When ya gotta go...
At my Redundancy Meeting on Tuesday, I was offered the opportunity to leave immediately. Had they not offered me an acceptable severance- nothing fancy but at least I won't have to work my month's notice, I might have taken up the offer, but I knew that a lot of stuff would just get dumped on other workers here and I felt that wouldn't be fair. I agreed to stay on till Friday to tie loose ends etc and perform a proper handover. By yesterday I was regretting it due to coming up against the strange logic of the Finance Manager- yet again. I have been managing up to 13 different activities funded by a dozen or more funding sources so of course I was going to have several interactions with this person but a couple of them were downright odd:
In one: I suggested a simple way for one of my duties to be passed to another worker with minimal impact on their work. This was rejected in favour of a sequence of 'steps' that start with the Finance Manager, dances around the organisation and goes back to the Finance Manager. In another: I was given a list of the individual fund accounts which showed deficits in some and surpluses in others. I checked the details of the funds and identified that at least two of the surpluses could be legitimately used to balance the deficits and shared that idea with the FM. The FM sent back a message saying 'are you suggesting that we use the surpluses to balance the deficits?" -Which is exactly what my message had said. I responded that it seemed logical to me but that if it was impossible for some reason I apologised for wasting their time. The response I got was 'I wasn't saying it was impossible I was asking if that was what you were suggesting'. I didn't know how to answer that so I didn't.
I got on with closing things down, removing posters, unsubscribing from email alerts, getting the cafe crew's stock out of the building before it becomes too difficult for them to get into it. I was OSTENTATIOUS about drawing attention to things I'd brought into the building myself and was taking home- it is too easy for people to make accusations after the fact! I have a strange feeling about the paper and electronic files I'll be leaving. They only want them (they say) in case a problem surfaces in the future but I'm suppressing the urge to copy everything lol.
Still no update on 'the other matter'. The strangest part of it all is that it appears that there is an expectation or belief that my organisation is trying to take over the building when we have been clear in our aim to develop it to be run BY local people FOR local people. I don't know how much clearer we can be about that. We have invested a lot of time and energy and all my personal savings into supporting a small growing band of people to run their own enterprises. The fury directed at me is damaging our ability to maintain the support we've started. It would be easier for me to leave my job and jump into the shit race for a new one- i'm qualified and experienced etc, but I fear ending up again where I am today: having put energy and enthusiasm into something that is vetoed before it comes to fruition. I HATE working for insecure managers who pretend they're perfect and infallible- it becomes brittle and toxic. In all of the jobs I've done in the last thirty years I have met too many of them and it is killing me.
Ironically, it looks as though AT LAST we're about to get the first structural grants for this project. There was hint in a recent conversation that it was not believed that we'd actually pull off our plans. Perhaps when the cash comes in that impression will change. If it doesn't we will take the cash and apply the model we've developed elsewhere... Which would be crap actually, because its not about sticking our idea into any old place- there is something really special about where we've been trying to develop.
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