Gavin, 18 October 05
A decade ago, looking for work meant visiting a job centre. Today these are re-branded as jobcentre plus – and that is not all that has changed.
Gone are the open plan spaces with display boards of cards for local jobs. Now the system has entered the 21st century and believe me, it sucks. A gang of customer service staff at the door look more like night club bouncers, and it’s not suprising that they are needed given the levels of frustration the system seems designed to create.
Replacing the boards with cards are rows of computer screens – jobpoints – which should allow search and display of job details. All good and well, in theory. Each screen was, however, covered with an A4 sheet proclaiming the system down.
No problem the customer service chap offered – the same information was available from the phone system by dialling ‘A’. And I’d get to search by speaking to a human for a change he added.
I was suprised how quickly I got through – no long queues on hold – but the reason for this became apparent when some lass in a Glasgow call centre informed me that her system had crashed too. Her colleagues had been left ‘twiddling their thumbs’ all afternoon.
Little suprise to find that the company that has revitalised the service in this way is the notorious EDS. Equally no suprise that I don’t seem to be able to use the jobcentreplus.gov.uk site from my linux PC. But that might just be today while the system is down across the UK.
