Ordinary council workers must be breathing a sigh of relief tonight.
Because while today’s front page Cancer story confirms that there’s a chance that their highly trained, vetted and well-socialised senior managers may indeed send them a photo of their own penis at any time, the gun that they keep in the top drawer of their desk is unlikely to be loaded.
So that’s all right then.
One factor in the current state of BCC middle management may be that so many of them are in jobs they never wanted in the first place.
In order to finance the ever-burgeoning top table (see Blogger passim re- the modern BCC department head’s inability to do their job without a hand-picked kitchen cabinet of sycophantic buddies, all on c.£80-100,000 PA), BCC have been taking the axe to middle-management for the last three years.
Rather than incur the costs and union aggro of redundancy, the policy is to re-deploy at the same level, but in a different department.
The befuddled middle-aged apperatchick, failing miserably to cope with a job which is totally different to the comfort zone he or she was in for the previous twenty years is now a common sight in BCC offices across Bristol.
One BCC manager recently went to London for a 6 month secondement with central govt. When he returned his job had been scrapped. “Now hang on there just a mo, chaps” said he, waving his contract in their faces. along with a letter from his boss making it quite clear that his job would still be there when he returned.
BCC are now desperatly searching for a job at his level to put him in. Guess what? There ain’t one. Not in the whole of BCC. The musical chairs have finally run out.
Of course, something might always crop up. When a junior manager recently took his own life, BCC paid a moving tribute to him by taking the opportunity to make his job redundant. So maybe his life WAS pointless all along?