgage which, again, is generally a good move because it’s a limit liability loan secured on property which, in most economies, is a pretty safe bet.
But all accountants will say that cashflow is of utmost importance. You may have a pile of assets, but if you can’t service your responsibilities then you become insolvent – you can’t always easily sell assets without a big loss. So always think about cashflow – it’s best to be gently increasing your cash position as your wealth grows.
I learned to let go of status plays
When I was young I caused myself trouble by buying that sports car. It wasn’t, in itself, a bad buy on the surface – sports cars depreciate more slowly, the insurance on this one was the same as a similar powered Ford Escort, and it didn’t use any more fuel. And it’s not like a 19 year old needs to carry a family. Two seats was fine. Reliability wasn’t great either. But where it went wrong is that my boss therefore believed he paid me too much! My older superiors didn’t like that I had, on the surface of it, a fancier car than they did.
Of course, I was financed to the hilt, and they weren’t. They didn’t know that. They just assumed I had more money than I let on to.
Had I been in a humbler car, they’d have had no idea of my financial status.
It’s better to let people assume you’re a bit skint, and focus on reliability plays in order to establish your career. Took me into my thirties to work that one out.
Same with clothes. Stick to cheap clothes until buying them is easy. If you do what young me did and buy everything on credit at Top Man and Burton’s (yeah I know) then you’re setting yourself up for bad decisions and bad outcomes.
Adaptable accent and open attitudes
I’m actually quite Scouse yet a lot of people I meet and work with down South just think generic, educated Northerner with a light accent. The reality is I just adapt my accent to suit the situation. This means I don’t terrify upper middle class people, whilst I can still sit and have a chippy lunch with garage mechanics. Non-threatening to everyone, basically. I accept that most people know stuff I don’t, that they believe they’re trying their hardest (they may not be trying optimally, or coping badly, but I accept their belief), and generally try to learn from the people I meet.
Meet lots of people from different backgrounds
The more people you meet, the more lives you get to understand, the more mistakes you can avoid and the more opportunities can come up. Local politics can teach you how councils and Westminster works. Bankers can tell you how finance works. Medics can give you really good reasons why you shouldn’t smoke, drink, or eat too much sugar! Bin men can teach you that you can make a good living even if you’re not well educated (or are – there are some very well educated bin men and women out there). Truckers can tell you how their industry works.
Just avoid the cynical and the put upon – there’s little useful information there.
One good thing with the internet today is that there’s so much sharing online that you can virtually meet almost anybody, from African villagers to corporate board members. Just be kind and open and remember that they’re all humans, every one of them.
What about you?
None of the above is unique to me, or in any way makes me special. I just think they’re what helped me. Feel free to comment on what you’ve experienced. Everyone lives different lives and found different ways out of poverty traps. And of course, some people find themselves ground down by a system that can be unfriendly and downright hostile at times which means they can never escape, no matter how hard they work.
