Say Goodbye

I know I have said goodbye before, but this time I actually mean it. It's not a "Oh its November! time to say I am quitting" fetish going on.

Two months ago, despite taking a lot of care and attention to anonymity, someone who did not like what I write on my blog managed to find out who I was. Not only content was the person content to do this, they also decided to contact my manager and complain directly to them. I believe the words "unprofessional" and "reflect badly on the organisation" were used. My manager then had the momentous task of wading through hundreds of blog entries.

To her credit my manager did not immediately go ballistic and take disciplinary action. Instead we had a informal chat that included why I had started my blog, whether it was something that I wanted to continue and whether there could be other ways to fulfil that aspiration. She then talked me through various other cases of what has happened in high profile cases in the press where bloggers were uncovered and how their careers had been affected. As she has high hopes for my development in the organisation, she did not want something that I either had said already or would say in the future to impact either on myself or on the charity. Though I felt my blog was always about free speech and making observations (initially about psychology and then about life outside it), I could see her logic. Also I realise that I have not been as kind as I could have been, but then again it would have been a fairly insincere blog if it was about me being happy and sunny the whole time after my billionth rejection letter. Although she liked the blog itself (thanks boss!), my manager suggest I write a final post, and then sign off but leave the blog up as an account of this part of my life.

So with that in mind, plus other things, I am saying farewell. If there was an overriding message I would say that "Life goes on despite your plans not working out exactly" or "Plan B can be pretty sweet." I wish all my regular readers well in wherever they end up, the blogroll writers on the side to get what they set out to do.

Bye

Secret

Service is going to be interrrupted as my regular uploader can no longer keep putting my posts up as often as I would like. With all this secrecy I am starting to sympathise how Batman must feel. I am going to have to find a way around that, but its winter anyway and everyone is going to be too busy doing christmas shopping and having Halloween fun to bother checking in with RLJ in any case.

To be honest, its fairly pedal to the metal at work as we are having to do extra work of two people to cover our recent lay offs. Boo. On the plus side we have been given a new coffee machine.

Yeah. Exactly.

Frozen

In the news today the main story has been about freezing pay in the public sector. As someone who works in the private or third sector NGO, I have to say "Welcome to 2009". As discussed in earlier posts we have lost Priya, as well as a few other of our accountancy bods and there were lots of mutterings that this would never have happened in the public sector.

I am not the sort of person who would make anyone else suffer just because I am, but from my experience in the NHS there were so many non-essential jobs (including my old job, Olga's and hunky Nick's if I am being hones) that were quite paperwork heavy and target oriented that it was hard to justify when the clinical service had a 6 month + waiting list. At least we were paid peanuts, there are loads of middle management types and what-the-hell-do-you-do? officers who just floated getting paid relatively lots. And they are salary freezes, not sackings, so they are not too hard done by. Yet, from the last few facebook postings you I read this morning I would have thought various assistants, trainees and other NHS staff were being selected by lottery and thrown into the hospital furnace.

Calm down dear, nothing has even happened yet.

Falling

Psyclick thread commentary + rant alert


A few weeks back a rather harassed IAPT worker started a thread about some of the difficulties she had faced at work. The remnants can be found here:

http://forum.psyclick.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=14285

Due to the lack of help available she reached out for assistance, only to be told by some of the oldies "no can do, go seek supervision" (in varying degrees of politeness), the absence of which was presumably the reason she posted in the first place. Can see this part from both sides, but I am slightly siding with the underdog original poster.

Then people started talking about confidentiality and if she was not careful she could be busted. I am quite a confidentiality freak (get other people to upload stuff for me, multiple anonymous email boxes, proxy servers and anonymising like there is no tommorow) so I would take this as excellent advice and probably take stuff down at that point. The original poster (OP) refuses, and then the thread goes all quiet.

Soon after the poster doesn't just remove the info, but deletes everything on the entire post. Now it may be a late reconsideration of advice, but in my experience of other forums, this is a bad thing. Its the internet version of having the secret police kick down your door, bundle you into a van and you wake up in a bare jail cell tied to a chair. Not good. Then some other posters make some speculative posts about, and then it all goes silent.

So what? Well, if you actually think about it someone tried to get help, and was effectively silenced because someone who didn't like it found out- possibly someone who wasn't helping the OP in the first place? Of course it could be that the situation was resolved, but seeing as the poster didn't just say "Situation resolved, thanks for everything guys" and then never posted again, I am not sure if this is the case. Regardless, it left me feeling quite uncomfortable and uneasy. No one mentioned anything, no one stuck up at this point and said this reflects badly on the OPs management not the OP.

Or maybe people didn't notice. Its application time and everyone is concentrating on other things. Or maybe they were too British and sensitive to address it? It left me feeling quite sad regardless.

Cleaning out my closet

I have been spring cleaning again, and found a huge stack of paperwork from my last assistant's job. Unfortunately some of it was data that I was supposed to input, that I thought I had done, but clearly never did.

I think the audit, data entry cum number crunching aspect of my last job was by far the worst thing. I had to go around all the clinicians in the area and collect their stats (appointment times, patients seen, diagnosis and a whole bunch of other nonsence). The psychologists, nurses and medics hated it and took great delight in shooting the messanger by making me wait extra long times to deliver this info. Then I had to spend afternoons at a strech entering this onto some massive pre 1990 database that was designed by Satan himself in the middle of a blinding hangover. I used to dread the last friday of the month as everyone would procrastinate and leave me to enter all the stats before the managers deadline.

I am not sure what these numbers did, or meant to anyone. None of them were ever used, and I think they went to some upper guy who pushed paper or crunched more numbers. Every once in a while we would get some meaningless feedback, like we were in the bottom 3 of the services within the trust, or we had worked at 76% effiency, but without knowing any context this was meaningless. Someone would have to be bottom in any comparison, regardless of being good or bad. 76% compared to what? What does 100% look like, what would 10% look like.

Didn't matter, we just got yelled at if the numbers werent put into the machine, so thats what I did. When they talk of NHS cuts in the future, they could save a huge pile of money and cut the people that push meaningless targets and deal with the numbers that make little sense to anyone. That and the utterly stupid, but no doubt expensive, David Brent style management workshops we had to attend where we all had to judge ourselves on the Myer Briggs (utterly non valid) and try to discern our personality by looking at shapes on a PowerPoint overhead.

So, this bundle of paperwork was missed. And nothing happened. The world didnt end, operations were not cancelled and old ladies did not die the street. Hmm. Perhaps there is a lesson there.

She's like the wind

It feels odd now Priya has left, sort of how the Beatles must have felt when John Lennon was assassinated. If the Beatles were a bunch of girls who spent most of their time in an office talking crap. I am used to the old psychology way of people coming and going like tumbleweed blowing in the wind, but there was something comfortingly permanent about our cosy little office, and now its just odd.

With just the two of us there, Jane and me lapse into these long silences, which is wierd because Priya herself didnt actually say that much, except the odd sarky zinger. What I realise she did do was play the jury and final word in pointless debates such as would you rather live without tea or dettol (Dettol obviously) or if you were in the position to shag Colin Farrell but you had to turn down Brad Pitt to do so, would you hate yourself (no). At the end of each of these little conundrums Priya would put in the final word, like Jerry Springer. Without her it feels like there is no Umpire to appeal to. For example, Patrick Swayze's death was talked about at indecent length today. No, actually Dirty Dancing was talked about at indecent length today, but it just wasn't the same.

Bye Bye Priya. Wherever you are there will always be a cup of Gold Blend and your favourite radio station on preset "2" here for you.

We can work it out

Did anyone see that programme "Dispatches: Middle class and Jobless" the other night? Okay it was quite grim, but it was a fairly accurate portrayal of what I went through around this time last year (Christ, was it only was only a year ago I was like this? I feel like I have been in this job since the Battle of Hastings).

Yeah, the old feelings of sending off a million CVs and not hearing from anyone. Thats not confined just to psychology people, its pretty much any graduate job in a recession. Which it still clearly is. Its those scenes of packing up belongings in student flats and having to move home that really hit home for me. Pour moi, nothing said failure like turning up to your mum and dads house with a cardboard box and a suitcase and saying "I hope you kept my old room ready".

Crap for everyone, but at least I didn't have a Channel 4 documentary crew following me around. I obviously paid more attention to the recent graduate stories, because the executive types the show followed made very little impression on me other than saying in order to be an executive manager you have to being overweight, unshaven and male. I felt the new grads were slightly mocked because the build up was about them getting graduate level manager/marketing jobs, but really they ended up either working door to door or for Domino's Pizza. It was a bit like watching a less funny version of The Office.

I am gassing on about this here, because I really could not talk about this at work because tommorow is Priya's last day of working her notice, and even I am not that insensitive. However, she seems quite happy about things, she has come to terms she is going and has been talking non-stop about starting her MSc. I will miss her tonnes and tonnes, especially her sarky comments and cutting wit. We are having a leaving party for her on Friday, and we are sloping off early around lunchtime. Probably not the best thing to be doing considering recent job issues, but you have to make exceptions for this kind of thing.

Besides scary boss lady is on leave, placing yours truly in charge, and if her royal highness declares it half day, so it shall be.