Mortise-and-Tenon Monday


 Glancing at an old diary over the weekend, I realised that if I'd still been working for HMRC, today would have been a Mortise-and-Tenon Monday. Named after the old sliding games that preceded Rubik's Cube, and challenged line managers to squeeze a United Nations level of co-ordination into the working day. This was one of the many benefits of "Working in the Office."

There was always re-organisation - especially in a processing unit. Every year a new strategy would be drawn up, new initiatives championed. Teams would be broken up, with their functions assigned to new managers. And since everyone was sitting at a desk with a computer, that would often mean people moving with their computers to a new desk. In the pre-Surface Pro days that meant picking up the base unit, keyboard and screen (together with desk drawers and contents) and wheeling them on a chair to the new base. But that was just the planned re-organisation.

Sometime during the year, managers would realise that things weren't working out. A wriggling-eel-pool of issues would mean that new staff moves were required. They included health-and-safety issues, staff who'd fallen out with their managers, staff whose particular skills were needed on another team and staff who'd won a temporary promotion to another role or project. 

The actual moves all involved a fair degree of Mortise-and-Tenon shuffling. It might seem easy to swap A in Team 1 for B in Team 3. But then someone reminded you that would mean A sitting next to C in Team 3 who hated their guts and refused to speak to them. And if you were moving someone for Health and Safety reasons (such as being unable to tolerate rising sunlight) you had to find a desk facing away from the Sun and make sure the person sitting there wasn't also there for H&S reasons.

And once all the moves were nailed down, the managers had to co-ordinate the roll-out of the news. Tell the people who were being moved, swear them to silence until a group e-mail could be sent out. Always tricky in the above mentioned example of moving A from Team 1, because you'd agreed to swap them with D in team 2. But then D would inevitably feel aggrieved at being moved from their friends and work area. "Why are you moving me? I've not done anything wrong."

Oh yes, the good old days. I'd like to see how Jacob Rees Mogg handled that example of Working in the Office.


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