Left?

Left?

I am not going to tell a story

I am going to tell my story.

As a desk Officer of the Organization of the United Nations, you are a very junior servant, yet you have plenty to do, really you have too much to do. And never underestimate the importance of Junior Civil Servants. Displease me and your case will go back and forth and never be solved. Please me and you will be surprised by the power I have to get your problems solved and to find funds for your activities.

To be a desk officer means that you are responsible for an area. An area could be some countries, some operations.

You have trays. One pleasant tray is the OUT tray. Except that OUT does not mean out, but means that the document will go to the Chief and will be returned to you with some rather unpleasant remarks.

The IN tray, I have never understood why they call it the tray, as it is made of Traysssss.

The latest job to arrive will be on top of the IN tray.

Then you have the classical PENDING tray. The pending tray can either be an old fashioned tray or a pile that is going to grow and grow like some kind of TV game, the winner being the one able to make the highest pile. One disadvantage of the competition is that when you need in document from the PENDING tray, when you grab it the whole pile will collapse. You are really surprised at the documents you discover, papers you had been looking for during more than a month, folders the Registry has blamed you for not returning and you have sworn never to have seen them.

Then you have the “Of Interest” tray. In this tray you put everything that you feel you should read. While don't you learn that you will never read it, I do not know.

The Organisation was well aware of these problems so we had training seminars on how to organize our activities.

We would be shown a film, one sequence being that of a disorganized Officer, one sequence being that of a well organized Officer.

Then we were activated, those were the days when all Organisations were emphasising the importance of the trainees contributions (yawning?)

The case we had to solve was easy to understand.

You have three types of documents:

Big ones that will require more than a day to be finished, possibly more than a week and of courses they are urgently needed.

Small ones that could be handled in a few minutes say a quarter of an hour and of course they are urgently needed.

Medium size documents which are medium both as to the time it will take to handle them and the urgency.

We were expected to come up with reasons as to why it would be better to handle ten small files in a couple of days rather than the big one that would take us a week. Or argue the reverse.

The training officer was in a quandary. I have been such a training officer.

Are you familiar with the way we work in Offices?

Are you familiar with the way the human mind works?

If you are then you will understand why all this is nonsense.

Experience shows that when an Officer is under severe stress and has to make a choice between huge urgent files and small urgent files, he will choose a totally irrelevant case that is neither urgent nor important and most probably could have been left to rot until someone else inherited it.

But the aim of all that writing is to show that I am a Good Civil Servant, I do not come to the point and if I can find a way to avoid the issue, I will do it.

The subject of this article is really, what does it mean to choose?

Silly you think!

Everybody knows what it means to choose; You yourself have been explaining the training seminars about how to choose which job has to be done.

Which brings us to the dilemma of the Trainer; Most Organisations do not want us to tell the trainees the truth.

Which truth?

The main, the most important fact to be remembered about doing a job is that it is not important in itself, nor difficult.

The most difficult aspect of working life is that while you work at the task you have to solve, you must accept that there are two or three other jobs that will not be done, which could even prove to have been more important than the job you are doing.

Take the Case of the Holy Grail. Nothing in a Civil Servants job is more important than preparing, arguing the budget proposal. Without funds you are going to vanish. When it comes to preparing the budget and defending it, you are ready to leave everything and devote yourself day and night to the Budget.

In the meantime you forget to check that the new tyres that have arrived for the Land Rovers have been mounted on the trail vehicles, you take it for granted, and one day you pick up your phone and you are informed that a duty car has rolled over in the bush, after having exploded a tyre, that the driver is dead but that they hope that some of the staff members might survive.

Choosing does not mean choose to do something, not at all, choosing means that you take the responsibility not to do something that must and should have been done, if you are lucky, nobody will discover it, if you are unlucky, your career is dead.

Think of the doctor that has to take the responsibility of the Ward during the night, rather the Wards, most of his decisions will be about not doing this or that; And if things go wrong, his career might be terminated but you do not care so much as in the meantime you died.