It’s been a while since I have had the opportunity to write, but personal recovery had to take priority for a while. Still I am back now so things will be getting back to normal.
Having taken the opportunity to recover for a week at one of our marvelous rehabilitation centres (a bit like I imagine prison will be in ten years time if things keep going the way they are) I returned to work yesterday for some restricted duty time and that ‘chat’ with the Chief Grown Up.
I don’t know what I was expecting but, having had the meeting, I have to say that it was a complete waste of time…for all of us. Thankfully, I took a Federation Rep with me just in case things got tasty and I have to say that the tone of the conversation was significantly different once there were three of us in the room. The arse-chewing that I had been told I was in line for suddenly became significantly diluted until it became a farcical attempt at delivering informal advice whilst trying to make it sound like it was a commendation for the Fed’s benefit.
Being the sort of Senior Officer that he is…the sort that have a drawer full of knives to stick in people’s backs, he managed ten minutes of being nice to me in an arm-tied-behind-his-back kind of way so as not to look like he was being a bully before there was an inevitable reversion to type. He couldn’t resist a dig and mentioned that over the last month my pro-active and violent crime detection levels had not been in line with the current targets. He went on to give me a five-minute spiel that involved the use of that word ‘target’ no less than 20 times.
This only had the effect of getting my back up to the point where bravery exceeded common sense and I asked him to tell me what I had done during this period of time – I may have let it slip that I suspected that his information was based on analysis of the figures required to initiate a bollocking rather than an actual understanding of what work had been done outside his blinkered statistical query.
There was no reply…only silence and staring.
I had done my research and went on to say that in the last month I had made more arrests per duty than 92% of the other officers on the district, had taken on additional responsibility for cascade training of the latest batch of skills being ripped from the hands of the experts (doing the job that, incidentally was meant to have been done by the local Inspector), had a week of leave and bought him the opportunity to brag to the local paper about the cannabis factory I discovered.
That didn’t go down well…and then there was shouting.
Following the shouting, during which I asked for confirmation that the 92% of poorer performing officers would also be having a ‘chat’ (apparently they won’t by the way), I left and went back to doing the low risk work that only those with an injury or a baby-bump get tasked with. Ten minutes later I received an email (blatantly a generic one rather than a hand-crafted message) informing me that my performance would be monitored for the next three months to ensure compliance with local targets and ensure I was providing a ‘positive contribution to the performance of the district’.
The second point raised in the email was that my risk assessment failure, namely deciding to bang on the door of a cannabis factory that I didn’t know existed and getting injured as a result, would form part of my next annual Performance and Development Assessment.
Just about then the clock on the wall said it was time to go home. Thankfully the hours are more predictable in my current role…even if I miss my shift and the front line stuff I was not in the mood to give the Queen half an hours work for free at that point. Here’s to a rapid return to the outside world…even if, allegedly, my contribution is insignificant!
