A 14 year siesta

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.

A party political broadcast on behalf of The Unelectables – or Who cares who wins?

So game is on and the election battle is off to a rip roaring yawn. The most closely fought contest since the … the last one.

The fact is that the major issues remain the same, as do the stock answers. The health service, the economy, immigration, education, housing, transport and pensions have always been the key concerns, always have been, always will be. The bottom line is that we all want utopia, there is only so much money in the pot and it all comes down to how the spoils from the pot is divided. Fundamentally there are more problems than there are solutions and it comes down to politicians to put whatever spin and window dressing on the situation they can to make their party look different from the rest. The election run in is not the for radical thinking so my guess is that we are in for another mud-slinging contest.

I would no more wish to be a politician than stick my head in a kitchen blender, far too much finger wringing, back stabbing and baby kissing for my likes, however in the spirit of contention I would like to put forward my own thoughts of what I would like to see in a manifesto. Not that I expect that my proposal would be adopted because it wouldn’t work, proposals seldom do, but at least it would be a more entertaining debate than the usual fodder.

My proposal would be to extend the day from 24 hours to 26 hours which would not only produce a variety of benefits, which I shall outline, but also go a long way to solving some of the unanswered questions to the key concerns listed above.

This may seem like a ludicrous idea though I do believe it does have a number of merits.

It would need to be a 2 hour increase so that you could spilt am and pm into whole numbers.

An additional 10 hours to the working week would bring a boost to the economy through productivity and taxes. Those in employment could see a rise in their income of up to 30%, while this will also be an opportunity to create thousands of new jobs. More money in our pockets with more time to spend it.

Those who like to party will have more time to do so, while those who claim they do not get enough sleep will get longer in bed.

There would be the equivalent of an additional 28 shopping days till Christmas, giving us more time to ponder what to buy our loved ones. If like me you struggle with this task the good news is that we will have fewer Christmases and birthdays in the future.

The extra 2 hours will give the government an opportunity to cram ever more ridiculous demands into an already overcrowded school curriculum and more time for students to complete their homework.

Students staying on longer at school should see an improvement in grades and there should be a welcome decrease in youth unemployment.

With the extra 2 hours even the most inept transport provider should be able to ensure that their buses or trains run to schedule. The potential for staggering journey times should lead to a drop in road congestion. It should also free up slots in the air reducing the need for a new runway at Heathrow Airport.

It will mean that patients will spend fewer days in hospital, freeing up much needed beds. The average pregnancy will be 3 weeks shorter than at present. The number of work days lost due to sickness will drop. Hospital waiting times will be shorter and those on daily tablets will not have to take their medication for so long, reducing the NHS drugs bill.

Those who believe that the legal system is too lenient on criminals can take heart from the fact that sentences will now be longer.

One of the biggest problems that this country faces is that there are more of us living longer lives. Increasing the length of the day addresses this problem by ensuring that life expectancy, which also helps reduce the pensions bill and the demand for home care for the elderly.

Some may view a shorter life expectancy as a negative factor but on the positive side we will not age as quickly, so no one will be worse off.

Assuming that most people will continue to eat 3 meals a day, increasing the length of the day by 2 hours should see no, or minimal, increase in our food bill which would effectively mean that the cost of our weekly shop would go down and this would reduce the effects of obesity in society.

As I see it, there are 2 downsides to this proposal, for the situation to work it would require the rest of the world to adopt the same option and extend their day. This may not be beyond the realm of possibility given that most of the other countries are in a similar financial mess and have just as few ideas of how to get out of a crisis.

The other concern is the impact it would have on nature. This again is possibly not so problematic. Climate changes would be largely unaffected but items such as bird migratory patterns and crop growth may. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your view, modern techniques have already dealt with timing issues for milk, seed and egg production. As for the birds and the flowers, well they are probably already confused by our fickle weather conditions but nature is very dynamic and adaptable so maybe the impact of any change would be minimal.

In the longer term there would be a changing of the seasons which could bring further challenges that may work in our favour. Heatwaves in November might expand the tourism market, removing the bottleneck for July and August breaks. It may also mean that our highly paid golf professionals who seem to play a disproportionate number of tournaments in exotic places where the sun always shine may find themselves on waterlogged or windswept greens in the middle of July. It would be nice to see how they get on in conditions more suited to the enthusiastic amateur.

There might be problems with future Winter Olympics being held in Summer conditions, but if they can hold the Soccer World Cup in Qatar in December then perhaps this will not be an issue. Personally I would look forward to seeing the ski jump turned into a water slide though I suspect that will never happen.

Doubtless there will be detractors who will be argue that it will mean the demise of the traditional clock. We are living in a digital age, changing the watch face should not be too difficult. There will be campaigns to keep the grand time pieces such as ‘Big Ben’ – you mean the ‘Big Ben’ at the crumbling halls of Westminster, the one that would probably disappear if parliament was ever relocated? Decimalisation saw us change from the old £-s-d to new pence yet the value of the pound did not change overnight, why should changing from 24 to 26 hour days be any more difficult?

That just leaves the housing shortage and immigration issues to be tackled, both far too complex for me to contemplate in my lifetime no matter how long the day is.

What's in a name.

The BBC has a lengthy history of utilising staff like tissue paper. Presenters and reporters come and go with alarming regularity. In a very competitive industry it has long been the practice to employ freelances as a means to reducing costs. There will always be a hardcore of staff reporters and journalists, who form the backbone to any schedule; what particularly irks me is the glorious titles that now seem to be handed out like confetti. My understanding is that the role of Senior Political / Sports / Health / Education / Crime / Local Government Editor has always been a permanent position. We now appear to have a situation where everyone is a Senior Correspondent / Reporter / Analyst or Editor of something (strange how there don't appear to be any junior members on any of these teams, if teams is what they are). It would seem a new face emerges almost every week in each of these roles. Either these journalists have incredibly short careers or they must share the roles in rotation. I can't believe they can all reach burn out before they turn 30; being shipped off to some regional backwater from where they can supplement their income through ghost writing D-list celebrity memoirs.

Seeing so many job titles being banded about willy-nilly has prompted me to look at the company for which I work. We similarly are inundated with numerous Managers, Specialists, Analysts, Consultants, Assistants, Engineers, Professionals, Controllers, Co-ordinators, Designers, Technicians and Architects. I don't suppose we are any different from any other medium-sized company. There is ultimately a management hierarchy within the company but most of the 'Business Development Analysts' and 'Senior Implementation Consultants' are in reality fulfilling the same role. I am not sure where this curious desire to pigeon-hole people stems from but it seems a curiously outdated concept in an age where employees are required to wear a great many hats. Perhaps in an ideal world we could all focus on our chosen skills but necessity demands that we all undertake a variety of duties from time to time which often have very little in common with our designated role.

Whenever I have turned up at a customer site my arrival has usually been announced as “Is anyone expecting the IT man?”, “The Computer guy's in reception” or "That man's 'ere again to fix the computers". I have never met a customer who has gone into raptures because he has come to face to face with a 'Senior Network Telephony Design Consultant' instead of some plain old 'Engineer'.

Personally, I stick to the generic title of 'Network Engineer' which broadly outlines the work that I undertake, though occasionally I will, in conversation, describe my role as a 'Consultant' purely on the premise that a lot of people choose to lump anything related with IT under one umbrella and expect you to deal with every aspect of it. This is often the easiest way to explain that different companies may be responsible for providing differing services to customers, we may be supporting the network hardware while another company may deal with issues relating to the pcs and other office equipment. No matter how well-intentioned you may be as an individual it is important to be aware of the repercussions of stepping beyond your company's remit.

The public are a great leveller and basically we all are categorised generically, whether we be “IT guys”, “plumbers”, “doctors”, “gardeners”, “mechanics”, “policemen” or “journalists”. The bottom-line is “If your job title is too long to fit on your business card then you are either in the wrong job or you are taking yourself too seriously”.

New Year Resolution?

Regrettably I have worn a hole in my soap box over recent years and am now having to resort to step ladders in order to get my voice heard. Undoubtedly it is a case that the older I get the more there is that irritates and I am of a disposition of fighting for causes I believe in rather than tamely capitulating and allowing all and sundry to get away with blatant injustice.

I recognise that this is a futile gesture given that the world is in such an appalling state, but I would rather put my two-penny-worth into the pot whilst I still have the energy to put up a fight.

I am still itching for the first silicon-enhanced Barbie doll shop assistant to utter those dreaded words “Ah, bless him” in my direction. Not that I have any propensity for violence but I am curious to know whether botox would improve or lessen the appearance of a black eye.

I have avoided the January Sales, just as I have done for every other month in the calendar, on grounds that it might be tempting fate. This cold snap has enabled me to catch up on some of my studies, watch a few DVDs, see a few friends and play the old Christmas game of spotting the actors in classic films that are still alive. Not that I watch a lot of TV these days. I particularly detest the way that TV presenters address the issue of the day as if the entire population existed in the same rarefied atmosphere that they do. Sadly, we do not all live in penthouse apartments in the city and employ our own nanny and personal fitness trainer. Anyone who can regularly blow 20 quid on a cappuccino and a sarnie is not a fit person to convey news of global atrocities or economic realities to the bewildered masses.

By the BBC reckoning anyone living in a house worth less than £500,000 is living beneath the poverty line. Heaven for betsy! There are even some presenters who don’t earn that amount in annual expenses. Poor things!

It makes me furious listening to these jibbering buffoons and their guests ranting on about how we are coming out of recession. Every day it seems there is yet another major employer going bust or laying off 1000s, can’t these politicians read or are they just so pre-occupied with filling in their expenses claims. ‘Green shoots’ they say; the only green shooting I’m interested in involves a blank wall, a handful of politicians and a loaded ouzi.

I also can’t see that the BBC is doing much to help with educating future generations, though I accept that the role of TV has changed thanks to the influence of computer games and other distractions. ‘Yoof’ TV seems to be an endless procession of bizarre music videos, comic book cartoons and American imports cobbled together by hyperactive continuity presenters who, if they behaved the way they do anywhere else other than in a TV studio, would almost certainly be locked up for their own protection. I assume that these individuals are recruited from drama schools since there seem to be few discernable characteristics that would link them with the kids one encounters daily in the street.

I am fully conversant that anyone between the age of 10 and 25 is physically incapable of communicating in anything other than primeval grunts. I am told that some have become accomplished in the art of texting, which is nice for them, even if they have yet to master the art of spelling and have very little to say to one another. It never ceases to amaze me that these very people, who are seemingly unable to string together a sentence of more than 10 words, can talk for hours given the opportunity to phone someone (often a complete stranger and usually at someone else’s expense). Even allowing for the fact that 30% of all conversation is ‘dead air’, that is still a lot of small talk in anyone’s language.

Still, I would not wish to be a teenager these days, the prospects seem very bleak in terms of employment opportunities and getting onto the housing ladder. I, now in my 50s, am still studying, because my industry has a shortage of qualified people. And where have my qualifications got me? Well, I spent 2 days before Christmas sitting in a client’s office making a note of the number of faulty telephone calls the company receives on a spreadsheet. It is a job that a 16 year old could do yet, the company insisted they need someone with my technical experience to do the work. I was even told that I was not to be pro-active meaning that I had to wait for users to come to me with their problems. I had 2 faults reported in a day and a half, neither of which has anything to do with the telephone system!

1. Can the volume on the headsets be adjusted? – No, because users then turn the sound down in order that the phone can’t be heard ringing. Quite an important factor you would have thought within a call centre.


2. Why does the department lose so many calls when an incoming call moves from a designated extension to a group call? - Simple, when someone is away from their desk it means that the call is diverted and someone else needs to pick the phone up, which no one does.


It is very typical within the IT industry to find people in such a situation as mine, being utilised to do work that has nothing to do with their particular skill set. The number of places I have worked where the software engineer is a web designer by trade, or the network administrator trained as a programmer. It is a total waste of resources, but you take what work you can get these days. You wouldn’t expect to ask Simon Rattle if he could play the spoons because you already had too many conductors with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

As far as I can see the only growth industry in this country is in training, an industry that is normally the first to be hit during a recession. No matter what your trade there will be a necessary qualification. Usually it is a case that once you have achieved that qualification you will either be informed that the qualification is no longer relevant and you need to take an upgraded version of the exam or, alternatively, you will be advised that the qualification will need to be renewed within 2 years. It is a self-perpetuating cycle that guarantees a regular income to the exam provider and eternal poverty to the unfortunate employee.

I can foresee the day when no one will have a career any more and the entire workforce will be on a continual cycle of retraining for industries that can’t attract anybody to work in it, the chief reason being because everybody is on training courses.

Forget all idea of being able to walk into a £40k+ job on the back of a degree. There are only so many opportunities for media consultants and marketing analysts. The best hope for most is a £14K job in a call centre. Perhaps my niece’s generation had it right all along – most of her peers wanted to become hairdressers, though I guess that most of them will now be single mums, living in social housing with their 4 x 4’s (4 kids by 4 different fathers).

Given that most employers operate a flexi-time policy I can’t see what all the fuss is about yoof having problems getting off their backsides in the morning. Most of the graduates I have had the misfortune to work with have displayed a marked indifference to personal hygiene, poor communication skills and a lack of basic common sense that should place them on the ‘at risk’ register.

Exactly what type of degree do you require to become a media consultant? Surely a quick flick through a few the tabloids would teach you all the skills you would need. What more valuable tool in life can one want than a degree in ancient Celtic dialects. Would King Canute have been more successful had he possessed a degree in wave management? – You can tell that I am getting bored now, since I can’t think of any rational explanation of why King Canute should enter my mind.

I better go and make a snowman and cool off.