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April 03, 2004

An ever-reducing spiral?

Two days in Birmingham have left the Monk with a bit of catching up to do. This leaves little time for blogging, but he felt some sort of token effort was necessary, and then he realised that there was a lot happening which he would like to remark upon, but hasn’t time to …

Oh, the dilemma!

Part of the problem is that the Monk must soon move house. This means packing up and sorting out. Both activities are not ones the Monk enjoys, and so, he has started by sorting things out. Oh dear! Why is he such a packrat? Why has he kept articles, magazines, notes, and even junk mail for over 15 years? He needs a bigger skip (Dumpster to the US) – do they come in “house size”, he wonders.

Then, in a quick skim of the web, he noticed that there are several converging items of news about people and jobs. Ozguru is busy job hunting, and so are several of the Monk's colleagues. Mr Blair and his chums recently announced that they were axing 40,000 civil service jobs – most of us probably won’t even notice the difference – and there has been a spate of other “downsizing” announcements in the last week. The noticeable thing about these is that they are always the people who actually do the work that get “let go”. Never the management.

This raises the interesting spectacle to look forward to of the day when all the workers will have been laid off and the managers will have the perfect management environment. There will be no one below them actually doing the work, just them in their ivory towers attending meetings, deciding budgets, and re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. I wonder at what point they will notice that they have themselves become redundant? Apropos of that, this little story illustrates the real truth.

Thus goeth the world !!

Posted by The Gray Monk at April 3, 2004 02:26 PM

Comments

Thanks for the link.

Posted by: Ozguru at April 3, 2004 09:19 PM

Man I hate moving! But one secret I have learned about throwing things out is start with what you didn't unpack from the last move. I figure if I never took it out of the box it was packed in for serveral years then I never will.

Posted by: Matthew at April 4, 2004 04:58 AM

A useful tip - already implimented!

Posted by: The Gray Monk at April 4, 2004 03:33 PM