Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Birthday, Love, Loyalty, My Fatherhood, Otis, Tattoo
Back in May I wrote a post about tattoos.
Specifically my tattoos.
In it, I talked about how I got my first one aged 42 during a holiday in Los Angeles, and now 14 years later I’ve got loads of them.
However, unlike some people who have them for the sake of having them, all mine are – unsurprisingly – personal and sentimental.
Birthdays.
Postcodes.
Phone numbers.
Signatures.
Names, pictures and paws of pets.
Honoring Mum, Dad, Jill, Otis and China.
Personal philosophies and heroes.
Nottingham Forest and Queen.
Some weird shit for some friends.
And nods to LA, UK, NZ and Italy.
I then wrote about how Otis had asked if any were for him and after showing him the ones of his name and date of birth … he pointed out that they were tattoos I had chosen for him, rather than ones he had wanted me to have.
So being a sucker, I asked him what would be a tattoo he would like me to have for him and quick as a flash he said:
Rice Is Life.
Yep … rice is fucking life?!!!
Now to be fair to him, he loves rice.
Has it every day.
He loves the taste, texture and the fact it represents the country where he was born: China.
But that’s not the only reason he wanted that inked on my body … it’s because he’s a wonderful mischievous little bugger who knew it was kinda-ridiculous and would look kinda-ridiculous.
The thing is, he didn’t take into account 2 rather important considerations in his suggestion.
The first is that I love him far more than any potential embarrassment he would like to subject me to.
The second is if I’m going to permanently mark my body with something HE chose, he needs to consider it a gift, not a prank.
It’s Otis’ 12th birthday on the 11th December and he’s hoping for a new keyboard as his present.
Guess what he’s got …
I love you with all my heart Otis.
And I love this ridiculous tattoo because it’s for you, from you and about you.
But a word of advice that may serve you well for the future …
While I love your cheeky, mischievous spirit and hope it always remains, be careful who you expose it to.
Because when the other party is also a mischievous little sod, they’ll always find a way to make your mischief come back on you in some way.
Happy early birthday present my love. Hahahaha.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Career, Corporate Gaslighting, Family, Fulfillment, Happiness, Jill, Love, Mum & Dad, My Childhood
When you’re a kid, you can’t wait to grow up.
Some of that’s because you want to do things you’re not old enough to do – like having adult portions of food or staying up all night – and some of that is because you want to get started doing the job you believe you were born to do.
Now, it’s fair to say, a lot of the time the jobs we dream of doing as a kid are pretty unlikely or unrealistic
Astronauts.
Rock Stars.
Pilots.
But some are definitely within the realms of reality – for example, I was obsessed with becoming a Policeman up until the age of 14 – so you spend loads of your time thinking about them, learning about them and preparing yourself to become them.
The thing is, most of the time, the jobs we want to do aren’t the jobs we end up doing.
It might be because our ambitions change.
Or because we don’t meet the requirements needed to do the job we wanted.
Or because we learn about roles we never even knew existed, let alone were a possibility.
Or maybe it’s because life gets in the way and we end up taking another path because of need, circumstance, context or opportunity.
Whatever the reason, many people end up taking jobs that are different to the ones they dreamt about – and while many are perfectly satisfied with what they end up doing, I’ve met a lot who aren’t.
That doesn’t mean they hate what they do, but they also don’t love it.
It’s more a case they tolerate them than adore them.
And even though the best jobs will all have their bad days – the reality is when we do something we’re not really into, niggling doubt tends to flourish.
Oh, we may push the feeling down.
Or flat-out deny it.
Or just say we can’t possibly start again given how much we have put into whatever it is we are now doing.
But every time we experience a shit moment, we are forced to acknowledge what we’re doing.
What we have ’satisfied’ ourselves with.
And then there’s a point where every little thing starts to sting.
Hurt.
Annoy.
Frustrate.
Until one day – you find that you no longer are in control of the job you do, because someone has decided to control it for you.
It’s why some of my favorite ever pieces of advice that I’ve received are:
“Do what you think is right, because you’re going to get fired anyway”.
Or my parents classic:
“Live a life of fulfillment, not contentment”
And my wife’s:
“Always choose the bigger life”
I appreciate that’s a position of privilege. Or insanity. But, given life will force us to endure, deal with and handle endless amounts of pain, suffering, pressure and tension, isn’t it worth making sure we’re suffering for something we actually love doing?
Maybe that’s why I loved this piece of writing below …
Because while I appreciate life doesn’t always work out as we planned, no one should forget the importance of what makes them happy.
It may not deliver every day, but it is better than never doing something that can achieve it.
Because with companies increasingly telling people to deal with whatever pain they dish out.
Don’t choose their suffering.
Suffer for a better reason.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, AI, Comment, Community, Culture, Humanity, Stupid, Technology
God this has been a rollercoaster week …
First on Tuesday I wrote about how – for all our resilience to oppressive technology – we are helpless to the seductive powers of a doughnut encased fried chicken burger.
Then, yesterday I wrote about the rise of Androids … and how we’ll ultimately win thanks to them not being able to deal with attending bad client workshop/brainstorm meetings.
And now I’m going full circle by writing how AI can’t be all bad when it has opened up the ability to create headlines like this …
Seriously, what the actual hell????
And if that headline wasn’t bad enough – of which I’ll be writing more about this in a later blog post – there’s the fact the guy looks a bit like me.
But it is absolutely, unquestionably NOT ME.
That said, what that story highlights is that while Trump insists this technology should now be known as ‘super intelligence’, those 2 little initials of ‘A’ and ‘I’ should actually stand for ‘authentic idiocy’.
Christ and it’s only Thursday …
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Clients, Collaboration, New Zealand, Robots, Security, Technology, The Terminator, Workshops
Walking in a small mall in a suburb in Auckland and I saw this …
Yep, that’s a robot.
A 4 feet tall, multi-operational robot.
Or an ‘android’ as they would refer to it in sci-fi horror movies.
If this is happening in NZ – a place that still operates about a decade behind the more progressive cities in the world [case in point, IKEA just arrived here and there’s no Apple Store] you can be sure-as-shit it’s happening wherever you’re living.
So if AI wasn’t bad enough in terms of taking our jobs … now we have these fuckers.
Oh I know how they’ll be flogging it ….
“We’re here to help relieve you of the things you don’t want to do so you have more time to do the things you want to do”
Pull the other one fuckers.
Sure, we might think it’s all nice and friendly in the beginning – but within 2 weeks, it’ll be bossing us around and demanding we work for it.
And we will have paid NZ$10 GRAND for the privilege.
NZ$10,000!!!
Sure, that’s about $2.54 in real money, but here … that’s a sizable amount.
And this is coming from someone who had 100 SONY Aibo robot dogs, multitudes of Nabaztag’s and once bought a remote control ball!!!
But before you think this is going to turn into a ‘humanity is doomed’ post – I have good news.
Because there’s 2 major advantages for having these Android Robots in our lives.
First, they can attend the worst of client workshop/brainstorm meetings, instead of us.
And second, when they do … they’ll realise they’re so damaging to their CPU brains, they’ll either break or come running back to us and ask if we can please take over again.
Which may be the most useful thing a bad client workshop/brainstorm will ever deliver.
[Bar the fact that means we’ll have to start attending them again. Hey, beggars can’t be choosers and in the big scheme of things, it’s better than being in societal jail. I think]
Happy fucking Wednesday.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Communication Strategy, Corporate Evil, Corporate Gaslighting, Customer Service, Technology
A few months ago, I decided I needed to sort out my emails.
Specifically, how many I was receiving each day.
That’s not a fucked-up, humble brag … it was because after decades of internet use, I’d acquired so many companies sending me their shit because I’d either once ordered from them or made an enquiry to them, that it was genuinely costing me time in my day.
So, over the period of a week I vowed to ‘unsubscribe’ from 98% of every company email I received – with only a few organizations surviving the cull because I either found them genuinely valuable and interesting and/or their were legal implications if I didn’t act on what they sent me.
So off I went.
Every morning, I’d go through each email … find the ‘unsubscribe’ button, which would be hidden somewhere in the body copy, normally at the very, very bottom … and then watch my browser open up to the corresponding website so I could ‘click’ on the metaphorical, ‘FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME ALONE’ FOREVER button and say goodbye to them forever.
Or so I thought.
Because some of those links didn’t open.
Some of those links didn’t automatically let you unsubscribe.
Some of those links had a messed-up UX that manipulated you into resubscribing without initially realizing.
Some of those links demanded you then jump through all manner of hoops before they would acknowledge you had achieved your goal.
And some of those links just ignored your request and kept sending you emails like a technological cockroach who refused to die.
And even after spending FIVE WORKING DAYS pressing ‘unsubscribe’ so often that I probably need a job number to justify all the time I spent doing it … and even after giving every one of these companies a week to get their shit together … there’s still 7 companies who keep sending me their bullshit.
EVERY. DAY.
Despite me unsubscribing from them again and again and again.
In some ways I’m almost impressed at how little they care about upsetting their audience … even though I have to admit, it has made me hate them with a zeal normally reserved for the true bastards of the world/
But what is also weird, is the companies who made unsubscribing easy – without fuss, mess, complexity or further demands – has made me want to sign up to them again. Because nothing shows how much a company really cares about their customers than how well they treat them even when it’s so they can say goodbye.
Have a great weekend.