Criticism

I sent an e-mail to someone at work yesterday because I was trying to track down someone’s payslip. We have a new system by which we no longer get paper payslips and have to look them up online, but if you are on maternity leave, a secondment etc then you still get a paper one. So I was trying to find one for someone who used to work for me who is on a secondment. The people who deal with these things for where I work are not always the most receptive to requests and this was certainly no exception. Not only was I trying to track down this one payslip but also flag up that perhaps others needed to be accounted for as well. I was trying to be constructive, but after sending a couple of e-mails clarifying the situation I got one back telling me that I “was accusing them of failure” and that the reason this problem had arisen was because both me and my head of unit had failed in our line management responsibilities and they can’t account for people who fail to carry out their duties properly. I was so unimpressed, I hadn’t been accusing them of anything. All I wanted to know was whether they had the payslip and pointing out that given this problem had arisen, perhaps it was a problem for others too. Clearly raising potential problems is not welcome though and is taken as a personal criticism. I did say that I would pass on their concerns about line management skills to my head of unit…

G was coming home a couple of nights ago and got on a train that was at the terminus and was going to be departing in about five minutes time. It was raining so G used the connecting doors between two carriages to avoid going out in the rain at which point this voice said “what do you think you are doing?”. It was the driver who was walking past and basically seemed to think that this was a big problem – walking between two carriages on a train through the connecting door, which didn’t even have a driver on it so was unlikely to be moving any time soon. Anyway, the driver made G read the notice stuck to the door. G read out the one that said “Do not use when the train is moving”. To which the driver said “no the one that says, only for use in an emergency. Two people were killed last year using the doors between carriages”. G replied “were they on trains that were sitting in the station and not even moving?”. The driver didn’t really reply but told G not to do it again. “You’re the boss” said G. “Yes I am” replied the driver and walked off. It has to be admitted that G had been on the cheeky water that evening, but the driver was still an idiot.