'How DARE you ask me to work' - spurious bullying claims

Apparently bullying in the Australian Public Service is totally rife, with a Greens survey finding that 75% of us poor tortured souls have been bullied in our cubicled workplaces, that hallowed universal space where the soul-sucking fairies live.  I would hazard a guess and say that spurious claims of bullying are the real epidemic here.

Have you been bullied in your workplace?, asked one of the survey questions.  Yes or no.  Often one man's claims of bullying is another man's incessant campaign of whinging and complaining against the system.  But a simple yes or no will suffice for the Greens.  I guess it doesn't matter how you ask the questions if you have already commissioned the findings.

I know a fair amount of workers in both the public and private sector who would have ticked the yes box.  A lot of the stories I've heard over the years come from friends - fair and hardworking people - who have been anxious, lost sleep and have been sick with worry about what comes next because someone has made a spurious claim of bullying against them. 

It makes me quite ill when I hear these stories, time and again.  Where's the yes box for these bullying victims?  Perhaps some of the people who ticked the yes box in the Greens survey are victims of spurious claims of bullying, but the Greens don't care about that.

I'm pretty sure that your supervisor asking you to action a piece of work when you'd rather just Google all day does not constitute bullying.  And I'm also fairly sure that your supervisor telling you that your work might need some more work is also not a case for bullying; it is your boss doing their job.  Having a reasonable and robust conversation with a superior or colleague is not bullying.

Unless the whingers are talking about the pain they feel when an endless stream of forms that must be filled out in triplicate is extracted from their backside. Yes, that hurts a lot, but it's not bullying; it's called doing your job.  It may be unpleasant to one's personal tastes, but it absolutely is your job.  Mindless paperwork is simply our punishment for never winning the lottery.

I think they key problem is that many public servants have not resigned themselves to the fact that they actually have to do some work for their pay cheque.  They become completely outraged when they are asked to do anything more than just enjoy the free computer for eight hours a day.

They can't handle this type of personal attack, and when asked to complete a simple task they become feverish and nearly completely die.  And then they call Human Resources in a total huff, loosely tossing around the B-word to highlight the outrageousness of it all. 

To be clear; since making the tactical error of joining the public sector, which became necessary after I was curiously rejected by NASA's aeronautical program based on some ludicrous reasoning that I was not smart enough (bullying!!!), I have found that the people who routinely complain about bullying are generally the same people who believe work is beneath them.

My first, second, third, fourth, fith, sixth and seventh red flag regarding the credibility of this survey commssioned by the Greens is that it was commissioned by the Greens, who 'self-selected' about 100 public servants - I speak roughly, approximately - who are likely of the same crop of public servants that are currently earning the big bucks over at the Department of Climate Change.

These people are currently paid to twiddle their thumbs and tweak their computerised weather stations while they wait in vain for the climate to disastrously, cataclysmically alter because of man and his tsunami-stirring, hurricane-inducing wicked ways.  What else are these people going to do but surveys produced by the Greens?

The final red flag was that the story was 'broken' by those renown newshoundsmen WIN News.  'nough said.  FFS, I am sick of the breed of public servant - any worker - that is so pathologically narcissistic that they complain about their conditions, their wages, their supervisor, the colour of the walls, the Schindler's lifts, and the fact that they don't get to sit on the internet all day without being rudely interrupted by someone requesting - bloody REQUESTING! them - to do some work.