We Know Shit

At three o'clock this morning I was standing on the balcony of a club in London while Miss Great Britain tried to scrounge a cigarette off me, chatting to a guy who writes the diary for The Guardian, another who runs the press office for a county police force, a corporate PR troubleshooter for some of the biggest firms in the world and a freelance sub at a number of national broadsheet newspapers.
We laughed about the day we first met 30 years ago as we embarked on a career in journalism (not Miss Great Britain - she'd just come to scrounge a cigarette) and about how little we knew but how much we thought we knew and how we once ordered a fleet of mini cabs to call at 15 minute intervals through the night at the home of a lecturer who go on our nerves.
We talked about years of death knocks and council meetings, editorial bollockings and mistakes made in order to get to where we were...wherever that may be.
We worked out that what three decades had taught us was that we still make as much effort now in our work as we ever did but the difference experience teaches you is that you know where and when to make the effort and when not to because you know it won't pay.
And we decided that if our generation needed a motto is would be this: We Know Shit.
Put the emphasis on the word 'know' and you'll see what we mean. We're not the young generation but we've still got something to say.
People pay us for what we know. For what we've learnt by making mistakes and then getting it right so you reach a point where you get it right pretty much most of the time.
But not all the time. We know that. We know that the more you know the more you realise you don't know. But then we can decide how much of that we're going to learn and decide that we're only going to learn the bits that are any use to us and save all that wasted effort learning the rest.
You know why people pay us - and that means you as well? Because we know shit. We know what works. We know what doesn't. And that applies to our generation across the board, not just journalists.
We can relate to it in journalism because that's what we do. But I've met analysts and computer technicians, car mechanics and plumbers who have the same expertise. They know shit. They know how to fix an engine by getting straight to the bit that doesn't work rather than take the whole thing apart to find out what's wrong which they may have done when they started out in that business.
Our generation knows shit. We can yearn to be young again when the fun was in discovering what that shit was. Or we can be pleased that we know stuff others are going to find out but it's going to take them a while. And we know that back then we didn't know half as much as we thought we did and that even now we don't know everything.
People who know shit about what they've been doing for 30 years know why the tap leaks, where all that lost data has gone on the computer, why it's best to avoid the A406 on a Saturday afternoon, why you shouldn't shop in a supermarket the moment the doors open but wait half an hour, the best place to get a drink after closing, why you shouldn't trust a man who starts a conversation with 'I'm really whacky I am', how to write the intro that turns an ordinary story into a page lead, the way to get on to the Central Line at Tottenham Court Road without following the signs that take you the long way and so on.
It's a small point to remember when you are trying to win business or get promotion or convince someone you're right for a job they want to offer to a 22-year-old. We know shit.
And it's great.
Cheers...Solly