【英语生活】知心大姐自白

I always wanted to be an agony aunt. There may have been a brief period when I was about nine during which I flirted with the idea of being an air hostess instead but, by the time I was 13, my ambition was strong and unwavering. I wanted to write a column in a magazine giving out advice to readers.My favourite reading matter at that age was Jackie, a teen magazine all about Donny Osmond and midi-skirts. The best part was the problem page on which Cathy & Claire meted out straight-talking advice to tortured adolescents. When readers wrote in moaning about their two-timing boyfriends, Cathy & Claire would briskly tell them to stop being doormats.

As I got older, I started to show promise as the sort of person that people came to for direction. Soon after I joined the Financial Times 20 years ago, my colleague Dominic Lawson (son of the former chancellor of the exchequer, he went on to edit the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph) matter-of-factly informed me that I had a “lavatory face”.

This did not sound terribly nice but then Dominic often said things that were not nice. He went on to explain that I, like his mother, had the kind of face someone coming into an office full of strangers would instinctively turn to for directions to the lavatory.

It might not have been much but it was a start. In fact, not only did I confidently tell people the most direct route to the office loo but, as time went on, I started dispensing more complicated advice too.

Eventually, at the beginning of 2006, some 35 years after I hatched the plan, it came to pass. My agony column started to appear on Wednesdays in the FT and since then I have handed out advice on bullying bosses, office affairs, sexism, when to wear chinos: big problems, little problems.

In dispensing workplace advice, I've joined a crowded market. You might say there are too many peddlers of “solutions” already – with all those executive coaches and trainers and “facilitators”. But most of them offer advice based on fashionable theories of management, most of which is daft. My unique selling point is that I have no fashionable theories. I never mention comfort zones, though if I did I would never, ever recommend stepping outside one. In my experience, comfort is nice and hard to achieve. If you have managed to get comfortable, I would strongly recommend that you keep up the good work. In truth, I have no theories at all, except that working life can be hard and we must muddle through as best we can.

My only qualification for handing out advice (apart from a desire to do so) is that I have worked in offices for a quarter of a century. I have written and read about the problems of office life for nearly as long (as well as experienced a good few difficulties myself) and I offer a humbug-free service, with all my answers written in a few, easy-to-understand words.

A second differentiating feature is that I'm not frightened of the negative. Most agony aunts and other advice providers now refer to problems as dilemmas – the word sounds less negative and, in this self-improving world, we have to be positive at all costs. By contrast, my problems are called just that – problems – because that is what they are and because working life is stuffed full with them. The more negative and intractable the problem, the more satisfaction I get from thinking about it and trying to solve it.

The first thing people want to know when I say I'm an agony aunt is whether the problems are real, or whether they have been whisked up by me in an idle moment. The answer is that they are all real. Though that doesn't mean that they all reach me in the conventional way. Only about half the problems in this book arrived obediently via the problems inbox (problems@ft.com, in case you have something you'd like to submit); the rest had to be winkled out.

When I first put an invitation in the FT soliciting for agony, I received a great many responses – which was good. What was less good was that some readers did not understand quite what sort of problem I was after.

One man wrote asking if I could help him with off-street parking in the Essex village where he lives. The answer to this was, “No, I could not.” Another person sent in a question about why the FT charges for access to a lot of FT.com material. I can answer this, although I do not consider it a problem as such. The reason is that the FT is a business and, therefore, it is trying to make money.

In addition to these, there were some pukka problems that were just what I was after. In that very first crop, there was a man jaded from his job as a City lawyer and wedded to a (dotty, in my view) search for more meaningful work. There was a woman whose colleague had been convicted of downloading child porn and who, on his release from prison, had tried to get in touch with her again.

Though the problems that I'm sent are plentiful, there is a snag. They don't cover the waterfront. There is no shortage of e-mails from people with troublesome bosses or colleagues, or ones from middle-aged professionals finding out that working life is not quite what they hoped it would be. But nothing from bosses. I'm never sent problems about the hard things senior managers have to do: firing people or promoting them or motivating them. This is sad, though not surprising. It isn't that bosses don't have problems – obviously they do. It is that unless they are slightly odd, bosses simply don't write to newspaper agony aunts begging for advice.

So I have had to be what is popularly called “proactive” in flushing out problems. Every time I meet anyone, I start probing. I ask managers what is troubling them most at the moment (apart from the fact that a middle-aged woman with a glint in her eye is asking prying questions). If they tell me something that sounds interesting, I write it up.

This has got me into difficulties in the past. I should apologise to the person who told me that his boss hit him. He seemed pleased when I said I was going to use his story as a problem. Indeed, he had told everyone in his office to look out for it. He was less pleased when he read the answer, in which I suggested that his male boss might fancy him. It seems I was wide of the mark – or, perhaps, I was painfully close to the truth. Either way, it went down badly and I apologise sincerely for any embarrassment caused.

From the beginning, I knew that I was going to need some help in answering the problems. Even great agony aunts sometimes give out duff advice, so it is a good idea to have some back-up. Cathy & Claire themselves were not infallible: my 13-year-old mind balked at the idea that a girl worried about her kissing skills should start to practise by kissing the back of her own hand.

To avoid such pitfalls, I invited FT readers to submit their own answers to problems and promised to print the best. I had no idea what sort of response I would get. I was hoping to hear from people who had had similar experiences to the problems in question, which I did, sometimes in large numbers. When I printed a problem from someone who was concerned that a friendship with a female colleague was getting dangerous, the response was an emotional outpouring of angst and intimacy revealing a whole new side to FT readers. It seemed that getting into hot water with female colleagues was the most common thing in the world, and the unanimous advice they offered was DON'T.

我一直想当一个“知心大姐”(Agony Aunt)。在我九岁时，我可能一度曾幻想做一名空姐，但到了13岁的时候，我的志向已坚定不移：我想成为一位杂志专栏作家，为读者提供建议。

那时，我最喜欢的读物就是《Jackie》了。这是一份关于唐尼•奥斯蒙德（Donny Osmond，一位偶像歌手、演员）和midi裙（流行于上世纪70年代的过膝半长裙）的青少年杂志。杂志最精彩的部分就是“凯茜与克莱尔”(Cathy & Claire)的问题栏目，为饱受煎熬的青少年们直言不讳地提出各种忠告。当读者写信抱怨她们的男友脚踏两只船时，凯茜与克莱尔会竭力建议她们不要再当受气包了。

财长儿子说我是“厕所脸”

随着我年龄的增加，我开始显露出了为人们指点迷津的潜质。20年前，我加入了英国《金融时报》，此后不久，我的同事多米尼克•劳森(Dominic Lawson)煞有介事地告诉我，我长着一张“厕所脸”。劳森是英国前财政大臣之子，后来出任《旁观者》(The Spectator)和《星期日电讯报》(The Sunday Telegraph)总编。

多米尼克这个说法自然不雅，但他这人一向是狗嘴里吐不出象牙。他接着解释，有人到办公室来，看到一屋子陌生人，如果要找厕所，本能地就会来问我这样的人。这一点，我和他妈妈一样。

这可能没什么了不起的，但这是一个起点。事实上，我不仅仅会颇具信心地告知人们，通往办公室洗手间的最佳路线，随着时间的迁移，我开始提供一些更为复杂的建议。

最后，2006年初，在我制定了这个计划的35年之后，理想实现了。我的知心大姐专栏开始在每周三的英国《金融时报》上发表。从那时起，我的建议范围囊括了恶霸老板、办公室恋爱、性别歧视、什么时候可以穿休闲长裤等大大小小的问题。

我的卖点：没有流行理论

在提供职场建议方面，我进入了一个竞争激烈的市场。你可能会说，已经有太多的“解决方案”兜售者了——那么多的高管教练、培训师及“促成者”。但他们大多数人提供的建议是基于目前流行的管理理论，而这些理论大部分都是垃圾。我独一无二的卖点就是我没有什么流行的理论。我从来不提什么“舒适区”(comfort zones)，不过，就算提的话，我永远也不会建议一个人应该离开自己的舒适区。在我的经验里，舒适是好事，而且难以获得。如果你已设法变得很舒服，我会强烈建议你维持自己在这方面的建树。事实上，我没有任何理论，我只知道，工作生活会很辛苦，我们必须努力以最佳方式度过这段时间。

在提供建议方面，除了自己想从事这行的愿望以外，我唯一的资历就是我已在办公室中工作了四分之一个世纪。我撰写和阅读讨论办公室生活问题的文章，也差不多有这么久了（自己也曾经历过不少的难题），而且，我提供的是没有废话的服务，所有回复都言简意赅、易于理解。

我的第二个特点是我不害怕消极的东西。现在，很多知心大姐和其他建议提供者谈到“问题”时，以“两难困境”代之——这个词听起来没有那么消极，而在这个自我完善的世界里，我们必须不惜任何代价保持一个积极的态度。相对而言，我的“问题”就叫做“问题”，因为这是事实，而且工作生活中充满了问题。问题越是负面和棘手，在思考和解决它们的时候，我就会得到越大的满足感。

读者问题都是真的吗？

当我说自己是一个知心大姐时，人们最想知道的就是，那些问题是否都是真的，还是我闭门造车编出来的。答案是：它们都是真的。不过，这并不意味着它们都是通过正常方式来到我这里的。本书中，差不多只有一半的问题是老老实实地来自问题信箱（problems@ft.com，万一你有什么想要讨论的问题，发到这个地址），其它的必须由我去自己挖掘。

当我第一次在英国《金融时报》上发出邀约、寻找问题时，我收到了很多回复——这是好事。不太好的是一些读者没搞清楚我要的是什么样的问题。

一位男士来信问我，是否能帮他在他居住的艾塞克斯村庄里找到一个不在街边的停车位。我的回复是：“我不能。”另一个人寄来的问题是，FT.com网站上的很多东西为什么要收费。我可以做出回答，不过，我并不认为这是一个问题。英国《金融时报》是一家企业，所以它必须试图挣钱。

除此以外，有一些是我需要的真正问题。在第一批问题中，一位男士厌倦了自己在金融城的律师工作，执意要去寻找一份更有意义的工作（在我看来，有些发疯）。还有一位女士，她的同事因为下载儿童色情材料而入狱，出狱后，他试着与这位女士再次建立联系。

老板不求知心大姐

虽然我收到的问题很多，还是有一个小麻烦。它们的覆盖面不够全面。很多的电子邮件来自那些遇到麻烦老板和同事的人，或是发现工作生活与自己希望的情形不太一样的中年专业人员。但没有任何邮件来自老板们。我从未收到过高级经理的提问邮件，讨论他们必须处理的难题。这十分令人遗憾，不过并不出人意料。不是老板们没有问题——他们当然有。只是，除非他们有点古怪，否则，老板们是不会给报纸知心大姐写信寻求忠告的。

我不得不像流行说法那样，“主动”去寻找问题。见到一个人，我就会开始自己的调查。我问经理人，他们现在最烦的是什么事情（除了一个两眼冒光的中年女人正在刨根问底以外）。如果他们告诉我什么有趣的东西，我就会写出来。

在过去，这也让我遇到了一些麻烦。我应该向一位男士道歉。他告诉我，他的老板打了他。当我告诉他，我会在专栏中用到他的故事时，他似乎很高兴。事实上，他告诉了所有他认识的人去拜读这个故事。当他读到我的回复时，他不太高兴。我的建议称，他的男性老板可能喜欢上他了。似乎是我大错特错了，或者，也可能是我太一针见血了。不管如何，结果不太好，我真诚地为我所带来的任何尴尬而道歉。

从一开始我就知道，在回复这些问题时，我会需要一些帮助。就连伟大的知心大姐有时候也会给出馊主意。所以，准备一些后备力量是相当明智的。“凯茜与克莱尔”也不是一贯正确的：在我13岁的时候，她们建议，担心自己接吻技巧的女孩应该在自己的手背上开始练习。这令我犹豫。

不要和同事陷入感情纠葛

为了避免这些问题，我邀请英国《金融时报》的读者针对问题贡献自己的想法，并保证会将最好的建议发表在报纸上。我当初并没有想到，将会有如此大的反响。我本来希望，那些有着类似问题的人会发表自己的看法。这的确发生了，有时，这些人的数量还非常之多。当我在专栏里写道，一个人担心自己和一位女同事的友谊正在朝着危险的方向发展，结果，收到的回复是一大片由焦虑和隐私汇集而成的情感迸发，揭示了英国《金融时报》读者全新的一面。似乎和一位女同事陷入感情纠葛是世界上最普遍的事情，而大家提供的一致建议是：不要。