Newspaper Columns
Between 2012 and 2019 I wrote a column in the MyCareer section of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. It was called Benign to Five.
The brief? “Do your blog thing, but make it about work”.
Heree’s some of what I wrote:
The Haught guide to mystery shoppers
When I asked at the start of this article have you ever been mystery shopped, there was only one possible answer you could have given…
The story of Eve: thank goodness for warm generosity in the cold world of work
I’ve been writing this blog for six and a half years. Over that time, I hope it’s become clear that…
The Haught guide to procrastination
Yes, I procrastinated about procrastination. And I left it for such an exotically long period of time that my untouched work moved beyond the bad…
Preparing for Trump – a time capsule piece
It’s been exactly a year since Donald Trump took office as the most powerful man in the world. Here’s what…
On Leonard Cohen
He traipsed through this “lost illusions boulevard” in his trilby and his double-breasted suit, smiling knowingly, perhaps ruefully. There was no pretence or charade.
The Haught guide to Big Brother watching you
I’m not afraid to admit it: I loved being surveilled at work. Without Big Brother having watched my every professional movement from one of his…
The Haught guide to learning fast
…the restaurant manager, a man I once found in the men’s toilets vehemently accusing a whole defrosted turkey of cheating at Texas hold ‘em. (He…
Pranker or wanker? (I still don’t know if I was being stooged)
My antagonist was a preposterous cliche who hid his ulterior motives with the same discretion as a trenchcoated 1980s flasher might have hidden his jibbly…
The Haught guide to end-of-year parties
Rule 2: Don’t dance. Dancing was invented in 1971 by Dr Hubert van de Waggelen as a cruel and unethical social experiment and was never…
How good words turn bad
The items that we now categorise as weasel words, wank language and corporate buzzwords weren’t always the indefensible, indecipherable brain-slop of desk-shackled keyboard tappers. Almost…
The Haught guide to burning career bridges
Several times I’ve approached the edge of the career abyss and thought, “Oo, that gaping void looks alluring.”
ParentHaught: Lessons learnt from the University of Fatherhood
Parenthood is a classroom like no other, and much that you learn within it is applicable to your daily life. Like saying that an audible…
Is Mondayitis real?
Is Mondayitis an actual, serious psychophysiological illness or just a throwaway malady akin to man flu and hose buttock? To find out, I asked former…
On being a strange generational hybrid
I’m generationally awry. I have the Birth Certificate, digital literacy and firm buttocks of a Generation Y, but the basic grammatical skills, suspicion of young…
Regrets? Surely you have a few
Some people ask me while I’m signing autographs or they’re basking in the fresh-baked-bread warmth of my celebrity, “Jonathan, have…
The Haught guide to “too much information”
There’s an acronym doing the rounds on the interconnected network of digitised information at the moment. You might be familiar…
The Haught guide to people who love drama
A little while ago a friend thought one of my articles was a pointed reference to his own behaviour. It wasn’t….
“How’s working at McDonald’s going for you?”
“So what do you do for a living, Johnson?” “Uh… it’s Jonathan… I’m a… well, a writer.” “A writer? You write books? Novels?” “No, no,…
The Haught guide to “deep dives”
I’m all for metaphors. If variety is the spice of life then metaphors are the smoked paprika of language. I…
The Haught guide to resigning
We often look back on the decision to resign from a job as a happy career juncture, a fork in the career road with a…
The Haught guide to bringing stuff to life
I went into the [Smorgy’s] cellar to look for the propane torch we sometimes used to keep at bay the warthogs that accumulated around the…
What made the 1980s great
The subtext is dance like nobody will remember your lycra-clad thrusting because they’ll all be dead. Love like humiliating rejection doesn’t feel so bad in…
How to become a thought leader
My new year resolution was to become a thought leader. I’ve already achieved it. I got my accreditation from the…
What is content?
“Content” is one of those words that gained popularity so quickly, people fell over themselves, and the bodies of others – some dead from suffocation…
The Haught guide to summer fashion
Of course, 1970 was a different time. I was minus 12 years old back then, so my memory of the era is a bit sketchy,…
The Murphy’s Law truth about your Year 12 results
If you bugger up your final exams and get a score that doesn’t reflect your hard work and talent, you will inevitably end up in…
The Haught guide to inadvertent plagiarism
I had one of those abject moments of deflation last year. You know the ones: they came just after you…
The Haught guide to “downsizing”
One day, in the not too distant future people will be coming home from work telling their partners “Love – I was permanently de-salaried today…
The Haught guide to Jehovah’s Witnesses
Years before I became a worldly, cynical and wildly popular blogger, Jehovah’s Witnesses preyed on me like I was a baby wildebeest with polio who’d…
The Haught guide to lying
Lying during job interviews is now par for the course. Well, it might be par. It might also be an excellent sub par round, replete…
The Haught guide to competition
To be truly competitive in a professional setting you must see each of your colleagues as brick walls blocking the road joining the towns of…
“There are no stupid questions” is a lie
I walked into the storeroom at Burwood Smorgy’s and found the manager wearing only a felt sock puppet and dancing a passionate samba with a…
The Haught guide to meetings
…What ensued was a kind of Stalinist purge, but instead of people vanishing, it was working time that was systematically liquidated or sent to the…
Chucking a spickie
Is it OK to let a weekend’s sport result affect your mood at work? Absolutely not. It’s unprofessional, unfair on colleagues and morally wrong. You…
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Re Benign to five
23-24 May 2015
“The curious case of the columnist who cried wolf”
from my experience – “socialise” means to circulate a document in draft or to float an idea, at noblest to seek comment and criticism from outside one’s silo and at basest to stifle opposition and to identify opponents within one’s silo before proceeding to “authorise”
Thanks for your education and smiles
Thanks Peter. I’ll now socialise your definition around the Haught office (my head).