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.