I have been editing my book and this subject cropped up, so I thought I would share my thoughts with you and give a couple of examples of people, including myself, who actually told the truth during the appraisal process. I have always thought it rather rude and pointless to sit someone down and discuss their performance. In the vast majority of cases people do their job, it is not within their power to change the way they do it, in the unlikely event that they even wanted to. If they are crap at doing it they get the sack, but on the whole most people just get on with it and do it reasonably competently; in another 12 months time they will still be doing the same job in the same way. Unfortunately, as with job interviews, nearly everyone has to go through this charade even though all the protagonists know it to be one.” Why do you want to be a trainee manager at ToysRUs for £17000 a year?” “I don’t really, I’m vastly overqualified but I haven’t had an interview for 6 months and it will do until something better comes along”. No, they expect your body and soul and total commitment for 17 grand a year. The second word is off.
My first proper job was in 1982 at the age of 34 doing high speed photography for the MOD. Prior to that I had been self-employed or done temporary jobs, often well paid, sometimes very well paid, or been sacked from or left full time jobs after a short time. But effectively this was my first full time straight job as a salaried employee, my main aim for doing it was so that I could qualify for a mortgage and get on the housing ladder. However, once I got started I found it to be interesting and once I had learned all the techknowledgy, my previous experience having been in fashion and advertising, I was left to get on with it, with very little interference. Plus, I got to play with about a million quids worth of high speed photography kit as well as guns large and not so large, rockets, mortar bombs and other military explosives and hardware. So, I managed to hang on to that one and was also able to start my other career as a budding property developer in tandem with it. However, after a year on the job it came as a bit of a shock when I was called into my bosses’ office for my first ever annual appraisal. I had never heard of such a thing and although I could guess what it was going to be I thought it would be acutely embarrassing. Fortunately, it turned out to be a painless experience, my boss, the principal photographer, who was very ex RAF, obviously shared my views on the whole process. He said, “You’ve done jolly well John, thank you very much”. Shook my hand and twenty seconds later I was back out in the corridor, that’s the way to do it.
At that time we had a senior photographer called Bernard who was due to retire soon, I suppose I was to be his replacement. To use the military parlance Bernard was de-mob happy, he had a big chart on the wall of the crew room with the number of days to his retirement which he would tick off every day. Originally from Barrow in Furness, he was a portrait photographer of the old school and had taken many of the portraits of previous superintendents that hung around the conference room wall. He was very good at delegating but a nice enough guy though somewhat lacking in guile. When the big day finally came, we were all in the canteen for his leaving do; the superintendent, always an army colonel, was saying a few words, “as we all know Bernard has been anticipating his retirement for some time now”. “The colonel is quite right”, said Bernard, “and I just have one thing to say, thank Chraast it’s last day”. It became a catch phrase. He also went down in history for one of his appraisals, which was done by the senior instrumentation officer, Eric. “your work is alright Bernard”, said Eric, “but you’re not very enthusiastic”, “nay Eric”, said Bernard, “what the fuckin ell is there to get enthewsiastic abewt at this place”.
Several years later we were privatized and I was now in charge of the department, we still had an MOD principal photographer but he was not involved in the operational side of things. However, all the appraisals of my staff were done by the next manager up from me as management knew my views, about which I was quite forthright. Incidentally, they also, when we had vacancies, tried to hold the job interviews while I was on leave. The only time I did one I insisted on employing a woman who had been a little bit sarcastic on her application form. I was pleased that she worked out really well and all the ones they employed on subsequent occasions, when I had NOT been involved in the interview, were useless.
Following the privatisation, my former boss had retired and everything took a turn for the worse. There is a long story about this time and it is all in my book but briefly the same company took over all the four ranges that did high speed photography. I won’t name the company but it is the same one that is now also involved in prisons and keeps losing prisoners. I was quite a militant leftie in those days and very annoyed about being privatised, especially with the company that was the Thatcher governments’ favourite for taking on privatisation, or contractorisation as they called it. I will give you an example of where this company was coming from; several years into the contract they now had similar contracts, mostly with the MOD, all over the country. All the site managers had to go to a motivational weekend MC’d by the CEO of Burgher King, for fucks sake. However, to get back to the subject, in most cases the new contractor depended on taking on the existing MOD staff and everything carried on as usual except they were now working for the contractor rather than the MOD. Although the object of the exercise was to save money there were now less people doing the job but twice as many managers. In the case of the photographers at the other 3 ranges I was able to make sure that they all stayed with the MOD and transferred elsewhere; for several reasons I now had issues with the company and the MOD and I wanted to get my own back, it’s all in the book. The company had to recruit and train new photographers on all the other 3 ranges but there was no-one to train them, I offered but they wouldn’t pay me enough to do it. The end result was a complete shambles at the other three ranges and we started to get all the trials because we were the only the range where the trials sponsors knew they would get good photographic results; hence the recruiting of more photographers. I am however sure that all those useless photographers would have had a detailed annual appraisal.
One would have thought that our management would have gritted their teeth and nurtured me, but I must confess to having been a bit arrogant then, and took the piss out of a lot of people who were higher up the food chain than me. So, they didn’t nurture me instead they started to cook up all kinds of plots against me, honestly it wasn’t paranoia, they really were out to get me. I don’t think they were trying to get rid of me, just get me to conform. This is one of the things that is wrong with conventional management, it doesn’t matter how well you do the job, if you don’t conform to all their bollox they don’t like it. Conformity is considered more important than doing the job well and I did take pride in that, doing the job well that is.
It has long been my opinion that most of the things management do could be done more efficiently and cheaply by giving the workers a bit more responsibility. If a manager goes off sick it’s business as usual, if the crane driver goes off sick you’re Donald Ducked. Many times I have heard people say “it would make more sense to do that in such a way, but I’m not paid to think”. Another thing I found ridiculous was quality assurance, to assure good quality is not a bad thing but the way they went about it was just a waste of time. They would go to the far end of a fart with stuff that didn’t matter, but ignore the important stuff. In the photographic department we had two large cine film processing machines, the same machines that would have been used in the motion picture business. As we used several hundred feet of film every time a gun went bang and they were nearly all classified secret we couldn’t just send them to Kodak. Following an audit I was told to monitor the temperature daily in the room where we stored all the processing chemicals and keep a chart. The temperature of the room never varied more than a few degrees and was well within the acceptable range, I did it for about a week then it was quietly forgotten. The one thing that was never monitored was the photographs and films we made which I would have thought was pretty fundamental. Don’t even get me started on health and safety which is only there to cover people’s backs; in my experience it doesn’t make you any healthier or safer, in fact during my time at the range I was within a hairsbreadth of being killed on three separate occasions.
My enemies included the latest superintendent of the range who didn’t like me, it was mutual, because I didn’t kowtow to him. He was a military manager not a soldier and even the rest of the military at the range didn’t like him. Then there were a lot of the MOD management who were in a cell of born again Christians who didn’t like me because I took the piss. How can you as a scientist believe in that stuff? if you are a Christian why are you involved in developing weapons of mass destruction? didn’t Jesus say “thou shalt not kill”? I think they are valid points. Then the company site manager didn’t like me because I never did as I was told, but always had a good reason. I took the piss out of him mercilessly and he knew I was doing it but was never quite sure how, I had several issues with him.
The policy of this company was to manage by fear; our site manager used relate a tale, and I heard the same one several times, about one of the senior managers at head office. Apparently if he was out and about on the road and saw a dirty Serco van, oh my God I have named them, he would write down the registration number, find out which site it came from and sack the transport manager. Obviously, it was total bollox but the fact that he would constantly tell this story as though it was a wonderful thing shows exactly where they coming from. Probably the same tale was told by all the site managers throughout the company and may well have originated at the Burgher King weekend. That was twenty years ago but when you look at how a lot of workers are treated now it was the shape of things to come and is becoming universal. Most of the workforce at Eskmeals, oops now I have named the range, lived in fear of losing their jobs, I was not one of them. I got the better of management every time and it became a hobby. I was anti-management even when I was a manager and I told them straight they needed me more than I needed them. However, I was aware that the Cold War was coming to an end and when it did that might not continue to be the case; also digital technology was coming in which meant that computers and video were replacing film and the expertise I had always made sure I kept to myself, making the whole process much easier.
It was time to start planning my exit strategy, because pretty soon they actually would want to get rid of me. I took out a PPI policy, which would pay the mortgage for a year in the event of redundancy or being unable to work. This was costing over thirty quid a month, but was soon to pay off handsomely, I was one of the few people to benefit from these policies. Something else that was to prove useful was living quite some distance from the range; I was once complaining about having to commute 36 miles each way to work, my immediate boss said “well, you will live in the back of beyond”. I said “no Sam, this is the back of beyond, where I live is civilization”. Anyway, because of where I lived I car shared with one of the army, a retired major, and an MOD senior manager, not one of the born-again Christians who had it in for me. This meant I was better informed about what was going on than even the contractor’s site manager and was able to use this information to my advantage.
After taking out the PPI the campaign against me went cold for a while which was bad news as by then I was wanting to leave but it had to be by redundancy so I would get my redundancy pay and have the mortgage paid for a year while I set myself up as a full-time property developer. I think they knew what I was up to because the next move was to take disciplinary action against me and this had obviously been cooked up by the site manager and MOD management. So once again I was on the well-worn trail to the site manager’s office. It seemed that by agreeing on a particular course of action with the trial sponsor which led to results being lost I had exceeded my authority. As usual I took the piss and said “is that the best you can come up with?”. He said “I don’t think you realise the seriousness of your situation, you failed to follow the correct procedures and results were lost. That is a sackable offense.” Now I was slightly worried, if I was sacked I wouldn’t get redundancy pay and the PPI would not pay out. However, when I investigated it turned out that on the day in question, the pp whose permission I should have sought, was on leave and I was deputising for him. Then I mentioned it to my travelling companion, who had been the battery commander that day, he was livid. “How dare they, it was battery commander and it was my decision.” Bloody civilians had tried to undermine his authority, I was home and dry, the army was very much in charge. The next day the MOD management dropped the complaint but I was told there was still to be a second disciplinary hearing with another officer of the company, which I assumed would be someone from head office. A couple of hours later I was called back for what turned out to be the second hearing with the site manager’s secretary as the other officer of the company. Now it was my turn I said “I haven’t been given any time to prepare for this and in any case I want my solicitor present”. Then I walked out. A few minutes later my boss turned up, he said “they were only going to give you a verbal warning and make a note on your record”. I said “a warning for what, I have done nothing wrong all complaints were dropped. They can fuck off and I want it in writing that there will be nothing on my record about this.” Shortly after I got a letter to that effect from the site manager. A couple of weeks later I was able to rub their noses in it again when my annual appraisal came around. Mine was always done by the site manager because I was such an awkward bastard. By now we had a form to fill in first, all the usual bollox. For the question, “what do you think was your most important achievement over the last year”, I put “forcing you to withdraw the disciplinary action despite all the odds being against me”. He said “I can’t fault the work of your department but your attitude is appalling.
So how did I manage to get my redundancy? We had a visit from a general, I think at the time he was the head of the army, you will have seen him on the TV news. When we were visited by VIP’s we always had to take a photograph of all the top brass and I hated it. However, on this day I was busy prepping a battery for a trial so I turned up at the appointed time and place in my overalls. There was a bit of nervous coughing and shuffling and the general said “do you always turn up to photograph people in your overalls”. I said “only when I have something more important to do”. Everyone recoiled open mouthed in attitudes of outright horror and disbelief. It was like a Bateman cartoon, “The Man Who Dissed a General”. I hadn’t even done it on purpose it just sort of slipped out. “Well you had better go and get on with it then”, said the general, and they made the pp go and get a camera and do the picture. My days were now numbered I had embarrassed the colonel and the army and there could only be one outcome. A few days later all the photographers were summoned to the site manager’s office and told that one of us would be made redundant and it would be me. We have calculated your redundancy pay and it will go into the bank along with this months pay, would you kindly collect your belongings and do one.
Sorry, I hadn’t intended this to be so long but I had a lot to say and it has been quite nostalgic for me to go through it all again. It was intended to be a short light-hearted piece but in the process of writing I got fired up again. I hope it has given you some encouragement not to let “the man” dick you about at work. Management has very much got the upper hand these days and you can expect no solidarity from your colleagues, but it is still possible to get the better of them. You will not be able to do this if you are two wage packets away from disaster, have a family to support, large loans etc. The only other way is to make sure that you can offer them something they can’t get anywhere else. You can bluff that they need you more than you need them, but if they call it you need to have the resources to survive without pay for at least a year. It’s better to be self-employed, for most of my life I have been the only one who would employ me, and I have found me to be satisfactory in every way, even without annual appraisals.
My recommendation is to aim for a simpler more connected life, connected to the real world not the electronic one. You don’t need all that stuff, join me, start by following this blog, all the rest will come soon and will be published here. Most of the people reading this will not have got this far, so you are already part of the small minority that may stand a chance when everything goes tits up. I only want about 1% of you the rest are doomed anyway. So, you might ask, why am I going to the trouble of telling you all this if most of you are doomed? I suppose I just want you to know that I have a long record of successfully fighting authority and therefore am qualified to start and run the organization that will help some of us to survive. There is no point in trying to save everyone, their sheer numbers are the problem and we are way past the tipping point already. We can only save ourselves, hope that the right people survive and try not to make such a bog of it next time.
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