One of my tasks while on rotation will be to scan thousands and thousands of documents into PDF files. Glamorous work, I know. Before I can start this task, I need to get some special software from our computer security guy, Marc. Trouble is, Marc is never around.
I don’t mean “never around” like “he’s so busy and running all over the place doing a million different tasks that it’s hard to grab his attention”. I mean “never around” like “the guy never comes to work – ever”.
Marc is in a unique situation – he has no team leader or staff director - his supervisor is the head honcho, our division director. The division director is far too busy to check up on him and Marc takes advantage of this by NEVER coming to work.
How does he possibly get away with this, you might ask? First off, Marc deals with computer security, so nobody can figure out exactly what his job is and if it’s being done or not. Second, he uses the perfect excuse: “I’ve been in the server room doing security installs”. The server room is somewhere in another building and nobody really knows where it is or how to check up on him. Third, he has a Blackberry so he can answer essential emails from wherever it is that he goes all day – although it should be noted that he doesn’t answer 90% of his emails, only the really really important ones from the bosses.
For curiosity’s sake, I decided to keep a “Marc sighting” tally for the first two months of this year. I would find excuses to walk by his cube once or twice a day just to see if he was there. I saw him a grand total of 4 times in January and February combined! No I am not making this up. At that rate, he’ll only be at work 24 days this year! But don’t worry; he’ll still collect every penny of his GS-13 salary ($82,961 of your tax dollars, if you’re keeping score at home)!
Ok, so we’ve gathered that he only comes to work twice a month, but what does he do with all of his free time? After almost 3 years of investigative work, my coworkers and I have determined that he sells jewelry on e-Bay. Really expensive jewelry that he flies to
How did Marc get to this awesome situation? Well, he started off as a computer contractor at FederalEntity. My bosses tell me that as a contractor, Marc was a superstar! He came in early, stayed late, did his work with speed and precision, and was always asking for more tasks to complete and ways to help out! Then, he got offered a permanent position on staff as a Federal employee and everything changed. (Side note: Federal contractors can be fired at a moment’s notice; Federal employees… are practically immortal). As soon as he knew that he couldn’t get fired, he stopped doing work.
When I first started here, my team leader told me that Marc was being watched closely by the head honchos and that he was on thin ice. Nearly 3 years later, and he’s still up to the same shenanigans. It’s so painfully difficult to fire a Fed that I think management has just given up…
It makes me mad though. Not because he makes a ton of money to do nothing (so do all Feds, he's just being honest about it), but because I still need to get this one piece of software from him so I can begin my scanning project! I’ve sent him 4 emails, left him 3 voicemails, and have stopped by his cube twice a day for the last 2 weeks – and have yet to see any indications that the man is still alive. I even left a big note on his keyboard that said “please call me” about a week ago. It has not yet been touched! Lets be honest, I didn’t really want to scan those thousands of documents anyways.
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