reflections on a revelation

I had a little rantette yesterday without actually telling you what the point of the visit was….

It seems that, to my surprise if I’m honest, there is some truth in the recently-popular rumours that the position I currently fill may be one that doesn’t exist by the end of the year. Company profits are down somewhat and, as usual in that situation, the only idea Head Office has is to cut out some members of staff and force those that remain to work even harder and even longer. So instead of maintaining a manager at each and every filling station in our area, they want to merge some of the garages together into ‘clusters’ with each cluster having its own boss.

Now, I’d like to take my little sailing boat across the lake of ranting once again here, but I can’t, because what they’re proposing actually makes a lot of sense. So many of the systems we use are uniform across the company that it’s possible to control the orders and rotas from anywhere. The idea is for one manager to be in charge of four different sites, giving them a chance to spend one day a week at each, with the fifth day in their office. Each separate garage would have a ‘senior staff member’ or ‘deputy-under-manager’ who would take on some duties and earn a bit more money, and then the general day-to-day responsibility of running things and dealing with problems would fall onto the duty manager at the supermarket proper. (None of our sites currently are stand-alone filling stations – we’re all attached to, or in close proximity to, a big store.)

I’m going to stop talking about it now as I seem to be slipping into management-level corporate wankspeak and I do NOT want to start sounding like one of ‘them.’

RC 6-4-18