Death by Yellow Card.

My friend Madeline poses a rather interesting question when it comes to bureaucracy. Whose need does it serve? That just about sums up my day today. It was a day on which I spent many hours completing forms that serve no purpose for me or my students.

One of the realities of modern life is that we have to find some system of recording what we do. When I came here in 2007 no one had done my job before so there were no systems in place. So I devised a simple electronic set of data collections that were easy to use and covered what I do. It is my no means perfect but it is exceedingly accessible and does reflect the chaos of my life. For the students it stands as an accurate assessment of their interactions with me. So it serves the purposes of both of us.

When I was forcibly moved departments in 2010 I kept going the way I had always done things. Why would I want to switch to a labourious paperbased system that makes no sense to anyone except those who devised it? And guess who those people were? It was devised by counsellors for counsellors. Why it is so complex I have no idea. Perhaps they want to hide behind too much information? Or maybe they just want to baffle the reader? But I pose the same question, who does it benefit?

In the 3 mainly unhappy years since I moved increasing pressure has been put on me to integrate with them. So this year I have been forced to use the infamous yellow card system. When we paid a lot of money to an organisational consultant for our annual navel gazing exercise she seemed as baffled by it all as I am. Will we grind to a halt without yellow cards? We are moving to a new system next year but I'm still being forced to fill them in which benefits neither me nor my students. I have spent all day today doing it and am not even half way through yet. I have no idea what the codes mean without a code breaking sheet (it is several pages long) and much of what I do simply isn't covered in it.

Has it been a useful deployment of my time? I guess only others can tell me that. But what I do know is that it won't be like this for ever. If I remain here, in a couple of years time I'm hoping yellow cards will be banished to some storage facility and forgotten.

And by the way, after I have transferred data from my database to the cards, someone else has to spend many weeks inputting it into another database. I'm glad it is not me!