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| Sometimes, you know, it's remarkable: I feel a little job satisfaction- whether its nailing someone for their Council Tax who has has shown nothing but contempt for our noble profession, or conversely when I've really been able to help someone out who was otherwise befuddled by our myriad offers of exemptions, discounts, benefits, reliefs and special offer two-for-one Council Tax instalments (well, no, I made that up). Confidentiality forbids me disclosing full details (oh, I know you're so disappointed not to hear the full story), but just occasionally by asking the right questions and giving intelligent answers you can save someone quite a bit of money. And no, I don't take bribes. So I might have been feeling in a good mood for once as I left work. I artfully sculpted a salad together at the mix-your-own stand at Safeway, and all felt right with the world as I waited in line to pay for it.Then the misanthropy struck: shoppers in front of me querying receipts; grannies taking half an hour to pay by cheque, debit cards failing to work; some adolescent cashier with only two stars on their name- badge having to call the supervisor, then me gambling to change queues before it got even worse in my new line. Oh, the teeth grinding, blood-pressure rising hellisotherpeopleness of it all. And then I am released for an hour-and-a-half on a stuffy tube, waiting for eternity to melt at White City, trying to get to grips with Gunter Grass, with the sure fire knowledge that a pile of laundry is waiting for me at home. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr............ |
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| back to May 15th-17th |
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| Clanger atop my growing laundry mountain |
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| If there appears to be a Nordic theme to today's entry it's because I've booked some flights: on the 10th of July I shall be jetting off from Stansted to Copenhagen, and seven days later I shall find my way home from the Norwegian equivalent of Essex's finest airport. I suspect that everything I do in between will be rather expensive- I shan't be surprised if a pint costs as much as my flight out there. Well, if people want Scandinavian-standard public services, then they've got to be paid for somehow. Still it shall be something else to look forward to. Work was fine today- the good citizenry of Ealing didn't bother me too much with their appreciation of the latest lot of missives we've sent them, and it's not a bad place to work, in all honesty, which is something that can't be said about everywhere else I've worked. Let's just call one of those places the Borough of Somewhere Else. Somewhere Else was not so much a stately ship of local government state gliding serenely through the water, but a sinking raft where the ratings spent all the time bailing out the vessell with thimbles whilst officers stood around rearranging the deckchairs. Somewhere Else allegedly had a management structure, but it was a bit like Kremlinology trying to work out how it operated; it had some permanent staff, but Somewhere Else's training practices left them continually unprepared to deal with often basic queries; agency staff kept the place going, but one of Somewhere Else's managers thought it was OK to get his agency to phone up and tell him he was no longer needed. After three years. Somewhere Else didn't believe in staff meetings- we had one in twelve months; Somewhere Else thought it was appropriate that Benefit claimants couldn't go and talk to a member of staff, but had to wait 30 minutes to speak to someone on the phone, whilst anyone who wanted to buy a parking permit could go and see someone anytime. At Somewhere Else, everyone knew it was a dog's breakfast, but we just kept eating it; it was a disgrace from start to finish and nothing short of taking it completely apart and putting it together again will ever make it any better . After too long at Somewhere Else, you start to doubt your own abilities and become part of the problem and not the solution. Progress at Somewhere Else was deemed to be the introduction of a uniform, and the glassing off of senior managers from the rest of the office: a little standardisation of procedures and retraining wouldn't have come amiss, but.there was little hope of that; people with ideas had long ago given up any thought of trying to improve things, and it was not a healthy place to be. And now I'm anywhere else than Somewhere Else. And it's OK. Mike's Big Book of Rambling Rants will be published shortly |
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| I went to a recording of the BBC sitcom My Hero this evening at Teddington Studios. My friend Gary had been given a couple of tickets, so always keen to have a cultural experience, no matter however low the brow may find itself, I thought I'd give it a chance. Things didn't start to well as I was only just pardonnably brassed off with Gary over his usual late arrival at the train station- the usual concatenation of catastrophe had delayed him again. Looking at the Beeb's own website would not have augered well either: My Hero was pitched as a gentle family comedy and it achieved at least two thirds of its aim. It was certainly gentle, and it was that rarity among modern-day comedies: family viewing. But it wasn't that comical. I'm afraid the last sentence was only too true: there was no sense of the cast feeding off the response of us in the uncomfortable studio seats, genuinely funny lines were few and far between, and many punchlines were telegraphed so far ahead that I could hear them coming on the bus down from Ealing. Ardal o'Hanlon, the formerly brilliantly stupid Father Dougal was simply going through the motions here, Geraldine McNulty as the doctor's evil receptionist is very much an ersatz Mrs Doyle, and then there are the cardboad acting skills of Hugh Dennis to endure. Well, I guess it was interesting to see a sitcom put together, although I couldn't help watching most of it on the monitors as booms,camaramen, and trainee jobsworths with clipboards blocked the view of much of the sets: they looked less real than on TV, anyway. And I laughed at the out-takes Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. |
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| The cast of My Hero: click on the pic for the BBC'S view. In 30 years' time no-one will bother to point at the screen and say "he's dead. and , he's dead," will they? |
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| My sister is starting to feed me, and is generally trying to organise my life. Is this a good thing? I suppose it would be nice to be able to find things occasionally that have long been rumoured lost on my desk. But what would a focused, organised Mike be like? It's a scarier prospect than the current arrangement in my humble opinion. |
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