When I left the service, the job I was leaving to go and do was pulled out from under me, well as it turned out it never existed in the first place. That for me was lesson 1 about civvy street.
Someone that was in a position of authority, he was Vice Principal of a university, was capable of offering a job that he was in no way qualified or authorised to.
And to make matters worse he then kept up the charade, or so I believed, for the next 11 months after I had signed off without telling me that the job I was giving up the life I knew to go and do was in fact fictional.
Then with just 1 month left of my service, he chucked the spanner in the works. Though he didn’t admit that he should never have offered the job in the first instance.
When I confronted him about it later, he admitted that he was unaware until the eleventh hour that he was not ultimately responsible for filling vacant posts at the university as he had been led to believe, and he had to get everything “signed off”.
So a title, a position of authority, didn’t actually have responsibility attached to it. Or at least certainly not the responsibility that the title holder believed.
The role of the position, Vice Principal, was undefined – indeed it transpired that he didn’t even have a proper job specification. I know I actually saw the so called job spec and it was so ambiguous that you would need a law degree, to be sure when you stepped out of your office every day, you were not actually contravening something. Or worse still seen to be undermining the power of the Principal.
Could you imagine a second in command of a military unit taking up the post without being aware what the roles and responsibilities were? Not being aware of what authority was theirs and what they would need to refer upwards?
This wasn’t to be the only poorly layed out job spec that I was to see, in one job I had to write my own only to have the caveat “subject to change” placed on it. I even began to think that this was being done on purpose in case of industrial action being taken later on.
But in hindsight things were probably being done in this manner due to a lack of understanding. No clear direction was being provided and there was no clearly outlined mission. People were doing the best that they could with what was available.
There were no Queens Regs giving guidance no SOP’s for people to work to. This was just the difference between a totally structured working environment with everybody working towards common goals and a bunch of people that didn’t really know or understand what the common goals were.
Thanks to Ell Brown for the picture.
