SHAVING CUTS
It morning again and finally I find time to get around to something that I have been meaning to get around to for a while with a nice little reminder.
Looking in the mirror in the morning and thinking about shaving ( though deciding not to) I got to thinking about the, soon to be, unemployed staff of the museum, to be called within this rant, the monarch's arse-nal. These poor people after having their most successful year are being thrown in the bin at the cost, no doubt, of some pile of middle, inept, management.
I mean I am all behind cuts in correct places, less politicians, less red tape, less benefits for those to feckless to gain employment. But should we cut things that work? For instance if a fighter aircraft, let's say the only one capable of flying off of an aircraft carrier, is perfectly functional and practical should we scrap them just as we are building new aircraft carriers but no new planes?
In the case of the ARSE-nal should you retire staff that function above and beyond their call of duty? The cost of this for the ARSE-nal is massive. It will now become one of the mausoleums of culture that it seems many of our great institutions are destined to become. The lack of the contextual presented by the staff and especially the interpretation staff, ,will this just become a monument to killing rather than a bastion of mans mechanical energies and work towards peace? As Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus wrote 'Si vis pacemaker, para bellum'. So without the acting, the sense of human loss, the explanation of why rather than the labeled information of how, will this repository just become a hall of hate?
Now I have a fairly valid argument for the retention of the worth while staff, although they are not all worth while, I can launch a tirade against the pointless, useless, ill prepared upper and middle echelons of management whose, dare I say it, past retarded activities have led this national museum to this point.
Let's start with things that are half in the public realm, let's start with Paul Evans. This ex-director of the ARSE-nal. This man, accused of various money crimes, as well as some personal grudges, was accused, put on paid sick leave for a elongated period and then was allowed to "resign" probably with a nice golden hand shake. This man abused the publics and the museums money, and was not even made to pay some small kind of reparation. After this the museum required a new master, just one mind, so what do they do, they employ two at a cost of around £100,000 each, or to put it another way the total of one years wages for the interpretation staff. And then there is the creation of ridiculous amount of pointless positions, let me try to get this right.
So I have several managers to cover several departments, you would suppose by the definition of the word that these managers could, well, manage. But no. So each manager requires an assistant, who are there to assist. But what if five of these six managers require an assistant to assist the assistant, fair enough I hear you cry, if those who assist need assistance themselves then that assistance must be given. But what if the number of assistants the themselves require a manager to assist the facilitation of their assistance, and of course this creation of this assistant department manager requires an assistant to help manager the assistance of all these assistants. Rather than all this why not just employ managers who can actually manage, who are qualified and bring at least some knowledge and ideas to the table? I mean who would put someone who ran a museum shop in charge of a museum?
Finally I arrive at pointless spending on pointless items. Say there is a big toothed gypsy women in charge who has a fascination with clothes and the changing of clothes, and let's say that see likes to spend time and money on the changing of uniforms, and the separation of "on floor" departments which to all visitor do the same job. So we have around 50 members of staff, all require two shirts, some require three. These shirts require an overcoat, one per staff. So design of shirts costs money, the time spent over deliberation of which design of shirt costs money and probably several assistants. So before even the design has gone to manufacture each shirt costs £5 and each coat £5 . Then there is a fitting for each member of staff which takes time which equals money, time that could be spent managing a department so you will no longer require assistance. Then we have the cost of each shirt, £5 and the coats, £7.50 . So let's put this altogether.
125 shirts @ £10 each.
50 coats @ £12.50 each
=£ 1875.00
Time wasted replacing perfectly functional uniforms, priceless.
The point of all of this is to say this waste of money and creation of pointless roles has come to a head with the mass redundancy of the interpretation and education department and the decimation of the visitor services department. So now who will the assistants assist in the non-education of the general public. This mis-management is wide spread throughout the country, so why should the non-management be made to suffer?
I think you maybe able to tell, today I am not angry, just disappointed.
THAT IS ALL.
