My planned trip to Manly didn't materialise in the end. J (for that is what my new girlfriend shall be known) got a phone call at about ten to eight in the morning and told me that it was her dad and that he wanted to speak to me. I might have thought that was odd if I had been awake and thinking straight but I wasn't and presumably must have gone to talk to him in a rather unintelligible way. He wanted to employ my services and, by the urgency in his voice, he wanted me to begin soon.
I would find out only later but the call wasn't completely out of the blue. Before typing last nights post I read J a story. This happened to be Shooting an Elephant by Orwell. J fell asleep long before it was over but I carried on reading it to myself because I am so fond of it. I decided afterwards that I would send the link to the page containing the story to FoJ (Father of J). I probably did this for a couple of reasons. Firstly because I like sharing literature I like with people (I am rarely in a position to discuss it with them but if I at least make it available to them then that possibility might arise at some point). Secondly, because the title of the essay reminded me of a conversation that I had with J's family on the night of her grandfather's 83rd birthday dinner. FoJ's girlfriend was apparently disturbed by the fact that my uncle Mike V shoots elephants for a living. After the early morning phone call from FoJ, after the day had progressed somewhat, he would tell me that the call probably wouldn't have happened without the email being in his inbox.
After hastily postponing plans with Anna I got dressed and showered and walked down to FoJ's office in Broadway. I was there by about nine o'clock, ready to hear what exactly it was I was there to do. With hindsight I can report that my duties today could be described in one word: nothing. Still, for the few hours I spent with FoJ, until about noon, I learnt what it was that I would be doing when circumstances permitted.
FoJ sells advice to not for profit organisations. How they can better run themselves, do their books, etc. The job I have become involved in revolves around an association that offers counselling to sexually abused children and women. FoJ explained to me that this association has lost the trust of the Ministry of Health and would no longer be funded. His job is to wind down the association and retrench the three staff.
The interesting thing, and this according to FoJ, is that this situation has arisen because of only one of those three members of staff at the association. So manipulative and unmanageable is this employee that over the period of a few years board member after board member has abandoned ship until eventually the MoH has lost patience and jumped ship itself. A woman FoJ described as having "serious problems" is free "counsel" sexual abuse victims and nobody has had the gumption to fire her.
My role in this story of typically weak management within the quasi-government sector is to get the sensitive data off the computers and away from the soon-to-be-terminated staff. Even this was impossible because the chairwoman of the association - one of the two members left on the board - was too weak-willed to explicitly instruct us to enter the association's work place and remove the computers. I sat in FoJ's car listening to this woman change her poor little mind three times about what to do about the whole sorry affair.
Well there was not much point for me to hang around so I walked home and bought a new phone:
Nice but not extraordinary
No comments:
Post a Comment