Jester’s morale

It’s been a while since I blogged on this site. The main reason being time; I don’t have as much of it now as I used to. This has more to do with a change in my domestic circumstances than work as I don’t feel the need to spend so much time on the computer nowadays. Another reason was that a change in my work circumstances significantly reduced the number of petty irritations I had to blog about and the main reason for this blog was the petty irritations at work.

However, times change and we have a recession and work is no longer the enjoyable activity it had become. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually enjoy work. I do it because I have to; I would far prefer to be able to indulge in more pleasureable pursuits: fell walking, Morris dancing, playing the piano (if I had one) and spending more time with my loved ones; but work doesn’t have to be an ordeal. You can go to work and have a reasonably good time and come home at the end of it in a good mood.

Unfortunately for me and my colleagues, it had become an ordeal and I viewed it as the most unwelcome 8 hours of any day. I was going to work, having a reasonably bad time and coming home in a foul mood. I didn’t want to go in in the morning and I clock watched from start to finish. I timed the day from start to break, break to lunch, lunch to break and break to home time. Anything that interfered with that routine was unwelcome in the extreme. A caller that made me late for my breaks or lunch or, Heaven forbid! going home was the lowest of the low. I knew, everyday, where the halfpoint of that day was. My whole work day was geared to getting to the end of it as quickly as possible.

Which is not a good way to be. By all means look forward to going home at the end of the day and appreciate the weekends but to be so desperate to be away from the place was shocking.

There were a number of reasons for this state of affairs. I think the original boo boo was the organisation of training, which in its first week took too many of my colleagues off the call centre floor, leaving the rest of us trying desperately to keep up with the work. We were not able to and we have been trying to catch up ever since. Then there were redundancies, reducing our number by about a fifth, which left us in worse straits than before. Then we were all called in for a meeting and told that our productivity had dropped and we would need to pick it back up. The worst case scenario being we would lose our contracts and we would all be out of a job.

So we now had a thoroughly demoralised workforce, more work than we could hope to do in our 8 hour shifts, productivity down (I know my productivity was down), a seemingly chaotic situation with managers to all intents behaving like headless chickens and fewer people to do the work. I don’t think we had reached rock bottom and I think that it could have got worse but fortunately it didn’t. We are very lucky with some of our managers, whose actions dug us out of a hole and effectively saved the day.

I came into work one day last week to find that we were being organised and given different tasks to do. Some of us were to tackle the backlog of work that had built up – an elite team to all intents and purposes – and the rest of us were to handle the higher volume of calls that were coming in. I wasn’t on the elite team but that wasn’t a problem for me. I know that I don’t work as quickly as some of my colleagues; probably because I can’t cut corners and have to do everything exactly as it should be done. I can’t help it; that’s the way I am. Others are, for want of a better word, more slapdash than me but they get the job done quicker. I was on calls but I quickly realised that I would be doing my part too.

This had an immediate effect on my morale. The effect on my morale had a knock on effect on my productivity, which increased dramatically. The change was amazing. I went home that night feeling so much better and found to my amazement that I was not dreading work the following day. Fortunately for us all, this new regime has continued and has made a huge difference to our workload. I even got to be on the elite team for two days. An honour indeed.

My contention is, therefore, that a demoralised workforce cannot be forced into increasing productivity by harsh words and threats. Browbeating people who are already down does not work. However, taking charge, having a plan, enthusing people and getting them to join in does work. A happy workforce is a productive workforce and bosses, from the lowliest team leader to the loftiest chairman of the board, should take note of this.

Make us happy and we’ll work so much better for you.

The diaspora of Jesters

It’s soon going to be the end of an era at the Dark Satanic Mill. The complaints department, which was Jester’s home at work for something like 7 years, is moving to the Head Office in the New Year. This is due to a restructure and streamlining of the business and is nothing to do with the current financial crisis. “Tell me another one!” I hear you all shout and “This one’s got bells on!” Heckling aside, I have no reason at present to disbelieve the party line. There are to be a few redundancies from other affected departments but most of the people whose jobs are going south will be found jobs elsewhere within the business operation in this benighted town.

Not that it affects this particular jester very much. My appetite for complaints has been seriously reduced in the past couple of years and last month, I moved away from them completely and am now experiencing a job satisfaction I haven’t felt for about 2½ years. Don’t get me wrong. This was not a career move. I was dealing with complaints in a sort of outpost of a sister company that was moved back to its main office and I was moved into another department. I was given a choice of three or four departments and chose this as the lesser of the various evils. However, it turned out to be quite a good choice and I’m quite enjoying the new job. I don’t know if the job satisfaction will last beyond the honeymoon period but I live in hope.

So the complaints department is going to another office too. I think this will come as a blow for a few of my former colleagues. The job was demanding but there was a reasonable amount of flexibility about the hours they worked. This flexibility will now disappear and they will be offered a range of shifts for the various departments to which they are relocated, which will probably not suit. Whole days off during the week, for instance, will not be forthcoming. They will be expected to work weekends. Maybe just one day every three weeks, like I do, but they will have to do it.

They will have to get used to the “Calls queuing!” environment and the questioning of every move they make. These people have had a degree of autonomy that is not seen elsewhere within the business and they are going to have to get used to it disappearing completely. There is also the possibility that there may be some resentment of them as well. They will be paid more than their new colleagues for doing the same job and apparently, there have already been some rumblings about that in the call centre.

I’ve been lucky. I have had no difficulty adjusting to my new working environment but, unlike them, I was heartily sick of complaints and ready for a change. Most of my former colleagues love the job. The new environment will prove a bitter pill to swallow, I suspect. My new colleagues do not seem to resent my but then I’m not particularly well known on my new department and they do not know that there is anything to resent. I am not confident my former colleagues will have the same experience but I sincerely hope so.

Jester and the Bad News

It’s been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster at the Dark Satanic Mill this week. At the end of last week, Jester was feeling positively dejected, undervalued and unwanted. She asked her manager for a meeting and explained the reason for her sad plight. Jester earns way below the national average but in terms of the Dark Satanic Mill, she’s not on a bad wage. She’s on this wage because she has been there a long time and has done well in previous years’ appraisals. However, the work she is doing at the moment does not reflect this and, to be honest, she’s pretty bored.

Her manager was sympathetic and said he would put something in place for her the following week, based on information her previous manager was going to send him. As of yesteray, he was still waiting for the previous manager to come back to him. He did give her some good news for Goodwill Geri at the time, though; Goodwill Geri will be coming back to full time hours and is now on the complaints team (to much applause and cheering, I can add).

On Monday, Jester’s car passed its MOT, so that was a good day.

On Tuesday, one of Jester’s former colleagues told Jester that she had heard that Jester’s department in the Dark Satanic Mill was moving to another city way over to the East. There had been rumours that this was going to happen for months now and Jesters had asked management if there was any truth in them and they had always said no. This information, however, came from another manager from another department and so Jester went to her manager and told him.

He went to see a Director (Dalek Caan to be precise) and came back with the bad news. Our jobs are being moved to the Eastern city in two months’ time. We were all heartbroken, although many of us were not surprised. Jester was furious. How dare they tell the manager of another department before they tell us! The news had, admitttedly, leaked out but even so.

We will not be made redundant; there are plenty of jobs for us in other departments. The problem is, we work in a really nice department. We’re busy but the stress levels are low because the work is easy to manage. We all get on really well indeed and we are going to be split up over a number of other departments. Also, other areas of the Dark Satanic Mill are not good places to work: management style is close to bullying and the ethos of “bums on seats” takes precedent over any human consideration. We do not want to go back to that.

We are also furious because when we inherited this department, it was a mess: the amount of work in progress was sky high, complaints were not being dealt with properly, new instructions were sky high and we pulled it back to the point where everything is manageable.

A director from the East is coming into the office on Monday to sit with us and explain the decision to us. I know Jester will be polite, she’s much better at sniping from the safety of a blog, but others will not be too gentle with him. I think he may have a rough ride and I’m so looking forward to seeing it.

Geri and the Desire to Work Full-time

Jester is feeling a little happier at work again. Agamemnon tends to keep me in good spirits and the young lady on the other side is also a pleasant person to work with. I also sit near another jester; a true jester. She is wryly amused by what goes on around her and is happy to share a joke or an amusing e-mail. She works part-time and she wants to go full-time.

Now I do understand about resource planning. It would be silly for our department to be overmanned. They tried that in various communist eastern european countries and productivity went right down. So we have to have a limit on the number of personnel we can have in our department. There has to be some slack though.

Our jester friend, lets call her Geri (yes, I am running out of names that start with a “G” or a “J”), is one of the most experienced people on the department. She can do most of the tasks we need to do to keep this well-oiled machine running smoothly. Actually, I think she can do them all. She can even turn her hand to complaints once in a while and you have to admire people who can do that.

She is a valuable member of the team and she wants to go full-time. We all want her to go full time too because we like her and she does her job well. The Dark Satanic Mill, or our little bit of it, has not really made up its mind. It can offer her full-time hours in another department, where she will need to have 3 weeks’ training and will probably not be able to do all the tasks to keep that particular well-oiled machine running or, at least at first, she could have stayed with us on part-time hours.

Our department or small part thereof has suffered some attrition recently (Dark Satanic Mill-speak for staff leaving) so we would have hoped that they could have done some mathematics and worked out how to do it. At first they were not prepared to do so and Geri was prepared to leave the Dark Satanic Mill altogether. However, they have relented to the extent that they are thinking about it and having meetings.

So Geri and all her friends and colleagues are left in suspense. We were hoping to have discovered Geri’s fate by now but we still don’t have a clue and Geri keeps working the part-time hours hoping she can go full-time. We seem rather short staffed and management don’t seem to want to make up their minds.

Business as usual then.

Jester at Work

I didn’t intend to come on here tonight. It’s late and I have work tomorrow and virtually no petrol in my car. Still, it’s a while since I wrote a blog and I thought that anybody who still bothers to come here (seeing as I hardly ever post blogs) might be interested to find out how I’m getting on.

First and foremost, I still find work immensely irritating. I don’t laugh at it quite so much, which is a shame because laughing at work makes it far more fun. I seem to be working quite hard at the moment but punctuate it liberally with chats with my neighbouring colleagues, Agamemnon and Christine. I decided to call her Christine because she is a Stephen King fan and I think I’ve just about run out of names beginning with “J”.

So work is irritating and I work hard. Strange combination but I think my bosses might finally have my number so I buckle down and work. I have recently been told I have to take my lunch and breaks at the times allotted to me by the ever present Vogons, our resource planners. This means that this week, I’m taking my lunch at 1.45pm. This is not such a great hardship because I can eat at my desk as long as I stick to finger foods like crisps, biscuits and fruit, so I can tide myself over until 1.45. Having said that, Agamemnon asked me to get her a spoon this morning when I went for my cup of tea so she could eat her yoghurt. Good lass; you see, it’s not really done to eat yoghurt at your desk at the Dark Satanic Mill.

The main problem with having my lunch so late is I can’t have lunch with Jessica, Jeannie, Mr Grumpy and Gary. That is a real hardship for me, especially because I sit nowhere near them nowadays and they are always under the watchful eye of Dalek Caan, making contact really quite difficult.

I’m also not allowed to send non-business related e-mails, which has really curtailed my long distance joke telling. Again, I can’t really complain. I know the Dark Satanic Mill’s e-mail policy and if I get caught breaking it too many times, I get in proper trouble. I’m not stupid, just rebellious.

So I’m reduced to shouting “Help, there’s a Vogon” everytime a resource planner walks by and surreptitiously telling jokes to Agamemnon and Christine and very, very quietly saying “Exterminate!” when Dalek Caan hoves into view.

I also keep my spirits up by staying as off kilter as it is possible to be without being sectioned under the mental health act. I managed to elicit a reply of “You Nutter!” to one of my business related e-mails today. That’s always a good sign. It shows that the true Jester has not been bludgeoned into submission by the various idiocies propagated by the management at the Dark Satanic Mill but merely driven underground.

And as I say frequently to Christine, “They can take my break times; they can take my lunch times but they will NEVER take my toilet times”. It’s just a matter of keeping whatever liberty you can in the modern call centre.

Jester and more jokes

This particular jester has always enjoyed work. Well, has enjoyed it to one degree or other. Things were beginning to pall at the end of last year and the beginning of this one and I was beginning to believe that the time had probably come to move on from the Dark Satanic Mill to what would probably turn out to be another Dark Satanic Mill, with less pay.

Then I was moved to another part of the group but still in the same building and things began to really look up. There seems to be a much more relaxed atmosphere in the new area. People have been really welcoming and really good to work with. There had been no complaints department until our arrival and the complaints procedure was embryonic. Just the thing for a bored Jester and, of course, lots of new bosses to try out and the expectation that I would be able to resume my role as Court Jester but in a new environment.

It is still a paradise compared to where I had come from. The bosses are lovely. Our big boss likes to get things done and wants the tools in place for us to do our job. Whenever we have hit a snag, she has harried the relevant departments to get it sorted out. So, when there was a problem with incoming calls, she had some poor IT guy (who is NOT a clown, may I add, unlike many of his colleagues) down in the department every 5 minutes or so until the problem was resolved. Then there was a problem with the group e-mail. Again she harried another IT guy (who IS a clown) to resolve it. This has not been quite so successful but, to use a rather vulgar phrase, you can’t polish a turd and it works a bit now.

On Tuesday, we had major problems with our systems which ended up with Jester getting so frustrated she spent most of the morning scowling and muttering at her desk. Nobody was able to gain access to any files, Word, Excel or any application you might wish to use. Which meant Jester couldn’t do her job. I do like to take the odd 5, 10 or even 15 minutes out every now and again and I sometimes think I go too far with the banter but I had 4 hours 20 minutes of trying to find something to do on Tuesday. That is when I realised that I actually rather enjoy working.

There is a happy ending to this blog. The systems started working again at 12.20 and I was able to get on with my job. I made a solemn vow then that I would never moan about Complaint Summaries being boring ever again. I kept it until yesterday. Oh well, as I said before, you can’t polish a turd, can you?

More about the New Broom

Now I hope that nobody would ever accuse this particular Jester of being unjust. I do like to poke fun at the absurdities of the modern working environment, at least the modern working environment in my limited experience, but I like to think that I draw the line at being unfairly critical about people.

So I am a little uneasy about how I have portrayed Dalek Caan. Now, please don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t choose her as a friend but, conversely, I don’t think she would choose me as a friend either. I don’t like her. She has done nothing to endear herself to me or my former colleagues but I have this pathological need to give credit where it’s due and I have to give her credit after some of her most recent actions.

First was the e-mail apologising for the missing overtime and pay. My former manager showed it to me and it was heartening. It was also heartening to receive my overtime in the form of a cheque about a week after pay day. Dalek Caan did promise an investigation and I believe her: she hates inefficiency and this was a classic example of it.

Then she had a meeting with my former colleagues (regrettably, I did not get to attend) to say thankyou for closing so many complaints and really turning the situation round (the complaints department had been on Red Alert when she first turned her attention to us). She awarded two Jesters, including one of the Gay Gordons, with bottles of wine to reward them for receiving compliments from customers and, to my delight, she awarded Mr Grumpy with a bottle of wine because he has not had a day’s sickness in the 5 years he has worked at the Dark Satanic Mill. I particularly like that because that sort of thing tends to go unnoticed most of the time.

Now she’s turned her attention to another failing department – IT. Well, I will have to go and personally congratulate her if she gets our IT staff sorted out. They are about as much use as the clowns in The IT Crowd (see the link above) but nowhere near as funny, personable or good looking. The consensus view of IT is that it is a support function. Our IT Department -ah, my desire to be scrupulously fair is getting the better of me – most of our IT Department, with some notable exceptions, have no concept of support. For them the job entails doing as little as possible and as badly as possible. The applications we use are constantly crashing, equipment does not work and they lord it over us and want us to be grateful when they spend a few hours at the weekend trying to rectify a fault that they probably caused themselves. They seem to think they are doing us a favour.

Dalek Caan thinks otherwise. I really hope she’s successful in her new endeavour because she has shown what a ruthless streak and an unpleasant personality could do when it came to the complaints department and it would be nice to see people who really deserve it to squirm.

Jesters, Daleks and Vogons

It’s a real shame that I seem to have found better things to do with my time recently than blogging because I have sadly neglected this blog. There is so much to say as well. For a start, the New Broom, Dalek Caan is doing her job at the Dark Satanic Mill ruthlessly and well. She has swept through the complaints department and decimated it.

I would give a roll call of the sadly missed but unfortunately, there are only two that I have provided Jester names for:

Goodwill Jessina and Yours Truly. Unfortunately, there was a cull of other Jesters, who have not been mentioned in previous blogs, in total 9.

Now, please don’t start worrying. I still work at the Satanic Mill and I still have some things I would like to get off my chest. I still do the same job – complaints – but for a sister company. Jessina and 7 others have gone back into the Call Centre (the true Dark Satanic Mill). I have been joined by the two other Jesters.

The New Broom has been more ruthless in the Call Centre and has basically got rid of anybody still in their probation not doing their job to her exacting standards. The rumours are that about 20 odd have gone, including 3 Team Managers. I know she hasn’t finished.

Actually, I forgot one more Jester, who, I heard today, has left the company: Goodwill Jasper. I know that he jumped before they could push him but I know little else but will get the low down off him if I can and, if it is entertaining, I’ll blog it.

So Dalek Caan is living up to her name and putting the fear of God into everybody.

Otherwise it has been business as usual. E-mails went down for a large part of the Satanic Mill for a number of weeks recently. This caused much embarrassment to a number of my colleagues because they were not receiving e-mails that needed urgent answers. None more so than Orville, a legally trained Jester who now deals with the Financial Ombudsman Service. They did not believe that she was not receiving their e-mails and assumed, most unjustly, that she was ignoring them. It is a pretty poor excuse, though, isn’t it, when you say that your IT Department is incapable of keeping e-mails working. Poor excuse; even worse reason.

The printers are or I should say were still rubbish. For a department that prints so many letters, they were wholly inadequate and had been so for years. Today, they were disconnected and replaced with a new, all singing and dancing one. Nobody has seen fit to train anybody on it though.

I think my favourite has to be the Payroll cock up. I worked a large number of hours’ overtime last month. I was eagerly awaiting my wage slip on Friday because I knew it was going to be a bumper pay day. Not so. Payroll messed up with a spreadsheet and forgot to add overtime worked by 100 employees at the Dark Satanic Mill. Whoops. I now have to wait for a cheque, like my 99 colleagues.

I think the Vogons were responsible for the misery endured by Goodwill Jerry and my lovely colleague and friend, young Goodwill Agamemnon. (Just a quick footnote here: Agamemnon chose her own Jester name. She loves the name and doesn’t mind that it’s a man’s name, even an ancient Greek man’s name. She loves it because it seems so absurd to her. I couldn’t refuse her, now, could I?) Anyway, the Vogons or Resource Planners as they more commonly known, have marked Aggie has having taken 16 hours’ unauthorised absence, so her pay has been docked by the relevant amount. This is blatantly unfair because Aggie does not remember taking any unauthorised absence and she would have been told about it if she had done so. Our Team Manager is looking into this for her so hopefully, she will get her money back.

I assume the same thing has happened to Gerard and I believe (although I have not heard it directly from him) that over £500 has been docked from his pay this month. That is a lot of money when you earn less than the national average and all Jesters earn less than that.

It’s a shame really because they do a good job and should be rewarded, not punished.

Jester and the New Broom

Jester wants the Fat Controller back!

He had his faults, I’ll concede that, but I’ve now realised he had his good points too. I may have thought his cheery, fellow well met, let’s be friends approach was insincere but at least he was prepared to make the effort to appear friendly. And he spoke to jesters; he sometimes even had a kind word for the minions. He was a West Ham fan, which, although it may seem a bit of a handicap to some, must qualify him to be a member of the human race. Lastly, and I’m being brutally honest here, he had a face you could laugh at. Nasty, I know, but it does count as a good point.

So, I know I used to say he was a

but now I’m beginning to see him through rose tinted spectacles and in my mind’s eye (now sporting a bit of a nostalgic tear), he looks more like:

Anyhow, compared to what has replaced him, he is a cross between Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela. I mean he may have looked like a Sontaran (crossed with Mad Eye Moody and Kryten from Red Dwarf) but deep, deep down, I think we all had no doubts as to his underlying humanity.

I can’t say that for his replacement. What has replaced him? Well, she looks human. She’s quite small, looks in her thirties, has blond hair cut in a bob. I’m pretty certain, however, that she is a Dalek in disguise.

There is a classic moment at the end of Genesis of the Daleks, arguably one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. The Daleks have killed the Kaled elite and then killed Davros’ number two, Nyder. Now you will have to forgive me here because my memory is not exact but I think the following a a pretty faithful transcript. Davros says to the Daleks, “Have you no pity?” and one of the Daleks replies, “Pity? That work is not in our vocabulary banks.” Now, unless I’m mistaken, that very same Dalek is now the Fat Controller’s successor. The word “pity” is not in her vocabulary banks. Neither are the words “please” and “thank you”.

She is rude. She never speaks to Jesters or even our immediate line managers. Last week, she interrupted a meeting (more on meetings later) without so much as a by your leave, knock on the door or excuse me. She then ordered (I won’t use the words ask or request here, the question mark is not in her punctuation banks) some figures for a meeting she was going to attend from our senior manager. I am sure that my presence and that of Goodwill Jessica, who were also in the meeting, did not register on her [Nestene] consciousness.

She is also ruthless. I have already mentioned that she has been heard to say that Jesters who fail to adhere to FSA Regulations (in our case, sending out “20″ and “40 day letters”) should be sacked. She has also been heard to say that Jesters who fail to meet their targets (i.e. close a certain number of complaints a day) should be kept in work until they do. I’m not sure this would work. Most of the jesters are pretty mutinous now anyway so it could be interesting to see what would happen if she tried to enforce this bizarre idea.

I have been agonising for a while now about what name to give her (I would not be so foolish as to use her own name in this blog) but I have decided while writing this particular blog on a name that I think will suit her. So, henceforth she will be known as Dalek Caan. I would also like to end on a lighter note, if at all possible, and one that I think my fellow jesters would appreciate. While I was looking for pictures of Daleks to illustrate this blog, I found the following picture. A fitting end for a true Super Villain. Enjoy!

Jester’s absence from the ‘Net

There have been lots of changes for this particular jester since I last blogged. Unfortunately, due to personal circumstances, I no longer have unlimited access to a computer or the Internet, so blogging has become almost impossible for me.

I am still a jester at the Dark Satanic Mill but, after a sideways move, I no longer have the job of speaking to customers, who tend to be to a greater or lesser degree, completely mad and therefore either wonderfully entertaining or completely infuriating. Unfortunately, you cannot predict beforehand which they are going to be; thereby making my professional life a bit of a lottery.

I was beginning to feel the strain in the past few months and actually pointed out to one customer a few weeks ago that it was no fun speaking to him and I had decided that I no longer wanted to continue with such an unproductive activity and hung up on him. My senior jester took action and moved me to another area, where I don’t have to deal with customers quite so much.

So, the sideways move was for my benefit and also the Dark Satanic Mill’s. I am enjoying my new role because it involves far more investigation and suits my analytical mind perfectly. Also, I don’t have to speak to customers. I know I’ve already mentioned that but it is a major bonus for me.

Fortunately for me as a blogger, some things have not changed. The office is still freezing. Our printer is still broken and still complains bitterly if one of my fellow jesters is a little too heavy handed with it. Pennywise is off sick again. Jasper is still entertaining me on a daily basis. Recently, our fax machine did not work for a week until somebody noticed that the telephone connection had been unplugged. Business as usual.

Last week, we ran out of headed paper (and were without for a couple of days). Not a problem for me. I don’t have to send letters to customers any more but the huge majority of my fellow jesters do. Some of them have to send out FSA letters. If they don’t get sent, we’re in breach of FSA regulations and the individuals concerned could end up having to pay a hefty fine. One of our directors has said that jesters who breach this particular regulation more than once should get the sack. A bit draconian, I think, especially when the Dark Satanic Mill is unable to ensure that the jesters have the raw materials to avoid breaching the regulations. I would like to see her attempt to sack a jester for this particular crime; the reaction could be very interesting. Actually, I would like to see her try to do a jester’s job without actually going mad. That would be very interesting indeed.