Miracle

Two posts in two days - just call me the comeback kid. Time for soemthing work related perhaps, after all this other excitement. How do you deal with staff who just can't cut it, yet you're in an organisation that frowns upon sacking people or even making them redundant? Now in some ways that sounds fairly Utopian, an understanding, considerate employer. However we are funded by people's council tax, and therefore should be thinking about how effectively we utilise that. My case in point, is a lady, let's call her Mrs X, who has worked here for 11, count them, 11 years. In that time she has never once had a promotion or endeavoured to change her component jobs in any way. I find that scary - I know everyone has the right to have no ambitions, but to do the same monotonous job for 11 years is a bit extreme in my book. Even scarier is the number of managers she has had during that time - at the last count 6 - all of whom are still employed here, but were unable to cope with her actions. Guess which lucky bloke got to be her latest manager recently? Interruption to entry Mrs X has just rung to say that she has an upset stomach and will not be coming in today, although quite why that makes your voice sound like you've been gargling acid I don't know. Could it be for effect? My efforts to get Mrs X to do more constructive work seemed to get off to a good start, she was willing to take on more challenging work, in return for more money obviously. However it has since become apparent that she is unable to do this new work. Today we were meant to be having a review meeting to see how the work is progressing (badly from my first glances at the figures), so that may be the reason for the upset stomach. Memo to self: try and stop being so cynical and come back to this topic at a later date.