In another lifetime (meaning a long time ago) I worked in the Civil Service. My department was an export/import insurance arm for the government. Now, like any company, there are good employees, and not so good ones, and despite it being a long time ago, I still get quite frustrated when people berate the whole of the civil service and its workers, and bang on about so-called gold-plated pensions. Whenever the press wants to complain about government, they blame the civil servants and remind us all, that they’re on gold-plated pensions and have a job for life. This may be true of some very senior civil servants, however in the main, it isn’t. My pension from then isn’t bad, but it’s also not that generous either.

I joined the civil service back in 1979 as a fresh-faced, very innocent 19-year-old. Not long afterwards, there was a major strike, for fair pay, and I spent many days being one of only a few people in work. Over the years, there have been several strikes by civil servants, and whilst I don’t always ‘approve’ of striking, there are times when no other option is clear. At present, civil servants are capped at a 1% pay rise, whilst MP’s managed to find the money to have around 10% for themselves – that’s on top of their already generous pay.

My job consisted of operating an enveloping machine, and enveloping by hand any mail that ran to more than 1 page. It was arduous, and noisy, but I loved it. I also had to shred lots of paperwork of a sensitive nature once it was finished with, ‘feed’ printers, despatch paperwork to the programmers, make the tea, and so on. I was the only woman, in an office of 14 men.

I quickly had a promotion, my last one as it turned out, and worked on the mainframe, working a 3-week shift rota. For years, I was the only woman on shifts, and was often the butt of what would now be classed as sexual innuendo. I grew a very thick skin! Again, hard work, and unsociable hours too, but I loved it although driving home at 1am, back then, was always an anxious time. If things went wrong on the overnight shift, we were expected to work right through to ensure all was ready for the next shift who came in at 7am. More times than I can count, we worked almost 15 hours on a shift, followed by 8 hours at home, hopefully sleeping, before we them had to be back on shift. Those were tough days. After about 10 years of this, my personal life and marriage started to suffer from the unsociable hours, and I transferred to the Help Desk on another site.

There were 4 of us in this team serving the network, hardware, and software needs of 550 staff. On top of this, we also had remote ‘users’ and private users who accessed the mainframe via one of our modems. A colleague and I frequently had to drive as far as Taunton and Plymouth to check out and solve any issues. We also travelled to France, and Germany, to provide support to the Sales team. The only remote site I refused to go to was in Belfast, for obvious reasons. Yes, we were paid for this, however it wasn’t paid as overtime because overtime wasn’t allowed. My colleague and I used to arrive at 7.30am to ‘walk the floor’ and ensure all was working properly for the start of the business day. The other two would come in for 9am, and work later, so that between us, we covered a long day.

By this time there were no promotions, except to fill dead man’s shoes or posts left vacant by retirement. Most of us were at the top of our pay scale so no more yearly increments either, and very poor national pay rises. In fact, these days, much as I’d like to re-join, I doubt I could afford to be a civil servant again.

All good things come to an end, and our department was one of a few actually making money, so of course a certain PM decided to ‘sell’ us off and make a fast buck – so much for a job for life. We were privatised, to a Dutch-based firm. Lots of redundancies followed though I managed to keep my job. A second round of redundancies followed about a year later and the Help Desk was going to being taken over by IBM. So, no job for me. I was offered a very generous severance package to leave quietly, which I took. Remember, this was now no longer the civil service but a private company.

Overall, I worked very hard for my money in an increasingly volatile work environment, had only 1 promotion in a 13-year career, poor pay rises, no respect from the public, no overtime, shift work… Would I do it again if I had my time all over again? You betcha!