Phew!

Today was my last work day this year. I have been counting down the working hours for the last couple of weeks. Its not that I like Christmas especially (not since that year when I spent Xmas day alone as my then wife was working at the hospital, went out to call the family and learned that my Grandfather had died, and when all the nurses knocked off work and came round for a party I didn’t tell anyone in case it spoiled the mood. Its never really been the same since.) I just like having almost two weeks away from work and only having to use a few days of my holiday entitlement to do it. And, of course, its a couple of weeks of not having to cram onto commuter trains listening to a dozen people trying to make calls on mobile phones over the noise of all the laptop keyboards clicking.

Over the year, this has just caused me to get more and more stressed out, and I really do need the break to calm down a bit and get myself into a frame of mind where I can go out and find a better job next year, in a proper company which is not associated with the railways.

The railways are the root of all my current angst. Obviously the train operating companies do their best to make my journeys to and from work as miserable as possible, but inbetween that I have to work for a company which is full to the brim with ex-railway workers who continue to have railway attitudes. At times it seems there is a critical mass of incompetence and fuckwittage at management level. Anyone who is in their 50’s and has worked for the railways all their life has only one obsession – their pension: it is their main motivation in everything they do. Recruitment for senior jobs seems to be done entirely through the medium of Friends Reunited. The only interaction they have with the staff is to formulate ever more random and arbitrary instructions, while they seek out our few remaining sources of pleasure with a view to removing them.

The ironic thing is that I quite like the French-owned parent company and I suspect that the appalling behaviour and performance of our little bit is kept well hidden from the main group, so I would be more than happy to stay in the company if I could transfer to a more reasonable part of it. I get quite nostalgic when I think of previous employers where I actually had respect for the senior management, and they in turn did not spend all their time with one eye on their pension and the other eye on their pension too.

Now I have that out of my system I will try to forget all about those ratbags and chill out until 2005.