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Date: 02/04/06

Staying Put

Well, I decided not to jump in the end.

Actually, I'd all but made my decision about a week before, but hung on until the last minute. There were two reasons for this:

  1. I wanted to see what (if anything) would change in the last week before I had to decide
  2. I wanted to leave it as late as possible so as to f#&k up their figures.

Not that '2' needed any assistance from me. They were looking for 165 volunteers to outsource themselves. In the end, they've ended up with about 130-odd. If that. About fifty or so pulled out in the last four or five days.

My colleague Chris decided to transfer. It must have been a difficult decision. He's only slightly younger than me, with a wife, daughter, car, mortgage and dog to support, so the pressure on him must have been huge.

And then he finds out that, because he's no longer an employee of the Depratment, he's no longer entitled to a staff parking space...

In the short term, nothing will change in any practical sense, as the move across to a centralised Help Desk is being phased in, and Chris and me (and our other colleague Derek in Bangor, who's also staying put) will keep on working together as we always have done.

So, you might say, why bother to change things? Your guess is as good as mine, of course, but it's all politics when you come to the point: outsourcing is the quack nostrum of our time, a sort of feng shui for the upper management classes.

(Someone of my on-line acquaintance recently went in to his local branch of Waterstones, walked up to the counter, casually informed the assistant that all their books on feng shui were lined up wrongly, then walked out again).

So, I'm still a civil servant, destined to continue working for an ungrateful public for not-very-good wages. I suppose safety has its price.