Work

[hallicks]

2 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

Guys this is WORK not WANK.

[Slapnut]

On 8/5/2026 at 12:42 PM, Slapnut said:

Nobody saying 67 every few minutes and asking me what I'd do if I cummed myself in work though, so that's a win.

Somebody said 67 today. I'm going on the dole.

[Chris B]

What would you do if you cummed yourself in the job centre, though?

[DavidB6937]

Got someone new at work called Oba. This may be my biggest test to remain professional in my career.

[BomberPat]

I'm absolutely fed up with it all, and the new academic year hasn't even started.

The university I work for is going through it's third restructure and fourth or fifth round of redundancies in five years. Our boss, who was supporting the restructure and doing a good job of defining what our role would be at the end of it, died suddenly of a stroke back in June. In terms of line management structure, there were two people between him and me - both have taken voluntary severance, with my line manager leaving tomorrow. Another member of our team will become my line manager, but she's on leave for two weeks, so I have effectively no management above me whatsoever.

Between voluntary severance and redundancies, our team has been cut in half. The university is split into two faculties, and the larger of the two is where I work; we would have struggled at this time of year when there were seven or eight of us, and there are currently four, one of whom is part-time. 

 

When our old boss was still with us, he was explaining that because we would be a much smaller team, part of the new structure meant we would no longer have as much proactive, project-based, or relationship-building responsibilities, and would become largely a reactive, "service desk" model of just responding to enquiries, but that, within that structure, we would be much more empowered to say, "no, this isn't our job, find someone else to do it" or "no, you haven't followed the policy, go away and do it properly next time". But to do that I would need to know what the job is under this new structure, to know what the boundaries of it are, and we just have no idea. 

At no point has anyone in management acknowledged how damaging this has been to our team. There hasn't been any effort to address the fact that an essential part of how the university operates is now down to not even a skeleton crew, with zero management, leadership or direction. They never even reached out to us with condolences when we lost our boss and friend. And I just left a training session that I was only told was happening three minutes before it started, in which they repeatedly suggested we address our questions to people who have already left the university, and were surprised to hear there's nobody acting up or filling those roles, that we have no management. Which means nobody's telling any of the other departments that we've lost half our team. So we're going into a new academic year, the most chaotic time possible, with half the resources we should have, zero direction, and the expectation that we will be able to provide the same level of service as when there were twice as many as us. It's going to be a shitshow.

The day-to-day of it is getting miserable too. The manager leaving tomorrow is someone I have really enjoyed working with, and I'm not looking forward to exchanging that relationship for working more closely with a manager who I like, but whose management style I don't really get on with. And the other full-time member of our team has just become unbearable - he was always hard work, but now he can't get through a meeting without derailing it with unrelated complaints, usually bemoaning how busy he is, as if he's the only one of us affected by all of this, and generally accidentally letting slip in the middle of his rants that he doesn't know how to do a job that he should have been doing the whole time (I've long suspected he doesn't do half the work he's supposed to, and this seems to be proving me right).

On top of that, I've started to get emails from students that have nothing to do with my job. I am not student support, I don't deal with students at all beyond bursary applications. I get it when a bursary applicant emails me with a question about something else, as I'm someone at the university that they've been emailing, and I don't expect them to be across what my responsibilities are, but when it's a student with no connection to my work, with a question that's nothing to do with my work, I have to wonder who the fuck is giving out my email address as a point of contact and why.


It's not going to get any better.

[westlondonmist]

In a organisation wide teams meeting (3000 employees and only the first 999 could get in). Been told by the Chief Exec our reorg isn't a reorganisation, it's a change of mindset. What a cunt. A group of executives talking for an hour, who's salaries and on costs equate to well over a million pounds a year managed to say absolutely fuck all despite talking for so long. 

 

Been told they'd essentially need to raise council tax by 100% or find income equal to stop this and other service cuts. 

Edited September 8 by westlondonmist