Gasp! Kumquats! Suddenly I don’t feel SAFE anymore–!
Most Americans believe government to be a necessary evil. But more and more it’s coming to look like an un-necessary evil. Like f’rinstance:
And this was eight years ago, man! They’ve had all this time to recruit more and more ignoramuses into all levels of government.
And then there are the voters out there who think a kumquat is some kind of racist thingy.
Our education system needs some work.
Man, there are some real morons in government. The DMV, in many places, is pathetic. I was a Federal government employee, for a time, and I couldn’t get outta there fast enough. A government job sounds like a dream, with exceptional job security, and even more exceptional benefits, but I found it soul crushing.
Please feel free to elaborate! Few of us have had the experience of doing government work. Is it really worse than covering local sports for a weekly newspaper?
Covering sports for a weekly newspaper? It’s hard to out-cringe that. 🙂 I would imagine that covering local school football games and Little League might be dangerous. Write the wrong thing about someone’s kid and you could end up with an angry parent to deal with.
You should’ve heard the phone calls. “My son had a hat trick and you never mentioned it!”
As bad as a stage mother.
I can imagine that working for the gov. would not be pleasant at all. It is very unpleasant to just observe from the outside.
Some years ago, I visited a DMV office in Colorado. I don’t mean to be disrespectful of anyone, but they moved so slowly and so deliberately, that it was like watching a partially paralyzed person struggling to move, but these people’s disability was behavioral, not physical. The utter resignation displayed by these people was mind boggling.
Here’s the problem, as I see it. Government jobs tend to be stable, and unlike working in the commercial world, it is unlikely that a government worker will ever be laid off due to an economic downturn. Besides that, the retirement benefits can be amazing. So a veil of perception is lowered and a person in a government job can easily fall into the trap of believing that quitting, and going back into the open market, is unthinkable.
Cults function by convincing members that they have some unique lock on life, and that leaving the cult exposes someone to exceptional danger. For this reason, cult members will look at the success of others as not being valid. How can these people truly succeed, when they don’t have this pearl of wisdom the cult provides? So the cult member essentially blocks out any information which conflicts with the cult’s worldview, and accepts only information which confirms their existing biases. Rule number one is that the cult cannot be wrong.
Now, apply this to someone locked into a government job. They are locked into a mindset that they have to remain government employees. Part of the work rules for General Schedule Federal employees is that they are allowed to search for other GS positions during work hours. It was normal, even expected, that you would peruse the job openings in the Federal system and apply for numerous other jobs. This started as soon as you were hired. Most water cooler talk revolved around retirement.
I was hired in about as high as you can come in cold from the outside. My starting pay was equivalent to 14 years seniority. What I observed while I was there was that any number of people left for other jobs, and a small handful quit to return to the open market, frequently without giving notice. I put in a leave request to burn up my accumulated vacation, and once that was approved, I gave notice, but only worked about two more days, ending my time there as vacation time. To some coworkers, leaving was shocking, but people whom knew me well were not surprised, because I had been discontent since 6 weeks in.
I would only consent to return if the signing bonus was so enormous that I could, literally, buy a new house, and stuff away enough to pay its taxes and insurance for the rest of my life. For that, I might consent to six months, so long as there was a clause allowing me to exercise my conscience if I was asked to support something in which I did not believe.
Wow.
I met some great people that worked for the Feds, and I had a lot of respect for them as individuals, but just walking into the building in the morning collapsed my state of mind, and it was a well known syndrome among people who worked there. In the case of this job, I didn’t interview in person, but had I seen the place and the people, there is no way I would have signed on.
About a year before that, I interviewed to head the IT department for a chemical company in the area. When I went to that interview, I saw that the people there seemed unhealthy and, as nice as they were, I didn’t want to end up where they were. I turned down a six-figure job, at a time when six-figures was still a lot to walk away from. 🙂
Try being a writer: a six-figure income ain’t comin’ your way.
Even IT isn’t nearly as lucrative as it once was. My job is probably safe, because my employer has a major presence in Tucson, and I’m the only network engineer on this continent. Nonetheless, much of my work takes place in the EU, UK, or even Asia.
One strange aspect of our times is essentially zero-cost worldwide communications. In the ‘90s, I had made precisely two overseas phone calls, strangely, to buy back issues of a British automotive magazine. (I still have those back issues, BTW.) These days, an extended conversations with coworkers in India, the UK, the EU, or even Australia is a daily experience. For the good and for the bad, our world is forever changed.
How about the American families in Hatie? They can’t get out because the State Department’s paperwork is taking so long to be sent to them. Meanwhile it is faster for these families to leave illegally than wait on our State Department. I sure don’t see this as America first. Or how about Americans being held hostages by Hamas as our national gov’t sends humanitarian food and supplies to Hamas which they complain about it not being halal.
Are we going to wind up with Americans having to sneak over their country’s border while foreigners get a free pass?