Congratulations
(I think?) to Joaquín García, a Spanish civil servant, who managed
to absent himself from work for 6 years while still drawing his full
€37,000 salary from Cadiz City Council. His absence finally came to
light when his name appeared on a list of those being considered for
a 20 year long service award and the Deputy Mayor decided to contact
him.
In
2004 Mr. Garcia was sent to a post at Cadiz Water to oversee the
building of a new water treatment plant. A subsequent investigation
in 2010 revealed that colleagues at the site had no knowledge of his
whereabouts and simply had assumed that he had been recalled to City
Hall.
It
was later revealed that he may actually have skipped work from as
long ago as 1996. The phantom employee made a complaint that it was
the council's responsibility to ensure that he attended his place of
employment and it was not his fault if they were negligent. He also
stated that he had suffered workplace bullying on account of his
political beliefs.
When
challenged as to what he had been doing during this time he was
unable to provide any answer. He also claimed that he feared for his
job and was too depressed to report the alleged harassment. He
subsequently retired in 2011 and was ordered by the court to repay
€27,000 in compensation, the equivalent of 1 year's net salary.
I
feel certain that there will be those who will say this could only
happen in Spain, but I am equally sure that there will be a few
managers in this country who will be having sleepless nights
wondering how many phantoms there are on their payroll that have
slipped beneath the radar of detection.
The
left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing would seem to be a
common management mantra in the modern work place so it is perhaps
understandable that one department may have no knowledge of another
department within the same organisation. Nevertheless to make
yourself virtually invisible for 14 years is simply mind-blowing. Do
they have no phones in Spain? If I was to leave my desk unattended it
would be buried under a mountain of post within a month. What
happened to all of this man's mail? Sooner or later someone must have
complained or returned the items to the sender. Had no one picked up
on the fact that this employee never responded to any of their
emails?
There
must have been a time when the office needed to be re-decorated, the
electrics tested, a fire
drill
scheduled or the cleaner noticed that they hadn't emptied a
particular waste bin for several months.
You
can't blame the guy for wanting to escape. In my days of working as a
'pencil jockey', when staff had to use writing implements instead of
keyboards there were 2 thoughts that frequently crossed my mind. If I
were to suffer a fatal heart attack at my desk, how many weeks would
it be before anyone noticed that I was dead? My work colleagues were
predominantly male so it would be unlikely that any of them would
pass comment that you had been wearing the same clothes for several
days. Nor were they likely to pass comment on any unusually odious
smell. It has to be said that there were a few of my colleagues who,
from time to time, gave me reason to suspect that they may have
expired (probably from boredom).
The
other thought that used to cross my mind involved working for a
fantasy firm based loosely on my perception of a few dubious
characters I had encountered. It is said that staff at banks often
while away the hours dreaming of ways to beat the system or what they
would do with the money if a sum with a huge number of zeros
mysteriously appeared in their personal account. Similarly, the firm
of 'Scribble and Scratch' as it became known opened the door to
endless opportunities of breaking the tedium of the working day.
The
nature of the hypothetical business changed occasionally but
ultimately I decided that the scheme I had in mind was best suited to
the legal profession, primarily because the underlying principles
seem to simply focus on relieving the client of as much money as
possible in exchange for the minimum level of service.
To
this end neither Messrs Scribble nor Scratch had any formal legal
training, preferring to rely on their own version of 'legalese', a
technical jargon which sounded plausible to the layman. The pretence
was that the couple had worked together in the customer complaints
department of some indeterminate company and their legal expertise
was gleaned from reading the range of warranties on various goods.
Under the rules of the game Scribble and Scratch were on their
uppers, working from a garret above a kebab shop. Their office
consisted of a shared desk, a phone, a laptop, a dartboard and a
kettle.
The
idea was to invent scenarios for them to 'deal with creatively' that
involved them doing as little as possible. The acquisition of 'money'
was not the primary goal, it was the accumulation of points that was
the real objective. Points would be awarded based on the nature of
the scenario, the time taken to 'resolve' the issue and the
inventiveness of the responses. The longer it took to resolve the
issue the more chance you had to score points. Nothing was deemed off
limits and the more devious or absurd the action or explanation the
higher the score awarded. The dartboard was the arbiter of any delays
incurred whether it be minutes, hours or days. This could mean the
length of time a customer was kept waiting on the phone or the number
of days required to obtain a replacement part. Penalty points were
deducted if you were required to take any positive action to assist
the customer, such as sending a letter (as opposed to simply lying
about it). Adhering to the principle of 'one step forward, 2 steps
back' it was sometimes advantageous to instigate a positive action in
order to open up fresh opportunities to further bamboozle the
customer and convince them that you are on the case.
Sadly,
technology has moved on, which has rather removed the need for staff
to think creatively in such situations. It would seem that the only
explanation or excuse required by any individual working in a
service industry these days is to blame the technology. The
advancement of phone systems now means that customers can be placed
on hold for days or transferred from department to department ad
infinitum without any human intervention. Some companies either
choose to put no contact details on their website or alternatively
list so many contact numbers that there is little chance that any
customer would be able to get in touch with someone capable of
dealing with their enquiry.
It
is infuriating to see so many websites where the customer relations
department is portrayed as a sizeable group of impeccably groomed,
ethnically diverse, grinning faces in ultra modern offices. This
seems to be a favourite ploy for local authorities and utility
companies many of whom see placing the words customer and service in
the same sentence as anathema.
Messrs
Scribble and Scratch may have gone to that great garret in the sky
but they could equally be sitting on a beach in some tax haven having
become insanely wealthy by cornering the market in red tape and doing
absolutely nothing.
