Guru has always been one to set the bar high. What are benchmarks for some are merely staging posts for Yours Truly. Indeed, you are reading the words of one whose ego reaches levels most cannot even hope to emulate.
However, there will always be pretenders to this crown, and they must receive a pat on the back for putting in the effort.
So Guru, once again safely housed in his impregnable ivory tower, can only congratulate the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC).
It has set itself the task of finding a ‘one in a million’ worker. That’s quite a hunt. The REC wants to recognise the UK’s most exceptional temporary worker. It’s even making use of the long-forgotten ‘National Temporary Worker’s Week’, which runs from 6-10 June. In case you were wondering, this was originally a Roman festival for the God Tempus, who was patron saint of air-conditioned offices.
If you think this is quite a mission, then spare a moment for the organisers at leadership organisation JCI UK, who merely wish to find ‘the World’s Most Outstanding People’.
Among the categories are business and entrepreneurial accomplishment and moral leadership. Good luck to you; the odds are only a few billion to one.
Weighty anecdote raises suspicion
A week or two ago, Guru praised our hard-working public servants after a nurse informed him that she was one of the poor unfortunates tasked with looking after one of the UK’s fattest men. She said that it takes eight nurses an entire two hours to wash him in the morning.
Disciple Julian decided it was time to wade into the fray with some well-placed sucking up, and an observation or two…
Dear Guru,
I always appreciate your wicked sense of humour and wait with baited breath to see what snippets of gossip you dish up.
In your article on the 29 March, you mention the 45-stone patient, and the fact that it takes eight nurses two hours to wash him in the morning. That’s 16 man hours (or woman hours – or to be completely non-sexist, ‘person hours’) to scrub the man clean.
I often clean my car at the weekend. It weighs one-and-a-half tonnes and has a surface area probably five times bigger than Mr 45-Stone Man.
Now, while I don’t roll my car from side to side to get into the little creases, nooks and crannies, it takes me less than an hour to wash, rinse and chamois dry.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the NHS – staff do a marvellous job on the shopfloor, so to speak. But, pray tell me, what do they do to the guy to stretch it out for 16 hours. Cotton buds and thimbles of water perhaps?
Sometimes Guru doesn’t want to revisit these things, but he feels he has to lay this particular ghost to rest. He hopes the simple fact that two of the nurses were employed solely to lift the guy’s stomach up is enough information. If you knew the whole story, you’d sleep as little as Guru has in the past few weeks.
OAP fails to cut it in the courtroom
It’s always a shame when employees won’t do what they’re told and it all gets nasty and the courts get involved. However, beware the possible outcomes. Here is a cautionary tale about what could happen if you don’t let sleeping staff lie.
A pensioner in Bonn, Germany, has taken his own daughter and son-in-law to court to force them to cut his grass. Paul Mueller, 72, told magistrates he was too old to cut the lawn at the house he shares with daughter Karin and her husband Peter.
However, the court found that the septuagenarian should be responsible for cutting the grass himself and if he didn’t do it, the daughter could hire a professional gardener. Mr Mueller would then be forced to pay for it.
If you think this story is a bit tenuous for HR, remember if you can’t cut it, you too will fall victim of the law(n).
