Pole Climbing

I realise that the Guild of Polymer Engineers may be disappointed.

But, I’m afraid I won’t be joining them in the near future. I have no idea if the Spatial Arts graduates have a group; but I won’t be joining them either. Much as I’d love to. Unfortunately, as a taxpayer, I would have to pay lots of money to learn their crafts. Sorry guys.

Of course there are alternatives to try and resolve the issues surrounding my academic abilities. Seeking promotion the traditional way seems to be the most obvious. I’m not quite sure how this process sits with those clever people at Politeia; it may just move me from the downright stupid category into the ‘poor leadership’ one.

To reach the dizzy heights of Sergeant I would need to:-

Read a handful of books. Having had a flick through some of these I’ve noticed that there are lots of big words and not very many pictures. As most of the books I read usually require a set of coloured pencils, which these don’t, I can see myself losing interest after the first few pages. There are lots of very important looking chapters about laws and things, including a section on the infamous Badger Act.

Sit an exam. Fortunately, this doesn’t require any actual writing as it’s multiple guess. Unfortunately, the questions don’t bear any relation to the job I do now. Instead they’re deviously designed to test whether or not I’ve read the handful of books. Damn, I might have stood a chance if they were about drunks, drugs and domestics. To the best of my knowledge I’ve never even met a badger.

In the unlikely event that I exceeded the daunting fifty five percent pass mark, I could move on to stage two; the Pseudo-Sergeant.

This is a recent innovation involving the need to find someone who knows some impressive sounding phrases and all of the current buzzwords to fill in an application form for me. As long as this made me appear suitable enough I could pretend to be a Sergeant for a year or so. As this is a very new scheme I’m not quite sure how it works. I’m guessing that the most important criteria would be to not upset any senior officers, or to let any badgers rights be exploited.

Now, I can see that this system does have some merits. But it does seem like an awful lot of hard work to start climbing the ladder towards a ‘key service delivery role’. I can’t see Politeia being totally convinced about it either, and they’re the people who should know.

Luckily it’s not the only alternative.

I have a cunning plan.

(…to be continued…)