The Forgotten Employee
Discussion
Guvernator said:
I've done some work for local authority borough council and if anyone has worked for local or central government, they can probably attest to this themselves but there are literally loads of people who "work" at these places who do absolutely nothing.
I used to here stories about working for government but always assumed they were somewhat humorous anecdotes but no, it's actually true.
No one really gets fired, if you are crap they either just put up with it or at worse shuffle you along to another department. I met people who seem to have made it their life goal to get paid to do nothing for the rest of there working lives until they retire which is why it boils my piss now when we get tax hikes. My council tax has gone up yet again, mostly to pay for people to sit around doing nothing.
My sister used to work in admin for a local authority and was bored to tears as she had such little work to do... she actually used to plead with her supervisor for extra work.I used to here stories about working for government but always assumed they were somewhat humorous anecdotes but no, it's actually true.
No one really gets fired, if you are crap they either just put up with it or at worse shuffle you along to another department. I met people who seem to have made it their life goal to get paid to do nothing for the rest of there working lives until they retire which is why it boils my piss now when we get tax hikes. My council tax has gone up yet again, mostly to pay for people to sit around doing nothing.
Eventually her supervisor caved in and gave her additional responsibility and a very slightly increased ''workload'' still no where enough for one person to fill a working day with... then the following week my sister got given an assistant to delegate much of that ''workload'' to and she was left with even less to do!
mike74 said:
Not quite a forgotten employee, but a few years back I halved my hours by doing a job share, which obviously should mean my annual leave entitlement should also have been halved... but no, I still carried on getting full time annual leave entitlement for 5 years, which was nice.
Which reminds me of a dentist I know who’s practice sold out to one of the big boys , his contract gave him 30 days holiday a year plus the usual bank holidays.Part of the deal was that he’d reduce his working week to a three day week except they forgot to downgrade his holiday entitlement pro rata.....
Couldn’t sign his new contract quick enough , to be fair it was only for two years.
Tankrizzo said:
... CSC ...
I worked for those idiots for a 2 miserable years, and it doesn't surprise me at all, I hear its even worse since they merged with HPE (former EDS business).Anyhow, my anecdote is from a mate (also ex-CSC) - he used to work with a lot of government departments in IT. The story goes that there is a role for a person to travel out to really rural areas to capture electoral roll information, places like the Scottish Islands etc. Collate it, and send it back to what is now the electoral commission. A chap took the job on, but resigned after a few months - however something in HR process went wrong, and they kept paying him for 10 years! Eventually the error was found in an audit, and they tried to get the money back. His considered response was that he'd go to the tabloids, so they wrote the whole lot off.
stevensdrs said:
I did some agency work for the Royal Mail some years ago. I discovered that many of the collection runs were actually ghost runs so if you were allocated that you just went for a drive for a few hours until it was time to clock off. There were people on the books who got paid a weekly wage but never did a stroke. When students were employed for the xmas period there was a nice loophole. If you turned up on the first day and then didn't report to the section you were assigned to, you could just turn up twice a day to clock on and clock off and be paid for doing nothing.
There were so many skiving it was no wonder the RM was loosing millions every day.
Another old chestnut from Royal Mail was the ''York game'' (a York being a large wheeled cage used to move the trays of mail around) the game involved seeing how long someone could just push an empty York around the mail centre without getting rumbled by a manager... apparently some people managed to do it for entire shift.There were so many skiving it was no wonder the RM was loosing millions every day.
Wildcat45 said:
Its amazing how even in a world of computer auditing things just slip through the net.
We - as in the big firm I worked for - lost a Honda CRV. It was only noticed when the lease company wanted it back.
It was delivered, but at some point between then and the end of the lease, it vanished.the company just paid up.
That happens more than you'd imagine!We - as in the big firm I worked for - lost a Honda CRV. It was only noticed when the lease company wanted it back.
It was delivered, but at some point between then and the end of the lease, it vanished.the company just paid up.
When I was auditing one of the big national vehicle rental companies, virtually every site had at least one missing vehicle at some point. Either it had been sent to a workshop with no paperwork, or delivered to a customer and the paperwork was lost before it was updated on the system. Customers calling in after a vehicle has been sat outside their house for a week awaiting collection was the usual way they turned up, but by the time I left in 2009, I still had around 30 long term missing vehicles noted.
We found a few using ANPR data, but we could never report them stolen as we were never sure if they were taken without our consent, or simply lost due to sloppy admin.
Curiously enough, last week I took a call from HPI that a Transit van we flagged as missing in 2009 ended up at a dealer in Oxford being offered as a trade in. It had been SORN'd the whole time and turned up when a property developer bought a bank repo'd warehouse near London and it had been sat in a corner for 9 years.
Not wanting to take the threat OT but it was reported stolen by us. The emails, to everyone across the UK were funny. Starting with a polite request for the person using the car to get in touch, through amateur sleuthing, whole sites taking umbridge at being accused of having it, to the final email.
It said something like:. "Today I informed the Metropolitan police that the car was stolen at some point between (Insert date from 3 years ago) and (Insert today's date)". Then lots of threats about going to jail if you still have it. In what was obviously a massive arse covering exercise by whoever in HR or whatever had no doubt 3 tax discs and a V5 for something quite expensive that wasn't theirs that got lost.
Our hunch was that as it was a pool car, some disgruntled staff member took it away on being sacked and either drive it abroad or sold it into a criminal ringing cincern.
It said something like:. "Today I informed the Metropolitan police that the car was stolen at some point between (Insert date from 3 years ago) and (Insert today's date)". Then lots of threats about going to jail if you still have it. In what was obviously a massive arse covering exercise by whoever in HR or whatever had no doubt 3 tax discs and a V5 for something quite expensive that wasn't theirs that got lost.
Our hunch was that as it was a pool car, some disgruntled staff member took it away on being sacked and either drive it abroad or sold it into a criminal ringing cincern.
Fun stories but that are actually fraud. The NHS suffersmore then most and now has a counter fraud team. A ccording to their website...
"...In 2016-17 it was estimated that fraud cost the NHS around £1.25 billion per annum.
That's enough money to pay for over 40,000 staff nurses, or to purchase over 5,000 frontline ambulances.
It is taxpayers' money that is taken away from patient care and falls into the hands of criminals...."
"...In 2016-17 it was estimated that fraud cost the NHS around £1.25 billion per annum.
That's enough money to pay for over 40,000 staff nurses, or to purchase over 5,000 frontline ambulances.
It is taxpayers' money that is taken away from patient care and falls into the hands of criminals...."
Guvernator said:
I've done some work for local authority borough council and if anyone has worked for local or central government, they can probably attest to this themselves but there are literally loads of people who "work" at these places who do absolutely nothing.
I used to here stories about working for government but always assumed they were somewhat humorous anecdotes but no, it's actually true.
No one really gets fired, if you are crap they either just put up with it or at worse shuffle you along to another department. I met people who seem to have made it their life goal to get paid to do nothing for the rest of there working lives until they retire which is why it boils my piss now when we get tax hikes. My council tax has gone up yet again, mostly to pay for people to sit around doing nothing.
And then they retire, on virtually full pay. That really pisses me off.I used to here stories about working for government but always assumed they were somewhat humorous anecdotes but no, it's actually true.
No one really gets fired, if you are crap they either just put up with it or at worse shuffle you along to another department. I met people who seem to have made it their life goal to get paid to do nothing for the rest of there working lives until they retire which is why it boils my piss now when we get tax hikes. My council tax has gone up yet again, mostly to pay for people to sit around doing nothing.
williamp said:
Fun stories but that are actually fraud. The NHS suffersmore then most and now has a counter fraud team. A ccording to their website...
"...In 2016-17 it was estimated that fraud cost the NHS around £1.25 billion per annum.
That's enough money to pay for over 40,000 staff nurses, or to purchase over 5,000 frontline ambulances.
It is taxpayers' money that is taken away from patient care and falls into the hands of criminals...."
nononono the problems in the NHS are down to evil Tory underfunding "...In 2016-17 it was estimated that fraud cost the NHS around £1.25 billion per annum.
That's enough money to pay for over 40,000 staff nurses, or to purchase over 5,000 frontline ambulances.
It is taxpayers' money that is taken away from patient care and falls into the hands of criminals...."
An old colleague had something a bit like this happen.
He interviewed and accepted a job. Turns up on day one and is given his induction by HR.
On day two he is shown to his desk and given logins for his computer.
Then nothing.
No-one seemed to have a clue who was managing him or what project he’d been hired for. The person who interviewed him had left the company.
He didn’t bother going in the second week. Or the third. Eventually, somebody called him and asked him if he was ok, and if was coming back to work...
He interviewed and accepted a job. Turns up on day one and is given his induction by HR.
On day two he is shown to his desk and given logins for his computer.
Then nothing.
No-one seemed to have a clue who was managing him or what project he’d been hired for. The person who interviewed him had left the company.
He didn’t bother going in the second week. Or the third. Eventually, somebody called him and asked him if he was ok, and if was coming back to work...
Another one from me - I was once IT contracting for a large telecoms company back in the early 90s based in Red Lion Square in Holborn.
The interview consisted of a load of contractors meeting me in the lobby and saying "We're off to the pub, are you coming?". Bish bosh!
However at said job, which was paying great money (back in those days there was no IR35 and I lived at home with parents, rent free). I was sat in a little board room for months and didn't actually do anything at all, there were two other contractors in with me and we'd just go to wine bars and pubs all day, it was great.
However there was always a nagging feeling that one day I'd get rumbled, and indeed, a few days before the end of my contract there was a knock on the boardroom door, it was the boss.
"Hi DS, can I have a word?"
I step outside "er, yes?" "How would you feel about a contract extension?"
Eh? WTF? "Er, yeah, great, but my current one finishes on the 10th December, and I'm flying off on holiday and back on Christmas eve".
"No worries", he walks off waving an airy hand in the air, "just come back in the new year".
The interview consisted of a load of contractors meeting me in the lobby and saying "We're off to the pub, are you coming?". Bish bosh!
However at said job, which was paying great money (back in those days there was no IR35 and I lived at home with parents, rent free). I was sat in a little board room for months and didn't actually do anything at all, there were two other contractors in with me and we'd just go to wine bars and pubs all day, it was great.
However there was always a nagging feeling that one day I'd get rumbled, and indeed, a few days before the end of my contract there was a knock on the boardroom door, it was the boss.
"Hi DS, can I have a word?"
I step outside "er, yes?" "How would you feel about a contract extension?"
Eh? WTF? "Er, yeah, great, but my current one finishes on the 10th December, and I'm flying off on holiday and back on Christmas eve".
"No worries", he walks off waving an airy hand in the air, "just come back in the new year".
In the early 2000’s I worked for Xerox and had a customer who I’d inherited, the primary rental period for their machines was long finished and they we paying a lot more per month than they could be if they had some new kit and a new term. I arranged a visit.
The companies office was actually based inside BT’s facilities near Ipswich. They had a fairly large office with several employees. Upon questioning the main man I was struggling to understand why he was so uninterested in getting much better kit and reducing his monthlies. He eventually trusted me with the truth and it turned out they were initially just there temporarily as a contractor to BT and we’re allowed to use the office for the duration of the contract. The contract had ended some years prior and no one had ever asked them to move on.
Later dealings with BT when I worked for a network security company were no better. Some deals needed a multiple level sign-off. In some examples by the time each stage of the sign off was completed (there was always someone on holiday in the chain or someone who had to make a point of questioning things, typically at the top level of the sign-off) the original deal had become obsolete due to the kit having moved on or no longer being available.
Most big Co.s have a level of wasted time and money but the likes of BT, RM, the NHS, Councils and Goverment have a rediculous level that would see most businesses disappear very quickly.
The companies office was actually based inside BT’s facilities near Ipswich. They had a fairly large office with several employees. Upon questioning the main man I was struggling to understand why he was so uninterested in getting much better kit and reducing his monthlies. He eventually trusted me with the truth and it turned out they were initially just there temporarily as a contractor to BT and we’re allowed to use the office for the duration of the contract. The contract had ended some years prior and no one had ever asked them to move on.
Later dealings with BT when I worked for a network security company were no better. Some deals needed a multiple level sign-off. In some examples by the time each stage of the sign off was completed (there was always someone on holiday in the chain or someone who had to make a point of questioning things, typically at the top level of the sign-off) the original deal had become obsolete due to the kit having moved on or no longer being available.
Most big Co.s have a level of wasted time and money but the likes of BT, RM, the NHS, Councils and Goverment have a rediculous level that would see most businesses disappear very quickly.
j80jpw said:
Most big Co.s have a level of wasted time and money but the likes of BT, RM, the NHS, Councils and Goverment have a rediculous level that would see most businesses disappear very quickly.
This last bit is very true. I think there is a probably an unavoidable level of waste when companies get above a certain size as it becomes impossible to keep track of what every single person is doing when you have thousands of employees and things can sometimes fall through the cracks. However for private organisations it's not really any skin off my nose as it's the shareholders etc that need to worry about the bottom line and there are usually decent checks put in place to promote efficiency and prevent too much waste.What really winds me up about government run organisations is that this waste is almost systematic, occurs at nearly every level and it appears there is very little will to actually try to control it or do anything about it both from within the organisation and from the ruling body of government which really annoys me as at the end of the day, it's our services being cut due to "lack of funds" or our taxes being raised endlessly for a lot of people to sit about doing nothing.
j80jpw said:
Another example from the Xerox days was the bumper time of year that council departments had to make sure they met their use it or loose it budgets. Selling kit that ranged from £500 up to £500k made us a popular choice to help use up budgets.
This does my nut in tbh.Council is prudent and saves money sooooo for the next year their lack of profligacy is recognised by cutting their grant AND (IIRC) clawing back the amount saved.
What sort of f
king lunacy is that? No wonder those idiots splurge like a drunken sailor towards year end. 
I worked for LTSB doing nothing. My Mum worked there and the manager gave me a job when there wasn't really a position to fill. I basically walked around a bit, mooched about on the computer and got coffee. Was 18 though and paid about 350 a week so just got on with it.
TBH though, I got bored, I'd rather be doing something. A nice private office getting paid to do nothing while actually investigating business I could open would have been great though. It was the pretending to do something that got taxing. I had a post it note over the computer clock lol
TBH though, I got bored, I'd rather be doing something. A nice private office getting paid to do nothing while actually investigating business I could open would have been great though. It was the pretending to do something that got taxing. I had a post it note over the computer clock lol
Monkeylegend said:
On a slightly different slant, PH have got a website development team lurking around somewhere being paid lots of money. The trouble is nobody seems to know where they are hiding out, there's loads of work for them to be getting on with.
Regarding the post about NHS fraud earlier there was a local news item about emergency prescriptions(?) and one hospital I think it was charged the NHS £2600 and another time charged them over £3k and both times the actual cost for the tablets was less than £1, no wonder the NHS is in the s
t.Never been paid for doing no work but last year I was paid twice for the same work. I rebuilt 6 diesel engines for refrigerated trailers. I did the work for for a company I do some engine work for but my invoice got forwarded to the trailer leasing company by mistake. When I sent the guys I do work for a statement, they asked for a copy invoice and paid the account as normal. Three months later we got a call from the leasing company asking for bank details in order to pay an invoice, which my wife provided them with. I spoke to the company I had done the work for and they had already been paid, so I emailed the leasing company but never got a reply. I kept the money in a reserve account until December when I decided a nice dividend was in order.
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