Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The Great Paper Chase

Christ, what a week it's been. It's been one long marathon of alternate annual review forms and meetings and drafting new role profile forms for 2009. I have been buried in paper. The paperwork with these things is UNREAL. The clerical officers were grand though, none of them made any additional work for me. Bless them all.

The meetings varied in length from ten minutes to half an hour, depending on how the private audience with the manager was valued by the clerical officer, or how scared they were that the EO might swear at them.

I had to schedule a lot of meetings for early in the morning, a time when I'm not at my best (see OED definition for Uncaffeinated Troglodyte), however several other EOs and HEOs beat me to the meeting rooms for the afternoon slots.

I even had some bastard nick the room which I had legitimately booked at one stage. I didn't protest, because I thought this might happen:

Govstooge: Here, I had this room booked for 3.30!
Other EO: Whoops, sorry Govstooge, but we won't be long. Can you give us half an hour?
Govstooge: For fuck's sake, I go for my COFFEE at four!

So I ended up having to do the review in a quiet-ish corner of the canteen. Over coffee, naturellement. Still not ideal when the canteen staff were dropping things that go CLANG and the HEO with the incredibly evil laugh kept overshadowing the proceedings. And other members of my staff, seated a safe distance away, kept glancing over to look at our facial expressions, to gauge where on the five point scale their colleague was going to come.

Sometimes I think what it must be like for the clerical officers. Most of them are older than me. Some of them even have adult children older than me. And, to make matters worse, I am one of those people who still occasionally gets asked for ID when doing a beer run. Some of them don't give a shite and happily sign the forms. The others think it's all bullshit, but sign the forms anyway, anything to get them out of the way. And I don't even have to bring in a gun.

My own review, now that's a story for another day.

I'm glad it's all over now though. Did I mention I had several other shitty things to be getting on with?

1 comment:

Cynical Scribble said...

Hello, Daaaave here!

Been reading your blog for a while. I prefer to take the stalking approach to blog reading - so I've just never commented!

Thanks for the linkage.