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.