During a recent parliamentary by-election my life was plagued by a constant stream of people coming up to my desk and saying, "Andrew, Can You Just....?" The team of volunteers working closely with me tried to defuse my irritation by producing a lovely laminated poster which I found attached to the wall one morning. It showed a happy relaxed photograph of me with the initials "CYJ...?" alongside. By the end of the campaign I had scrawled "NIFC" underneath. You can work out for yourself what that meant!
At West Kent Towers the "CYJs" come in on a daily basis. The work involved in these ad-hoc demands is usually a couple of hours. For example,
"Can you just redesign and run off 500 Sorry You Were Out cards for me for this Saturday" or
"Can you just design a flyer for my policy discussion and send it out to all pledges in the area" or
"Can you just knock up and print off a flyer for my lunch next week?"
In almost every case the person making these late demands have known for weeks or months they they needed something done, but rather than make their request in good time allowing us to feed it into our schedule, they invariably phone up with 48 hours notice saying how busy they have been and expecting us to jump at their command.
This irritates me for two reasons:
This irritates me for two reasons:
- They are assuming that their work is more important that what we are currently doing and that we should stop our present project to design and print what they want as a matter or priority, or
- They think that Jon and I are sitting at our desks with our thumbs up our backsides whiling away time and hoping for someone to call and give us work to do. I actually find this assumption quite insulting. Interestingly, the people who make these demands hardly ever come into the office to help. Maybe if they did they would understand how the West Kent machine operates.
For example,
On Monday last week we took delivery of 88,000 cream C6 envelopes which have to be hand-addressed as part of the Kent-wide PCC campaign.
By Thursday these had been dispatched to a team of 128 volunteers who had each offered to hand-write 500 or 1,000 envelopes.
As Jon was meeting and greeting the volunteers and handing-out their packs, our weekly volunteers were packing 5,000 Voter ID Surveys for a target ward in Maidstone, which had been printed on Monday.
Meanwhile, I started work on mail merging 50,000 letters to strong pledges encouraging them to apply for a postal vote. These will be packed by a team of 40 volunteers working in shifts on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
As the volunteers pack the PV letters we will start printing 88,000 letters (in 37 versions) which will be packed into the hand-written envelopes the volunteers took away last week.
Somewhere in this process we will organise 5 Association AGMs, send out membership cards and reminders, bank money, run an annual dinner, manage the Boris Johnson and Charles Moore events, arrange canvassing sessions and open and process 150-200 items of post every day.
All of this works smoothly because every hour of our day is planned, capacity on our printing machines is booked weeks ahead, and our amazing team of office volunteers rise to the challenge each time they are asked.
Jon and I pride ourselves on finding the time to do everything we are asked. With good planning yes we can, but without.... NIFC !
As someone infamously said "Calm down dear". Your irritation is palpable and understandable, but also potentially curable. As guilty party I can also sympathise with people on the other side of your irritation. Perhaps, as in my case, they were poorly briefed on how things get done.
ReplyDeleteAs someone infamously said "Calm down dear". Your irritation is palpable and understandable, but also potentially curable. As guilty party I can also sympathise with people on the other side of your irritation. Perhaps, as in my case, they were poorly briefed on how things get done.
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