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.