Chapter 2

Setting the scene – who am I?

B efore we continue with the story proper, I feel the need to introduce the main characters,
namely, myself and Messrs Burn Out and Depression (chapter 3). When reading a story or
watching a movie I find it helpful to understand who the characters are, to help me
contextualise their actions. If you aren’t like me, skip straight to chapter 4.

A s hinted in the previous chapter I am quite unremarkable.

However, through the quirks of birth, timing and geography my
life has not been without colour – not quite as vibrant and
textured as a famous battle rendered in oils; but something slightly more
interesting than a watercolour turnip.
Biography

I was born in England in the early seventies. I have three older sisters and a Mother and Father
who were war babies. I lived a fairly traditional middle class life, with a Father who worked to
earn money and a Mother who raised the children and managed the household. We moved to
Somerset when I was about four (England’s equivalent of the Free State, but greener) where I spent
a pretty idyllic five years jumping in cow pats, climbing trees and stealing apples from the farmer’s
orchard with the other village children. The only blot was my asthma which I developed early on and
which frequently sent me to hospital. Medical wisdom at the time pointed towards California and
the Highveld of South Africa as the two best climates for curing my wheezing and we moved here at
the end of 1980.

My school career was reasonably bland. The only spicy bits were receiving a good caning in standard
5 (now grade 7) and getting an academic special mention in standard 8 (now grade 10). I largely gave
up on academics after that as I disagreed with the bell curve system of distributing marks – I could
never get a straight answer as to why my marks should be pulled down to help raise someone else’s.
My comments that it merely reflected on the teacher’s inability to teach properly were not met with
good grace. This was undoubtedly the start of the ‘troubled teenage years’ and I entered into a
phase of subversive rebellion. I wasn’t particularly sporty (my asthma and scrawny chicken legs
determined that) and was hopeless at rugby. In the mid to late eighties in a white government
school this meant you were a ‘moffie’ or a ‘paf’ – not necessarily gay but certainly worthy of
contempt and low grade bullying. Myself and others like me fought back by wearing lots of black
clothes, dying our hair and listening to bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain, Alien Sex Fiend and the
Dead Kennedys. We fashioned ourselves as ‘alternatives’ and poured scorn on the popular culture of
the day and anyone who mindlessly followed it; before running away quite quickly.

“You are all individuals”. Brian, from the movie ‘Life of Brian’ by Monty Python.

1
I matriculated unspectacularly in 1988 and joined thousands of other spotty, snotty know it all’s at
the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) the following year. I had no idea what I wanted to do but
my marks were good enough to get in and my parents could afford it so I went. Career guidance
appeared to be an optional extra at my school and so when someone told me that BA stood for
“Bugger All” I signed up for a BCom instead. How wrong could one go with a sensible business
degree? Unfortunately I had the maturity of a tadpole and spent most of my first year perfecting
beer drinking and vomiting. Needless to say I failed all subjects catastrophically.

I signed up with UNISA the following year – WITS being somewhat reluctant to allow me to set foot
on campus and my parents quite rightly reluctant to have me pee any more of their money against
the walls of another academic institution. And I took six subjects to ensure I would qualify as a full
time student – this still being in the days of military conscription. Unfortunately the long brown arm
of the South African Defence Force tapped me on the shoulder in June that year with some call-up
papers. I was to report to a local sports ground at the beginning of August, from whence I would be
transported to Phalaborwa1 for ten weeks of basic training. I contacted the issuers and confidently
explained that I was studying fulltime and would have to decline their kind offer. Equally confidently
they told me I wouldn’t. In South Africa during the late eighties / early nineties you had four choices
as a white male:

- leave the country;

- be a conscientious objector and spend three years in jail;
- report for duty and then try to fake an illness or claim homosexuality so that you would be
deemed unfit to serve and sent home; or
- spend one year completing your national service.

Not having the wherewithal to travel abroad or the moral fibre to conscientiously object I had little
choice but to report for duty and then play the asthma card with everything I had. Fortunately /
unfortunately my asthma wasn’t severe enough to secure my freedom. The next twelve months
were undoubtedly the most surreal of my life – something I can only describe as a cross between
Dante’s Inferno and The Wombles. Grown men running around with too much testosterone, hatred
and facial hair under their noses; shouting and screaming at us because we hadn’t polished a zinc
dustbin properly or fetched the correct leaf from the correct branch on the right tree two kilometres
away.

“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.” George Orwell

The one memory I have that completely and perfectly sums up my experience of national service is
arriving at my final posting and being greeted by the camp commander. He was a beefy ex-
Rhodesian and for some reason he was assigning us to the various functions.

“Anyone with legal experience” he asked in English. My hand shot up.

“Yes Major. I failed Commercial Law 101” I declared in a proud and steady voice.

“Excellent! Legal department for you!”

1
A small town in the north of South Africa, on the western border of the Kruger National Park. Hot, dry and dusty.

2
The rest of my time in brown is mercifully hazy. But apparently it made me a man, which is nice.

I demobbed in August 1991, too late to rescue my studies and too early to start a new year. It was
also around this time that I met and fell in love with my soul mate and it took me another nine years
before I asked her to become my wife – fortunately she has greater patience than I. With studies
kyboshed I sought employment and spent the next six years working in the booming electronic
security industry. I did everything from digging holes and mixing concrete to wiring alarms and
electric fences before moving onto sales and project management.

By 1997 I still didn’t know what I wanted to do but did know that I didn’t want to spend the rest of
my life in that industry. I applied to do a post graduate diploma in business administration through
the Wits Business School and after an entrance exam and interview I was accepted. There is nothing
like taking a year off to study and paying for it yourself to focus the mind and I did very well, securing
employment with the largest systems integrator in the country at the end of the course.

I started off as a sort of business consultant and progressed through various roles to end up as a
business analyst and project manager. These were the heady days of the dotcom boom and the
environment was fast paced, brutal but fun. You worked hard and played hard and I was given
amazing opportunities that I wouldn’t have got in other companies. It was the kind of place where
you worked on compiling a ZAR300m tender response for two days with no sleep and then finalised
the financials in a caffeine induced psychosis half an hour before the courier came to collect the
document! Seat of your pants stuff, you sank or swam very quickly.

After the tech bubble burst in 2000 and my company started to downsize I took voluntary
retrenchment and spent a few months pottering around the house and riding my motorcycle while
idly looking for another job. I landed one as business analyst and project manager in one of the local
‘big four’ banks and spent two and a half years there before moving to Dorset in England with my
wife and six month old son at the beginning of 2003.

I was restless and convinced myself that our son needed to be raised in the same idyllic ornamental
lavender-bush environment that I had enjoyed. London wasn’t an option – London isn’t England, its
London – and I got a job in the beautiful medieval cathedral city of Salisbury, essentially doing
business analysis and project management work again. Looking back now I can see this as an
attempt to run away from my growing dissatisfaction with my work and myself – ‘a change is as good
as a rest’ and all that. But running away never works and within eighteen months we were back in
South Africa and I was fortunate enough to secure a job with my old bank again.

I remained with them until September 2010 and during those five or so years progressed from
programme management, through product management, to heading up a product efficiency
improvement portfolio. Throughout this time I remained disillusioned and unsatisfied with what I
was doing – I saw no meaning or purpose in most aspects of my work, but ploughed on because,
well, that’s what you do.

-X-

T he path I have taken through education and work

not been completely conventional. The
‘alternative’ associations I was drawn to during
Character has

my

3
teens stuck with me, but became less outwardly visual and more intellectual in nature. I would take
pleasure in challenging the status quo, standing up for an alternative opinion and often saying too
much too strongly. Sometimes I would even challenge things just for the hell of it, to get a reaction
and stimulate further discussion. The unfortunate downside of this approach meant that I was also
quite cynical and judgemental.

Paradoxically I didn’t shun achievement, quite the opposite – I wanted to achieve to show people
that you can hold unconventional views and still excel. I am fortunate to have never really struggled
academically, at school I coasted and only put in effort once in a post graduate environment, firstly
at Wits Business School and more recently on a Senior Management Programme administered by
The Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) where I finished as top student of my group without
any conscious effort to do so.

But my desire for achievement spread beyond the purely academic and I would drive myself at
anything I was engaged in. For example: if I was decorating a room it would be finished, two coats in
one day; once we decided where we would like to go on holiday I would arrange accommodation,
flights and car hire within the week. I liked seeing results.

Linked to this I am quite time urgent and get bored easily. In addition I seek structure and desire
order, some may say I am a perfectionist.

Basically I am a classic “A” type personality 2.

2
Type A = driven, achiever, perfectionist, time urgent, talker. Type B = laid back, listener, thinker. See Appendix 1 for more
details.