About that thing you promised…
As some of you know I share my current life with a couple of beautiful animals. The Golden Retrievers Otis and Saul. They consume a fair amount of food and about a decade ago I purchased a large plastic bin to store bags of the stuff.
This bin stands a couple of feet tall and provides for a large bag of dog food food to be contained within and accessed via a hinged lid. The hinge on the lid is typical of many plastic containers and consists of a series of interlocking plastic teeth. The design seems reasonable but in practice it is less than satisfactory. The lid regularly disconnects from the bin resulting in a minor but consistent irritation.
Every time I feed the two beauties, I open the lid wondering if it will fall off, resulting in a swear as I have to stop what I am doing and refit the lid. As I said, this is a relatively minor irritation in the grand scheme of things, and definitely a first world problem.
This happened to me a few minutes ago. It has probably happened a thousand times before, but for some reason tonight I realized that the faulty, but still more or less functional bin was a metaphor for many systems we use within government. If you are a public servant, or a citizen interacting with government, you can probably think of an example. Imagine something that more or less does the job, but in an irritating way.
It might be document management, enterprise travel, procurement or HR related system. You know what I mean, a tool that more or less works, most of the time but occasionally for no apparent reason fails utterly.
In isolation the problems hardly seem worth fixing, after all good enough it. But taken together these continuous and ongoing irritations amount to employee harassment. The complete and utter lack of empathy and respect for our time is demeaning, intimidating and occasionally a cause for personal humiliation and embarrassment.
Ok so I am taking the definition of harassment a little out of context, but the erosion of our mental health is real. #Justsaying