Recruitment

If All My Posts Could Be Titled Grumpy

Remember when I used to work with a grumpy ex-chef? I refer to him as”chef” or I should have. Well, occasionally, in random impromptu training sessions he would offer a scenario to the office a typical client scenario. But he would offer “Initials start with” then he would just pick someone in the office that was present and just use their name. Yes, Helen Caligiuri featured regularly. It was a moment to smile because I wasn’t in his bad books. But it was just an amusing way to throw someone under the bus.

The example I would give for an impromptu training session I once gave, was beconing all the Admin in to the front of my desk. I held up a very long and colourful police check and I asked, “should this client go to do their mutual obligation in a school or an aged care facility?” One woman looked at me with so much fear. She did not want to read the actual police check. Our clients had some colourful police checks. It is fair to say most would be license or loss of driving license or driving without a license related. Stupid but what’s the clientele coming through our doors 20 years ago one might expect?

It is also to say, a general rule of thumb Chef gave me was if a client was outside a primary school dealing drugs, you would not place them in a school to do their mutual obligation. No. God NO! That said, those were our locally born and bred young clients and then I had one Dickhead of a colleague! What? You think he’s reading my blog? Did I name and shame him? Initials or otherwise? Wish I could. He delivered me half-signed/half filled-in paperwork on my desk. It included a half-arsed police check.

I know this staff member was employed as the T.P.O. (Trading Placement Officer) however, while I was only an Admin he had not retained the wisdom of what I could legally enter on the government system with only half the forms filled in. And I was over it. Our Supervisor watched as I called the TPO over. I held up the paperwork and demanded. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Chef looked at me, not actively backing me but not telling me to step down. TPO asked “what?” He had no fucking idea. So, I explained to him his error in judgement. “I cannot lodge this!” Then I had to unpack why, “It’s not signed! Dated! Or completed!”

I suggested he put it on the government system, but I suspect he didn’t know how, not that he understood why he legally could not. Part of our admin process was that we “certified” that the original documents had been dated and signed. He told me to put them aside until Friday, two days later when they attended the office again to attend the Induction where we would normally officially place them on the system and therefore we would finally get PAID. What he failed to realise was that those clients fuck-all turned up two days later.

It has just occurred to me my current mental state might have me being too pissed off to politely complete this post but I think if half of you read next weeks post. My obvious attitude will be explained. Christ! I digress, where was I?

Those damn clients! If they turned up, I wouldn’t enter those documents because they were therefore out of date and I would need to have the clients complete new ones and then I would need to post-date their Induction timesheets and their start date. It’s a whole big fraudulent thing, yeah?