You know you’ve blogged about local government too long when…
…You start repeating your posts!
As some of you would have noticed we passed a big milestone this week and it is possible that perhaps we celebrated a little too hard.
With the whole WLLG team out of action we decided that on this one occasion we’d reprint one of our old articles for your enjoyment. The following piece was written before we had a twitter account and before we had any pictures on our site; it was also the first blog entry that received more than 50 hits and subsequently got us the opportunity to write for the Guardian.
So, with apologies to anyone who read this first time through,
‘You know you’ve worked in Local Government for too long when:
- You see chatting to the person next to you on the bus as a community engagement exercise
- When a friend offers you a lift you think ‘Ah, the Big Society in action!’….. then you CRB-check them
- You refuse to recognise a story as news until you’ve read it in an LGiU Briefing email
- You have to have three separate people sign off approval for you to send an email to your mother, to ensure it has the right policy and community positioning and doesn’t contradict previous correspondence on the matter
- You write all of your documents in the prescribed corporate font size and type for briefing notes, as anything else just doesn’t look right
- You put together a project plan for your own wedding and diligently update it until the event
- You go to a restaurant with friends and wonder aloud when the last Food Safety inspection was conducted
- You have to get a purchase order signed off by your mum before you can do the shopping
- When someone asks you what you want for your birthday you provide them with findings from a focus group and an evidence base
- You don’t talk of your next door neighbour but of a resident
- You know the exact person to contact when your bin isn’t collected (including which company the collection has been tendered to)
- You ask your friends to fill in an equality monitoring form when they come to your party
- You demand Gantt charts and RAG reports from your children’s school teachers
- You don’t have an invite list for a party, you have a range of stakeholders attending
- You start spouting jargon that you don’t understand
- You check out all the parking signs when you travel through the Borough, to check whether they are estates or on-street
- You smile at anyone in a high-vis vest in any authority doing any sort of work since “we’re all in this together”
- You set your Children performance indicators for their homework.
And finally:
You know you’ve worked in local government too long when…
- Your job title is longer than your address
Tags: blog, guardian, laziness, local government, local government blog, nostalgia, we love local government, you know you've worked in local government too long when
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October 21, 2011 at 8:19 am
…..when you don’t make an original contribution, but manage to spin out jokes so old many people won’t have heard them before
October 22, 2011 at 8:07 am
…When you use unnecessary capital letters because they’re important words (ie Local Government, the Council, Community Engagement).
October 22, 2011 at 8:12 am
[...] You know you’ve blogged too long about local government when – We Love Local Government Congratulations to the team behind this blog, who recently had their 100,000th visitor and are preparing a post to mark its anniversary soon (as I understand). This is a republication of an earlier post, which found its way into The Guardian, but is linked here because it makes a particularly apt ‘engagement’ point of its own. ‘You know you’ve worked in Local Government for too long when: you see chatting to the person next to you on the bus as a community engagement exercise.’ [...]
October 22, 2011 at 12:23 pm
…when you go to an Olympic Ball and the first ‘famous’ person you spot is one of London’s elected mayors, despite their being 60+ gold medallists in the room!