There was once a teacher, a nurse, a policewoman and a social worker. They were all dedicated, hard working and devoted. All working people who didn't want to be known as persons! They chose four of the traditional professions where people contact is paramount. True these are not the trendiest professions in this IT driven society but they chose these careers all the same! They were all people's people not paperwork or IT people, which is why they chose the professions they did! Five years into their careers though, they were totally disillusioned.
The teacher went into teaching because he loved children and wanted to make a difference to their lives. He was a great and enthusiastic communicator, a lover of drama who used both skills to help him with his profession and his passion. The nurse also loved people contact, being of service and was very good at managing difficult situations of which there are a plenty in any hospital. She also had this uncanny knack of sensing when something was wrong with a patient and acting on it quickly and calmly. Common sense maybe, but it is a skill, which many do not achieve even after years of university or higher education. The young policewoman had been influenced by BBC Crimewatch type programmes in her childhood, and also wanted to be of service. The social worker also started his career with great enthusiasm. He had suffered quite a lot of abuse and trauma in his own life, and was determined to turn this into a positive experience by using his understanding of suffering to help others.
They certainly didn't go into any of these professions for the money. True the teacher had plenty of holidays and could supplement the income with private lessons, but this particular teacher gave of his best, spent hours on small individual tutorials and did much more than mark the homework; he gave his all so that every student would be guided and inspired by his comments, and private lessons would not be needed.
The nurse was totally exhausted, always covering for many of her colleagues who were sick, but was most irritated because of the mounds of paperwork and bureaucracy that followed the arrival of management consultants who spent their time monitoring everything.
And of course no extra staff was ever engaged to cope with all the monitoring! You actually had to spend less time with patients to fill in all the endless forms, which of course led to a decline in standards in patient care, which surprise surprise was the result of more monitoring!
The social worker too was becoming disillusioned. He went into social work to help people, to show people how to help themselves and found that increasing piles of paperwork, or computer work, was taking him away from where he wanted to be in the first place.
These four professionals were nationals of a country that joined the EU with great enthusiasm. When that happened, the bureaucracy, monitoring and paperwork got even more cumbersome.
The teacher had endless targets and had to fill in forms saying how targets were or were not met. Instead of employing more social workers the government had to employ a whole army of people to comply with all the requisites of monitoring. And the questions always remained. Who monitors those who monitor? Can we afford to take people away from their actual job to fill in forms, particularly in professions like the police and nursing, social work and teaching?
They tried to talk to their respective managers but found an even more stressed-out group of people, who were in the front line fielding off requests for information that arrived by the bucket load every day. Besides these, there were parliamentary questions, surveys, questionnaires, media requests, which again meant that these managers were no longer managing people to provide a service. They were managing information, and people were being left by the wayside.
Everyone in this country seems to have forgetten that IT is just a tool to help us deliver services more efficiently, a tool that is meant to help. Instead, IT and IT driven policies became an end in themselves. IT people were the most highly paid, the most valued, even though the skills needed in IT don't denote any superior intelligence at all, much less a talent that adds quality to our lives. Yet an IT person could earn double+ what any of these important professionals could. They even had a Minister dedicated to promoting this area.
They couldn't believe that they had once believed the lie that IT would make their lives easier and more efficient.
So they all left. One managed to be boarded out and never worked again. One dedicated herself to her family wasting all the thousands government had spent training her. One went abroad and one retrained as management consultant, deciding that once you can't beat them you might as well join them. These people all exist. They are still in a minority but their number will increase. We need to question more fully whether the IT driven culture of monitoring everything and anything is actually improving lives and services, or whether it is becoming an end in itself, to the detriment of real people and the quality of their working life.
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