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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.

The best advice I ever received was from a Swedish priest: if you have a request pending in some Office, do not forget to ring twice a month!

Will it improve the treatment of my case?

Not at all, but it will bring your case to the top of the pending documents.

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.

As a results, bosses and junior Desk Officers we spent most of our Saturdays and Sundays at our office in the Food and Agriculture building of the United Nations. At least we could work in peace. The downside of this system being the often asked question from the love of you're your youth “are you married to your desk or to me?”.

The Organization 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 (my Danish friend next door), one sequence being that of a well organized Officer (myself, but I take no pride, I am Swedish).

Then we were activated, those were the days when all Organizations were emphasizing 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.

Look at the way you start cleaning you own house after having neglected to do if for years.

When I joined Head Quarters in Rome, due to my excellent qualities, (I was free of cost for another six months) I was taught my job by a colleague from the Philippines. Possibly it might have been preferable if I had been house trained by someone else. His system was to put one paper on top of another paper. By far he was the winner of the highest stack of paper. Some of the papers at the bottom of the pile must have dated back to the signature of the Peace Treaty (of which war?). This system was ensuring him total power. When asked for a document, he would stretch his hand to the pile, grab a document and by small jerking movements, bring it out and give it to you without collapsing the pile. Nobody else was able to do that, so there was never any suggestion that he be changed to another Officer or Promoted.

In a well run Floor, there are two men of Power. You have the one with the big room and the deep carpet, he believes often that he is some kind of Director; his job is to know what happens above him and below him. Everybody nods in a wise way when he speaks and when going back to the Office everybody asks the same question “what did he say, meaning, was he going to sack someone?>> . If not the work went on as usual.

The True Most Important man was the Man in Charge of the Registry. The activity has such a low status that it does not carry any up blown title. The Man responsible for the Registry see all the Correspondence, in and out. He is responsible for filing it in the proper cabinet and cross filing it as needed.

As a result you would come to registry and ask for a document, you vaguely remembered that you had seen it two weeks ago, that it had a coffee stain in the right bottom corner, but of course, no idea of the content or filing number. It never took them more than 5 minutes to find the document. Try to do that with a computer!

When I entered Head Quarters as some kin of rat that had escape field extermination, my first job was to develop some kind of system that would make it possible for the Manager to sleep more than 3 hours. Little did I know that the rest of my life would be devoted to that, now it is "I" who sleeps 3 hours.

When joining FAO, we started with billboards, then we evolved to a huge IBM 370 that took 3 full days to process 2000 cards, in spite of all the chocolates I have given to the hole punching girls, the we got mini computer, a total revolution and they finally we entered into the age of computing with the PET and the Apple. They would sort a list of 25 participants in less than 25 minutes.

The happied day during the year?

Holidays!

But not for the reasons you think. We would all rush into the Boss' Office and start foraging and find all the documents that had been missing for more than six months. Documents that he intended to "solve" some day.

Are you familiar with the dilemma of the Boss?

If he comes back and his desk is a clutter looking like the flea market, that means that the Unit cannot work without him, so he starts shouting and being angry, but inside himself he is very proud. If his Office is clean and functional, he cannot but understand that his presence is not really useful, that possibly he is the cog that is slowing down the activity. So while he has to praise all his collaborators, you can hear his teeth grinding.

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 attending the training seminars on about how to choose which job has to be done.

Which brings us to the dilemma of the Trainer; Most Organizations 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. Devoting the nights to the Budget has some interesting side effects, I let you guess.

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.