Jobsworth by Malcolm Philips

Author:Malcolm Philips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Local government, Council, Town Hall, County Hall, Local authority, Civl Service, Public Sector, Memoir, Humour, Bureaucrat, Red Tape
ISBN: 9781909183186
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

DO YOU SERVE JEWS?

I don’t quite remember how I got caught for it, but I was drafted into being an occasional guide for visitors to County Hall.

Quite why many of them came is a bit of a mystery, because it was scarcely a venue brimful of excitement. Some were students from the local colleges and schools, some were young Europeans from language schools or making exchange visits, and some from further afield were directed to us by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or the British Council.

The usual route for the sightseeing started with a visit to the council’s committee rooms (quite grand, high ceilings, leather chairs, marble corridor), and then moved on to the council chamber (very grand, lots of oak, serried ranks of leather chairs and desks in tiers, microphones, coats of arms) where I gave some general chat about the history of local government, what it did, how much it cost and a few other statistics. The next port of call was the reprographics room, where most of the council’s printing and copying was done (a bit of action here, with machines churning out stuff and the smell of ammonia from the device used to copy architects’ plans and the like). The final stop was usually the computer room (nothing to see except humming metal and plastic boxes with ‘IBM’ on the front, a sterile atmosphere and a fairly sterile brief talk from the chief programmer). Occasionally we would show small school groups the Education Department’s film library, but this was scarcely a laugh a minute, either. Sometimes I took groups to look at our terribly modern telephone exchange (not much action here except “Good afternoon, County Hall” and “Hold the line, I’m putting you through”) and, with something of an ulterior motive, groups of trainee secretaries from the local college of further education were shown one of the better-equipped typing pools and introduced to the operators of the golf-ball typewriters or typesetting machines, which were then considered the height of sophistication.

Most of the school and college visits were murderous, with the noisy younger end of market not having the foggiest idea what local government was, and the older batches of the great spotty unwashed (as the late Alan Coren referred to teenagers) who didn’t want to be there, anyway. We tended to get the older children at the end of the summer term when the GCE exams had been sat and the school was thrashing around desperately trying to find something to pass the time until the end of term.

Even worse were the visits that I sometimes made to schools to speak about local government. The audiences were usually drawn from fifth and sixth forms, and, again, they didn’t want to be there. There are fewer less exciting uses of time than addressing hordes of unwilling adolescents imprisoned on hot sunny afternoons in the cavernous and stark surroundings of school halls. What usually happened was that I was introduced by a member of the teaching staff,

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