Fed Up. Srsly.

Like the title says; seriously fed up today. You'd best not read on if you're not in the mood for some ranting.

My job is rapidly going down hill. We're down to two engineers covering the entire city of Edinburgh, which constitutes 7 buildings and a couple of thousand users. The enigneer I have working with me is a French guy who's lived here for 6 years with his Belgian wife, and whose English sometimes seems like it's as bad as my French. Which really isn't that good at all. Add to that the fact that he's frequently worse than useless, sometimes taking 3 or 4 times as long to do a job as he should, or sometimes not doing it properly despite having had it explained to him more than once, and I'm sure you'll see why I have little patience left for him.

He joined our team a couple of months ago, after the contract he worked on for us - the Lloyds TSB bank - had to lose staff quickly because the contract was losing money at a rate of knots. If he's an example of the people they have on that contract, I'm not surprised.

Add to that the nature of my job is quickly becoming less and less technically-inclined, and becoming more and more about record-keeping and stock-taking. Because our main contract is the Revenue and Customs, security is becoming more and more of a concern. Not because we're actually breaking any security rules, but because management on both sides of the contract are seeing media reports about information and kit going missing, and doing what management do best - making knee-jerk reactions and demanding that engineers bear the brunt of the changes they think will make them look, good.

I've now been sitting in one of our offices in Edinburgh, waiting for my French colleague for 2 hours. He has the pool car for our team at the other side of the city, about a half-hour drive away. He's probably been stuck for an hour and a half doing a job I could have done in 15 minutes.

Is it any wonder that I've been spending most of my time during the day lately thinking of ways to get home early?