The Build-up

Here I am. Another weekend ahead and a week off after that, as is the usual custom when birthday comes around. This custom stems from constant fear of a strippogram in a previous job, 20 years ago. When you are just out of school and sharing an office with two late-30 something ladies, the cheeky threat of a strippogram was always raised around June. The threat was not an empty one either. In the late 80s, you couldn’t break wind without justifying a visit from an overweight slapper dressed as a policewoman.

One example does spring to mind. It was the long hot summer of 1988 and I think the poor guy in question was 18 I think. He was our new purchase ledger clerk and had been working with us for about a year. He invited us all to his birthday bash at a local railway workers social club. As usual, for reasons nothing at all to do with the lad in question, nobody really wanted to go. Well, you just don’t do you? Anyway, 10 or so of us turned up in that “going on to somewhere else after” way that you do. The social club was packed to the rafters with his extended family, from 3 year old nephews to his 80 year old grandparents. Not present, we were soon to discover were his football teammates Unknown to anyone, they instead sent what can only be described as a fat old cow dressed as a St Trinian’ schoolgirl. I apologise to the lovely, larger ladies reading this, for I do know a few. I mean no disrespect to your generously proportioned loveliness, but it did rather look like someone had tied the cuffs and collar of a white blouse and poured the contents of a butcher’s dustbin in.

Anyway. The grisley tableux unfolded and poor Scott experienced the slowest, most painful few minutes of his young life. The lady’s pimp/photographer placed a chair in the middle of the dancefloor and Scott was forced to sit on it. The manky old bag of spanners planted her corpulent backside on his lap and pressed his blushing and unfortunately sober face into her bottomless cleavage. She quickly decided that doing this in front of his embarrassed family was not enough and freed her bosom for all to see. And so it went on…

Poor Scott was completely sober and I can only imagine what his was going through his head. The ritual slaughter of a football squad was probably pretty high on the list, closely followed by the thought that he could never face any of his family ever again.

But its just a laugh isnt it?

I will be back in a while. I need a lie down.

Unity

So it looks like The Strike is going on ahead. Well, the workers have voted for strike action by a majority of 77%. Or have they? Well if you read the papers or listen to the radio and tv, it would be easy to think that that is the whole story. Not quite. You see, only members of the my union have voted. Not everyone is a member of the union. In fact, as far as I can make out, there are 20,000 members of the workforce (myself included) who are not union members and hence their opinion is not asked for or counted. Ok, so I am sure many of you have strong opinions on the subject of unions and here is not the place for a debate, its just that I haven’t heard that fact mentioned in the last few weeks. I am not saying that we should get a vote in union ballots or anything, it just seemed like a tiny fact was being ignored by everyone.

Ok, so the tiny fact doesn’t affect the outcome, but we all need to know everything before damning an entire workforce to hell with your fiery public opinion.

I am not saying for one minute that all of the 20,000 would vote “no” to a strike either, its just that all of my friends seem to think the same thing. A strike is a really bad idea when we have lost a 1/3 of our business to competitors. Even the idea of a strike has lost us customers in a the last few weeks. We were offered 2.5% or a £600, non-pensionable lump sum. Also, there was a colleague share scheme announced last week that would see us get a payment of about £800 a year and (I think) a lump sum of £5,300 after 5 years. Not brilliant in my mind, but nothing to grumble about.

Maybe you have to have been made redundant at least once to take a sensible look at your future and be mature enough to strike a balance between your immediate financial status and your long-term job security. Unfortunately, I know that a large portion of my workforce are quite young, non-pension members who have no intention of staying in their current job more than 12 months. So, because I don’t choose to be a union member, they have voted on my future for me and I get no say at all.

Incidentally, is there anything lower on the social or evolutionary scale to a union than a non-member? Selfish, piggy-backing, spineless, lazy freeloaders the lot of us…

Jericho

Yeah!! Fine TV series Jericho has been saved from cancellation by commited, loony geeks from all over the world. I am not sure what that teaches us but…

Hold that thought…

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