A new manager turned up the other day, keen as mustard. Another one. Aren't there EU regulations about this? Someone appears to have realised that most managers start out energetically but soon get absorbed into the malaise. So they've taken to moving them around, trying to get them going again, like rechargeable batteries. This one poked his head around the office door, made a few dark-sounding comments about overstaffing, and ended with, "You'll be getting very fed up of me before long." He was met with silence.
The new managers are often seconded station supervisors, stepped up on temporary contracts, and seem to believe that if they get a few station staff before the disciplinary board they'll have the job permanently. They seem to be right about this. Perhaps the top brass want them to have a victim under their belt before they join, like the mob.
My supervisor, however, was derisive once the new man left. "We'll run rings round him," he told me. Given the underground's haphazard promotional system, he may be right. Since it is hard to demote incompetent staff, the wisdom goes, the next best thing is to promote them somewhere out of the way.
The underground has recently made a great fetish of attracting outsiders: people who have managed, say, cinemas or petrol stations. Alas, by the time they get their head around our bizarre ways, they've been sucked in and none of their outside wisdom counts.
Not that the lower tier of management has much to do. "Everyone says the managers do nothing," one aged clerk told me, "but I've never seen it." Mostly they act as a sort of inefficient staff police force. The cunning ones will turn up at a station, creep up the emergency stairs and surprise you on the gateline - all in the cause of catching you without your hat on, or with your hands in your pockets. Otherwise, if you do meet a manager, it'll probably be because they're trying to farm out their personnel work to the supervisors (a bit tactless, as the latter are often people who failed the management interviews).
From time to time, managers will get interested in some arcane aspect of station life, such as the bins. This is how I came to be reading a sheaf of papers headed Litter Receptacle Trial Record Sheet. Each sheet was for a separate bin and asked questions like: "Has receptacle been used recently? Y/N"; "Has receptacle been emptied recently? Y/N"; and then two essay questions: "Any incidents/accidents involving receptacles?" and the somewhat surreal "Any comments from staff or customers?" At the bottom, the manager's handwriting requested that the sheet be filled in and faxed back on a weekly basis. On receiving this, a supervisor turned to me and asked: "Do you think we might not be reaching our litter targets?" before dispatching the sheet into a convenient receptacle.
And just recently a first-class piece of managerial ineptitude came to light which raised all of our spirits. It was discovered that a building firm that had been given space for an office while it worked on a contract in a depot was still there nine years later. It had never paid a penny for rent, lighting or heating. The booking clerks, who have to explain any discrepancy over £2 on their daily account, found this particularly amusing. One wag wrote on his memo: "I don't know how I lost this money. Maybe in nine years it'll come to light."
But it is on managing sickness that you separate the managerial wheat from the chaff. Because they get bonuses according to attendance figures in their group, managers take a keen interest in administering the rather draconian sickness policy. Some take it a bit far, unlawfully ringing up GPs, making not very veiled threats.
Some managers are neither vindictive nor incompetent. But even they are usually forced into the role of whiphands, by a body of staff that has little personal stake in the service. Job satisfaction is slight. As one booking clerk told me, "You'd have to be very strange to be satisfied in this job." You come to work, slog your guts out and the next day they're all back again. Didn't I send you on your way yesterday? It's like painting the Forth bridge, only with filthy air.
Another problem is loneliness and boredom. It is a common complaint that staff are always congregating together, chatting among themselves. But if you've ever stood on your own on a gateline or a ticket window for eight hours with only the public for company, you'd soon understand. The us and them mentality, officially discouraged, in fact lends itself to a very strong teamwork ethos.
Some seem to enjoy the work, but they are mostly the sort who enjoy causing trouble for everyone else. Of the decent people, the best that can be said is that they don't actively hate it. Certainly some of this discontent can be traced to a complacent cynicism, borne of a secure job which nevertheless offers little satisfaction and few prospects. Often, in the same sentence as a practised gripe, they will tell you how they could never go back to work in the "real world," a fabled land of horror where there are no unions, poor wages and, even worse, managers.
