Back to the Future

Well, a little rest has done me a world of good. For the best part of the last few weeks (joys of several re-rostered rest days and a bit of leave thrown in) I have been resolutely not thinking anything job.

However, the time is nigh where I shall be launching myself back in the deep end.

When I say deep end, I don't mean jobs- calls, or interacting with the public. That shall have to wait. I am going to have to wade through a pile of emails sufficiently high enough to remind me of the mountains I was climbing only a few short days ago.

I have a sinking feeling that I might a simple, but possibly fatal error before I ran out the station leaping for joy at the commencement of leave.

Cue drum roll and sounds of impeding doom riders, please.

I did not set my out-of-office email autoreply to "on".

I shall therefore expect one or more of the following.

- Emails urgently warning me for court.
- Emails urgently dewarning me for court when someone actually bothered to check the duties to see if I'm in. The Witness Liason Office or whatever their title is these days have an annoying habit of warning absolutely everybody for a court case, and then checking the roster. They even check on what date you've booked your leave to see if you didn't pull a crafty one. I got warned for court on the first day of my honeymoon. I had great pleasure in telling the somewhat snotty bloke where he could stick his warning as I had booked that leave about a year in advance.
- Emails warning a PC that he has certain work on some job outstanding cc'd to me (because the PC is on leave.)
- Utterly useless tripe sent to the entire division about how the lift in HQ is having scheduled maintenance.
- Emails advising me that a PC still hasn't completed certain work on some outstanding job (because he's still on leave).
- A good work email celebrating the fact that someones latest politically thumbs-up scheme has gone down terribly well. Too many examples to mention.

These emails shall be dealt with in the usual manner:
Delete without reading (50%).
Read briefly and delete. (40%)
Read, consider actioning, then delete. (7%)
Read and actually do something positive, like reply. (3%).

This will probably take most of the shift. The greatest sense of achievement of returning to work will likely be sourced from getting the email inbox back down to zero.

On a more serious note. Am I the only one who gets just a tang of worry about going back to work after time off? Not about nonsense on email I might add. But I do worry that in time off I'll have forgotten something. I haven't had to think about police stuff for a fortnight or so, and part of me says "Do you still know what you're doing?" (I ignore the voice which says you never know what you're doing.....)

Still, I ignore that voice too. I always seem to get back into things just as quickly as occasion demands, which is usually 10 minutes or so after parade. Except night duty, when things have usually gone wrong about half an hour before parade.

Anyway. I still have a couple of days before the joys of going back to shiftwork. Could go and top up my tan. Ha! If you include rust / weatherbeatenness as a tanning type that is.

Normal Service

Shall hopefully soon be resumed. Went back to my old parade site the other day and saw the vehicle fleet has been more than halved: an accident, a mechanical failure, a cockup by the workshop (petrol? diesel? uurrrrr). I couldn't be bothered reading what was wrong with the rest of them.

Everything has changed on my old team. Apparently my governor has got himself into hot water with senior management (I like to think he told them how it was) and is looking for an escape route out of team. I'll miss him. He was a Gadget-esque governor, and policed more by common sense rather than unflexible rigid adherence to SOP's.

I was away for a fortnight or so and came back to just short of 140 emails, of which I managed to delete roughly 125 without taking any further action whatsoever. I hate emails. They're a cheap way of telling everybody what the latest standard operating procedure (SOP) for reporting stolen toothbrushes is, or Suburbiatown Police Department is trialling a new pet come to notice reporting scheme which everyone must adhere to. Everyone can very quickly be told about the latest change in legislation or practice or procedure, and for when you forget about the latest hot sliced bread idea because of email tracking you can't get away with claiming you weren't told about it.

Problem is, when you have 140 emails after 2 weeks off you glaze over by roughly email number 9 and a very rough email triage system develops:
- delete immediately and forget;
- think that this ought to be kept / actioned, and then delete later having done nothing
- actually file it or action it.

The only good thing is that most people who aren't office based and use computers as assistants rather than the-universe-revolves-around-me work essentials, make sure they actually tell you stuff. (and then send an email!)

Changing subject: apparently, and I have it from powers higher than I, I shall be returning to response team imminently. Hum. Deja Vu. I think I might have said that somewhere before. Still waiting. I suppose with the vehicle situation as it is at the moment I won't have a car available anyway. But it's coming up to PDR (performance development review) time! Aagh. For the uninitiated, this is a great paperwork exercise that sounds fantastic on paper but in reality takes forever to do, uses a great deal of artistic licence in evidencing Integrated Competency Framework "behaviours" (as determined by a committee of policy makers who have probably never seen the inside of a police car yet decide precisely what a patrol constable must do in order to demonstrate competence in his job). PDR's would be great if I had a third the number of constables to report on, a third less commitments (you know, the little things that can happen on a 999 response team) and three times the hours in the day.

Maybe I could cope with another month on the Probationer Development wing after all.






Actually, no I couldn't.

The case of the missing probationers

Uncovered quite a debacle in the division admin department. Very frustrating I can't give much detail, but by next week the entire force will know about it so unless I want to put up a big flashing advert for who I am I can't give away much.

But the short version is someone kind of got their wires crossed and all of a sudden a load of people who were supposed to join the force have kind of disappeared. Apparently circumstances changed roughly 7 months ago. And I inadvertently find this out, not the various civilians (probably some of whom get paid more than me) whose job it supposedly is.

I shall stand back and watch the blame wars unfold. As I discovered the cockup, apparently that means I get cc'd in every email related to it. So I'll sit back and chuckle as human resources blame workforce planning who blame personnel who blame the training unit who blame the finance department etc etc.....

And I am told I shall be returning to response team work some point this year! I shall believe it when I walk in the door and get a load of abuse from my old colleagues :-)