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.