War of the Roses was a walk in the park…

What a week, what a week. It’s been long and frustrating but there is light at the end of the tunnel and that light is in the form of 16 days (yes 16 – count them people) off of work!! Hurrah! Annual leave + bank holidays + Royal wedding = much time off for Nancy!

As from 5pm today I am officially outta here!

For not the first time I will be glad to see the back of this place, it’s not been the best week and the eejits here are driving me nuts. No one seems to have logged into any common sense this week and stupid questions are the theme of every day. Everything working arse about face and no one really knowing what’s going on.

Pretty normal then.

I’ve been trying to help out this poor new woman in one of the projects – Curly (it’s a play on her name and her hair…that sounds a little wrong…anyway…) as she hasn’t been given CrapBags access yet. She started 2 weeks ago and was told “you won’t get any training do the on-line stuff and then you’re on your own.” Brilliant. Welcome to our company we promise we do care about our staff but not enough to actually train you up properly or give you the tools to do this yourself.

So Curly has obediently done the on-line training and then called me. She needs help with doing some requisitions on the system. She’s nervous about it, 1^st time, CrapBags virgin and so needs some hand holding – fair do’s really. So me and the heavy breathing temp shadow head down to see her. Turns out she doesn’t even have access to the system yet. She’s been here 1 ½ weeks and nothing. It was requested last Tuesday. So now she has a pile of requisitions building up on her desk and her line manager is telling everyone with a problem or question on CrapBags to ask Curly for help. The poor woman is freaking out as she doesn’t know how to even log on yet.

You see if you want access to the holy grail of CB you need to go through a ‘system’. You apply in triplicate then they assess your application and 50 people have to tick a box, sign it, then its sent to pixies in Sherwood Forest to sprinkle magic dust on it, sent back here, shredded in case anyone might need it, started all over again and then stamped, sealed and signed. At this point access is given. Apparently this process can take a long time. It took us 3 weeks to get Shadow her access, Ms Rigsby took a month. I know for a fact it takes 2 minutes to set up. 2 minutes.

This place is a complete joke. Works in an arse about face way. Went round to bollock the CB layabouts and none of them were there. So sent an angry email. 2 days late they finally give Curly access and she is on flexi and as of 5pm today I am on holiday. Hurrah. Well done. Slow hand clap for you CB people.

What makes it even more infuriating is that in the week Gunner was processing an order to pay a certain company that shall remain nameless but lets just say you have heard of them and they are the geniuses who gave us CrapBags. It had all the consultants rates on it (i.e. the CB layabouts) we are paying a grand a day for some of those useless tossers!! One guy is £1,660 PER DAY!!! Per day! I know the consultants themselves don’t see the whole amount but I’d imagine it’s a fair chunk. Fucking hell– pay me £500 a day and I’ll do their job for you! They never do anything anyway, they just sit in meetings procrastinating all day – I can do that!!

Gunner is fuming, he just keeps muttering “a grand a day!” all the time.

As a complete role reversal I just found out that Ms Rigsby who works her arse off everyday and is here from 9am to 6.30pm most days is paid £7.50 an hour before tax.

What is the world coming to?

End of rant.

On a more positive note Andre made a cake yesterday in the shape of a castle. As one does. It’s for the War of the Roses apparently. She’s as nutty as a fruitcake but she makes a damn fine fruitcake. I missed the actual castle as I was in a flippin meeting and it had been cut up by the time I got out! Only one turret remaining. She says she has a photo so I am demanding to see it. Apparently it was very impressive. Impressive turrets. Fnar fnar.

I am drained, I am done, I am spent, I am all ranted out. Time for me to go sit in a Grecian bar and sip cocktails in the sunshine. I hope you survive a blog-free 16 days without me, I’m sure you will. You have 4 bank holidays and a Royal wedding to keep you occupied.

Until May…

Trapped

It’s all go here. Yesterday I had 4 meetings back to back between 1 and 5pm which in my opinion is pretty feckin’ ridiculous. I even had to write down on my meeting pad (yes I have actually started taking pen and paper to meetings now, this is how serious its getting) where each one was, what time, with who and what the hell it was about to stop me just wandering the corridors aimlessly looking for room MR4-2.99g or something. What also didn’t help was that at one point Kirstie, Ms Rigsby and I got stuck in a small corridor, well not a corridor really, that space you get between doors. You know? When you work in an office that deems it necessary to have a door from the main lifts foyer bit into another small space that then just leads you through more doors? Well we were stuck there. Some how we’d managed to get through the 1^st door but then none of the others would work and we couldn’t get back out the one we had just come through. Other people were trying to get to where we were with no luck as well.

At first this is all fairly hilarious and then you remember you were actually on your way to the vending machine for a coke and off to sit in the sun and suddenly it’s eating into your lunch break and it’s not so funny any more. We managed to mouth through the glass doors to someone that we were stuck (no shit Sherlock) and they scurried off to security. A security dwarf arrived (seriously, I can’t see him taking down any burly intruders unless he’s a bit of an ankle biter) and said that they were testing the locks on the doors so the more we swiped would actually delay things.

“How long is this going to take?”

“Some time”

“Er that’s not an answer, how long?”

“I’m not sure, you’ll have to hang on”

“Why?”

“Well they are testing the locks so the swipe passes won’t work”

“Did you think to tell anyone this? Perhaps an email warning people not to venture out?”

“Er, well…”

“Wow, so you thought that 1pm on a Thursday, in the middle of the working day when people have to actually get to places, thorough these doors would be a good time to test this?”

No answer

“How about you stop the testing so that we can actually escape this corridor and start it up again at the end of the day when most people have gone home?”

“Well I’m not sure….”

“Listen Shorty I for one do not intend to spend my afternoon stood here and so unless you let us out I will hit this fire alarm button here and have everyone leaving the building at the same time and you can deal with that instead ok?”

At this point he mumbles something we can’t quite hear through the glass and wanders off. A couple of minutes later the doors reactivate.

I mean honestly.