Rubbish

When I was temping a dozen or so years ago I was happy to take any job offered. Some weeks I could only work for a couple of days due to my music commitments, so I was happy to take the odd one or two day assignments.
One May Bank Holiday I was asked to do a day working on the Domestic Refuse Collection at the basic minimum wage, but at double time for a Bank Holiday otherwise I'd have turned it down. It was hard and heavy manual work for someone in his late forties, but I gave it a go.
I turned up bright and early at the Council Depot, climbed into the Refuse lorry and we drove to a neighbouring town where we were to do our round. There were three of us, the driver and two mates who worked on opposite sides of the street. You've all seen how they do it. It's quite hard and there's a knack in getting the bin onto the hoist and then getting the empties away. The lorry is constantly moving and you have to watch out for traffic. You very rarely sit in the lorry and you're always on the go. I wouldn't want to do the job for minimum wage.
We drove up and down the streets which were quiet as it was a Bank Holiday. As we drove down one street in a rough part of town a man came out of a house, saw me and started effing and blinding "Who you looking at? I'll smash your face in", etc etc. Charming man, charming neighbourhood.
After an hour or two the lorry was full so we climbed in and drove off to the tip. This journey comprised my morning break. We returned to carry on the round and filled the lorry twice more before we finished the round in the early afternoon.
I politely turned down other offers of odd days on the bins at single time. The job is worth more than that.

A few months later I was offered a couple of days work at the landfill site that we'd dumped the household refuse. It had been very windy and paper and other rubbish had escaped the netting surrounding the tip and had to be picked up. So I spent a couple of days litter picking from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. I turned up at the gatehouse and they gave me a roll of black bags and told to get on with it. The netting that surrounds the tip is very good at catching any paper or plastic that blows around, but if too much sticks to the netting the net becomes a wall and the rubbish is lifted over the netting, so the first priority was to clear the netting. Pick the rubbish off the net, put it into a black bag. When the bag is full, drop it into the tip. Repeat until all the rubbish is collected. Once that was done I cleared all the rubbish inside the boundary of the tip, then all the fields around the tip for a quarter of a mile or so.

Plastic takes forever to degrade. There's a wood a short distance from my house that is the site of an ironstone quarry. The overburden (the soil and rock that covers the iron ore) was removed with a mechanical shovel and tipped so that it formed ridges and valleys known as hill and dale. These were planted with trees and the gullet was eventually filled with household refuse. It's possible to walk through the woods and see the site of the gullet, and also see old washing up liquid bottles sticking out of the ground and showing no signs of decomposing

I spent a couple of days clearing old plastic bags from the fields and hedges, enjoying the open air and being inspired to write a song or two. The only downside was the fact that my trusty Doc Martens finally gave out and began to leak water after a year of hard use, in factories and three months walking the streets pushing charity bags through letterboxes (but that's another story)

The driver of the Refuse lorry told me that when this landfill tip was opened it had enough capacity for over thirty year's worth of domestic rubbish. It had been in use for just over fifteen years and was almost full, such was the increase in the local population and the amount of rubbish they were throwing away.

Since then the council has introduced a two weekly refuse collection and recycling for domestic customers. We're quite happy to sort out our rubbish, with different bins for garden and household waste, and boxes for glass, paper, metal and plastic containers. What I'm less happy about is this.

I'm responsible for making sure my firm's rubbish is collected. It's a small firm with only a few staff, but even so we can produce a lot of cardboard and waste paper, drinks cans etc. I called the Council to ask if they had any facility to separate the recycleable stuff from the rest of the rubbish. They said that hadn't and had no plans to extend recycling to business customers.
Our business rubbish is collected in blue plastic bags that currently cost about £1.60 each. If I separate out the recyclable items I'm left with one or two blue bags that we have to leave out overnight as the binmen go by before the office opens. At the moment we don't have an urban fox problem and the rats are well fed from the rubbish left outside the many takeaways at the end of the street.

I can see the benefit of recycling. I've worked as a binman and I've worked in the landfill site. I'm happy to separate my household rubbish so that the council can sell the cardboard, cans and paper to offset the cost of landfill.
What I don't understand is why the council can't or won't extend the recycling scheme to their business customers.
I suspect that it's more to do with taking money from businesses than recycling.

World Cup Cricket

I was watching the cricket this afternoon and it reminded me of the time I worked in a call centre selling tickets for the 1998 Cricket World Cup. The main centre for getting tickets was at Lords and it was soon apparent that they couldn't cope with demand. People were hanging on the phone for hours trying to get through, and there was a real danger that the matches would be played before the tickets could be sold. Something had to be done.
I had a call from an agency asking me to turn up at a location in Market Harborough where I would be trained ready for going live the next day.
This was the first time I'd worked in a call centre so I was interested to find out how it worked.
The computer programme was fairly straight forward to use and we were soon up and running. The phone would ring in my ear and I'd find out what match the person wanted tickets for. Tickets were finite and many matches had sold out. We mostly had games featuring the smaller nations like Bangladesh, Kenya, Ireland and Holland in provincial grounds. All games featuring England and India were sold out and we had only one Pakistan game with unsold tickets.
I won't bore you with details of how the process worked. I've worked in a number of inbound call centres since then, selling magazine subscriptions and booking engineers for photocopiers. They all use versions of the same software, so if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

I did learn one important thing regarding Indians and Pakistanis. I'm not being racist, just telling you what happened.
If someone rang asking about a game featuring India and they were told that it had sold out they expressed dissapointment and rang off.
If someone rang about a Pakistan game and I said that it had sold out, they wouldn't accept it. Are you sure? You don't have one or two left? I can pay a bit extra etc, etc. It's as if it's built into their culture that tickets can always be obtained with a little backsheesh.
They wouldn't take no for an answer. If I said there weren't any tickets they would take it as a personal affront, as if their money, their offer of backsheesh wasn't good enough.
There was one Pakistan game that had some tickets. We were told that tickets were limited to two only per caller, so we had the spectacle of the buyer asking for ten or twenty tickets and being told no. Then they said can my brother/sister/auntie have two tickets? I checked and was told that they could if they came to the phone and ordered them in "person". So another voice would then buy two tickets for his brother, another voice would buy two for his sister, then his auntie/uncle/cousin/grandmother all had two. Once he had his ten or twenty tickets they'd all be paid for with one credit card.
Specially obtained to buy tickets for the World Cup.
The tickets were specially printed with the buyer's name, but when people in the same family are called Hussein or Ahmed or Mohammed who knew if the tickets were genuinely for family members or to be touted outside the ground?

We never had this problem with the Indians, only with the Pakistanis.
Maybe if there were tickets available for Indian matches I might have a different view but my opinion of the two nations was definitely shaped by my time selling World Cup tickets.

Trolley pushing

I went shopping in Morrisons for the first time in months (due to being housebound with my leukaemia). Seeing the lads and one girl pushing snakes of trolleys back to the trolley park reminded me of a time 33 years ago when I did just that.
I was working at Tesco Weston Favell. At that time it was the biggest supermarket in the country. People would travel from all over the county and from as far away as Milton Keynes to do their shopping. We had over 30 checkouts and at times every one was busy, with long queues at every till. This meant that we were always out of trolleys.
I had a small team of lads and our job was to keep the trolleys moving back to the trolley park in the entrance. When it was really busy we'd wait while a customer unloaded their trolley into their car and almost snatch it out of their hands, such was the demand for trolleys. We had one goods/passenger lift that would take twenty trolleys and many times I'd ride up the lift, open the doors and twenty or thirty shoppers would descend on the left, take the trolleys and rush into the store. We hardly ever had to empty the lift! It didn't matter how many trolleys we had, there were never enough. We had a team with a van and trailer touring the local estates rescuing trolleys from alleyways and ponds, and we had a contractor come in every couple of months to repair the trolleys and steam clean the really dirty ones.
Like the time a woman left her young child to soil itself while sitting on the baby seat. It was everywhere. On the mesh, on the floor. As we rushed over with a mop and bucket she never batted an eyelid, just scooped the child up, left everything and went and got another trolley and started again.
There's an art to pushing a row of trolleys, especially when the ground slopes as it did under the Weston Favell Centre. It was possible to push twenty trolleys without them breaking away if you kept them pointing upslope slightly. Once you were at full speed, a flick of the wrist would point the trolleys downhill onto a ramp up the kerb. You soon learned when to stop pushing so that the row of trolleys would stop just in front of the lift. We were out in all weathers, and apart from one or two very lazy lads who's rather argue than push a trolley, we kept the trolleys rolling, and thereby kept the tills ringing.
Now that every town has two or three supermarkets we will never see the levels of business that we had back in the seventies and eighties.
When we lived in Somerset our nearest Tesco was either Bristol or Yeovil. Now there are Tescos is Shepton Mallet where we lived, and in Wells where I worked.
In the early eighties the nearest cashpoint was in Bath, more than 30 miles away. Now even our local newsagent has a cashpoint machine.
The banks have closed branches everywhere. There will come a time when banks will be as rare as cashpoint machines were in the 80s.

We seem oblivious to one consequence. Every cashpoint machine has contributed to the loss of a person's job.
However, they'll always need someone to push the trolleys.

The Net Book Agreement

One of the many temp jobs I did was at a local print works about ten or so years ago. They needed some extra pairs of hands with a huge print run of magazines. It was all very clean, light and airy and the work wasn't too strenuous. Pick this up, put it there, and so on. There were frequent stops while they worked on the machines and our small gang of temps were moved around the works as required. All in all an interesting couple of days for a couple of reasons.
It wouldn't have happened at all a few years before that. The printing trade was 100% unionised and any non-union labour would have had them out on strike. We can all remember the scenes in Wapping when News International moved production of their papers out of Fleet St.

I drove past the site of the print works the other day. It is no more. The buildings are demolished and the concrete floor is a car park for the local hospital workforce. The other printworks where the local paper was edited and printed was knocked down about fifteen years ago and production transferred to Northampton. It's inevitable that that print works will also close as more and more people get their news on-line rather than from a newspaper.

I thought about this as I was browsing Ebay looking for books by a particular author. This week it's Kurt Vonnegut. I have a dozen or so and I'm looking for more of his books to take on holiday. As I browsed the lists I thought about the Net Book Agreement, which was in force when I managed Volume One Books in Northampton twenty years ago.

According to Wikipedia
"The Net Book Agreement (NBA) was a British fixed Book Price between publishers and booksellers which set the prices at which books were to be sold to the public.
It came into effect on January 1, 1900 and involved retailers selling books at agreed prices. Any bookseller who sold a book at less than the agreed price would no longer be supplied by the publisher in question.
In 1962 the Net Book Agreement was examined by the Restrictive Practices Court which decided that the NBA was of benefit to the industry, since it enabled publishers to subsidise the printing of the works of important but less widely-read authors using money from bestsellers."

I was made redundant in 1994 when the Goldsteins foresaw the end of the NBA and put the company into administration. The new owners and I didn't see eye to eye about how the books were ordered, etc and I was made redundant. I was happy to go. Within a few months the Net Book Agreement was no more and Sunday Trading had been forced through. My employment contract would have been changed for the worst. I was glad to go.

I was a firm believer in the Net Book Agreement. Books are not baked beans. You don't read your Dan Brown or Nick Hornby or whatever your favourite author happens to be, and then pop down the supermarket for another one. Each book is unique. They take time to write. The most prolific authors only manage about three every two years. They are a premium product.

So why pile them high and sell them cheap? Why reduce your margin and even sell them at a loss? Waterstones opened at midnight to sell Harry Potter at half RRP.
Two things. Either the RRP was wrong or they sold it at a loss. All that work , all that expense, all that aggro and they sell it at a loss. They're mad.
Secondly, the books were printed in China and shipped over by the container load.
Hardly any books are printed in the UK now. Since the NBA was scrapped the publishers can't afford to. So all those printer's jobs are gone forever. When they close the print works or shoe factories the machines aren't scrapped. They're sold, boxed up and sent to factories in the far East where they are used to print books or make shoes that are sold back to us.

Cheapest is dearest. Always.

Working for the Government -part two

 A few years ago I was employed as a temp to enter all the flood defence data on to the National Flood Defence database. I've explained how I was recruited at short notice from a local employment agency, despite the fact that the EA had contracted with Reed International to supply all their temporary staff. I also explained how unworkable and unsatisfactory the arrangement was, as Reed offices are usually in a different town to where the job was situated, meaning that local staff were unlikely to be given the job.
I was employed on minimum wage and I had no spare time or money to travel to another town to register for work (at minimum wage). In reality the national minimum wage is also the national maximum wage. You can't run a household and a car on minimum wage, so having a national agreement in place is the worst possible option when trying to get people back into work and getting work done and meeting your own targets.
Reed had to take up my references, but I argued that I was already working at the EA anyway, and had been for some weeks, so why shouldn't I continue to work there? Then there was the small matter of the deadline for uploading all the data, the reason why I was engaged in the first place.
So I went back to work at the EA while my references were checked out. In the meantime the agency had sent a new temp along to help. He was considered the very best they could find. He was useless, but then I was biased. However, he was unable to match our work rate even after a couple of day's training. As I said, the job required tenacity, accuracy and intense concentration and my co-worker was sadly lacking. It didn't help that he lived miles and miles away and his transport was unreliable.
(Back to the same problem of paying minimum wage. There's no money for keeping your car up to scratch. Yet another disincentive to work.)
As the days passed, we began to see the light. The pile of work slowly began to diminish. We were going to upload all the data in the time required. My boss rang around the neighbouring regions to see how they were doing. Their answer astounded me.


No they hadn't made much progress in getting the data online. No they weren't making any special effort. Yes they were going to miss the deadline set by the government. No they had no intention of meeting it at any time soon.


So much for government targets.


I now began to see how the public sector works. I began to see that setting targets is unproductive, costly and gives a totally false picture of what is actually happening.

Basically there are three options.

One is to stop doing your normal work and divert all your resources to producing the evidence required by central government that you are hitting your targets.
In the case of my little backwater of the EA, it would have meant taking all the field satff off the job of repairing and improving flood defences and sitting them in an office entering the data on to the computer. Data which is basically useless in the event of a flood. Flood defences are what's needed, not lines on a map.
Option one is the one favoured by someone looking for promotion. Look good in the eyes of Head Office and bugger the workers and the public.  Produce glossy plans and charts that look good but betray the reality.

Option two was to continue to work on the flood defences, utilising the staff according to their strengths, and updating the data as and when time allowed. This also creates a false picture of the situation, but in a positive way. The defences are probably better than as marked on a plan. This is not the way to go if you want promotion.

Option three is to bring in people to update the data while the regular staff do the job they were hired to do. The problem with this approach is that the quality of staff is variable, the training patchy, and the rush to hit the deadline outweighs the need to enter the data correctly. It's also very expensive.

And the final option, one that is used over and over again. In my office there were a couple of men who were working on technical drawings for various flood defences. They worked on a draughtsman's table producing plans in the old fashioned way. I chatted to one when I had a break one day. He used to work for the EA or one of its predecessors but had been made redundant when the EA was re-organised. The re-organisation left them without anyone to make the deatiled drawings that are vital for any work to be done. What did they do? they re-hired the draughtsman, this time as a consultant at a vastly inflated daily rate. So he came back, sat at the same desk and did exactly the same job as he did before, but this time with a big smile on his face. He was his own boss, earning a fortune compared to his earlier salary, and if he fancied a day off he could take it. Nice work if you can get it.

We made the deadline. We were the only office in the whole of the UK to do so.
We were the only office to hit the government's target.
Guess which office got into trouble?

Anyway, my job was done. I heard that another department needed a temporary worker so i approached them and found myself work to last another three weeks or so.

Reed International. Useless. I'd never recommend them to anyone.

Working for the Government

I've not posted for the last few weeks as there's been an election followed by week away on holiday.


And I had nothing to write about.
But that hasn't stopped me in the past so here goes.


I briefly worked for the Environment agency about five years ago. It taught me all I need to know about how the government sets targets, allocates resources and gives contracts. In short, it's rubbish.
The Environment Agency was formed from the Anglia Water Authority and National Rivers Authority amonst other agencies. It sought to bring a whole raft of differing organisations with different responsibilities under one roof. The government did  a similar thing when it combined the Inland Revenue with Customs & Excise and created a body that managed to lose all the good aspects and retain the bad bits of both agencies. I suspect that the same thing happened with the Environment Agency.
In 1996 there were really bad floods in Northampton. It turned out that the flood defences were so bad as to be useless. A lot of money had to be spent putting that right and then the government called for a nationwide survey of every flood defence, and for that information to be put on a national database that could be accessed on the internet. All this had to be done in addition to the everyday work.
So how do they assess the flood defences? They send their staff out to walk the riverbank and measure the height, angle, constuction methods etc of every river bank. These were entered on to paper plans and then entered on the computer database.
As usual, the government set a target for this to be accomplished. The order went out from Whitehall that the whole country's flood defences be available to view online by such and such a date.
It was an impossible task, given the manpower available and the pressure of actually repairing the banks and creating flood protection areas, rather than merely measuring them.
You see the same problem in the NHS, in Education, the Police. All have targets that must be achieved, so the staff spend all their time filling in forms and only doing the work that is relevant to making their targets.

I'd been looking for work for about three weeks. My last job was entering data for a Supermarket chain's distribution depot. The company's promotional allocations were on a separate database to the stores orders, so I entered the quantities from one database to the other so that they could be picked and sent out in one load rather than two. It was not a hard job, but needed speedy and accurate keyboard skills, which I'd learned almost forty years beforehand.


One day I received a call from a local employment agency asking if I was available to work the next day. I was, so I turned up at the local Environment Agency offices, where my job was explained to me.
It was quite complicated, but nowhere near as complicated as working Cubase music software, so I was able to get up to speed quite quickly. I'd be given a pile of A4 sheets that related to a stretch of riverbank, then I'd download the relevant master data from the national database. I'd enter the data from the sheets to the database and once I'd completed the set, I'd upload the amended data to the national database.
I will say that not everyone can do this. It required a high degree of accuracy and attention to detail, as well as working to a tight deadline. But that was what I was used to, having come from a banking and FMCG background
(FMCG= Fast Moving Consumer Goods)
The deadline loomed ever closer. My boss and I were the only staff available to enter the data. To be honest, you could never get a man who'd spent all his life outdoors maintaining water courses to have the computer skills to transfer his data in an office environment. Any more than you could have asked me to survey the riverbanks for the data.


It was then that we encountered a snag. While it was OK for my boss to have a temp, he could only get that temp from the approved supplier, which was Reed International. I wasn't registered with them. I had to take a day off and travel to Northampton to register and be interviewed for the job I'd been doing with a great deal of success for a couple of weeks. I had to give references which had to be checked up. I went along with it reluctantly.


Here I was, a temporary worker on minimum wage having to travel to another town at my own expense to register for a job in my own town. If I wanted to work in Northampton I'd have registered there. My boss said that they'd asked Reed for temporarary staff months before but they'd been unable to find any, and yet he'd rung a local agency who provided a first class temp (me) the next day. He shook his head, saying that the government had a policy of using local business wherever possible, but that it was thwarted by their insistence of centralised accounts, who refused to allow local businesses to compete. There had to be central buying, which accounts for why a post-it pad costs ten times from the approved supplier than what you could buy it for in the high street.

False economics.
On a national scale, it may make sense for one firm to supply all the temporary staff, if all that mattered was sending out one cheque instead of hundreds. But unless the agency has an office near every government office, it is useless. If you go to Scotland or Cornwall teh problem is even more magnified. If a government office in Penzance needs a temp and their chosen agency is in Bristol, or Taunton,or Exeter, or Plymouth, or Bodmin or even Truro, they will have a long wait to get one.
The whole idea of temporary staff is their availability at short notice, their flexibility and versatility.

As usual, the government got the worst of the deal.

(to be continued)

Job Hunting

I've written at length about some of the jobs I've done, so now I want to write about the bits in between- job hunting.
Until 1994 I'd only been unemployed twice.
The first time was after I'd left Town & County Catering at Olympia and signed on with a temp agency. I was hoping for a day or two off but was back working full time within a week.
The second time was when I left Telfers, having had enough of battling against the odds, doing a job I had no training or aptitude for, and hoping to "make it" with my band.
I was out of work for about six weeks that time.
My experience at the labour exchange and trying to claim any kind of benefit influenced my decision to get married a year or so later. One government agency treated me as single for tax purposes, but another treated me as married because I was co-habiting. Both decisions meant no benefits for me. Back then married couples had a tax break so in the end we got married for tax reasons. But that's another story.
After I'd been made redundant from Volume One Bookshops following a takeover (another story for another time- I'm not writing chronologically), I took a year out courtesy of some redundancy insurance that I'd taken out a few years earlier. I used the time to work on my music and record an album for a charity at our church. One thing led to another and I recorded three albums of songs in eighteen months. However, I wasn't earning enough to pay the bills, so I embarked on a ten year career of "temporary" work.
My first "temporary" job was driving a delivery van for a firm that supplied meat and pies to pubs. My route involved travelling around 2000 miles a week around East Anglia, from Peterborough and March in the North, in and around Cambridge, east to Newmarket, Brandon, Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich, south to Colchester, Clacton, Chelmsford, Brentwood and west to Harlow Welwyn Garden City, Letchworth, Hitchin and various places in Bedfordshire. I did this for about eighteen months in a little Citroen C15 fridge van. I drove more than 100,000 miles in it and went through two sets of tires and two engines. I was out in all weathers, rain , snow and heatwave. I remember having to drive at speed through fields of wheat that had caught fire in the extreme heat of that summer, and I also recall driving through some achingly beautiful countryside. Most of the time, however, I was chasing deadlines and failing.
One day my van was in for repair, and the only vehicle that was available was the boss's Vectra. I loaded the boot, packed freezer bags around the goods and set off. I was driving around the Colchester bypass when I noticed two things. One, my speedo read 105 miles an hour, and two, there was a police bike on my tail. The van I was used to driving wouldn't do 70 downhill with the wind behind it, and I forgot how fast the car could go. I pleaded guilty and was fined £30 and had three points on my licence. That is the only time I've ever been caught speeding in more than 30 years driving.
The firm kept losing contracts and although my mileage remained constant, I was carrying less and less, and therefore the turnover was dropping. I did a few days work in the coldstore and freezer, picking orders. That was cold work, and no-one begrudged us taking frequent tea breaks to warm up.
Eventually the firm went bust and I was looking for work again.


I decided to register with the local employment agencies. I didn't want permanent work because I was getting a few bookings including midweek work, and I was spending time in various recording studios. Temping meant that I could work a few days as required and from 1996 until 1999 this was what I did.
I registered with several agencies and would visit them all in turn when I wasn't working, spending a couple of mornings a week calling in to say hello, to see what work was available and to keep my name at the top of their lists.
I occasionally walk around town and I notice that many of the agencies have closed up. There are only about half the number of employment agencies compared to ten years ago, and one of my friends who ran an employment agency for twenty years painted a bleak picture.


A few years ago I worked  at one of the vast car yards in Corby. I didn't stay long, I couldn't cope with the chaos which was due to the manager's failure to plan or organise. Every action was a reaction. They were always fire fighting. Every day the staff would miss their lunch breaks because of some minor catastrophe that could have been avoided if they'd plan ahead.
Even then, six or more years ago, the gangs that collected the cars parked across acres of Northamptonshire and brought them to be loaded onto car transporters were organised according to the country they originated from. There were gangs of Lithuanians, Slovakians, Poles and Bosnians, with only the gang leader speaking English. A few years before I'd worked at the same yard preparing new cars for delivery to dealers. We'd get the car from the yard and while one person fitted the licence plates, I'd check that the heating, aircon, tyre pressures etc were OK. We'd also strip the protective plastic from the wings and bonnet, make sure the lights and indicators worked etc etc. All the staff were English/British. Not any more.


It's tough to find temporary work now. I read that some factories won't employ English speakers because everyone now speaks Polish. Five or six years ago I saw the beginning of that.


But  hey, the food's cheap, booze is cheap, clothes are cheap so why worry?