The Judge RANTS!
Date: 03/09/08
August 34th...
To Telford for a team meeting. As my regular chauffeur was on holiday, I had to make the trip by train. Afterwards, I had a chat with my manager about what the Depratment was trying to do to me (see here). I had decided over the Bank Holiday weekend not to go quietly and to fight the decision, and I've tried every which way to appeal to reason.
I was told today that it has all been in vain. This, I hasten to add, is not my manager's doing. He wants me to stay on the team, but has been over-ruled from a higher level. So from September 29, I will be in a job where I will have to switch my brain into neutral for six hours a day just to be able to cope with the tedium.
I'm looking around trying to find something, anything, more rewarding to do for a living. Or even a mundane job in an organisation which doesn't treat its staff with ill-disguised contempt. I'm also applying for a job in another public-sector body, only I'm being frustrated by yet another of those management-guru curses on our lives - the 'competence-based application form'. Why the hell these have become popular I don't know, except that their use explains why so many people end up in jobs to which they are singularly unsuited. "Describe a time when you delivered a challenging task under tight timescales" was one question. And then they only give you about a hundred words to do so. Sheesh! I've got a feeling I'm not going to get that job.
Back to today, and I walked from the office we'd held our meeting in back to Telford Central station during a blustery downpour which nearly knackered my new umbrella - one of those automatic ones with a recoil on it like an old shotgun - to arrive and just miss a train back towards Chester (it was about to pull away just as I was crossing the footbridge). Now, for a town the size of Telford, its railway station is pretty basic - the place was clearly designed for the car culture - and it provides only very limited shelter from the elements. The next train back homewards was due at 1443. It was delayed by about seven minutes due to signalling problems, and it was about 1520 when I got into Shrewsbury. I ran across to another platform to catch the next train north - only for that to be held back for about eight minutes because we were waiting for another late train to arrive which connected with it.
This meant that I got back into Wrexham just too late for the bus I'd hoped to catch. The next one wasn't for another twenty-five minutes, so I walked into town through the same fucking drench-fest which had caught me earlier on! I know it was the same one - it had shadowed my whole journey back.
I got home and found that one of the two hospital appointments I had a week on Monday had been cancelled, so now I'll have to make two journeys instead of one.
And I failed in my bid for a reel-to-reel tape recorder (which I need to digitise a lot of old tapes) on eBay - by 99p.
I don't remember treading on a nick in the pavement whilst walking under a ladder and simultaneously beating a black cat to death with a broken mirror, but that's how things feel just now.
