All the lonely people....

...where do they all...find the time to carry on so much?

But, really, it’s all relative, isn’t it?

I’ve just been in a conversation with some folk telling me how hard they work. Apart from that sort of garbage pissing me off in the first place (the irony of having time to congregate in little groups and whinge about how busy it is seems to escape most public servants), I find it hard to sympathise.
Many will argue that the sort of work that goes on in the public service is not the same as that which happens elsewhere – that it can be mentally challenging and leave you feeling drained at the end of the day. As buggered as you would be after a day digging holes in the sun, just in a different way.
While that may be true, I doubt you’d find many people that wouldn’t swap digging in the sun for an airconditioned office fairly smartly.

At the moment, my job is fairly crap. It’s as boring as batshit, and doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere. That’s not to say I’m stuck in it, but I will move on, probably in the next few months if I can swing it.

But I still like working here. All I have to do is imagine what life was like about two years ago and I feel pretty damn good about things. I content myself with simple equations.

2 years ago: 50-60 hours per week = 38.5 hours pay
Lunch: 45 minutes only when no one else was gone.
Now: 40-50 hours per week = 38.5 hours pay and the rest in flex.
Lunch: whenever.

Obviously people on contracts and that sort of thing still tend to get ripped off, but it will NEVER be as bad as the conditions in private enterprise.

The common thread that runs through the complaints about how much hard work public service is that the people making them have either never done anything else, or it has been a long time since they have.

Interestingly, the higher up the ladder you climb the less people tend to complain. I suspect this is because these are the people intelligent enough to realise how good they have it.

The other one that crops up is “but the stuff we do is sooooo important! It’s for the minister/ director general/ CEO/ insert grand poobah/ etc. We have deadlines/ meetings/ presentations to be ready for!”

Whoopdee fuckin’doo. Possibly, if things weren’t checked eight times and the meetings about having meetings about how good we all are were cut back there would be more time available. The term ‘sycophantic pedants’ comes to mind.

I watched the Four Corners show on torture last night. Finally, the reason that spending your whole working day with the eyes of a hundred people boring into your head, a hundred people that have been waiting in a queue for longer than they’d like, became clear. Finally it made sense why it made you stuffed at the end of the day.

But all I had to do was remember back to being a cook for a year.

$10 an hour, stinking hot kitchen, singed eyelashes and stupid hours.

But then, to brighten my day it was just a matter of remembering how my scumbag sister would bribe me into doing her chores (the going rate was a dollar per tree planted, that sort of thing) then not actually give me any money. My own stupid fault for not getting the money up front, really.

Stupid IR laws.


The upshot of it all is that my job is pretty good. I do my work, listen to my headphones, have my lunch, listen attentively to the complaining folk, and leave at four on Fridays for a beer.

Sometimes others even join me.

So if I sound like a cynic, sorry, I don’t mean to be.

Have a good one.

Salud.