Answers

The previous post has generated some interesting comments and questions (keep them coming!) Let’s take a look at some of them here:

Q: “Why are you still a Fed if it sucks so much??”
A: Read (among others): http://federalwasteland.blogspot.com/2008/03/trapped.html

Q: “You are a horrible person for writing this and [insert threat here]!!!”
A: If I were to summarize the major goal of this blog, it would be: "To present a realistic yet humorous view of the absurdities of the Federal Government". Yes, everyone already knows that the Government is inefficient and backwards in many ways. The anecdotes here are posted to "show" versus "tell" what everyone already knows. And yes, its also a good way for us to vent our frustrations after a long day of dealing with idiots. The feedback has been 99.8% positive (especially from other Feds). However, a few people seem to be upset by what we write. That confuses us. Are you pro-Government inefficiency? Are you pro-wasting- tax-dollars-on-employees-who-sleep -under-their-desk-while-stealing-$95k-a-year-of-your-hard-earned-money? Let us know your real concern and we’ll try to address it.

Q: “[Republicans] like you want to let Capitalism take over the Federal Government – and it will destroy us all!”
A: Unfortunately, we are not proposing any type of solution to fix the problem. If we had a good one, we’d be teaching at the Kennedy School or making millions as private consultants. We've laid this out there numerous times, but lets do it again: ours is the best Government in the world. And for every inefficient, wasteful coworker we have we can name another coworker who genuinely cares about their job, their mission, and their country. All we're advocating for is increasing the number of true "public servants" and decreasing the number of "Federal zombies waiting for retirement". We’ve been brainstorming ways to do this for the last three or so years… so far we’ve got nothing. In the meantime, please continue to read our blog for some funny anecdotes!

Q: “You said you want open discourse, why didn’t you publish my comment?"
A: Probably because you said our mothers were wh*res or something. Civil discourse, please!

That's A Good Question...

If there’s one question that I’d really love to know the answer to it would be: “will I get fired for writing this blog?” Despite what one cantankerous comment board poster seems to believe, I don’t think I will. Allow me to explain:

1. This blog is not written by one person, but by a handful of Feds from different FederalEntities who are sick of watching the Government machine piss your tax dollars down the drain. The same nonsense happens anywhere you go in the Federal Government…

2. All of the names, ages, genders, positions, and specific details are significantly changed. This is for anonymity of both the writers and the subjects. Most posts also have red herrings thrown in just to spice things up. One commenter hinted that we were being libelous and could be sued. Our subjects likely wouldn’t even recognize their own stories…

3. Nothing posted here is top-secret or confidential. There has been no revealing of hidden Government secrets or anything like that. Sorry. Our coworkers probably find this blog boring – they already know everything we’re writing about! The juiciest this blog has ever gotten is simple hallway gossip. We’re just yelling this gossip through a megaphone (this blog = a very weak megaphone).

4. It’s all done on personal time. It’s really no different than keeping a personal diary at home. Can the Government fire someone for vaguely talking about how bad the Government is in their diary? Pretty sure that kind of speech is protected under the First Amendment.

5. It’s the Federal Government! Have you read any of the other posts?? It’s almost impossible to fire someone! The private sector is completely different – they can fire you for not wearing a necktie if they want. In the public sector it’s the opposite. I previously linked to an AP article about Federal purchase card fraud. If you recall, there was a Fed who charged thousands of dollars in personal dating services to the Government, downloaded porn on his work computer while at work – and he DID NOT GET FIRED! For serious! All we do is write a blog. From our homes.

6. The Government Unions. They love to fight for the employees. Federal Employees fired for informing the public about how messed up their taxpayer-funded workplace is? Sounds like a whistleblower case to me. Oh man, they would love to sue the Government for that! In fact, I’m sure any lawyer reading this just creamed their pants!

There are about 15 more reasons that come to mind, but who cares about that. What do you, gentle reader, think? Feel free to comment here. Please note the new comment policy – if you are a jerk in your comment, it will be removed. FederalWasteland is all about open discourse. Just don’t be a d-bag. Thanks in advance!

Guest Post!

My hope for this blog is to have it evolve from me squawking about my ridiculous Federal Government experiences, blossoming into a meeting place for Feds, contractors, and taxpayers alike to squawk about their ridiculous Federal Government experiences - together! Step 1 (me squawking) has been accomplished. Welcome to step 2 - where you the reader get to help tell the story! So, if you have any thoughts about the Feds you would like to share with the world, write it up and email it to federalwasteland (at) blogspot (dot) com. Hopefully one day, you'll see your words posted here!

Without further ado, here is the first ever Federal Wasteland guest post! It comes from an anonymous Fed somewhere in Washington, DC - this story is so right on the money it hurts... Enjoy!
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The lifelong federal government employee is concerned first and foremost with maintaining the illusion that s/he never has and never will make a mistake. This is accomplished through a mixture of passing the buck, documenting with hard e-mail or paper evidence every move that s/he makes, and swiftly pointing fingers at a co-worker when the possibility of a mistake is laid at his or her feet.

This week, a project I am on with a questionably competent person who is a little above me and a new-to-the-division and also questionably competent attorney who is more above me has ramped up. The management and communication between “team” members has been poor throughout, and the tasks I have been asked to do have ranged from demeaning to duplicative to unbelievably demeaning (I was actually asked to print a document out for someone today!). The eternally frustrating thing about being on the lowest level of this chain of incompetence is that you cannot point out your superiors’ many mistakes but have to endure their insistence on passive-aggressively noting yours.

The mid-level person, who I will call the Airhead Bureaucratte (because she is female), asked me and a colleague to go about an assignment in a way that sounded counter-productive. In fact, my colleague and I remarked on how the nature of her request actually imputed her own mental functionality, so we called her back to clarify what she had asked. Indeed, she said, go ahead and do this job the nonsensical way she had outlined.

The next day, I come into work and find I am being sought by the attorney who manages me and the Airhead Bureaucratte. The frazzled and unabashedly irritable attorney comes down to my office—which she rarely does, because, being the lowest on the totem pole, I am expected to always report physically up to them—and tells me and my colleague that we had done something differently than from what Airhead Bureaucratte told us. We were sure we had heard Airhead Bureaucratte’s directions correctly, because we had been so confused by how bizarrely counter-intuitive they were.

Despite our supposed inability to follow directions, this team still needs us badly on the case, so badly that the attorney insisted on dragging us up to her office (of course) for a giant task-in-order meeting and immediately apologized for blowing up at us just about an hour earlier. The kicker is, she told us that in dealing with Airhead Bureaucratte, we should repeat back the instructions we have been given, so she can recognize whether what she has asked us to do is totally crazy. “Just ask Airhead Bureaucratte if she is sure she is asking you to do something that makes sense,” this attorney told us.

Well, the other thing lifer bureaucrats hate is having it insinuated that they are wrong or unclear in any way, though many of them are consistently both things. So I am now supposed to screen every work request from Airhead Bureaucratte based on how batsh-t crazy it seems, while somehow trying to maintain the veneer that she knows what she’s talking about (because she never makes mistakes!), even though I know that I must look at her as if everything that is coming out of her mouth is spoken in an alien tongue.

Anything But Work

The Gallup Organization did a study that found a strong correlation between workplace satisfaction and "having a best friend at work". At first it seems like an odd connection, but it really makes sense to me. Most people hate their jobs, but if you have a friend to share your misery with its much more manageable! I'm lucky - in my office here at FederalEntity there are a handful of similar-minded, young government muppets who I can commiserate with. We spend, on average, 1.5 hours every day doing so.

Over the past three years, our clique has devised numerous ways to help the hours go by faster. I'll go into a couple of them here.

1. Terrible Tie Tuesday - I happen to have an impressive collection of terrible neckties. My coworker John does too. Every Tuesday for the past 4 weeks we've had a competition to see who has the worst necktie. Week 1 his reversible Xmas lights/Valentine's Hearts beat out my purple and brown hand-painted drop cloth tie. Week 2, my bright yellow and green tie with little pints of Guinness drawn all over it bested John's tie which was covered in little ducks. Week 3, his hand-sewn glossy green tie that was a foot and a half too long was defeated by my red tie featuring a huge picture of a little boy peeing into a lake. Yesterday my retro 60's heavily-stained yellow and green paisley tie lost to his navy tie with a giant hand-painted panda. So it's tied 2-2. The pressure is on for next week! I enjoy Terrible Tie Tuesday because it gives me something to look forward to on Tuesday (other than going drinking after work). Plus, there's something exciting about walking into an important meeting full of government bigwigs wearing a tie that features a picture of a little boy peeing.

2. Office Baseball / Mini-Golf - I have collected a fantastic assortment of stress balls during my time here, which are perfect for workplace diversions. Aside from throwing them at coworkers, these stress balls are great for baseball and mini-golf. If you dismantle a file cabinet, you'll find that there are several pieces of metal that are similar in length to a baseball bat or golf club. Give it a try, I'll wait... See how easy that was? Office baseball is pretty self-explanatory - have someone pitch the stress balls at you, and try to hit them as far as you can with the "bat". Bonus points if your hit knocks anything over. For office mini-golf, just put a coffee mug on the floor on its side. Then go to the other end of the office and see how many strokes it takes you to hit the stress ball into the mug. More than the competition itself, the looks that your coworkers give you as you "putt" a stress ball with a big piece of metal right outside of their cubicle are what makes these games so entertaining.

3. Cubicle Fortifications - If you share a cubicle wall with someone, you know how annoying it can be at times. You hear them on the phone. You hear them listening to music. They sneeze and you feel like you're instantly covered in their germs. You live in constant fear that they could throw something over the cubicle wall and hit you. If only there was some way to protect yourself! One day in a fit of boredom, I shot my former coworker Kevin with a rubber band over the cubicle wall that separated us. When I came into work the next day, Kevin had constructed a cardboard castle (with drawbridge) on top of the thin cubicle wall that separated us. The inter-cubicle aggression quickly escalated and so did the castle. Fences made out of office supplies, catapults, siege ladders, a giant turret, sand, fighter jets, plastic cowboys battling plastic fish - it was quite a battle scene. Our castle became so ridiculous that we were convinced that upper management would scold us for blatantly not doing work. Much to our surprise, when our director walked by our cubes after the castle had been built his only response was "oh, a castle." Kevin moved to another office, and the castle came down. He still has the main castle piece up in his new cubicle. The common response he gets when people see it is "Oh, a castle. Did your child make that?"

4. Prank wars - This will be the subject of my next post.

Governmentium

The following was submitted to me by a reader in California. I didn't write it, but I like it, so I'm putting it up. Any of you Feds out there, if you have an absurd story that you'd like to see posted here for the world to see, please write it up, send it to me and I'll post it. Just be sure to mask who you are and where you work. Submissions to: federalwasteland (at) gmail (dot) com. Rockin!
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The New Element

Recent hurricanes and gasoline issues are proof of the existence of a new chemical element. Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second to take anywhere from four days to four years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of two-six years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration.

This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.