Petty Office Silliness and Credit Cards
Written at 12:58 p.m. on 2006-01-31
Petty Office Silliness and Credit Cards
Our office is riddled with petty office silliness, or �office politics� as it�s also known. There are many times in my job when it would be useful to have a central database of who we employ and where they are working at the moment and you might think that that wouldn�t be a difficult thing to set up. You would be wrong, and you would be wrong for the simple reason that there are certain people in this place that are firm believers in the adage �knowledge is power�. And they aren�t sharing theirs with anyone, not now, not ever. So, if I want to find out who we employ I have to contact one of the account clerks (for waged staff) who is very lovely and always sends what I need on to me quickly, the head of accounts for salaried staff who will then send me a snotty email telling me to refer to some email he sent back in August last year and the Managing Director�s PA who may share some snippet of info with me if the wind is the east, the moon is in its third quarter and her hormones aren�t out of whack.
In short trying to get hold of information is a bit like cheesegrating your own forehead � it�s painful, it�s pointless and it leads to you making odd little pained noises. My friend Cass says her office the same and it makes me wonder � if umpteen million working days are lost each year through hangovers I wonder if anyone has yet worked out how many man hours and working days are wasted each year trying to bypass petty office silliness?
Then we come to credit cards. Applying for credit cards is similar to office silliness on the cheesegrating of forehead scale. Now I freely admit that in my student days my grasp of the concept of credit ratings was minimal, which led to me running up 2 student overdrafts and a credit card before discovering I couldn�t pay them back and having to enter into all sorts of voluntary payment schemes. Yes, it wasn�t a very good idea to run up a huge debt I couldn�t pay buying drink, clothes and cigarettes but compared to some I know it wasn�t a very big debt and I did get it sorted. Also it was 7 years ago. Apparently it could be 7 years or 70 years, it doesn�t really matter. I have failed every credit application I�ve attempted since then so for a couple of years I just didn�t bother with them at all. I don�t have a credit card and my mobile phone account is the same one I�ve had since before the problem. The finance on my car is in my dad�s name (failed the credit check in the car showroom, would have been embarrassing had I not been used to it by then). So today I thought I�d try applying for a credit card to see what happened. 7 out of 8 of the leading companies told me to fuck off. Wankers. Children, the moral of the story is � If you�re going to run up debt getting pissed every night and smoking like the world is ending then make sure you do it properly and thoroughly because once you reach the credit limit you�re not going to be able to afford to do it again for 20 years.
