As with all the health and safety stuff, it was never intended to become an over-bearing, onerous sack of shit. But it did.

At my place we used to book leave by filling in a little green form, pass it to our manager to sign off, then file it in the ‘annual leave’ folder. Someone, maybe him, maybe me, would put it on a calendar somewhere. Job done. And very handy to look back and see how much time you`ve already taken (can you spot a tiny ‘trust’ element in this process?).

Then that form went electronical, to test the new electronical forms system. It was shite. The already small form had to be scrolled up the screen because of all the toolbars, buttons, widgets and web-frippery stuff that is apparently essential with all electronical forms systems.

Then they scrapped it because they realised it was shite.

Now we`ve got the mother of all electronical systems for all manner of stuff, of which applying for annual leave is just a small part.

And it`s shite as well.

If I pick the ‘start date’ for my weeks holiday as October 12th 2010, then click on the ‘end date’ widget, should it automatically skip over everything between now and October 12th, because it`s a computer, and even the dumbest computer can be taught that you don`t return from holidays before you`ve even left?

Of course it should. But does it? No. It`s shite. Thick and shite.

And it`s the global market leader in ‘back office’ software.

I shit you not.

I used to lead teams of up to 60 people and no matter which company I worked for I always found it simple to organise holidays. I had a big wall planner with the the public and school holidays shaded, plus a diary. Staff with school-age children had first call on school holidays, those who’d worked bank holidays the previous year had first call on them in the current year, and after that it was first-come, first-served provided no one department was down more than a quarter of its staff.

Everyone could see at a glance what the position was and if they wanted to organise swaps, it was up to them to come to me with a viable solution.

Then came the rise of “Human Resources”. Personnel departments went from being a couple of clerks responsible for collating and filing personnel records to huge, bloated monstrosities filled with numerous experts who came up with ever more complicated ways of stuffing up what should be very simple tasks. And then passed the actual work back to the managers…