Blogging Too Far: An Introduction to Red Tape

What can I say about when I realized what the central government is to work for?

Maybe I can sum it up in this strange but true story. We'd just got a new boss, who came from one of the regions. I think there were too many complaints about him, so we got him. These were the days when the center was the dumping ground for dangerous or useless teachers. Caught being a paedophile? That's fine. We'll just give you a filing job for the next 20 years. Hit a kid? No problem. You're now in charge of data management. Just as long as you don't tell anyone, we won't tell anyone either. Everyone will be happy and no-one has to do anything hard like discipline a teacher.

So the new boss decided that he would start out by firing everybody on the floor. This was the 6th time I had been fired in the last two years. I was around the 30th person on the list to be fired, so I'd already taken my friends out to coffee and lunch, counseling them as they cried and cried, taking it personally. They told me what would happen. I would be offered a cashew, and told I was no longer needed, and given two weeks’ notice.

So it was my turn. I got called into the office, I got offered a cashew, and I was fired. And strangely enough, I cried too. It was heartless and impersonal. My replacement was my boss's elder brother. He had no education or technology qualifications, but his wife had recently died, and my boss said he'd just been moping around the house for too long. So he could do my job instead, although my boss didn't know or even care what I did (I was co-ordinating teacher training and accreditation for 55,000 employees and mentoring the managers of our seven 'lighthouse' centers across the state).

An old man walked in one day, and it certainly looked like he'd been crying a lot. The main switchboard had found out that I actually cared about people who phoned the government and put them onto the right person, so they put 90% of their difficult calls through to me to deal with. That was his first challenge. He'd never used an office phone and answered the phone just like you would expect an old confused man to answer a phone. The staff directory was on the computer, so he'd have to find the right number to put callers through to.

But then there was the computer. He'd never, ever used a computer. He didn't even know what one did or what the concept of a computer was. He'd been so busy with his vegetable patch or whatever that he'd missed the introduction of the entire information age. I taught him to press the 'on' button and watch in amazement as things beeped and lights went on and off around him.

In the center there are no secretaries, no administration staff and nobody to help. It's DIY everything. Executives have secretaries, but they detest communicating with ordinary staff, sharing a printer or a fax. They also demand that furniture be moved out of the way, so they can get to their desks as quickly as possible, without having to actually pass nearby any workers. Like we have lice or something.

As part of the appeasement process, we were offered a free career coaching session, in addition to the cashew previously distributed. Now, I can go on forever about career coaching. It changed my life, from the very first session. I was working through EPR International, but they all do the same thing. A lot of it was counseling, helping me realize that I was working for one of the slowest and retarded organizations to ever grace the planet. Education departments were like brain damaged students integrated in your class. They are lovely and you certainly try very hard, but there is only so much that you can do. There is a limit to what they can actually do, no matter how much you try.

The central office was filled with 5,000 workers who liked things to go very slow. Coming from schools where jobs needed to be done by the end of the week, or at the very most the end of the semester, my view of the central office was stunning. Minimum timeframe for anything, at least 6 months, more likely 2 years. Some new work? Well, we'll have to set up a meeting to discuss it. How's your diary looking next year? You want something published? There’s a 6 week waiting list for the marketing department. Turn around time for a graphic is 12 weeks, minimum. You want something involving a computer? There’s a 200 day “moratorium” forcing any new work to wait for this ambiguous timeframe, and then pass through about seven committees, with each one initially rejecting your proposal, because that’s their job. If they didn’t constantly reject things over and over, they wouldn’t have a job, would they? Even if you got through that obstacle course, the outcome would be you would finally get to meet the head of the IT department, who refused to believe that you’d got your sign-offs. Although by this time you’ve been working on the project for two years, having meetings every day with everyone, including the head of IT, that very same person would now deny any knowledge of your project, or you, in fact. You would then have to go through your emails and show that you had got your project signed off by every executive that was currently employed, or had been employed in the last 12 months that now had another job somewhere else (yeah, that one stunned me too). And then, just to add to the insult, the head of IT would squint her eyes, grab the paperwork out of your hands and call one of the executives who approved your work. On speakerphone, so the belittlement could be much more overt than it needed to be. “You didn’t approve this, did you?” the head of IT would ask. “I think there has been a miscommunication,” the other executive would respond. “When I approved that project, it was a personal comment from my own private perspective, but certainly not from the point of view that my office would be supporting this project in any way, shape or form.” The head of IT hung up, spun back around on her chair, eyebrow raised, ugly smirk, pushing my filthy little bit of paper back into to my grubby hands.

Education had become such a political poisoned chalice that no-one wanted to do anything or make any commitment. Policy documents were 99% nice graphic art and a few buzz words, but the documents never really said anything. It was like doctors too scared to make a diagnosis, pushing the issue to a specialist, who would push it around until someone actually took notice.

Anyway, it all ended up like it started, because my stupid boss was fired and removed before our final 2 weeks’ notice ran out. So the Monday after what was meant to be our last week we all came to work, and no-one said anything, so we just sat down and kept working, and luckily, getting paid. Because I was still a registered teacher, and a male, I was hunted down and fired every other month. There was a massive teacher shortage, especially males, and there was a lot of pressure for me to go back to a school, where I would get paid more, have better working conditions and know if I would be employed next week. But by this time I discovered I was a better at this than I was at teaching. I found teaching hard, and I worked so very hard for many years, for so very little in return.

And how did my new boss get fired so quickly and efficiently? The Minister had asked about the progress of a teacher training program coming out of our area. Now, this program was dead two years before this point. It was an unpleasant, rotting mess that everyone with half a brain avoided knowing anything about. And teachers hated it – they even went on strike because of it. Everyone hated it and someone we all reached a quiet agreement to forget that it ever existed and never speak of it again. I prepared a briefing for the Minister, giving her an ‘out’ with a minimum level of public fallout, and provided absolutely clear data that targets were never met, promised programs were never delivered, and we had data to show a good proportion of schools used the money from the project to top-dress their sports ovals, rather than to implement our stupid teacher training idea.

My new boss however didn’t want such a negative outcome coming from his area. So he rewrote the brief, to make it look like he was doing a good job. Such a good job in fact, that he convinced the Minister to hold a press conference and announce that we had met 100% of all targets on time and under budget, 100% of our 55,000 teachers all had an extra qualification that would count to one quarter of a Masters degree, and hers was the first government in the world to achieve such an accolade and solve the massive problem of expensive teacher training.

After the press conference, and the following apocalyptic media questioning, my boss didn’t turn up for work anymore.

And that’s what working in the center was like. I made cakes and muffins, which let me call in lots of favors, and I didn’t mind playing the game. In fact, I was very good at it and climbed the corporate ladder faster than anyone else. I spent about six weeks at each work level, which took most people ten years. I didn’t actually plan this – I just kept getting fired and offering myself to other work areas. Eventually I became an asset, and I was valued for my own skills.

I knew I had made it when I was put on a project with the very person who had called me a ‘feral employee’ and instructed the CEO to fire me, back when I was an adviser in the late 90’s. We were both given work in a meeting, but she needed to ask “Just to make things clear, am I the line manager here, or is he the line manager and I work under him?” “Jenny, you are working under him now.”