Angry

Despite having planned a post for today and despite also intending to have started writing a new story for The Sleaze,  I find myself unable to write anything creative as I am still incandescent with anger over a work-related incident.  I say incandescent, but that was a few hours ago, now I'm in a state of cold, calculating anger.  Which, I know from experience, is far worse.  It means that I'm likely to do something in retaliation.  I can't help myself when I'm in this state.  It will probably mean having to track down one of those increasingly elusive beasts, a union rep, tomorrow and twisting their arm into doing their job and backing me in making a complaint against a manager.  I have no illusions about actually getting anywhere with such a complaint, but I simply wish to fire a warning shot across said manager's bows. 

These days the public sector is full of over-promoted middle managers with no experience, usually brought in from outside, who think that they can run roughshod over staff.  Due to the government's war against union activities and general undermining of workers rights, they expect us to be supine in the face of their bullying, (and it is bullying, not management - they have no idea of how to actually manage staff and workplaces, instead picking on individual members of staff and trying to intimidate them by seizing on the most trivial of things ('untidy' desks, notices on notice bards out of alignment - I'm not making that up, by the way, being 'too helpful' to the public and thereby 'wasting' time - again, I'm not making this up - and so on)).  But some of us still bite back.  Some of us don't like being threatened and harassed by jumped up, ignorant little pricks.  Little pricks who don't even have the balls to do it to your face and instead use third parties to convey their threats.  Little pricks who threaten me over something incredibly trivial which has nothing to do with my work performance. 

The underlying agenda here, I know, is that I'm one of a significant number of long-serving staff members the department would like to get rid of as part of its constant cost-cutting. (Our experience, it seems, counts for nothing in today's public service). Some have already had enough and have either applied for early departure schemes or early retirement.  Usually in the face of the kind of petty harassment I now seem to be facing.  But I haven't done any of those things and have no intention of doing so until my mortgage is paid off in just over two years time.  At which point, financially, I'll have the advantage.   Unless I'm offered another job between now and then, I'm going nowhere.  So my intent with regard to reciprocating this particular manager's bullying with a complaint is simply to try and make them back off until I'm ready to leave under my own steam.  It's no good little upstarts like this individual getting impatient and trying to harass me into leaving before then.  He and his ilk will just have to be patient.