Terrible ParentingMy parents used to lock my brother, sister and I in the car while they went to the pub for a "quick one" after work. This quick one might last several hours, during which they would send bottles of Indian Tonic Water to us by way of refreshment.
On one particularly cold evening, bored stupid, we lit a small bonfire on the back seat of the car using the cigarette lighter and the contents of the glove box. We owe our lives to passing winos. (BTW: Please no more Maddie or Jesus gags, they've been done.)
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Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 16 Aug 2007, 9:47)
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short-sightedMy main memories of my parents are all related to short-sightedness. I don't mean my eyesight, I mean their inability to look ahead and see the likely consequences of their actions.
For starters, it seemed as if they didn't know what to do with their kids. "OK, we wanted kids, and we have them... now what?" Their confusion translated in to "unavailability" in every sense of the word. My sister and I basically brought ourselves up, unless it was anything that cost them money, or some hare-brained interference.
They moved us to South Africa at a young age, without thinking about any long-term prospects, such as health or higher education. My mother smoked a lot, which caught up with her just before I turned 13. My dad remarried, 18 months later, to a woman wih 4 kids of her own... and shipped the lot of them out to South Africa.
So now we have a family of 8, so poor we had underwear on store credit, in a country with no welfare system, and no subsidised higher education. We all finished school and went to work.
The Larkinesque effect on me is real: they've turned me in to an inflexible planning Nazi. I see short-sightedness everywhere I look: at work, in life, when I watch the news. Iraq War? Check: you broke it, you bought it. Subprime mortgage? Whaddya mean, you didn't expect interest rates to rise?
Now, 20+ years later, I'm about to stop work, go to university and study Engineering, after too many years in reactive IT support. Took me far too long to realise why I was so pissed-off at all these customers who called us to fix their cockups, almost all of which can be traced back to a lack of ... you guessed it ... foresight. The designers of the product didn't think about how it would be used in the real world. The customers who bought it didn't consider the effect on the rest of their systems. The support managers didn't plan to have people on the phones, who knew the product, to answer the calls that came in. Argh! Think it through, will you?
Length? Think of the children...
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bnt what, me worry?, Sat 18 Aug 2007, 12:52,
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