Agency work...
...is always strange. I was once posted to a small government department in Leeds to work as a "office support manager". This basically entailed sitting at a desk remotely near the door and being given work to do - hence the support part I guess.

The problem was, I wasn't given any work. Now i'm as lazy as the next man, but being paid to do NOTHING, becomes tiresome after a while. Coupled with that, the majority of the staff seemed to be the most inept group of people you could find. I worked with 3 other people, all 50+ women who didn't really seem to understand how to use a computer. One of them (my immediate "manager") would set me a task and expect it to take about 2 hours to do. Upon announcing that I had completed it after about 10 minutes she would look like she had just had a coronary and try and forget that I was there.

Her manager had the BIGGEST arse i've ever seen. She looked like Daisy from Keeping Up Appearances and muttered on about "quangos" and "funding targets" most of the day. The others weren't as bad, apart from the woman who sat opposite me who did nothing but cackle and take time off most days to go to church.

Other tasks detailed to me included:

- Ordering £2500 worth of crockery for the office for use during meetings, from John Lewis. My protestations of "Why don't we get it from Ikea to save money" were met with more budget mutterings.

- Packing up some laptops and PC equipment to be sent down south via Parcleforce. My offer of doing it for £90 instead of the £280 Parcelforce wanted fell on deaf ears

- Write a guide on how to use the textphone they had just purchased. That didn't work.

Yet they saw fit to pay me £12 an hour! Woo!
(Horgy, Sun 27 Jan 2008, 23:16, 3 replies)

my dad's work title
is Operations Support Officer

when people ask him what he does, he tells them he's a bra
(misskitty reeks of sex and turpentine; laudanum afternoons, Mon 28 Jan 2008, 3:18, closed)

with more budget mutterings.
Perfectly reasonable really.

If they managed to run the department on less money this year than last, then next year's budget would be smaller again.

A mate of mine used to order new computers every other year just to burn through his budget so he could put in for more money the next time.
(Fanta Menace Is tall enough to see over the fence, Mon 28 Jan 2008, 9:22, closed)

Budgets.
My lot used to be really tight on budgets for 11 months then, at the end of the budget year, blow whatever they had left. Usually on potted plants.
(Big D, Mon 28 Jan 2008, 13:53, closed)