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I guess Kindergarten lasts until you retire in 21st century New Zealand

A shock horror story the Dominion Post has kept alive for two days now involves a "Public service high flier" who is on "sick leave".

Very few facts but according to the Dominion the proximate cause of Ms Bach's sudden indisposition that sees her unable to perform her duties as Chief Executive of the Housing and Building Department is that
Ms Bach was involved in an altercation with employee Jaime Rawlings in front of several other staffers. It is understood she swore at and manhandled Ms Rawlings.
Aside: aren't we being told by another extremely well remunerated female public employee that women don't get Chief Executive roles because of "unfairness at work" or something.

Everything is a illness these days it seems, like the malady I'd not come across before, maskophobia, which struck down a couple of Auckland bus drivers the other day. Luckily maskophobia is simply cured by attending a diversity awareness course and visiting a mosque.

I wonder what Ms Bach's illness is called.

I do know whatever it turns out to be that the men who ran the heavy engineering workshop where I worked in my youth had extreme cases of it, indeed colourful language and a little physicality is what kept things ticking over at times.

But then again it was, in the words of one of our extremely highly paid female public servants, an example of male occupational segregation, that being there wasn't a girl to be seen.

Those were simpler times, the work involved much heavy manual labour in dirty and noisy conditions and carrying on regardless of the weather and it just didn't seem to attract girls to take it up.

Which is just as well there was little future in it. Nowadays we send most of the sort of work we were doing back then to Hong Kong or bring contractors in from overseas if it must be done onshore.

Perhaps because we have become a nation of shrinking violets stuck in the Kindergarten phase of our development - "Please Miss my supervisor called be a bad name because there were lots of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in my report on lack of gender diversity in the boiler making trade".

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