Unsuckgov

http://php.app.com/fed_employees10/search.php

I work in a small office. There are some cubicles and a lesser number of actual offices. Two of those actual offices were unoccupied.

Recently, my boss and the head of my office, had a new level of bureaucrat hired and put above them. (More on that waste later.)

Needless to say, it was a blow to their ego.

Anyway, there was a real chance my boss could have been bumped from the nicest office in the suite to one of  the lesser ones to make room for the new hire. So what did they do?

Masked as “helping,” they scrambled up and down the agency offering up the empty offices to anyone that would take them in a cynical move to fill up the space where they might have been relegated.

Furthermore, the move demoralized many in the office who were very deserving of being upgraded from cube to actual office.

Full disclosure: I was not one of those who might have been considered for an office.

UPDATE: Someone in our office was charged with registering all of the “leaders.”

So my agency is having an event that will be open to the public.

We’ve got limited seating, so it’s important to have a good headcount so that we can cut off admission when we’re full, so we’re using a well tested, widely used online ticketing system you’ve probably heard of.

The system requires some rudimentary registration, and then a “ticket” can be printed out for the event. Simple.

Or so you’d think.

Obviously, there are a lot of agency people who are going to want to attend, but many of the muckety-mucks of the agency (not the leaders, mind you, but rather senior chair moisteners) think they can just shoot an email to those putting together the event and undermine the whole idea of using a free, efficient way to track who’s coming or not.

Yes, this kind of mentality is PERVASIVE, and it’s a shame.

So I’m on the Metro on the way home, and my boss uncharacteristically texts me to ask if co-worker X was still at the office and whether co-worker X had sent a link from our agency’s website to one of the leaders.

Baffled about why my boss didn’t directly contact co-worker X directly, I simply texted back that I didn’t know.

I then got another text, asking me to do it and CC my boss and co-worker X.

Why? Who knows?

Now, my boss and the leader are perfectly tech savvy enough to get on their Blackberry and find the link. It was on the top of the front page of the agency website, and they both know that. This is simply an exercise is establishing a pecking order.

It’s like the leaders must be served like the members of a royal court.

And toady bureaucrats are happy to oblige. It’s really gross, especially for government.

Hoping either my boss or better yet, the leader would realize that they could simply grab the link themselves, I made up something about having email problems, and shortly thereafter, my boss texted me that she’d sent the link to the leader.

I REALLY wish I could tell you who this leader is because you almost all know who they are.

Maybe someday.

The was a reorganization of my agency recently, and one leader was given quite a bit more power than they previously had.

There was an announcement made, and the new powers were listed. However, there was some lingering questions on the margins.

Through an internal communications system–a suggestion box of sorts–it was asked if the leader, under the new arrangement, would have authority of one part of the agency not mentioned in the announcement.

The leader was emailed the question and responded simply “no.”

There was no controversy. It was a straightforward answer and an accurate one.

A communication person in the agency wanted to elaborate a bit and added a simple sentence of explanation. Again, it was all cut and dry.

However, they “looped in” general counsel, who decided to add a few more sentences, which neither added nor subtracted meaning.

There was emailing back and forth for days with lots of hemming and hawing.

Finally, the tailored answer, which said nothing more than “no
had to be cleared by the leader.

After another few days, the leader responded that they preferred the “no with a sentence” answer.

In all, it took over a week to respond to a simple question.

This is typical.

A lot of government activity revolves around seeking out any mention of the agency in the press, just in case.

It doesn’t matter how oblique the reference might be.

So the other day, the WIFE of a “leader” emailed her husband that she thought she heard a reference to an issue vaguely related to the agency on CNN.

She caught the tail end of a report.

The “leader,” not to be bothered with looking it up themselves, emailed a sub leader about it, giving nothing else but the information above.

The sub leader then tasked an intern with hunting down the needle in the haystack.

The intern was unfamiliar with the issues and really had no idea where to begin the search, so they asked another person in the office to help them.

Finally the transcript was found, but it mattered not because the reference actually turned out not to have anything to do with the agency at all.

So in sum, four bureaucrats, one appointee, a GS-15 and two others, were involved in the hunt for a sliver of information that turned out to be inconsequential.

Your government at work.