Citizen Watchdog
Federal questionnaire with 5 bullet points for last week:
1) I came in late for work to test my boss to see if he would dock me. He hadn't got there yet. I made a note in my log.
2) I spent an hour in the bathroom playing games on my phone and he didn't know I was even gone. Then I noticed he come out behind me. I made another note in my log.
3) Pissed away the rest of the day and left early in spite and he was already gone. I noted his golf bags were gone.
4) Stopped at post office and mailed notes off to regional office. Waiting for response.
5) Paid my income taxes and added extra $5 to check IRS audit offices for compliance. Waiting for response.
As you can see, I'm doing a great job for you so you can concentrate on more pressing government departments, such as the Defense or State Department.
You're welcome. Glad to help.
Thread is open, what can I put in my log book for you?
Woof! Woof!
Comments
Good morning e1. Government or non-industrial private
sector, generally time wasting falls in certain categories:
Meetings, meetings, meetings
follow-up meetings
reports, especially time/billable hours reporting
fixing the damn copier and/or printer
answering dumb-ass phone calls
asking around to see who took your stapler
explaining shit to management for the fifth or sixth goddam time
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Never worked
in an office environment. Always worked outside at jobsite. Sometimes in a highrise, even "walking iron" on occasion.
But knew enough people who did and some of their stories of office politics were enlightening.
Have a good day.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
meetings?
Hi EL,
Aren't meetings those places where minutes are taken and hours are wasted?
I have been to some good ones but they are by fatr the exception.
I found corporate office politics insufferable. Hope those pics of me in a suit never get out... .
happy trails!
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein
Ha, the dogs of war are beyond auditing
.
.
War is just something done in the name of 'democracy'.
Once got cornered into a BS management role.
Total waste of time. Managers justifying their positions
by thinking-up new ways to 'improve' productivity.
Needless to say, I quit. There are other more
important things to do than discuss bullet points.
Thanks for the OT. Gotta go, have a meeting with my
table saw, chop saw, design sheet and other items.
question everything
Did a 3 year stint
as a project manager on a big retrofit job. Had to interact with the main office a couple of times a month.
Just didn't like the pressure to produce more from my crews who were already highly motivated to do a great job. I did a fine dance to leave them alone and let them speed on.
It turned out to be a great 3 year experience and we all left proud of what we accomplished.
Meanwhile, in that three years, management went through 3 field supervisors, 2 regional managers, and a corporate hostile takeover.
I happily went back to being a foreman.
Thanks for stopping by and mind the business end of that chop saw.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Oddly enough
I found the bean counters and the "efficiency or management experts" to be blind to the dysfunctional and inefficient consequences of their measuring and evaluation tools. Most of the criteria for one size fits all evaluations of different categories of work product, didn't differentiate among degrees of complexity within particular categories of work assignments.
Therefore senior personnel, supervisors, and people of like minded ideologies or political stances, would create informal channels of work assignment distribution based upon criteria unmeasured by the management tools, based upon very obvious differences in degree of difficulty within a uniform metric or algorithm that was poorly designed. As experienced supervisors they knew the shortcomings in the criteria, and assigned the most dysfunctional or unacknowledged difficult problems(by the data criteria in the management program) to disfavored employees in a discriminatory fashion to sandbag their output statistics and thus their careers, despite their obvious abilities and quality work product outcomes.
In this fashion, costs could be imposed on people who didn't game the metric. To game the metric one had to be on the patronage list of supervisors or management. If not, a person not in the informal structure's party loop, could consistently produce better quality and more work intensive output in government service, and then be discarded because the metric numbers (quantitative in nature rather than having a qualitative multiplier) would penalize that government employee rather than reward working smarter, and producing better and ultimately more efficient output.
For example plea bargaining in the courts, which results commonly in convictions of innocent people. This creates an appellate workload and the case comes back to ultimately add to workload. Or the equivalent in administrative determinations or adjudications. Remands which take less than 30 minutes to put together, get the same credit as a well considered, fully articulated final decisions. The latter basically ends the time spent by the agency, because of its finality, rather than having the case return again and again, to be adjudicated and litigated, thereby wasting more government resources.
My experiences go back to LAN and lap top days, but I have experienced the same kind of inefficiency and mistaken determinations in the automated decision making and handling of government or corporate monopoly services currently as an ordinary person or consumer. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible to get a government employee, a real human, on the phone, either in the government, or at one of major corporate monopolies, providing services. The whole function of "do it online," or "get the app," and automated phone trees, often improperly programmed, is to push administrative burdens and costs to the consumer or citizen. If it doesn't work for you "tough," the monopoly or the government "makes the rules."
語必忠信 行必正直
Wrongful termination lawsuits a-coming?
When I was a manager in private sector, had to be careful within larger companies on firing people. Firings could not just happen arbitrarily. One buddy who attended a seminar with a lawyer specializing in wrongful termination basically said, follow your rules and procedures for termination--otherwise he was there to file suit. (He gave a demo on an HR person defending a wrongful termination. The lawyer literally had the HR person in tears.)
It seems that much of workforce reduction could be achieved with basically a government wide hiring freezer and let ordinary turnover like resignations, retirement, etc reduce the workforce.
Edit: just to clarify not talking about layoffs, work force reductions, re-structuring, etc. But cases where a worker is fired.
Yeah, that is one of the trademarks of trumpet
.
heard he had some show on the teevee where his role
was to say: you're fired. Guess he liked the position so much
here we are. An egotistical maniac still playing some game show.
Sorta like Exlensky. Played a role as dictator-in-chief in some show
and was elevated to perform as such in real time on a global stage.
Are people really that desperate for entertainment?
question everything
I've long considered
my labor as a product that I sale for compensation. As long as I continue to provide that product, unchanged in quality and quantity, my business partner (employer) is obligated to continue the agreement without breech until the job is completed and my product is no longer needed.
Layoffs are a different issue that are the result of unseen conditions of a changing economy, and are understood as necessary to the survival of the place of employment.
I can always sale my product elsewhere.
This is what a labor union does, it sells my product for me.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
My response
to the federal questionnaire:
1. Went to a meeting where one of my 5 managers pulled me off the project I was working on, and tasked me to work exclusively on another unrelated project with a higher priority.
2. Went to a meeting with another of my 5 managers, in which that reassignment was reversed, and was tasked with a third unrelated project, with a still-higher priority.
3. Spent half a day trying to come up with ways to a) fix the problems with the third project, and b) make that specific manager believe that it was he who had thought of said fixes.
4. Went to an emergency meeting with the manager of the first project, who demanded that I immediately stop work on everything for my other managers, and instead justify to him why I had not been spending time on his project, which he believed to be the highest priority.
5. Stopped at a bar on the way home and continued my fourth project, which was and continues to be to drink until liver failure.
I found out today that they've hired another manager for me to work for as well, to bring the total to 6. This'll be fun. But hey, at least I don't work for the federal government...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Cluster something or other
comes to mind, Ufs.
Heh.
In a situation like that I would tell one that you were offered a special perk by one of the others for favoring their job, and get them bidding against each other, and start collecting perks.
Have a great day.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
In Texas,
if you get laid off, you can get unemployment benefits. If you are fired, you cannot get them without suing successfully for wrongful termination. Well, guess what client lawyers do not work for? Those with no income who cannot pay lawyer's fees.
This whole mass firing/laying off is a double edged sword. I feel sorry for workers who will suffer egregious financial problems. On the other hand we tax payers are financially harmed by being forced to pay federal worker's salaries and benefits for jobs that aren't essential. The number of employees is bloated across all agencies. In fairness to we middle class tax payers who have financial burdens due to the tax schedule, some consideration of our distress should be addressed.
I worked at a manufacturing plant in Houston in the drafting department. One afternoon, the entire workforce was called to a mass meeting. We were given a speech about a charity the corporation supported. The goal was to get contributions from 100% of the work force for some certificate of achievement. I refused to donate. A co-worker said they would make a contribution in my name so the corporation could get their certificate, and I could keep my job.
I wonder if USAID did something similar. Hmmmm...
Thanks for the OT, friend!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I too
have some sympathy for Fed workers getting laid off, which is how I see what Trump is doing. He is downsizing the workforce, rather than firing people for just cause. They should get unemployment relief.
Choice of words matter.
The construction industry I was working in is renowned for feast or famine work availability due to changing economic conditions. You were a wise one to always keep a little nest egg for when a downturn would put you on the "out-of-work bench" until new jobs broke ground. The ol' six months salary in savings rule applied.
This concept should be come more widely used as each four year administration seems intent on reversing the previous administration's economic agenda.
Now days there is no lifetime jobs. It's all a gig. Feast or famine has come to the federal government.
That said, I do believe there is fat to be cut. But I agree with Mr. Webster's solution, let ordinary turnover like resignations, retirement, etc. reduce the workforce.
Thanks for the post.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
I have no reason why but I am sharing this.
Hey, I don't care why
you posted it. I am delighted that you posted it!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981