When the company reorganised and my job disappeared two years ago I was at a loose end for a while. They kept finding me stuff to do but I was more or less an employee without portfolio for a long time.

Now they have reorganised again and recreated my old job while removing the one I had just started doing, and decided I was the best fit to do the job they recruited me for in the first place.

Its great to be doing what I felt I was quite good at in the first place, but in some ways I feel just a little bit stitched up. For a start, the department has not really been managed in the meantime. It has had a couple of people in charge, but they had lots of other responsibilities and left my old help desk to run itself. More precisely they let it run itself down, and its going to be a real struggle just to get it back to how it was before.

The real stitch-up is that I have been appointed in late December, just before having a Christmas break followed by jury service. In mid-February I have to have 15 staff appraisals all done and dusted with the paperwork sent to Human Remains.

The icing on the cake is that there are always rows and disputes about leave over the Christmas period. We have to keep the place manned all the time, twenty-four hours a day, even on Christmas day. The default state is that everyone gets a 30% shift allowance for working unsociable hours and then complains about working unsociable hours, but at this time of year the moaning reaches a peak. Just to make sure there is no morale in the staff at all, the rest of the reorganisation is still pending, there is a proposed change to the shift patterns and there are rumours of the company changing the basis of calculating annual leave entitlements and the level of shift allowances.

Season to be merry? The phrase is especially inappropriate.

Being appointed to manage this department in mid-December is like being parachuted in to referee an England v. Argentina World Cup semi-final during the last 10 minutes of extra time in a match where the players are allowed to carry small arms.