Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE. This week I talk about workplace culture, and the runner up entry on my best sci-fi list.
Update
It’s just been myself and Poppy this week as Oana has been back in Romania visiting her Gran. In her absence, Poppy and I have gotten into a routine. She asks for food and I feed her. She asks to sit in my lap and I let her. I try to get anything done that doesn’t involve feeding or petting Pops, and we have a disagreement, and then compromise by doing exactly what Pops wanted me to do.
I’ve managed to get a couple of bike rides in but the weather has not been great. Other than work, chilling with Pops, and the occasional bike ride, I’ve been binge watching Rescue Me on Netflix.
I first saw Rescue Me on its original run back in the days of Sky One. I enjoyed it at the time but never got to finish the whole series. Now, the entire run is on Netflix. The show is coarse, blunt, not politically correct in any way, but that makes the characters believable. These people are complex with you hating them in one scene and then feeling for them in the next. The dialogue is also top notch. Also, there is not a single chance that the show would ever be made today.
One thing that frustrates me with a lot of fiction now is that critics often confuse the words and actions of characters with the words and beliefs of those writing the script. I could write a character that was a complete misogynist. That does not make me a misogynist. It means I’m writing a character as part of a story to entertain, horrify, educate, or to get people thinking.
Workplace Culture
One of the strange things about work is that when people talk about a “good team”, they often mean completely different things. For some people, a good workplace is one where everyone gets along, has a laugh together, and the atmosphere feels easy and relaxed. For others, it’s about competence. They can tolerate awkwardness, bluntness, or even people they personally dislike, so long as the people around them are reliable and know what they’re doing. Then there’s the third category: respect. The idea that you don’t necessarily have to like someone, but you do need to respect them professionally and trust their judgement.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about recently after a few conversations with friends about their own workplaces. Some are in environments where everybody is pleasant enough, but nothing actually functions properly. Others work with highly capable people who are also utterly exhausting to be around. And some seem trapped in offices where there’s neither competence nor respect, just politics, ego, and survival instincts.
The older I get, the more I think competence is probably the foundation everything else rests on. A workplace can survive a lack of friendship. It can survive people being a bit distant, socially awkward, or not particularly warm. What it struggles to survive is incompetence. Few things drain morale faster than watching capable people repeatedly clean up the mess created by people who either cannot or will not do their jobs properly. Over time, resentment builds. Good people burn out. Standards collapse. Cynicism spreads.
Competence on its own also isn’t enough.
Most people have probably worked with somebody who was brilliant at their job but impossible to deal with. The person who treats every conversation like an IQ test. The colleague who mistakes arrogance for leadership. The “high performer” who leaves a trail of tension and misery behind them everywhere they go. Eventually, even competence stops compensating for behaviour that poisons the atmosphere around them.
That’s where respect comes in, and I think respect is often misunderstood. Respect doesn’t mean blind agreement or forced corporate positivity. It means believing the people around you are acting in good faith. It means trusting that they’ll pull their weight, communicate honestly and clearly, and not throw others under the bus to protect themselves. You can disagree with somebody constantly and still deeply respect them.
Ironically, workplaces obsessed with everybody “getting along” sometimes end up being the most dysfunctional of all. Difficult conversations never happen because people are terrified of conflict. Poor performance gets ignored because managers don’t want to upset anyone. Entire departments become passive-aggressive pressure cookers where frustration simmers beneath forced smiles and LinkedIn-style positivity.
I’ve come to think that friendship at work is more of a bonus than a requirement. Some of the best colleagues I’ve had were not people I’d necessarily socialise with outside work. But they were dependable. Intelligent. Honest. Calm under pressure. You knew where you stood with them. That matters more than whether you’d go for a coffee together.
At the same time, humans aren’t machines. You spend enormous chunks of your life working, and if the environment around you is hostile, petty, or emotionally draining, it takes a toll. There’s a reason toxic workplaces can wreck people’s mental health even when the actual job itself isn’t particularly difficult.
Maybe the ideal balance is this: competence earns respect, and respect creates the conditions where people can eventually get along naturally. Trying to force the order the other way round rarely works.
Ultimately, most people don’t need their colleagues to become their best friends. They just want to work with people they can trust. One thing that sits underneath all of this, and probably determines whether any workplace functions properly at all, is communication.
You can have intelligent people, technically capable people, even decent people, but if communication breaks down then everything else eventually follows it into the abyss. Confusion spreads. Assumptions replace clarity. Small mistakes become major problems because nobody spoke up early enough to stop them. Clear communication. Honest communication. These things are vital.
It’s remarkable how many workplace problems are not actually caused by malice, incompetence, or laziness, but by people operating with completely different understandings of what is happening. One person thinks something is urgent. Another thinks it can wait until next week. Someone assumes a task has been picked up by somebody else. A manager thinks they communicated expectations clearly when in reality they delivered a vague stream of word salad that meant different things to different people.
And then there’s the other side of it: workplaces where people become afraid to communicate honestly.
Once people start worrying that asking questions will make them look stupid, or that admitting mistakes will get them punished, communication becomes distorted. People hide problems instead of raising them. They say they understand things when they don’t. Meetings become theatre performances where everyone nods along pretending alignment exists when it absolutely does not.
The irony is that strong communication often matters more in stressful environments than easy ones. Anybody can communicate when things are calm and going well. The real test is whether people can still communicate clearly under pressure, when deadlines are collapsing, systems are failing, or clients are furious. That’s usually when you discover whether a workplace is actually functional or merely pretending to be.
Some of the smoothest teams I’ve ever seen weren’t necessarily made up of the smartest people in the room. They were made up of people who kept each other informed. They documented things properly. They asked questions early. They clarified expectations. They admitted uncertainty instead of bluffing confidence. That creates trust surprisingly quickly.
Bad communication also creates an exhausting amount of emotional friction. People start reading hidden meanings into everything. Tone gets misinterpreted. Minor issues spiral because nobody addresses them directly. Entire workplace cultures can become built around gossip and speculation simply because leadership refuses to communicate openly.
And perhaps most importantly, good communication reduces anxiety.
There’s a huge psychological difference between being busy and being confused. Most people can handle pressure if they understand what’s happening and what is expected of them. What destroys morale is uncertainty. Constant mixed messages. Contradictory instructions. Silence. Ambiguity. Feeling like you’re trying to navigate through fog while being judged for not moving quickly enough.
A surprising amount of “work stress” is actually communication stress.
The workplaces people tend to remember positively are often not the ones with beanbags, pizza Fridays, or endless corporate slogans about culture. They’re the places where people spoke plainly, expectations were clear, problems were addressed directly, and nobody felt like they had to become a mind reader just to survive the week.
One piece of workplace advice that sounds sensible on the surface but falls apart the moment you think about it properly is the classic line:
“If you’re unsure, ask.”
You’ll normally hear this immediately after somebody has made a mistake.
The problem is that it completely misunderstands how many mistakes actually happen.
Most people do not make mistakes because they are sitting there paralysed with uncertainty while consciously choosing not to ask for help. They make mistakes because they are confident they already understand what they’re doing. The issue isn’t uncertainty. The issue is certainty attached to the wrong conclusion.
If somebody genuinely knows they don’t understand something, they’ll often ask. Or at least they’ll recognise there’s a gap in their knowledge. The dangerous situations are usually the ones where people don’t realise they’ve misunderstood in the first place.
That’s what makes the advice so frustratingly shallow. It sounds wise, but it’s almost useless as a preventative measure because it assumes people have accurate awareness of their own misunderstandings. In reality, human beings are terrible at this. Entire industries are built around people confidently doing the wrong thing.
You see it constantly in workplaces. Somebody follows a process incorrectly because they interpreted an instruction differently. Someone assumes a task works one way because that’s how it worked in their previous role. Someone uses the wrong terminology, misunderstands a system, or draws a logical conclusion that turns out not to match reality.
Afterwards they get hit with:
“Well, you should have asked.”
But ask what, exactly?
How do you ask about something you don’t know you’ve misunderstood?
It’s a bit like telling somebody who got lost while driving that they should have checked the map earlier. True, technically, but only useful if they already suspected they were going the wrong way.
I sometimes think workplaces underestimate how much hidden knowledge exists inside experienced teams. People who have done a role for years forget how much of their understanding is instinctive, implied, or absorbed informally over time. Processes that feel “obvious” to them are often anything but obvious to somebody newer. Then when misunderstandings happen, organisations frame it as an individual failure rather than a communication failure.
The best workplaces tend to understand this. They don’t just tell people to ask questions. They actively create systems that reduce ambiguity in the first place. They encourage people to explain reasoning, not just instructions. They normalise checking assumptions. They accept that misunderstandings are inevitable whenever humans communicate complex information.
Because ultimately, competence is not about never making mistakes. It’s about building environments where mistakes are caught early, discussed openly, and learned from properly instead of reduced to one-line clichés after the fact.
The Greatest Science Fiction Shows
I’ve noticed a few posts recently listing sci-fi shows and movies with titles like “best ever” and “greatest of all time”. I thought I’d enter the chat and list my top ten sci-fi shows of all time, starting at number ten and working my way to the best one of all over the next ten weeks.
Note: for a show to qualify, it has to have finished.
So far, I’ve covered:
10 – The Outer Limits
9 – The X-Files
8 – Space: Above and Beyond
7 – Quantum Leap
6 – Battlestar Galactica (2004)
5 – Dark
4 – Babylon 5
3 – Star Trek: The Next Generation
2 – The Expanse
One of the things that makes The Expanse so special is that it succeeds on two completely different levels. The television series is excellent in its own right, while the book series is able to tell the complete story in full. That distinction matters, because the show ultimately ends with threads still left hanging after its cancellation, whereas the novels are able to carry the story through to its intended conclusion. In many ways, they feel like companion pieces rather than direct replacements for one another.
Now I know what you are thinking; David, didn’t you say that a show has to be complete to be considered for this list?
Yes. Yes, I did. However, one thing you need to understand about The Expanse is that there are nine full novels and a lot of novellas. The core nine books are often considered to be a trilogy of trilogies. The show ended on season six (book six), and anyone who knows what is coming after that will probably agree that it was a natural place to stop if you were not going to adapt the final trilogy of books. So, on that logic I’m including The Expanse on the basis that it did finish at an end point of sorts.
The television adaptation deserves enormous credit for what it achieved. Few science fiction shows have ever managed world-building on this scale while still making the setting feel believable. Yes, there are fantastical elements at the heart of the story, most notably the protomolecule itself, but outside of that one great unknowable force, the universe of The Expanse feels startlingly plausible.
Having the jumping off point for the story being a fantastical factor like the protomolecule is not unusual in great sci-fi. Many of the best sci-fi stories have an element which is exceptional, acting as a spark for the story; the impossible dust storm in The Martian, or the Monolith in 2001, or astrophage in Project Hail Mary, to name just a few.
Anyway, the politics, economics, military tensions, resource shortages, and cultural divides all feel like natural extensions of humanity’s current trajectory. Earth, Mars, and the Belt are not just locations; they are societies shaped by geography, scarcity, and generations of history.
The attention to realism is what elevates the show above most of its peers. Space is not treated like a magical ocean where ships drift around like naval vessels from the eighteenth century. Ships flip and burn to decelerate. Combat happens at enormous distances. Gravity matters. Acceleration matters. Vacuum exposure is terrifying. Even the physical differences between Earthers, Martians, and Belters are considered carefully, with Belters shaped by generations of low gravity in ways that make them physically distinct from the people of Earth. It is science fiction grounded in consequences.
That grounding makes the world feel tangible in a way very few shows manage. The Expanse does not feel like fantasy wearing a science fiction costume. It feels like a future humanity that genuinely evolved from our present day. Strip away the protomolecule, and much of what remains feels uncomfortably achievable within the next few centuries. Climate collapse, overcrowded cities, proxy wars over resources, corporate influence, and widening inequality are all recognisably human problems carried forward into a larger solar system.
Another thing The Expanse deserves immense praise for is its diversity and inclusivity, because it demonstrates how effortlessly representation works when it is treated as a natural part of the world rather than a lecture aimed at the audience. The cast is wonderfully varied, but the characters are never reduced to checkboxes or slogans. They are fully realised people with strengths, flaws, loyalties, prejudices, ambitions, and contradictions.
Chrisjen Avasarala is not compelling because she is a woman in power; she is compelling because she is intelligent, ruthless, exhausted, funny, and terrifyingly competent. Amos Burton is not memorable because of any demographic characteristic; he is memorable because he is psychologically damaged, deeply loyal, and morally complex in ways that make him simultaneously unsettling and strangely endearing. Drummer, Naomi, Bobbie, Miller, and Holden all feel like complete human beings first and foremost.
That is what modern television so often forgets. Diversity is not what audiences reject. Audiences reject shallow writing. The Expanse proves that you can have an enormously inclusive cast while still prioritising character, storytelling, and world-building above all else. Representation works best when it is woven naturally into the fabric of the setting instead of constantly pointing at itself demanding applause.
Ultimately, The Expanse stands as one of the finest science fiction series ever produced because it understands something fundamental about the genre. Great science fiction is not really about spaceships or future technology. It is about humanity. About politics, fear, tribalism, survival, curiosity, and the uncomfortable possibility that no matter how far we travel into the stars, we may still drag our oldest flaws along with us.
A lot of people have compared The Expanse to Game of Thrones, with the authors of the former having worked for the author of the latter, and all three having been part of the same tabletop gaming group. Many of the elements of political intrigue are present in both stories, with a fair few other similarities which I will not spoil.
If you like thoughtful sci-fi, and something that demands your attention, please do check out The Expanse.
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What I’m Doing
Listening: Slow Gods by Claire North.
Watching: Accused (Netflix), Rescue Me (Netflix).
Reading: Leviathan Wakes (Expanse Book 1) by James S. A. Corey
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £144,836.74.
Fuck It Fund: £22.30.
Pensions: £121,370.29.
Residential Property Value: £242,113.00.
Total Assets: £508,592.33.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,982.31.
Total Debts: £173,982.31.
Total Wealth: £334,610.02.
Although I’ve not been able to invest much of my own money recently, my investments continue to grow. I feel a bit like a broken record now, but I really need to start bringing some serious money home. I still believe I have what it takes to make this money, but doing so in the mortgage sector is time consuming, in that there can be a lengthy lead time between doing the work and getting paid.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading.
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, nor should they be considered advice.
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