My Life In Bureaucracy
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From the age of 14, after reading an article in ‘Mizz’ magazine about career choices, all I knew was that I wanted to help people. I didn’t know how; I just wanted to make lives easier, the way mine sometimes could be made easier. I started studying psychology, from A level to degree level, and although I wasn’t able to use my BSc right away due to starting a family almost as soon as I graduated, knowledge of behavioural science has been immensely useful to me ever since. While my children were little, I worked for voluntary organisations such as the Samaritans and undertook courses in counselling skills, whilst working in retail for the flexible hours and useful extra money. Even my time in retail wasn’t wasted in conjunction with my ‘career plan’. After being taken on by the John Lewis Partnership at the age of 22, I was kept out of sight of the customers for an entire week whilst being rigorously trained in a training suite within the store, which equipped me with the skills to identify and find ways of meeting the needs of the customers I would encounter.
When I began working for the youth service, I loved the idea of identifying specific needs a child or young person may have, in order to be able to meet them - which in turn would help them and make their lives easier. Both my John Lewis and counselling training helped with this. I didn’t love the unfamiliar vocabulary, which sounded disconcertingly like ‘Newspeak’, the language from George Orwell’s novel 1984 to me. However, I acclimatised. Needs not only had to be identified and met, but outcomes had to be identified, evidenced and documented. Although in fairness, I have no experience of or idea how to effectively manage a countywide youth service, in times of crisis, the youth service response would often paraphrase that of Reg, the leader of the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’: “Right. This calls for an immediate………assessment form”.
Young people, many of whom were blessed with the sort of attention spans of which goldfish would be wildly jealous, found the endless form-filling as tedious as I did. Especially when it rarely led to the outcome they’d been hoping for. “What’s the point of all this?” they would ask. If I told you how many times I resisted the urge to reply “I have no idea – but I suspect it’s so you can be fooled into thinking your individual needs count for anything to the government, whilst they can fool everyone into believing they’ve met them anyway.”, you probably wouldn’t believe me.
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