Ch-ch-changes

Two conversations from last week.

The first was with a 50-something professional who changed her workplace about 6 months ago. Her colleagues stayed the same and the job stayed the same. Just the location moved, about a mile down the road. She said the experience was 'traumatic.' But, I reminded her, it was worth it: this is a great place to work, isn't it? 'Oh yes,' she said. 'I just don't like change.' She said it as if she was the only person on earth for whom that was the case. Possibly because nothing much had changed in her professional life for a long time.

The second conversation was with a 30 year old. Self-employed. Since October, she has started a new relationship and has now moved in with her new man. She has also changed her job and gone into partnership with a friend. So three changes: new man, new job, new home. She didn't think this was unusual and that reminded me that change really doesn't bother young people too much, especially this generation of young people who are used to having no security in their jobs or in their (usually rented) homes. Permanence has no meaning for a lot of these young people.

We used to have a way of dealing with the fear of change: it was called death. People got older, maybe retired for a wee while and then snuffed it. The burden of dealing with change passed to the younger generation, who were often just waiting for the chance to change things, having had the feeling they were being held back for a long time.

Now people live longer and work for longer (no choice if your pension won't be paid till you're 66 or 67) and I wonder what effect that is going to have on the workplace of the future. Do you want your catheter changed by a 66 year old nurse getting to the end of a 12-hour shift on a busy ward? Do you want your 4 year old taught by a nursery worker who can't get down there with the kids in the reading corner because she's got arthritis? If you're 66 and have been working on the factory floor since the age of 16, are you still able to do the job the way you did twenty years ago - or are you just knackered?

Part of our difficulty is that decisions about pensions and working age and contracts are made by people in parliament and the civil servants who work for them and they all seem to come from the professional classes: they'll have a good pension, they have little or no experience of doing a job that demands constant physical activity and they have probably never known what it's like to be on a short-term contract with no financial back-up.

I've lost count of the number of times newspaper and TV journalists have referred to going to 'the office', apparently unaware that most people don't work in an office: of the 12 adults in my immediate family, 3 of us are retired, 1 works in an office, 2 are teachers, 1 is a nurse, 1 is a hairdresser, 3 work in the building trade and 1 is a musician. I defy anyone to teach, nurse, do hair or build schools from a seat behind a desk.

A bit of work experience might do the parliamentarians, civil servants and journalists a power of good.