Another day, another meaningless three hour course. Scheduling a course on the day after the Easter break strikes me as pretty stupid, especially as, when I got there, it wasn't even relevant to my job. Let's just call it ''Box-ticking 101'' and be done with it.
I've come to the conclusion that the organisation I currently work for exists, despite it's exhortations otherwise, purely to keep lots of analysts and trainers in work, endlessly churning out statistics and reports and running courses on how to keep the organisation compliant. All of the computer systems we use are top-heavy, ridiculously convoluted and complicated - and were obviously designed by some malevolent government goblin who's never actually done any of the jobs that the system is designed to work with. I use the word ''designed'' in its loosest possible sense, of course.
Today, it took three hours to explain how the others in the room must use this system in order to comply with a particular government diktat. The diktat itself has quite a simple premise. Get them in. Get the job done within a specific timescale. Close the record when you've finished doing the job. Unfortunately, there are lots of built-in differences, depending on the most bizarre of circumstances, every one of which these poor saps are supposed to know and remember. When the trainer went out for her break, one of the other trainees looked up and said what we were all thinking; ''How come those of us that do the job at the ground level and get paid the least, are the ones who have to be personally responsibly for compliance''? Seriously, that's how it works. If they make a mistake, there are huge financial penalties levied against the organisation, PER MISTAKE - and there are a lot of opportunities to make mistakes, because the system is so convoluted. Couple that with regular forensic auditing and...well. You get the gist.
Still. I went, I listened, I took the test and (sort of ) passed - we all did, but only because, when the trainer went out of the room, we all cheated and talked together about what we had written. I'm pretty sure none of us took much away from the session except for a looming sense of doom. It's not nice for people to feel as though at any moment, they might be hauled across a bed of coals for a tiny infraction. I'm wondering if the area outside the front entrance isn't, in fact, to be transformed in to a new treatment area but, instead, will be the modern equivalent of the Tyburn tree, or a Particicution arena. I've seen the Hunger Games. I didn't realise I should have been taking survival strategy notes...
Gandalf leaves on Thursday. I am still no closer to finding out what happens to me and my job when she goes, and during the five weeks before her replacement returns to work. Still, she has promised me a Handover file, which she's been writing for the last two weeks. Every day, all day. I'm of the mind that perhaps she'd have been better employed actually teaching me to do the shit I'm going to have to do, but still. That's how they do things in the North Wing.
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