(Shudders)
Well, this one's still a little bit raw (the twunt left a bit over a year ago), so apologies if I lose it a little.

Where to start? I work for one division of a UK based multi-national financial services company - one of those ones with profits in the £billions - I'll not name it, for obvious reasons, and you can quote me on that (I didn't say 'happy'). If you've ever worked for a similar organisation, this will probably seem familiar to you, and if you've been following my posts carefully over the years, you will also know that I started my adult life with no direction whatsoever. After many a blind alley and wrong turn I washed up on the shores of this great institution towards the end of last century. I was in my mid-30s and earning the same as a school leaver, though I'd recently (finally) got myself a degree.

The most commonly used metaphor for a career is a ladder. A plain old ladder: start out at the bottom and work your way up one step at a time. Experience has shown me the picture a little clearer: The organisation is like a huge hall; over the floor are dust-sheets and various obstacles ready to trip you. To get to the other side there are ladders, but they are rickety decorator's ladders; the ladders are connected by planks, some level, some are sloping upwards, none are properly fixed in place. At the entrance to the hall you're handed a massive tin of paint and a huge bucket full of shit, then they put a paint-brush in your mouth and tell you to get to work. You don't know exactly what you're supposed to paint but you do know that if you spill so much as one drop of shit from your bucket, then you go back to square one. Now try climbing those ladders. Oh yes, and watch out for the other fuckers dipping their brushes in your paint, trying to make you spill some shit, trying to trip you up. That's a career path.

I've been here a decade now and I'm pretty good at painting with a brush in my mouth and I could balance shit-buckets for England. What annoys the hell out of me is that people are constantly being brought into company with neither of these skills, onto ladders much further down the hall from me. Then they ask me to wipe up all the shit they spill and sand down the lousy paint job they've done, re-paint it neatly and then sign their initials at the bottom for them, while continuing to do my own stuff too.

Meet Rix. I won't give his first name as I don't want to go to court. He'd been in the company just six months when I was put in a new team with him. Well, a team of two: me and him. Due to my wide experience in various parts of the company and the exams I'd taken, I'd finally managed to get a job in an interesting (that's a relative term) area: Strategy.

He, supposedly, had had similar roles in different companies and came highly recommended. LIAR. How can I put it? He was so clueless that if he was sat down in front of a Bumper Book of Crosswords, with Inspector Morse on his left and Sherlock Holmes on his right to help him, he still wouldn't have been able to discover a single, fucking clue. I can honestly say that he added absolutely no value at all in the year or so I worked with him. Mostly, I did the work then he picked over it. He fussed like an old woman and knew nothing and nobody that would help in our role. He was completely free of gorm.

Funny thing was, I quite liked him at first. He was fairly easy to get on with and although ten years younger than me, that wasn't a problem for me: virtually all the managers I work for are younger than me, because they've had a decade's head start. But then his habits started to annoy me. Constant stories about his car, a BMW 3 series, e.g. it had a scratch and he spent the best part of three weekends sanding and spraying it until he'd ruined a whole panel and had to get it done professionally. OK, but why tell us the whole story every single day? Also, he'd constantly, but surreptitiously sniff his fingers - yuk, and when he said 'marketing' it came out as 'margeding' and WITHOUT FAIL, at every meeting we ever went to he'd use the word 'predicated'. And he would moan about how the work we were getting wasn't interesting enough. He thought he should be advising the executive board on strategy. The total sum of his knowledge was a passing familiarity with the BCG Growth-Share Matrix (try Wikipedia if you're very dull), which is probably taught in term one of A-Level marketing [that's Marketing 101 for our American cousins]. Imagine going to the top guys at NASA and suggesting that to get more thrust, they should have a look at skateboard propulsion technology principles.

This numpty I then discovered, was actually two grades higher than I had supposed and consequently earning over £50,000 a year, while I scraped by on roughly half that, while I did his job. Towards the end, we weren't given any new work to do. Stuff we should have been doing was given to other people and what did Rix do about it? Did he have a frank discussion with his boss, ask why, suggest stuff we could usefully do? Did he fuck. He'd call a 'team meeting', which meant we'd get up from our desks with our pads and pens and wander off out of the building. If the weather was nice, we'd go to the park, find a nice bench or some grass and sit and chat, or rather he'd bitch, I'd advise him to pull his frigging finger out of his arse, stop sniffing it, and get something done. Then we'd go back to our desks no further on; this went on for a year.

Only two positives: 1. In the next reorganisation he opted for redundancy and was refused, so he had to resign, while I finally got a decent job, and 2. In our part of the country there's a small independant petrol station company called Rix. Every so often while driving into work, I'm stuck behind one of their tankers going 40 mph on a 60 mph road. Without fail, when this happens I shout out, almost loud enough for the tanker driver to hear: "RIX YOU BASTARD, GET OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY YOU TWAT", and I feel a little better.
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Fri 25 Jan 2008, 10:14, 5 replies)

Ahh, the Financial Services
I spent 2 years as admin in various companies, I even passed my 1st FPC before I realised that just because my manager used the word "Career" in our one-to-ones, it didn't mean I had one.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Fri 25 Jan 2008, 10:47, closed)

*click*
If I could give you multi-clicks, I would.

Yous descriptive skills weave pretty head images in my brainular cavity.
(JasperSinister is offering two tickets to the gun show, Fri 25 Jan 2008, 10:58, closed)

Your description
of the career "ladder" is absolutely spot on (and why I've recently quit and am going self-employed). Great post...
( dan j the filthy bastard, Fri 25 Jan 2008, 12:49, closed)

*click*
for the fantastic metaphor of the 'career ladder'.
(Greencloud Wanted to go fishing on, Fri 25 Jan 2008, 15:02, closed)

I know what you mean
"What annoys the hell out of me is that people are constantly being brought into company with neither of these skills, onto ladders much further down the hall from me."


Yup. I had that problem.

A director in a company I worked for seemed to think it was his duty to treat the firm as a 'lifeboat' for all his chums whose own companies had come a cropper during the IT bubble burst of 2001.

While all us 'bread & butter' earners were being bombarded with emails telling us about pay & hiring freezes - we'd get an equal amount of mails telling us how "John Murphy is joining us from GoneBustCorp as an overpaid consultant. He will be tasked to work in the 'Glad Handing & Luncheon Expense Account' Division."

The fucking eejit never realised of course that they were all taking the utter piss out of him by using his largesse to keep them in Edwardian town houses, trophy wives and this year's BMW until they could get a better gig.
(Fanta Menace Is tall enough to see over the fence, Sat 26 Jan 2008, 9:43, closed)