Windows onto the unknown. Brick walls. Curtains?

My eighteen colleagues and I spent today away from the office at Oxfordshire’s Outdoor Education Centre. After designing and constructing containers from paper, pipe-cleaners, balloons and sellotape to prevent eggs breaking when dropped from a balcony (most of us failed) we stopped laughing and talked about our future. Everything is changing. The drug and alcohol service we’ve been working with for the last few years has lost its contract and another agency takes over in April so those who worked for the old service are now applying for jobs with the new. The probation service and its databases have just been split into two (serious and not-so-serious offenders – please don’t ask what happens on the  borderline) and half of it has been privatised. The education service we work with has been contracted out, in this case with the existing staff, thankfully.
 
Some organisations we work with are creating new bits of themselves so as to conform to the revised regulations about which sorts of entities are entitled to bid for which sorts of contracts or grants.
 
As the head of the snake negotiates with its belly about how to eat its tail, three jobs are created to ensure that all three parts record how they adhere to the agreement…
 
I’m happy that all my colleagues believe in the way we work and intend to continue being as excellent as we can be in a mad world.