Hypothetically, a zero-hours contract, it is

Benched and unsubstituted

He reads with a wry smile the many congratulations that greet the announcement of being engaged in a new role beneath which is a story generally untold of process and procedure that confers invisibility and humiliation on the subject affected.

In a similar engagement just 5 years before, an associate role gave contract terms of 100% billing for client assignments and where there were no assignments you were benched at 50% of your daily contract rate. It placed the onus on the organisation to ensure that he spent as less time as possible on the bench, for they had to find him billable work to do.

That bench rate disappeared from associate roles after a year, and then responsibilities shifted in radically consequential ways. Now, he could be on contract but without a client assignment and hence, nothing to bill; effectively there is no income.

It was not working for him

Without rewriting the general terms of engagement, the apparent flexibility and fluidity the new construct brings would be ideal if he did not have to revisit the employment market, it is however exceedingly precarious, there was a period that engagements fell from 90% utilisation to 55% utilisation year-on-year that it was prudent to exit that arrangement.

They decided to reignite the associate relationship recently where the matter of full engagement was discussed at length and assurances were given that projects abound for him to rotate other full-time employees out of roles for longer stretches of time. These were convincing enough to lay trust in the prospect, there was work on offer.

After a presentation and discussion that constituted an interview, a contract engagement was offered as he was assigned to a manager who was yet to begin in his role. The scheduled start date of two weeks time was moved back a week because onboarding processes were ahead of the organisational line of management.

More snags and frustration

Then the proposed assignments with clients could not be taken up because they were of a security-sensitive nature for which enhanced vetting was required and the agency that should have immediately transferred the security status would only offer to share it and that would take months to conclude, even as the term of its validity was running out. This was besides the fact that there was no contracted activity with a sister executive agency he was assigned to for over 4 months already.

Now, having confirmed that the assignee had the necessary clearances even if not in possession of the new sponsor, this should have sufficed, but it took a barrage of pleading emails to engage that thought process and by then, the opportunities being considered for had slipped away.

Zero hours with style

Whilst a valid contract without client assignment seems to break you out of a stretch of unemployment, the critical element of earning an income is lost in the circumstances such that even the agency that facilitated the contract has abandoned the contractor in frustration and resignation.

The many times I have read about ‘zero-hours contracts’ I thought it was redolent of gig-economy stints, piecework, or on-call job roles where you were engaged but not guaranteed any work, along with other strictures that engender such contracts. You never consider this can apply to technical and specialist roles that pay well on an assignment, but nothing at all when not assigned to a client.

Some may suggest, you are at liberty to find other work and return to this associate role when available, it seems an ideal quite different from experience. The only apparent change to the situation is he does not have to undergo the interview and onboarding process anymore, he has everything to be assigned an immediate role, but until then, he is on the most sophisticated castle-in-the-sky highly remunerated zero-hours contract.

Each hour he is still scanning the job boards to send his CV and a cover letter still applying for a role in mid-December. It is going to be a cold lonely Christmas with little to cheer about if nothing changes soon. Bills due, rent due, what a sordid tale, it is. 

Stringing a lanyard to the bus stop

To suffer, they must

I had as much as a hypothesis and experience has shown that it would never become a law. Many things are designed to be assembled or disassembled easily – well, apart from Olivetti PCs in the 1980s and 1990s, they were a conundrum of the inexplicably impossible.

Then, whoever awarded the contract for the building of bus stops in the Amsterdam and Schiphol Airport areas should be put in a perpetual motion dunking stool.

The bus stops would work in the desert but not here; a few years ago, I wrote about this but it is just getting really silly, none of the bus stops offer any shelter in the rain, they serve as funnels for the rain water – it is better to be soaked in the rain shower than stand the “protective” shelter of those bus stops.

If you are not wearing waterproof clothes, there is no point sitting down, the seats are dishes of water and the bus stop in front of my new office is so water-logged after the rains, a walk there might just be an aqua-plane cum surf – you wonder if anyone does quality control of these places as the designer and builder walks away pockets filled to the bank laughing.

Obviously, neither the designer nor the builder would ever have to try these places in weathered conditions, the design probably came off some sketch that looked aesthetically pleasing to the eye and that was all; all form and no function – one could cuss.

The riddle of the lanyard

Then my KPN mobile internet dongle came with a string lanyard to attach the cover of the connector to the body of the dongle. Everyone tried every kind of technique to string the lanyard without luck, some improvised but it did not look like in the picture.

Surely, it could not be that hard as I tried every possible permutation of stringing the thing through – this morning, I thought I had a solution of trying to string it through, taking apart the whole thing and still without success.

The more I looked at it the more I thought, it could not have been so badly designed that we could not put the lanyard on and just before the blog incubation in readiness for castigation of the thing was completed, I had an insight about the possibility of not having to string through the lanyard.

Lifting the cover that had the access to a recessed memory card, there is was, a simple hook held in place by the cover and all that aggravation ended with a sense of victory and accomplishment.

The hypothesis still finds true but sometimes you have to stop head-banging and start thinking, if only one picture were added to the manual and we would have saved us the hours of stupidity with the simplicity of the smart application of instructions and pictures.