Cleaning

I was walking through the hospital corridors this morning when I saw a man wielding a dust sweeper, painstakingly collecting every fibre of dust along the margins of the corridor, and it reminded me of the time a dozen or so years ago when I worked as a cleaner at Whitworths in Irthlingborough. I'd worked there a few times in the production area doing various jobs. Sometimes I'd run a packing line, where we'd run a machine that put pre-packed bags of sultanas or other dried fruit into the cartons. Easy and repetitive (as long as the machine behaves itself). Another time I worked on the dried apricot production line. When the apricots arrive at the factory they are well and truly dried into a hard mass. They are soaked in a weak acid in order to separate them and soften them. Funny enough, I haven't fancied one since then.
Then I worked in the pepper and spice department for a shift. I was on the floor above the packing line. I had to keep the pepper flowing through a hole in the feed hopper where it was gravity fed into the little pots that you buy in the shops. I used a broomstick.
Such variety! Those little packs of casserole mix? Packed them. Currants, sultanas and raisins? Packed them as well.

Then there was the small matter of disposing of all the cardboard and packaging that the raw materials came in. I worked on the baler for a few shifts before I reached the pinnacle of my time there. I joined the cleaning team.
We cleaned the wash areas and the toilets around the factory. We kept the rest rooms and canteens clean, sweeping and mopping. We emptied the ashtrays in the smoking areas, we picked up any rubbish lying around.
And we spent a long time hiding away, because with all the will in the world it only takes fifteen minutes to sweep and clean the restrooms after the mid-shift breaks,and the rooms weren't dirty anyway. We found an empty office in an old part of the site and made ourselves scarce for an hour at a time. It was a big site and they just assumed that we were working at the other end. The place was spotless, so if we didn't do even the little bit we did, then you'd soon notice.

So we squirrelled ourselves away, reading books and doing the crossword, waiting for the next foray with mop, broom and bucket.
I drove past the site last year. It's gone. All the buildings demolished, with no trace of the busy and bustling enterprise that employed hundreds of staff over three shifts just a decade before. They're going to build houses, but where will all those potential buyers find jobs to pay their mortgages?

Back to work

I started writing this blog while I've been off work having treatment for leukaemia. I've more or less finished listing the jobs that I've done over the last 43 years, and I'm having my hopefully final appointment with the specialist this week. Whatever the outcome, I'm back to work from Wednesday.

I've been blessed in that I'm working in a small independent solicitor's office, and they've kept my job open for the past 13 months. I was also lucky in having critical illness insurance cover, and that has now finished after 12 months of paying our mortgage. We, like everyone else I know, can't afford to live on only one income, so I have to go back to work.

That small fact is one noticeable change over the last 40-50 years. back in the 60s a man could earn enough to have his wife stay at home and run the household. Not any more.

Twenty five years ago I worked as a retail manager and earned about £10k. When I left the retail sector fifteen years ago that had risen to just under £20k.
I did a lot for the money. I recruited and trained my staff, ordered all the stock for the shelves, did all the merchandising, handled all the cash and bankings and was responsible for the security (yes I even arrested shoplifters and confronted and ejected louts who'd congregate in my shop).

These days the job pays considerably less. Why? Because the job has shrunk. The manager is now nothing more than a glorified key holder. EPOS takes care of the day to day ordering. Head Office allocations take care of the rest. 90-95% of my takings were in cash, nowadays it's far less. There's no doubt that the job has changed and the industry is far more centralised.
My friend used to work in a major booksellers. He was employed on the national minimum wage (which is also the national maximum wage in some jobs). Part of his job included being a keyholder from time to time. That's how far the job has changed.

It's quite hard to find a job that allows one to use one's initiative. Jobs are micro-managed and all creativity is stifled. It may be because the product/service demands uniformity of delivery, and it may be because the quality of staff is such that they can't be trusted to use their heads. The downside is that we have produced a generation who are almost incapable of showing initiative, of using their heads.

Red tape and regulation has chaged the workplace. There is a thing as The Law of Unintended Consequences. Take Employment Law.

It was originally introduced to give employees some protection from unscrupulous bosses who could sack you without notice. That is a good thing.
The Law of Unintended Consequences (LUC)kicked in, and now bosses won't hire anyone for fear of being unable to get rid of him or her.
Health and Safety was once a matter of common sense. Some aspects of the Law are reasonable, but LUC has made over-regulation a barrier to employing staff.
Maternity leave and sick pay sound great, but LUC has made these a major barrier to bosses taking young female staff on.

I could go on. The workplace is not what it once was.

I learned a few things down the years. I discovered very early on that the staff who make themselves indispensable and never have a day off or take holidays are 9 times out of 10 on the fiddle. This has been born out time and time again.
A friend of my boss ran a two-branch business a few miles away. A couple of years ago he bought new accounting software as his business was booming. It immediately showed a discrepancy in the books. He initially blamed the software, but after a major investigation it uncovered a long lasting and systematic theft by a senior and trusted member of staff amounting to thousands. He has since gone out of business.

About twenty years ago I was asked to manage a different branch of the bookshop chain I worked for. I hated it. I hated the journey. I hated the fact that the shop was in the middle of a building site and it was impossible to keep clean. I walked in one day to find a piece of the concrete ceiling had come away and brought the false ceiling down.
But what I hated most was the discovery after just a few days that my assistant manager was on the fiddle. The shop floor staff knew it but he'd intimidated them into keeping quiet. My predecessor and the area manager were oblivious to it.
They didn't believe me when I broached the subject. It was difficult to convince them, because they should have picked it up but hadn't. And yet it was obvious to my trained eye and years of cynical experience.
He confessed once he was confronted and was dismissed. Once he'd gone the staff told the whole sad and sorry story. Of how he'd walk out with armfuls of videos on the days when he managed the store. He was taking cash and stock and it took an outsider's pair of eyes to notice.

Luckily these incidents are few and far between.
But every system that's ever been set up and declared foolproof will always tempt someone to cheat it.