Fun Friday

I decided to lighten up a bit this afternoon. This was partly brought on by a discussion with a former colleague yesterday when we were reminiscing on the phone about a former boss of ours who was the David Brent of the economic development world and bore a close physical resemblence.

There were several amusing episodes of note:

• One year he took all the staff performance budget and gave it all to his number one stooge in a big bonus, salary hike and company car
• He didn't give a colleague any work to do for 3 months because he didn't hire him and didn't want anything to do with him. Meanwhile the rest of the team were working until 7pm most weekdays!
• He managed to take over entire departments in the space of months at one stage! but really did bugger all.
• He let another whole department write tenders! none of the tender writers had ever been consultants!

It really was a mad place to work. It was reputed at the time to be one of the top local or regional development organisations. On balance, in some things it was actually very good, in others it was dire but overall it was schizophrenic ... more tales...

• it restructured itself on paper 2 times in 6 months
• it went public and exposed itself to a potential £10 million profiteering asset stripper all to get the glamorous tag of 'plc'
• the nice colour template and layout we invented for our reports was, on orders of the Chief Executive, scrapped to be replaced by a very basic Times New Roman 12 pt format invented by a secretary whose husband was a golfing partner of said Chief Exec

...I left after 6 months! I was posted in the economic consultancy department and found I was the only person there who could actually do economic research! I can still laugh about it though!