The Department of Shirk and Truncheons

Now that Bain was in the job he had to wonder at the whole palaver of the application process. The hoops they put you through, it was like you were applying for a job at NASA or Director General of the United Nations or something. That’s the way the world was these days. 

Everything was phony-baloney and over-hyped. The Department of Shirk and Truncheons had obviously hired some hot-shot consultancy firm to construct a ‘recruitment process’, and to prove they were truly hot-shot they’d come back with some over-blown psychometric/competency-based MENSA thing that was almost wholly unrelated to what was required to do the job, which was basically to answer phones, not swear at people if at all possible, then log a few documents onto an in-house computer system so basic that yer auld granny could do it.

This was to ensure that ‘only the cream got through’ but looking at some of his colleagues you had to wonder: if this was the cream what on earth had the dross been like? Bain imagined Cro-Magnon knuckle-draggers with IQ’s of about four. Folk who tried to bite the interviewers and soiled themselves unselfconsciously when asked ‘did they have any questions?’ at the end.

But, you were forced to ‘play the game’ if you wanted to succeed otherwise you faced banishment into the outer darkness of Food Banks and Christians in vans that came round at midnight offering blankets and soup.

The Tories were for ‘workers not shirkers’ so they said. What they didn’t say was that they were also lying bastards and hypocrites who didn’t like splashing the cash for people who suffered under their credo. Bain didn’t much like folk who were ‘at it’ either and claiming for benefits they shouldn’t be getting: it meant everyone was tarred with the same brush. But, when the folk at the very top were ‘at it’ as well, whether it be fiddling expenses or siphoning off huge wealth to offshore islands then where was the example? At least your benefit claimant, fraudulent or otherwise, was spending the money back into the economy. With the rich, we’d never see it again.

The phone rang again.

“Department of Shirk and Truncheons. Can I help you?”

See? Hardly rocket science.