Mr and Mrs McMuffin

change is good, repeat after me, change is good

I am generally not made happy by change. I find these redesigns unsettling.

I'm not keen on being a purveyor of dog t-shirts and thongs. Thongs are just so 1999, everyone knows big pants are the new thongs. I imagine this latest lark will go the same way as the Penpal account [ha ha, I think that should read PayPal, Mr McMuffin]. Mr McMuffin finds the idea of making money from the internet endlessly amusing, you should hear him chortling away.

Back to me, I don't like interviews. If I do well my life will change, if I don't do well things will stay the same except that I'll lose my dignity and self respect. You can't buy these you know. They are free, therefore I conclude (and reassure myself) they aren't really worth anything, so it doesn't matter if I lose them I can always get more.

I have as much crammed into my head as I can take before it dribbles out of my ears. Go on, ask me about the Children Act, Children Bill, London CP procedures, Assessment Framework, 'Working Together' and Children's trusts. I shall make mincemeat of your feeble questions about PAF indicators. Supervision/Equality issues/Practice questions/Staff management/Partnership working/Legal issues in CP, ask away, I shall go on until long after your eyes have started to feel heavy.

I can guarantee that I will know all of this until 1.30pm tomorrow, then the mysterious mind wipe will occur. Sod it. It's only 20p more a year, right?

you know...

I should be working. I have a report to write.

it's the kiss on the lips...

...before they execute you 'Goodfellas' style. I have a very bad feeling that I've crossed into an alternate universe. So far everything isn't too different, but work is going really well. As you may recall I have been offered a promotion and I now have the results of my appraisal. I have a pay rise and a performance bonus. I didn't even have to drag more chidren screaming from the loving arms of their parents than any other Social Worker to achieve this. It's a bit creepy. I would like to think that my obvious talents have received recognition at last, but I suspect that I fell asleep and Mr McMuffin put me in his time machine. Thank God I didn't end up in Karan's microwave.

something for you to do

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le weekend

Like most kids, I used to look forward to the long summer holiday from about October. I always imagined that the next one would be the best ever and I would do something amazing every day. Of course they were never like that. Mostly it would be long patches of boredom and rain with my equally bored friends. We seemed to work so hard dreaming up new ways to entertain ourselves. Some days would be sunny and exciting and they would redeem the whole holiday.

The holiday feeling would start to fade by the end of August and the 'Back to School' signs appeared. I would refuse to go into any shop that displayed these signs, trying to persuade my Mum that they didn't deserve our custom for hurting my feelings so unnecessarily. I swear to God that I have seen these signs in shops in July this year, no wonder our nation's children want to grow up so quickly and leave this torture behind.

Anyway, weekends are a bit like the summer holiday for me. I look forward to them from Monday morning and always imagine that they'll be great. Instead they're just OK. Cleaning, gardening seeing friends, seeing family and before you know it, it's Sunday, the depressing 'Back to School' day.

just sitting here

I am absolutely exhausted. I was sitting at my desk reading through some papers for a new assessment that I am about to undertake, when I was overcome with tiredness. I decided to sneak into the manager's office for a little nap. She was not in there obviously. I have just had a 15 minutes power nap, and I am ready to go on with the rest of my day. I wish I was going straight home, but I have to go and do some private work later this evening. I am looking forward to another lamb dinner tonight, and some more episodes of 24, which surprisingly doesn't seem to be 24 episodes long, more like 10 or 12. I think we have been robbed.

at home again...

I am sitting at the machine trying to finish that awful report. This is my last day to do it, and so it will be done. Just had a quick look around a few blogs only to discover that we have been removed from the little hedonist's blogroll. We only appeared there last week, and this week we have been removed. Have the quality of our posts really gone down hill that quickly?

Also, apparently if you Ask Jeeves about downloading music using bit torrents then our site comes up at the top for the UK and fourth for all of the internet. I just knew I should have been a little bit more circumspect about it all.

congratulations ashley

Ms Ginger Cake's genius son has managed to get thirteen GCSEs (six A, six B and one C). All that hard work has paid off. I know that now may not be the best time to tell you how much I hate him. Not only is he very, very clever, he is also very good looking, and really nice too. Oh, and girls love him. It just is not fair! I suppose some measure of congratulations must go to Ms Ginger Cake too, for raising such a fine son. Well done, Ashley, and well done, Ms Ginger Cake.

i am so angry

I can feel it in my stomach. I finished another report this morning and sent it off to the legal department to file with the court. I sent them the report in Word and a PDF of the last page with my signature. The lawyer I sent it to has emailed me back asking me to send her a signed hard copy so that she can file that with the court. We exchanged a few emails, with me asking her why, and her saying it's the rules. I wrote her a sarcastic email but decided not to send it. I telephoned her instead. I told her that I had never had to do this before, and it just created more work for me. She insisted that she had to file the original document. I reminded her that we lived in an electronic age, and asked her to tell me which copy of my Word document was the original (that wasn't patronising at all). I told her that faxed documents were acceptable to the court. She just wouldn't have. In the end, I told her that I wasn't sending her anymore and that she should just file the report as it is. She told me that she has emailed my manager, and no doubt sent a letter in the post too, to complain about me.

I hate pedantic lawyers. We seem to have a lot of them where I work. I think they forget that we are not here to service them, but rather they are there to service us.

I am not an easy person to work with sometimes. I have such a low threshold for fools.

the lengths he will go to

Mr McMuffin spends a lot of time working at home, which means I rarely get the chance to. I arranged to work at home today, safe in the knowledge that Mr McMuffin would be in court all day. He's just returned home after finding out that the train he was planning to take won't be going anywhere, as the whole line is closed due to a derailment. Now the fight for the Mac begins. He will play the 'I've got a court statement to write' card, I can shout 'snap' as I've got one too. I also have an investigation report to complete, two complaints and a staff appraisal. I win.

Ha ha. Mr McMuffin is necessary to the whole court process today and has been asked to attend whenever he can make it. Sadly, we are not out in the middle of nowhere so there are other lines he can use to get to court...and he'd only just changed out of his suit.

I have been working happily in the garden as it's a glorious day. The wind is quite strong so I have had a little light exercise chasing confidential papers around the garden. I have discovered that my lovely Bodum cafetiere makes a bloody good paperweight

the middle ages

I was sitting having a cup of coffee when the clerk to the court phoned me. He said it was essential that I get to court anyway that I could, the Judge really wanted to talk to me. I asked him if it could be done over the telephone. He hummed and hawed and eventually said no. The Judge wanted me there. It took me 2 hours and 30 minutes to get there. The Judge was very grateful. I wasn't sworn in, and he asked me three questions, which probably took about 5 minutes in all, and then dismissed the case. Why? What was that all about? Why couldn't he have spoken to me on the telephone? (By the way, it's a long story, but neither of the parties had bothered to turn up to this, the final hearing.)

workflow...

I finally finished the report I was writing at 4.30am this morning. I had two hours sleep on the settee because I didn't want to wake Mrs McMuffin and I went into work. Had a very stressful meeting with a family who told me that the conclusions of my assessment were completely wrong, I recommended that their child be removed from them, and then I met with THE MOST BORING PERSON...EVER (TM) who talked, and talked, and talked, but hardly said anything. The only way I could get away from him was to stand up and start walking to the door. Fortunately, he followed me and I was eventually able to bid him a fond farewell. The good news for me today was that I didn't have to go to what was going to be a terrible meeting with the horrible manager who had decided that my assessment was wrong before she had even read the report. Legal, God bless lawyers, told that her that it was inappropriate for her to be trying to get me to change my recommendations before the report was submitted to court. So, I came home early and had a couple of hours sleep. Feel fine now, and ready to eat and watch some more of The West Wing.

I didn't mean to say any of that, I really wanted to say, I LOVE MY MAC. The workflow for my report was simple. You can see it in the little chart that I have prepared. I DO know that this is all a little bit sad. At work we have a strange networked system running Windows 98. No hard drive, no disc drives, all very strange. I hate it. They would never buy us a useful program like Adobe Acrobat or Omnigraffle. Oh, I don't know what I am waffling on about, so I'll stop now. I think I am suffering from sleep deprivation.

Before I go though, here is a little movie of Mrs McMuffin trying out her vacuum spider catching thing that she bought at Lakeland the other day. The quality is really bad, but you'll get the idea.

breaking up is hard to do

I have mixed feelings about my time with the team I have worked for. It's been hard work, but they are good people and I shall miss working with them. I have been on the verge of tears today and am going to try not to sob like a little boy tomorrow. I have been a bit sneaky and arranged a joint leaving do next week, so that I can leave in bits and pieces and also share the limelight. I am grateful to Ms Ginger Cake for her cooperation with this plan.

I think I'm going to miss working with Ms Ginger Cake the most. We have been really lucky to have been such good friends as well as workmates and she always organises my lunch. In fact, after being congratulated on our new jobs, the second thing people say is how much they think we shall miss working with each other. I think that when I achieve my retirement plan of being a mad old cat lady living in a caravan with my sister, I shall invite Ms Ginger Cake to join us.

I found something very interesting at Roxanne's blog, from guest blogger Tas. Go and have a look and think about signing up, if you're not from the US and would like to do your part in the elections.

lazy days

This morning I decided to completely ignore my to do list and just do nothing except read. Unfortunately I've run out of books, so I took a stroll into town to get a few. For some reason our town is a paradise for market researchers and I always feel a bit sorry for them, having done a stint when I was a student. I was particularly enamoured of the researcher who asked if I fell into a particular age bracket. I just smirked and said, I wish. It was a creative ploy, as I felt so well disposed towards her that I sat for over half an hour going through what appeared to be a survey commissioned by Expedia. I was also able to check all the qualification boxes, which is some satisfaction for having spent so many years not earning any money and living in a rundown heap.

Feeling good about myself, I returned home to take on the difficult task of making a hair appointment. Now I'm as comfortable as is humanly possible with making difficult calls to parents in my work and pretty much anything, but I am terrified of making appointments with hairdressers, dentists and garages. I am proud to say that I am now the owner of a double booking with the style director at a good salon. We'll see exactly how good they are on Thursday afternoon by how many glasses of wine I need to drink when it's done.

I couldn't make a booking for Gypsy Tart, Ginger Cake and I to have the treatments we wanted at the spa, so I'll just have to have another day off in a few weeks. That sounds so good, doesn't it? I could really get used to this, but I don't think I'll ever be able to give up work and fill my days with 'me me me' activities unless we get a rich benefactor. You must be out there somewhere, find us. I'll even throw in Mr McMuffin for an Indecent Proposal style deal and I promise I won't think he's dirty afterwards.

assaulted i was

A client assaulted me the other day. I have been working with people now for 20 odd years, and some of them have been seriously messed up, but yet not one of them has ever tried to hit me. In fact, that's not really true, I was kicked on the sole of my shoe once by a 16 year old boy. He was attempting to provoke me by spraying me with a water pistol, and when I could stand it no more, I jumped up from my chair. I think this gave him more of a scare than he had expected. I suppose he thought I was going to beat him up or something. After he had kicked me and jumped on the waste paper bin, he very quickly calmed down. Believe it or not, I apologised for scaring him, and he apologised for provoking me. He managed to push the bin back into shape, and all was well with the world.

Anyway, I had this meeting with this couple the other day. It lasted no more than five minutes. By the end of it the woman had grabbed me by the throat and threatened "you better watch it, you get yours." Fortunately her paranoid schizophrenic heroin using husband was a bit more together than she was, and he was able to intervene. He pulled her off me and ushered her through the door. The amazing thing about all of this is that just before she leapt on me, she said to her husband, "I don't know why you're bothering, he's not listening to a word you say." Now, without going into all the details, the truth is, although I will deny this to my dying day, I was just thinking, "why the fuck do I have to listen to this? I don't know why I bother."

I didn't bother reporting her to the police. I reckoned that she had enough problems at the moment, and she didn't do me any physical harm. However, I think the real reason I didn't contact the police is that I was feeling too guilty at having provoked her. Although, how was I to know that she was telepathic?

more drivel

Well this is a marvellous little thing from the BBC, for anyone interested in the election results. We believe in the BBC more than ever these days.

The new job is interesting. I have to close my door every so often and have a little smirk at how stupid they are to put me in charge. The people are very nice, but I don't have any chums yet and the pool gets smaller as I head towards the top of the pyramid (I'm about 8' from the ground now). I do miss Ms Ginger Cake's daily presence and I think that the rest of the division must know this because some higher ups have copied me into an email which suggests that the pair of us go to a conference together. Aah!

David has once again beaten me to it and done it better than I could. Damn him, Mr 'Zeitgeist' TEFLSmiler! He's not getting a link, I can tell you. Instead I'm going to link to an earlier post about smacking. I clearly forgot to mention at the time that it was only sensible to include an exemption for red headed step children. Please consider this a correction.

looking good

I love my new job. All that anxiety, complaining and let's face it, fear and I'm really enjoying myself. It's going to be hard, as the team is depleted through training and there are scarily varying levels of competence, but it's nice being in charge of it all. I probably won't be saying this next week, so I think it's important for me to share the happy for once.

Like most miserable old gits, I'm not outside watching the fireworks as I can see the display in the park from my kitchen window. Last year I made an effort to go out and was very excited when I found one of those fairground stalls where you can hire balls and throw them at rows and rows of china. I was so overwhelmed by the thought of legitimately smashing pottery, that I went a bit mad with the throwing and one of the balls sailed over the roof of the stall into the masses. I bid a hasty retreat and retired to the pub with my chums. I think it was the sensible thing to do before too many people committed my face to memory.

fickle, moi?

Quite enjoyed work today. Nothing more to say as we're watching The Long Way Round in about two minutes. That Ewan McGregor is so charming, he's even got Mr McMuffin interested in watching motorbikes.

bristol are brave or stupid

I'm going to watch this tonight. From what I've heard we get to see the classic clients as none of the middle class families involved agreed to take part.

I'm again feeling quite despondent about my profession after a day of forced training around supervision. The major issues impacting on us such as shortages of experienced staff and impossible demands were left unaddressed and I was left safe in the knowledge that anything that goes wrong is my responsibility as a manager. Funny that, they told me the same thing when I was a practitioner. It appears that all the responsibility and limited control is stalking me like the apparition of Christmas Past. Where are kittens when I need them? Even raindrops on roses would be acceptable.

Update: Interesting TV. Liked Leroy, didn't like Di. Was pissed off her explanations to clients about why she was gathering information and her not insisting on hair strand testing. Talked about her power to remove a baby-not without the Courts or Police you don't! Rather worried that the team seemed to see a child dying as mostly about a Social Worker potentially being in trouble rather than a child dying. However, who knows what went on when the cameras weren't rolling. Ah, Social Workers, we eat our young.

sleep eludes me...

...because I don't like my job (again). I really can't go into all the reasons, but it's not the job itself or the personalities, but the competence of the few staff that I have. I'm actually quite worried about their ability to do the work and ensure that children are safe and protected. They act as if the guidance and procedures are 'helpful hints' rather than the structure for their work. Actually, that's not true as I'd feel happier if some of them actually knew enough about the procedures to decide to bend them. Add to this the massive influx of work and I'm feeling quite frightened.

I'm also not feeling all that grateful for the advice from my fellow managers, as these are the people who allowed this situation to arise. Nice as they are, I think that they've been quite content not to address some of the issues I'm identifying (and people outside the team have been raising) and I can't decide whether I'm the 'new broom' or the 'fall guy'.

Not very cheery, but then it is almost 2am on a school night. Here's bunnies.