Tether End Reached.

I will have worked for my public sector employer for a year next week and it has been almost everything I feared it would be.

Income is up, spending is down, visitors are up, more money has been made from hiring out space, there are 5 new retail or business tenants, local people are more involved and engaged, there are very few negatives about the place in the public realm and, due to a wizard wheeze courtesy of my superior; the big-spending problem department run by a stubborn, insecure supervisor with limited experience will not be my responsibility very soon. That will mean that the operation I run will be in profit which was the two year aim of the job.

I have struggled to get a handle on the public sector procedures. Like my previous experiences of working with/in the public sector; the emphasis is on procedure and appearances rather than logic, practicality and common sense. No training is provided for labyrinthine procedures created in house, yet 'one' is expected to be able to do them. Everything about the organisation is anti risk although, to be fair; attempting to sue them is a pretty universal game. Considering my responsibilities which include 18 staff and about 20 business and retail tenants as well as a few hundred visitors a day, the salary is pathetic. I discovered that working as a groundsman for Newcastle City Council pays £2,000 more per year!

I had noticed how difficult it was to get any semblance of support of interest from other departments. Once I'd experienced the indifference of superiors it became clear that there is NO reason to excel in a job like mine- unless you aspire to climb the greasy internal job pole, I would rather endure torture. The culture is of bored, sometimes resentful people who could not care about anything that does not affect them directly. Then, there are those to whom I have to report or defer, some of whom debase the word 'mediocre' but believe themselves to be terribly important. I organised a programme that has run all week. In February, I asked for a list of media contacts to whom I would send press releases. When nothing came back, I sent two reminders. The programme started last Friday. On Friday morning, I received a message telling me that the press release would be signed off "sometime today". As you can imagine: I was 'delighted' at this useless activity 😡.  WORSE was to discover that, in order to exercise their authority, someone had altered a direct quote from me and said exactly what I had been avoiding since deciding in early November 2017 that we would do the event.

Worst of all: after a year; I remain no better off financially, in fact shit has hit the fan in some respects. I can't afford to service my car (153,000 on 'clock' and 66 mile daily commute) when it fails I will be forced to resign.