The creep of the State in this country is ominous. This socialist ideologue driven government seem to want to Nanny us in everything we do. The latest under 16 use of social media for example. Why aren't parents allowed to look after their own children as I did with mine. They soon found out that various websites weren't working and that I shut down access to the internet for them at bedtime. What a terrible father I was! It is easy to do if you have a router. There were some sharing sites that may have been what everyone was doing back then but I am sure were not legally doing so, so I explained what I was doing and why, what copyright was/is and that those sites wouldn't be available. If nothing else, it stopped virus and Trojan attacks too.
The state don't actually work FOR us at all, in fact we, the very people who give them the power are meant to be their masters but it doesn't happen. It hasn't happened for years and so the only thing you can do is ignore them, get around anything that they do and build resistance. Live despite them. When I used to be employed my directors and managers had rules imposed because there needed to be rules of course but some were plainly stupid and wrong. So what you did was use them when they were to your advantage and get around them when it was likely to affect business or the customer. You used your common sense and if someone said "You broke the rules" you could always point out that the customer was happy :-)
Using the rules works well when it is a stupid rule. One of my businesses decided, in its infinite wisdom, to change the reporting system from one that took me a few minutes a day to one that took a whole day. The level of granularity (it must have been an accountant) went to 15 minute slots and these were also entered using a work code that was broken down to a number of extra levels. This was to analyse what we were working on and how much GA (General Admin) time we were claiming. I used to claim around 1 hour a week as I had to do a time-sheet and expenses claim to bill the customer. I did that on a Friday afternoon evening and so on Monday morning the boss and the admin person would have these to bill the customer.
I remember being horrified that instead of a single sheet for each element we then had a combined system that we had to complete online. That system rather than being local was located abroad on a server. Better than that, it was loaded with the company's rules (expenses Vs grade levels etc). If you strayed outside of one of the rules it would red flag your submission and you had to write why the rule was broken - even if it was know that my customer asked specifically for these rules to be broken and was willing to pay for them.
I dropped a not to my boss stating that the customer wouldn't pay for me to fill in this new form and so I would do it on a Friday afternoon and so we would lose half a day's fees. He wasn't happy but I suggested he explain it to the customer why he should be made to pay for something that he didn't normally pay for and to explain to me why I should spend my time doing this sheet outside of the hours he paid me for? He had no stomach for a fight and my manager never went to see customers, they didn't really do that!
So the first Friday report I did took me way more than four hours and I decided to not fill it in properly and sent it in half complete with an email saying how long it had taken me and that it needs fixing, I also attached the old sheet which had taken me 20 or 30 minutes and suggested they get an admin to do this as I was an expensive asset.
The next week I took the whole day off and started doing this sheet, it needed the activity, activity code and sub code etc. As it was on a server in another country it took forever to get the code and populate the sheet. As a stickler for the rules I made sure that every 15 minute increment was slightly different in activity code for the job. The whole of Friday was of course now time spent filling in this form and so my general admin went from 1 hour a week to 7 and a half hours. Better than that I was posting my expenses in and my customer used to book me in to stay at a very nice Hotel in Brussels and also I used to enjoy first class travel on the Eurostar to get there and back too. This had been agreed and so I paid, the company reimbursed me and the customer paid plus the admin fee on top. The Hotel was the same one other members of the team stayed at and it had been agreed so all was well until I entered the expenses.
Red Flags went off everywhere. It was against company policy, it needed all the information and emails were sent to head of VP Europe Consulting, My boss, head of UK and how about this, the Office of the CEO also got a copy of it. We are talking here of perhaps £50 over my pay grade Hotel cost LOL. You'd have thought a world war was about to start I got emails from all these people and my boss was going apoplectic. I had a standard piece of test that I'd send off for this sort of thing saying that this was agreed with the business, to see the contract documentation etc and that it had been going on for months. Now you'd have thought that they would alter the timesheet to take account of this wouldn't you? NO of course not, they would get the responses to my email and then alter the sheet after sending me the pay grade email saying don't do it again to which I'd respond and say go talk to the customer and rearrange the contract that agrees to this and also you are being paid for it so what's the issue? So I'd go every two weeks for two or three days at a time and bingo, every occurrence was red flagged.
I got called into the office thereby wasting a further day of Admin GA time. When I got there the manager read the policy out to me. I asked if that was it? Apparently so, so I explained that I'd wasted a day coming into the office which could not be billed to the customer andthat if he read my emails and looked at the contract he'd see that this was all agreed and also to speak to the sales team who agreed it.
So that week I only did three days for the customer, two days were wasted (as opposed to now one day a week) and he had the cheek to drop me an email saying that my GA time was now 20% (and of course 40% the week before) where it had been almost zero before. We were losing revenue and not just me the whole business had suddenly lost productivity and were scratching their heads to try and work out why. A big meeting was called and once again, (the distance of my customer meant I couldn't travel to the office and back and there in a day). Over 120 of us in a room where my dickhead boss said that he was concerned with the way we had dropped our numbers and how GA time was going up and revenue down.
He obviously saw me shaking me head in disbelief and wasn't complimentary and asked me to speak. So I did, he was horrified when I explained what problem we were all having. I then explained that today, every one of his team was not productive and he'd lost 20% of his revenue this week in a meeting and was likely to lose a further 20% of revenue later when we all had to try and combat the crap IT system we were trying to use. We were an IT company FFS! When I said the problems I was having and my customer was getting unhappy with me not working as I previously had you could hear and see people agreeing. I also said the system was thrust upon us and it wasn't fit for purpose. I had a copy of the CEO's email to me as it was he that had to pass my expenses! The CEO, not VP Europe and not my boss.
I have no idea if they ever dealt with it but I used to have Fridays off at home spending all day filling this stupid form in and making cups of coffee in between waiting for it to come up with a work code and also watching it red flag everywhere. I left that business and set up on my own after that.
Just another thing, like the government that suits their spredsheet jockeys but not the workers or the customers. There's always a way around it or you use it to your advantage and make them looks stupid.
Here's a quick aside. We were not allowed to buy certain goods over a certain value (let's say £5K) without 3 quotes. OK, the purchasing department were meant to get them for you but they weren't engineers and so the spec may have been a problem. Some customers actually specify a particular thing and manufacturer supported with a quote. So we had to buy a Diesel Generator a backup for a large building it was, even back in those days around £175K or perhaps a bit more. Our Purchasing department were kicking off and so my boss said, buy a barrel of diesel from the company who made the generator. Which I did so the purchase order went in and then we did an amendment to order for a generator which went through the system without issue. If you know your way around.....
So Stop Telling Me What To Do. If it is silly I'll get around it!
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