As regular readers will know, last year I was dismissed from my job in media by sad little ideologues, and proceeded to life on the dole, with a short period at the Royal Mail. I’ve recently started a new job, which I will talk about more in posts to come, but I’d like to tell you now about the training.
Despite the fact that this Substack is written under a pseudonym, I’m going to be careful about saying what the job is, but I will say it’s civil service adjacent.
There’s a lot of online learning. Which means sitting on your laptop clicking through videos and text-based exercises. You devoutly wish for time to pass, you pray to be elsewhere; Afghanistan, perhaps.
You are presented with many images, illustrations and stock photos. Good luck seeing a white male. I’d say they make up around 15% of the total number of figures seen. The vast majority are either female or non-white, often both. As for the names given in case studies, there are no Bobs, Jacks or Henrys. There are instead Jatinda, Syed, Rana, Harpreet, Huang, Rabiya and the like.
Doing the training is informative, in that it makes clear where the Establishment’s head is nowadays. The language acknowledges all the latest progressive notions: ‘gender identity’, ‘gender pay gaps’, unequal racial outcomes, carbon neutrality and more.
The overriding impression given is ‘over-correction’. You could argue that half a century ago office bosses weren’t mindful enough, didn’t take account of the wider world or different types of people. Now the employee is infantilised. Being nice is everything – even when you get a training question wrong the website won’t retort ‘No!’. It says, ‘Not Quite’. Work has become heavily feminised; it’s like having your nan permanently on hand. And everything is PC.
It was all so different in the past. I swear the following is true: a friend of a friend, in the 1980s, used to enter his civil service job in the morning and creep up behind a woman he’d known for some years (but wasn’t romantically involved with), put his hands inside her blouse, and jiggle her breasts. She’d laugh. After he did this for a while, his manager told him that this wasn’t perhaps the best thing to do – but he wasn’t given a formal warning, or, y’know, sacked and thrown into jail as he would be these days.
I can personally top that. A one-time editor of mine, who writes for the Telegraph and the Guardian nowadays, used to pretend (I think he was pretending) that he was gay and that he fancied me. He’d leave Post-its on my desk. Much of what he wrote was so incredibly filthy I can’t publish it here, but it included:
“Your girlfriend away this weekend? Want me to come round?”
“We could have a foursome tonight. Actually, without the girls.”
He’d approach me at my seat, lift me up on to the desk, bend me double, and pretend to, ahem, have his wicked way with me. Everyone in the office would chortle – including me. This was the late 1990s. Hey, we were a craaaazy magazine.
Oh the stories I could tell you about the lads’ mags I worked on. I can’t bring myself to relate too much, but a few random memories: a picture on the wall of a model having sex; BB gun battles that sometimes smashed screens; scooter races round desks; returning to your Mac after lunch to find it now had a gay porn screensaver; a challenge to eat the most Yorkie bars (which ended in vomiting); pool tournaments; loudly playing the Hawaii Five-0 tune while beating surfaces with big objects when it was someone’s birthday. It was great, mostly (not when there were near-fights).
The point is, however you think working life should be, it’s changed. Obviously for most it wasn’t like what I experienced, but now much of it is presided over by technocratic, finger-wagging, box-ticking, boring people. Small-minded HR teams rule the roost. Creativity and independent thinking stagnate. (A friend who works for a US company tells me they have just sacked their entire HR team. Fab!)
Back to my training. Of course there was DEI stuff, but it wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be. It had its painful moments though. One question went:
“In which of the following scenarios would you recommend an Equality Impact Assessment be completed?” One option to click on was: “A new Carbon Neutral policy is being developed.”
Sigh.
Some of the advice on the Health & Safety module is glorious in its nanny-ness, such as this warning: “Climb all steps and stairs carefully to reduce your chances of falling.”
Generally speaking, in the training quizzes you’re given, you must always pick the most cautious answer to the question to get a green tick. I came a cropper when I was too cautious at one point. We were told the fire alarm went off and asked, “if safe to do so, should you pick up belongings that are close to hand?” I said no, thinking that would delay our exit by precious seconds. Wrong! It seems that is acceptable – but only if belongings are close at hand.
This section also included the following:
“There is a fire drill occurring in Priya’s building and she is waiting in the fire assembly area, which is outside. It’s raining and Priya has left her medication upstairs in the office. A team member has offered to collect Priya’s medication for her.”
Classic 2026 progressivism: safetyism; ethnic name; apparent medical condition.
Perhaps I’m moaning too much. Maybe this kindness is to be welcomed, and workplaces see less anger than they used to. It comes at a cost though, as all changes do: they’re less fun, less creative, probably less productive. Open-plan offices removed a lot of the enjoyment from them; political correctness finished the job. No wonder many don’t want to work in offices.
Anyway, on with the training. Which I doubt will include modules on firing a BB gun safely or jiggling breasts in an acceptable manner.
Russell David is the author of the Mad World Substack.
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I totally agree with you that’s why I am retired and nearing 80.I will not need to work again I was always self employed this is why I hate dealing with any bureaucracy I cannot believe I will be able to control my temper much longer especially when the arsehole speaks pidgin english.