Bean counters, a rant

There is a word around our offices that brings out the despair in even the most hardened, no-shit buster Parking Enforcer. Council policy has dictated that these guys can have you fired on the spot should they so desire. Departmental Manager, Corporate Director, Parking Officer, whoever. All are subject to their diktats. When they say ‘frog’, everyone better jump. Or Else. Rather like Terry Pratchett’s ‘Auditors’ of time and space, these guys can royally screw you over if the ‘procedure’ isn’t followed rigorously enough. To them, the rules are God and no thinking outside the box is allowed. By comparison they make even the hardest hearted Ticket Hound look like Snow White on Prozac.

The word is ‘Audit’ and their department oversees everything, and I do mean everything that the Council does. No decision too small, no item too insignificant, no words unconsidered. It all comes under their hideously hidebound microscope. For yea and verily, the most sacred of Council commandments is written in tablets of stone in letters of holy fire; THOU SHALT FOLLOW THE PROCEDURE.

Over the past two years, these guys have been paying us too much attention, even though there was nothing broken to fix. Now after much cheeseparing and numerous staff resignations we are perennially short handed and most of us spend our time covering two beats. To say that our On Street officers are at half strength is an accurate representation of our current dilemma.

There was a time when this wasn’t such a bad job, despite all the crap we had to contend with from our adoring public, but those days are long gone. Oh yes, and it’s all our fault, not the procedures. So what’s new?