Some people just ask for it, don’t they?
Yesterday, at the start of the Slovenia v England game, the staff of the Dundee City Council crashed the whole computer system and the Council site was unavailable to tax payers for transaction of business.
The management (and I use the term loosely, because it implies some sort of foresight, forward planning and control, none of which has been in any way evident) quickly blocked the BBC website which was live streaming the match.
What?
The action they took was to stop the match being shown. Right.
The only councillor they could find to comment was a Liberal Fraser MacPherson (without whom the pages of the Courier would be decidedly bare). He rather lamely said that he would speak to Council chief executive, David Dorward, to make the point that they should not be watching sport in council time. But he pointed out that because of flexible working practices some staff may have saved up time and might have been watching in their own time.
What?
Don’t they have homes to go to?
MacPherson continued: “The bottom line is no one is going to object to staff watching sport in their own time as long as management is Ok with it. We would have to be sure that there were sufficient staff to maintain services and particularly those staff in public facing positions.”
What? Again. If they were doing it in their own time, but on our equipment why would there not be sufficient staff in public facing positions (whatever that is?)
If staff are at work, they should be working. If staff are finished work, they should go home, or to an internet café or whatever to watch the match. No one should be watching the match in the office. If we allow people to watch sport why can’t they watch Emmerdale or Strictly Come Dancing? What nonsense.
How could other staff do their job effectively with the distraction of television entertainment? That’s not what the computers are for.
A council spokesman has said that measures have been introduced to stop this happening again.
So let me just enlighten him or her to the fact that we, the people who pay for this, are incandescent. Why aren’t the people who were logged in to the BBC website being disciplined? It would happen to me if I did it.
Ironically the very next day, the Dundee Trades Union Council, in the form of Mike Arnott, its secretary, has suggested that as many as 660 jobs may be lost in Dundee City Council in the cutbacks. Apparently 600 were due to go before the Budget and that has been revised upwards because of the austerity measures announced by Mr Osborne.
The council’s administration leader, Ken Guild, refuted this saying that the figures had been “plucked out of the air”. He declined, however, to say if the figures were in any way realistic. He said that he didn’t know how many people would be going, but rolled out the usual platitudes about avoiding compulsory redundancies. It seems, however, that there will be many more unemployed in Dundee in the near future.
Whilst I hate to see people made redundant, I really can’t help but wonder what we, the Council Tax payers, get for our money.
Yesterday, at the start of the Slovenia v England game, the staff of the Dundee City Council crashed the whole computer system and the Council site was unavailable to tax payers for transaction of business.
The management (and I use the term loosely, because it implies some sort of foresight, forward planning and control, none of which has been in any way evident) quickly blocked the BBC website which was live streaming the match.
What?
The action they took was to stop the match being shown. Right.
The only councillor they could find to comment was a Liberal Fraser MacPherson (without whom the pages of the Courier would be decidedly bare). He rather lamely said that he would speak to Council chief executive, David Dorward, to make the point that they should not be watching sport in council time. But he pointed out that because of flexible working practices some staff may have saved up time and might have been watching in their own time.
What?
Don’t they have homes to go to?
MacPherson continued: “The bottom line is no one is going to object to staff watching sport in their own time as long as management is Ok with it. We would have to be sure that there were sufficient staff to maintain services and particularly those staff in public facing positions.”
What? Again. If they were doing it in their own time, but on our equipment why would there not be sufficient staff in public facing positions (whatever that is?)
If staff are at work, they should be working. If staff are finished work, they should go home, or to an internet café or whatever to watch the match. No one should be watching the match in the office. If we allow people to watch sport why can’t they watch Emmerdale or Strictly Come Dancing? What nonsense.
How could other staff do their job effectively with the distraction of television entertainment? That’s not what the computers are for.
A council spokesman has said that measures have been introduced to stop this happening again.
So let me just enlighten him or her to the fact that we, the people who pay for this, are incandescent. Why aren’t the people who were logged in to the BBC website being disciplined? It would happen to me if I did it.
Ironically the very next day, the Dundee Trades Union Council, in the form of Mike Arnott, its secretary, has suggested that as many as 660 jobs may be lost in Dundee City Council in the cutbacks. Apparently 600 were due to go before the Budget and that has been revised upwards because of the austerity measures announced by Mr Osborne.
The council’s administration leader, Ken Guild, refuted this saying that the figures had been “plucked out of the air”. He declined, however, to say if the figures were in any way realistic. He said that he didn’t know how many people would be going, but rolled out the usual platitudes about avoiding compulsory redundancies. It seems, however, that there will be many more unemployed in Dundee in the near future.
Whilst I hate to see people made redundant, I really can’t help but wonder what we, the Council Tax payers, get for our money.
