Fourteen months ago I started a contract for a “Major Financial Institution”, the job ran for seven months and was aborted at the last minute. It was a little surreal at the time as the job was aborted only a few hours before the major effort and more or less the minute that the job was aborted – everyone who was involved was paid off. Given the line that I work in I shouldn’t have been too surprised, but I did think that a notice period of eight minutes was a bit on the thin side.
Over the years there have been a few of these moments, on one occasion I actually turned up on site on a Monday morning to find out that all the staff had been paid off on the previous Friday. They were a bit miffed when I suggested that they still had to pay me – it was a part of the contract after all. Or like the time when I waited on a site for a full week, being told each day – “don’t do anything yet”. Then the massive panic to get the job completed by the agreed deadline, but with almost all the preparation time having been used doing sod all. Still these things have been sent to try us I suppose, or maybe just to train us to be grumpy old men.
Still I digress, the job that was started fourteen months ago now has just resurfaced. The requirement is for ninety eight days of work, all on weekends. I would take the job if it was offered, but it is pretty hard going working forty nine weekends on the trot. So I guess that I’ll just have to keep an eye on this job, just to see where it will go. Given that over the past couple of months there has been a real ramp up in the amount of work being requested, there could be some quite lucrative times ahead for contractors – you will only know how lucrative when the work is done.
But it does seem to me that jobs are coming thick and fast, so I’d watch this space with interest.