Not Me
24 March

Well, it's not me.

Instead, the shock news was that it was Kamal who was chosen alongside Steff, Shirley and Geoff to be made redundant.

A lot of other valued colleagues will go and it looks as though I shall never get the chance to cup Stevie B's buttocks. Sorry, I know that that is crass but, honestly, there are times when this whole business is so horrible that crassness feels like a safe refuge.

Ever since the news was announced late on Tuesday afternoon, there has been a sense of grief around the place. To say that the atmosphere in the office is like that of a morgue would be an understatement.

In training, only myself, Steve, Jill and Ian remain on the JobCentre Plus contract. All of the Employer Liaison Unit staff have been seconded elsewhere. We had a meeting last thing today and it became immediately apparent that the next few weeks, whilst the dust settles, are going to be appalling. Everything has been arranged around the premise of a full complement of staff.

Next week, for example, we have a commercial training course running for the whole week and so the technical training will be divided between Ian and myself and we'll both be basically reading from the notes. We both know that we will be giving substandard performances (which rankles) and we both know that Kamal would do the job much better (which rankles even more).

No doubt, some of this will smooth itself out over the next few weeks as we re-organise things to suit ourselves but the transition is going to be foul.

I've also has another couple of disappointments in areas which had been my lifesavers for the future.

On Thursday, I attended an initial training session to achieve my Internal Verifiers Award, V1. This will mean little or nothing to anyone outside of the world of training. However, it is a well regarded qualification and will certainly be of use when it comes gaining employment elsewhere.

The whole thing is about quality control and ensuring that assessors are acting fairly and consistently. Having run a City and Guilds assessment centre for the past eighteen months, I was hoping that I could use a lot of evidence from that. However, I was told that, because it was all for a Vocational Qualification rather than an NVQ, my evidence was probably inadmissible.

I'm going to challenge this because nowhere in the standards for the V1 are the letters NVQ actually mentioned. We'll see how far I get but it was infuriating to receive the set back.

I was also less than glad when I was talking to my City and Guilds External Verifier the following day to hear how badly paid an External Verifier is. I'd been hoping that it might provide a route to escape. However, the fees are £75 for a normal visit lasting up to 5 hours and £150 for an NVQ assessment taking a day. In the first year, you might only be given 10 centres to visit giving you an income of just £750.

Les now has 60 centres to look after. It's a lot of work for just a few thousand pounds a year. As he said, it suits the semi-retired and gives him little holiday money. It's not a major career move. I'm still going to follow it through, however. If Connect stays open long enough, I might be able to get myself established or something else might come up.

In all of this turbulence, I am pleased to say that I have had no cravings for cigarettes nor alcohol and I have not lost weight. So, at some level, I'm doing something right for the moment. But it is hard. At least, I'm keeping channels of communication open by talking abut things with people.

And by talking about my own story, I have heard of many others. My yoga teacher, Barbara, told me that her husband has been made redundant four times. My sister, Linda, works part time and they have shed staff recently. Following the Budget, the scheme for getting computers to low paid workers has been cut as as a result some 60 firms will be letting go of up to 2,000 staff. Our neighbour Spencer told me abut his brother in law who works for Jaguar and was told over a year ago that his job was at risk and has been living on weekly contracts ever since not knowing when he will be out of a job.

So, you can imagine that, with all of this going on, Ross and I have not been going out very much. I passed a pleasant time with Roland this evening eating, drinking a couple of glasses of wine, chatting and watching a DVD of Der Rosenkavalier.

Back at home Ross and I have been watching Queer as Folk which first graced our television screens back in 1999. What I wrote then pretty much sums up what I felt about the series now - starts well but then peters out.

Ross picked up the recently released DVD of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire whilst we were in Liverpool on Monday (the trip also included a visit to the permanent collection of the Walker Art Gallery). We watched it straight through on Monday night. I liked it much better than the film we saw last year. There were some extra bits and they all added to the development of the characters. The film as released was just too much hurtling action and not enough about the people concerned.

I've been reading Britain BC by Francis Pryor. This was recommended to me by Gary at work (another colleague I shall be losing). Francis Pryor appears regularly on Channel Four's Time Team when the excavation is about prehistoric times. the book is a jaunty summation of his thoughts about the five thousand years before the Christian era. I'm really enjoying it. Enough to award four stars.