So taking a crafty break from the bedlam of the Fish Factory I sneaked a phone call to Sparkling Eyes, not just to tell her I love her and miss her, but to have a good moan about work in the Fish Factory. It is getting out of hand especially when you go to a meeting and enter the room then a little man jumps out with a tape measure to check the size of your anus. This is always a bad sign for it means the last set of brooms they shoved up there are about to be renewed with another set. All you can hope is the handles are not as wide as they were last time. And of course it gives a chance to audition for a high pitched tenor vocal range at an Oprah House. So I says to Sparkling I think I could just jump out the window with the amount of crap they are now piling on. To which she replies "no you can't you have to get your Will sorted out first." Wonderful I would be better thought of as a rich dead dude than a poor overworked, stressed out alive dude. Of course she didn't mean anything by this comment, well, I hope not. I know she would rather be a full time GaGa to Princess J rather than be a hard working undervalued, underpaid stressed barmaid. The two of us being stressed isn't a good combination, yet finding humour in it is. For it seems every employer now days is out to get a few ounces over their pound of flesh? Yes, is the answer.
Mind, there would be quite a mess if anyone fell out of the window, it's 4 stories or more from the ground, and the landing is on hard concrete. No walking away, maybe this thought I have shows the need to mentally escape. I sit there and wait to see if any of the other middle management fish are about to have a mental breakdown, the only person I think is close to it is me. Then I carefully consider, these people don't give a shite about the broom sticks, in fact they stand around the corner making phone calls to Stationary asking if they need to get more broom sticks on order. Currently the world's supply of broom sticks is a booming industry. A growth industry with lots of broom stick makers popping up all over the place. They are now more frequent than Pound shops in the high street. Except these companies do their business behind closed doors and direct to employers.
It's odd, I mean, organizations have stress policies and they have Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) but this means nothing if those policies are not acted on. Someone who may be on the edge of a breakdown is just left to see how they get on. They are left to see if they do actually break down. To see how much stress they can take. There are few if any Stress assessments, because being stressed out is like having a mental illness and it is a marker of someone not being able to cope. Employees don't like to admit they are having problems. They don't want their cards marked. Then employers throw another spanner in the works and up the ante by bringing in more stringent sickness policies, or if they don't like to use the word sick they call them Attendance policies. Gone are the days of saying exactly what you mean because this is a taboo subject. Employees have got to show blood sweat and tears and be pushed and worn out like a part to an engine. And then ultimately they say it is the employees own fault, because it is they way they view the world.
I wonder if broom stick makers have the same problems as these organizations which run a common practice of over working employees and getting as much unpaid overtime out of them as possible. If only we all got bonuses equal to the degree of stress we felt. I don't though whether these would be much good to those individuals who have been to hell and back. The ones who have stepped on a precipice and fallen. Only to land in a large dung heap, left appropriately under every open window. Get up, shake yourself off and don't let the broom sticks change the way you walk down the road. Just sweep your troubles under the carpet, and while your sweeping there could you just....
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