Gov Workers

A contractor reminded me this week that the hate between gov workers and contractors happens to be mutual J. I don’t know if I just never stopped to look around, but that week I had all sorts of epiphanies.

First of all, I want to make a disclaimer that not all government workers are this way. While I am not one to subscribe to stereotypes, I do believe they come from somewhere. So if someone out there thinks all gov people are lazy, there must be a reason.

Here are some of the trends I’ve picked up on:

Getting by doing the bare minimum – Gov people do everything in their power to avoid responsibility and to do as little work as possible at all times. The longer you’ve been with the government the more this applies to you.

“The Blame Game” - Again the older you are the more this applies to you, because you’ve had years of experience in dodging bullets and getting by unnoticed.

“The Cover-Up Game” - It may be easy to admit you made a mistake somewhere when you’re new, but as the months roll by that excuse gets old. So, when a mistake is made, the newbie tries to cover it up!

I received a call recently form a lady out in an office that shall remain nameless talking about how she entered some dates in the system a year ago and she entered them wrong because she was new. When I ask for documentation and I cross check the facts I realize she didn’t make a mistake, she just didn’t know what to do because the system gave her an error. Instead of reaching out and trying to correct it, she decided to make up a bunch of dates similar enough to the real ones so it would look a mistake should anyone ask. This made me so angry, because she did something wrong and didn’t know how to correct it, but she didn’t reach out to me for help until she had no choice, and then she lied about what really happened!

It doesn’t stop there though, ask anyone who’s been around the organization long enough to do something outside what is required in their daily activities and they will freak out! They create this storm in a glass of water for no good reason other than they are too lazy to go an extra 2 feet, let alone a mile!

There are so many archaic ways of doing things and no one wants to change them because it’s the way it’s been done for years. Nobody in the gov likes to get outside their comfort zone and try something different, because that requires the use of your brain for a change.

Then we have the inevitable/completely useless changes that are implemented every time a new manager steps in. This may not be the case in all organizations, but in mine management rotates every year for reasons I will not get into here. Anyhow, every new manager has 3 things in mind, resume, resume, resume. So they all want to say that they changed something, that they made an “impact”. Sometimes change is good, it makes things better, and fixes old problems, but when someone is changing something like the name of a program every year, or when they are making policy changes every month on things that actually work, you start to wonder how we get anything done at all?

I sometimes can’t keep up with the changes we make here, so how are the people in different offices supposed to know that even though last month the answer was A, this month the answer is B. Yet we get mad at them when they call us with a bunch of messed up ideas, or when they are doing everything wrong. Well duh, we keep changing the rules and not telling them! It’s no wonder contractors hate us.