The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

A storm in New York meant I missed my connecting flight to Auckland so ended up in Houston.

But if that wasn’t a big enough come down, maybe the hotel I found to spend the night was …

Because in NYC, I stayed in the utterly swank Crosby Street Hotel in Soho, in a room that – as a friend described – as “main character, intimidating-as-fuck, energy”.

Look at it!

How bloody New York awesome it is?

I got to spend 4 nights in that bloody gorgeous room and while I should have left on a cloud of joy and happiness, I found myself – just 12 hours later – in a room that I described to Jill as “the sort of place that could double as a crime scene in an episode of CSI. Houston Airport edition.”

There are 2 especially amazing things about that room.

The first is it wasn’t exactly cheap.

Sure, it was a lot cheaper than the Crosby Street Hotel, but when you take into account the city it was in and the location in the city that it was in … then the proportional difference in cost between the two, wasn’t much at all.

Or said another way, certainly not enough difference, hahaha.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with dodgy hotels – hell, I’ve stayed in enough of them in my time and they’re my ‘go-to’ when I’m footing the bill, but this was dodgy but at a premium[ish] price.

What’s funny is that when I saw it advertised – basically as the only hotel available at 11pm at night, when I got in, it was labelled as ****.

Naturally I assumed **** was its hotel rating, but as soon as I walked in, I realised it was actually just blanking out the word ‘SHIT’, hahaha.

Anyway, I survived and got back to NZ at 5am this morning – so this is the most up to date post I’ve ever written.

But it will also be the last post till Thursday as I now have to fly to Australia for a couple of days – so with that in mind, I’m going to leave you with the post I originally wrote to be shown today, mainly because I’m already tired of this post and I can’t be bothered to type anymore.

So until Thursday, let me ‘welcome you back’ with the first of my ‘piss and vinegar’ posts for this week.

The photo above is from a trip to Memphis – or more specifically, Memphis – way back in 2006 … and while it is both alarming and amusing that the local council seem to hate anything on wheels or 4 legs … I can’t help but feel this is a perfect metaphor for how many companies hire these days.

For all the conversations about diversity … conformity prevails.

Not just in terms of heritage, but backgrounds, interests, education.

A production line of parity.

But the really fucked-up bit is I believe many companies do want to ‘evolve’. They just can’t.

Or should I say, they just can’t help themselves stopping themselves from doing it.

So what happens is they do hire people who are different to everyone else in the company, however – if they then don’t conform to how the majority behave – they get let go for “not being the right cultural fit”.

In essence, they’re fired for being exactly who they were hired to be.

In nature, there’s this thing called ‘the edge effect’. It’s basically where different eco-systems – often found at the ‘edge’ of natural habitats – merge together and create something new. New possibilities created by new combinations. Evolution created by the acceptance of possibilities rather than the denial of them.

This is basically why we – as in, ‘humans’ – are still around, because despite humans giving it our best shot to kill the planet … nature keeps evolving to find ways to beat our bollocks.

In essence, it is constantly growing, evolving, adapting, and creating.

But in many companies today, they have adopted an opposing view.

More focused on denial, destruction, distain and dismissal.

In Japan there’s an old saying that goes, ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered down’

Sadly, in a lot of companies, anyone who stands out does not even get viewed as a number anymore. Instead, they’re a nail to be beaten down by a bunch of tools … and when I say ‘tools’, I mean that literally and metaphorically.

See you Thursday, which will be before my family get to see me. You lucky people.