Secretaries

I mentioned in an earlier post that I've had 5 staff directors since I've been here. I've also had 5 secretaries in my office. We don't really need a secretary as far as I'm concerned - we have a Copy Boy who does all of our copies, faxes, and deliveries. The secretary seems to just sit around all day, talking on the phone.

Secretary #1 - She was here when I started. She was young-ish, seldom at her desk, and ALWAYS seemed to be talking to someone on the phone. I used to think that she was really busy with work, but a coworker who sat near her said that all she did was call her friends who were secretaries in other offices and gossip with them. Kind of like how cab drivers are always on the phone with other cab drivers. She would also make bold statements that I never knew how to respond to like: "Sorry I'm moving slow today, I was up until 4am crying and screaming at my boyfriend." Current location: secretary at another FederalEntity.

Secretary #2 - This woman was just downright strange. She always had a weird plastic-clown smile on her face. Whenever you asked her to do something she would say, with a weird plastic-clown smile on her face, that she understood exactly what you wanted and seemed really excited and eager to do it. But then it would take her a long time to complete the task and she would mess it up. She always assumed responsibility for her gaffes at least, and apologized profusely. With a weird plastic-clown smile on her face. I have no idea what she's doing now (birthday parties?).

Secretary #3 - This one was a male and he hated to be called a "secretary". "Executive assistant", he would interject immediately when someone would say the word secretary. He was probably 20 years old. He would eat Five Guys cheeseburgers at least 3 days a week. He also wore some ridiculously office-inappropriate clothing. Like huge sweaters that said "Sean John" in giant bright letters, or saggy jeans and Timberland boots with a chain wallet. He was also a wannabe Slam poet. He left to go back to school, and I am friends with him on Facebook.

Secretary #4 - I don't have much to say about our fourth secretary. In 6 months I don't think I ever heard her say a word. She just sat at her desk looking bored out of her mind and playing solitaire. Seemed pretty miserable to me. Then one day she was gone, never to be spoken of again.

Secretary #5 - Our current secretary. She is a tough cookie (used to be a NYC bus driver). She'll tell you what's what and will make you regret that you ever asked her to do something for you. During this past summer, she would bring her kids in 1-2 days a week and they would just sit in an empty cubicle all day. She leaves scary custody battle lawsuit papers on the printer. I could write pages about how interesting she is, but I'll leave it to this one conversation I had with her on October 31st:

me: Happy Halloween!
secretary: (defiantly) Naaah-uh, I don't celebrate Halloween.
me: (silence)
secretary: I celebrate The Harvest.
me: (puzzled) Uh, well then, Happy Harvest!
secretary: (frustrated) The Harvest is NEXT week.

Tomorrow: Government Non-Religious Holiday Party!

Office Crazies

There are lots of crazy characters working in the Government. And while there are surely crazy people in any office setting, the nut jobs in the Federal Government are 10x crazier because they can't get fired! There's nothing to reel them in - nothing to keep them rooted to reality. The old-timers tend to be especially askew - years of mindless work can destroy one's brain.

For example: there's this one guy in our office who is absurdly territorial. If he's working on a project, he doesn't want anyone to help him or give him feedback out of fear that they might, um, steal his glory I guess. He always wants to know what you're working on - just to be sure that you're not infringing upon his projects. He even gets steaming mad if he's not CC'd on emails are barely pertinent to him. This territoriality spills over into other aspects of office life as well.

He strangely feels that he has the right to leave his dirty dishes in the office kitchen sink for days, and even SCREAMED at my coworker who had the nerve to ask him to wash them (it's HIS sink I guess...). Another time, he yelled at our secretary for printing a very important memo on "HIS" color printer. Our office has 3 color printers in various locations, but in this guy's mind you are only allowed to print to the printer that's nearest to you. Anything else is an infringement of space and property.

The printer incident set me off. We all work for the same boss - I should be able to print to whatever printer I want. And if the color printer near me is broken (which is has been for the last several months), I'm going to have to print elsewhere.

So to get him back, I started printing on "HIS" printer as frequently as possible. Oh, and I would only print pictures of puppies...

I would find the cutest puppy I could on the internet, blow it up in MS Word, and then send a couple of copies to his printer and just leave them there. I did this 3-4 times a week for about a month.

My coworker John was in on the prank towards the end. He sits right near the disputed printer, and every time he would find a puppy picture sitting in the printer bin he'd loudly proclaim "Who keeps printing these damn puppy pictures on our printer?? They're wasting all our toner!" This would inevitably set crazy printer guy off. He would even tack the pictures to the wall right by the printer to serve as a mocking reminder.

Did it teach him a lesson? Probably not. But it taught me a lesson. A lesson I have since forgotten.

Why Me?

I joined the Federal Government at the urging of my senior thesis advisor. She had worked at FederalEntity for 30+ years (in a Regional office) and had thoroughly loved it. I was trying to decide between Government and working for a huge investment/insurance company. I probably made the right choice...

I got into the Government fairly easily. At the time (2005), there was a program called the "Outstanding Scholar" program, which was designed as a simple way to get college seniors into the Federal Government. Something like 60% of the Federal workforce is slated to retire in the next 5 years, so there is a tremendous need to get some new blood in here ASAP.

The "Outstanding Scholar" program worked as such: if you had above a 3.4 GPA from any accredited college or university, you could apply for an "Outstanding Scholar" position. When a person who met the criteria applied, their resume was simply placed in a gigantic binder. Any office that was looking to hire a young person could request this binder, look through it for people they liked, call them up for an interview, and then hire them. No "top 3" lists, no procedural hassles, no red tape! Just look through the book, select who you like, and hire them. I got interviewed by 3 different offices at FederalEntity, was offered a job by 2 of them, and chose to come work at my current location. The process was quite painless!

About a year ago, the "Outstanding Scholar" program went bye-bye. The Government unions sued, saying that the "Outstanding Scholar" program unfairly bypassed veterans and older people (it sure did - that was the beauty of it!). The courts found in the union's favor, and now every young, talented, recent college graduate has to get in line with everyone else in the crapshow that is the Federal hiring process. How often does a college Senior with excellent grades and amazing potential (but little work experience) get ranked above a Veteran who has been a plumber for 30 years? Never.

AN ALTERNATIVE

A good friend of mine from college had a summer internship at a different FederalEntity between his Junior and Senior years. He liked it so much that he wanted to go back and work for them upon graduation. However, his GPA wasn't high enough to be hired by the Government! The hiring manager at FederalEntity refered him to a government contracting company who had contracts with said office. He was hired by the contractor and he now sits in the exact desk in the exact office that he would have occupied if the government could have hired him direcly. The kicker - as a contractor he gets paid $20k more! Since his grades weren't good enough to be hired by the government, he got the exact same job as a contractor and gets paid a lot more! Plus, they have lavish parties and are paying for his grad school!

Coming up tomorrow: Fun office pictures!

An Exercise in Futility

I frequently get asked by friends and acquaintances: "I have a friend who wants a job at FederalEntity. Can I send you their resume?" My answer is always "You can send it to me, but there's absolutely nothing I can do to help them get a job here." Allow me to explain.

When our office has a vacancy, we contact our HR department (notoriously awful), who prepares a vacancy announcement - a generic document that briefly lists what we do and who we are looking to hire. The announcement is sent to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM, a separate FederalEntity) who eventually posts it on USAJobs.gov. Everybody and their mother can then apply to the vacancy with a few clicks of their mouse.

After 2 weeks, the announcement closes on USAJobs.gov. Someone in OPM (on the West Coast, no less...) then takes the hundreds of submitted applications and ranks them on a 100 point scale. You get an automatic 10 bonus points if you are a veteran. For those of you keeping score at home - all of our applicants are ranked based on a vague position description by someone 3 timezones away who has no clue what my office is, what we really do, or what type of person we are hoping to hire!

We've gone through this process 5 times in my 2.5 years here, and each time the list of suggested candidates that we get from OPM is shockingly awful. They supply us with the "top 3" point earners who we have to interview, and if all of these candidates are unsatisfactory, sometimes we can request to see the "next 3" on the list. However, it's extremely difficult (read: impossible) to justify hiring someone from the "next 3" list over someone from the "top 3".

Blah blah blahhhh, what does this all mean? Well, last time around we had an applicant with undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics and applied mathematics from great schools, plus great work experience. For some stupifying reason, she was ranked #4. All of our "top 3" candidates were horrible. Eventually 2 withdrew (found other jobs?), but the guy who was ranked #1 really wanted the job. He had been a plumber for 30 years, had never really used a computer, never worked with Excel (that's all I do all day long), and his writing sample had 13 typos on the first page (including the misspelling of his company's name!). He was ranked #1 partly because I think he "exaggerated" some things on his application, plus he was a veteran. Our request to skip over him to hire the #4 applicant was rejected by OPM. The reason? It was an entry-level job opening, and those skills that we claimed he clearly did not have (computers/excel/writing?) were learnable! We could hire them both if we wanted to, but we couldn't skip #1 and hire just #4.

This was over a year ago, and that vacancy still has not been filled. In 5 tries over 2.5 years, we've only successfully hired 1 new person. In that same timespan, 3 people have retired, quit, or moved to other offices. Ever get the feeling like you're on a sinking ship?

Coming up on Wednesday: How I became a Fed and how my friend didn't.

Too young to die

Yesterday I had a moment where I very briefly but very seriously considered jumping out of a window.

My office is in the process of hiring new people to join our staff. We have several openings that we're trying to fill and a list of about 15 potential candidates. We are giving everyone a 30 minute preliminary phone interview, and we will invite the people who impress us in for an hour-long personal interview.

Yesterday we conducted 5 of these interviews. It's really true what they say - almost everyone on the interview panel makes up their mind about the interviewee within the first 3 minutes. This oftentimes results in the next 27 minutes being quite painful. Bad interviews aside, allow me to recount a moment of Government ridiculousness:

One of the people applying for the permanent Federal job (lets call her Tami) currently works in our office as an outside technology contractor. Tami sits about 8 cubes away from me (she could hear me right now if I were to shout her name). I thought - "Oh great, at least we get to do ONE of these interviews in person rather than over the phone". Au contraire... In the Government hiring process, everything has to be fair and equal! The same staff members have to sit in on all interviews. The exact same list of questions must be asked to all candidates. And yep, if you're doing phone interviews, ALL candidates must be interviewed by phone.

So at 2 p.m. the 4 other members of the hiring panel and I filed into my staff director's office and called up Tami (who was sitting no more than 40 yards away, seriously) for her phone interview. When the half-hour phone interview was up, I walked out of my staff director's office and at the other end of the office suite, I saw just-interviewed-Tami walking out of her office. This moment of absurdity left me completely flustered. I quickly looked away, saw the window, and for 0.00001 second pondered hurling myself through the glass. I imagined myself falling towards my death screaming "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"

Instead, I went to Starbucks. MUCH more on the Federal hiring process coming soon...

It's Official!

Today I released this blog to the general public. I've been working (slowly) on it for a few months, but wanted to get some thoughts written down before telling the whole world.

You may have stumbled upon the Federal Wasteland randomly. Perhaps a friend or coworker sent you the link. Maybe I sent it to you myself. Who knows how the information superhighway works. Regardless, let it be noted here:

1. Everything written here is true. My coworkers read it, so I can't lie.

2. Feel free to pass this blog on to anyone (but refrain from using my real name/workplace if you know it, you know, so I don't get fired...). Actually, let me rephrase that: It is your DUTY as an American to send the link on to everyone you know. Technically, you're paying for it.

3. Also go ahead and make comments if you'd like.

4. Now that I've released it to the public, I'll try to update 1-2 times a week, so check back for more on how your tax dollars are being flushed down the drain!

What's the Password?

I have 16 separate passwords for work. Yes, 16: Computer log-on, network access, email, office instant messenger, voicemail, financial mainframe, financial system, timesheet reporting, electronic pay-stub, web-based data report tool, web-based data storage, financial planning system, travel system, electronic file cabinet, room reservation tool, e-learning site.

I would have no problem with this password overkill if I could use the same password in all sixteen instances. However, some of the passwords listed above have annoying requirements, which oftentimes conflict with others. Some must include a number, a symbol, a capital letter, and no string of consecutive letters that form a word found in a dictionary. Some passwords are numerical only. Some of the passwords are just "assigned" to the user and never change. Some of the passwords are linked to other passwords (so when you change one password, you unwittingly change 3 other passwords without notification). One system briefly had a requirement that passwords be in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Fourteen of my 16 passwords must be at least 8 characters long, but none can be longer than 10.

When I first started working here, I devised a single password that met all the password requirements for all of the systems. I thought I was a genius! Little did I know that each system has a different "valid for" period, which quickly rendered my super-password useless. Some passwords need to be changed every 6 months, most are valid for 90 days, several expire every 45 days, and 2 of them never have to be changed. These varying timetables, applied over the last 2.5 years on a constantly rotating basis, have led to my passwords becoming really f--d up!

I would say that I currently have 5 major passwords, spread across the various systems. But there's no logic to how I have them grouped. All of my financial passwords are different. All of my Lotus Notes based passwords are different. I literally have no clue what my electronic file cabinet password is (starting 6 months ago we were supposed to save copies of ALL important emails using this system - orders from the President!). To keep it all straight, I have a sheet of paper tucked away in a desk drawer that lists all of my passwords for each system. Yes, I understand that keeping a written list of my passwords right next to my computer defeats the purpose of having passwords and/or rotating passwords so often. But it's way better than forgetting one!

My coworker forgot her password to the financial system this morning. Up to 50% of our day is spent working in this system. She has sent several emails and even called the system helpdesk to try to get her password reset, but as it turns out there are only 2 people in the whole FederalEntity that have the power to do so. One is on vacation today, and the other isn't answering his phone (he's probably out as well). So it looks like she's off the hook on a lot of work until tomorrow. Hmm, now that I think about it, forgetting a password doesn't sound so bad!