A Hundred Consultants.

Work is very, very bad right now. Anyone who’s read my blatherings in a past life will understand that this is nothing new; life is always bad at work, but, struggling though I am to give adequate testament to the badness of it just now; I feel I owe it to the world to try.

We’re merging. This is kind of akin to a Borg assimilation, insofar as I can gather; whereby all our useless appendages will be chopped off and replaced with even more efficient electro-mechanical widgets that can do amazing things and new eyeballs that can see through clothes, even those of fat and ugly people unfortunately.

Actually, that’s not true. The truth is worse. What happens is that we all go into a room where we’re told we’re to have showers, but really…

Actually, that’s not true. The truth is worse. We’re merging with an organisation composed entirely of consultants…

Actually, that’s not true. Well it is, but it’s worse even than that, because, the ugly reality is that we’re not simply merging with an organisation composed entirely of consultants, but they are, – would you credit the good lord for permitting such a mortal sin to live and breathe – marketing consultants.

Good heavens above, it doesn’t seem possible does it? There are more than a hundred of them too, so I’m told; which is more than any mere mortal should have to endure outside of eternal purgatory. I shudder at the prospect even as I dress it up with jocularity, because life at work is already made miserable enough by the vast ranks of consultants that I’m forced to endure; indeed, everyone outside of my small department is in fact, a consultant, they just don’t know it (necessarily). How does it actually transpire though that one finds oneself consulting in the first place? Simple, it’s what everyone with a tenuous grasp of their own credibility who would otherwise work in domestic service and/or unskilled construction fields but can’t take the sheer ‘working-ness’ that implies ends up looking into. No skills? There’s always consultancy! No wits! Wanna be a consultant? No Clue?

We have them all, the fat, ugly, stupid and overpaid; indeed, I’ve come to the conclusion that the entire management core of our company is composed entirely of such people-persons, client-facers, communication-enablers and other monikers which imply that droning on at great length about things which you don’t understand to other self-satisfied, ignorant overpaid pricks (or prickesses) is somehow a service that anyone really wants or needs when in fact we all know that you’d be more useful as ballast in a sewage barge.

In the meantime, deafened by the endless drone of job-justifying consultant-speak and feeling a little faint from all the hot air that permeates the atmosphere, we do all the work. That sounded rather flippant, don’t you think? Blase? Off the cuff? Actually, it was entirely serious. We do all the work. Like a flock of vultures though, our myriad consultants circle above waiting for us to drop our guard so they can swoop down and steal the credit for our every production and innovation; usually, we beat them off… (not like that!) and take cover.

This week though it became too wearisome. To fight well, you need to believe that the cause is just, and when you see that the promised reinforcements are a malnourished rabble armed only with clods and cowbells you begin to think of home and harvest; inevitably.

Imagine, an entire hundred or more consultants, and not a skill amongst them. Hell.