Long Lunch
February 15, 2016 6:40 AM   Subscribe

 
It's nice work if you can get it.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 6:43 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


Man, mastering Spinoza is not how I would spend six years not showing up to work
posted by dismas at 6:46 AM on February 15, 2016 [23 favorites]


Yeah, I think I'd spend my time on the Frankfurt School and building up a really comprehensive knowledge of the European novel between about 1780 and 1850. Focusing on Spinoza seems fiddly, somehow.
posted by Frowner at 6:48 AM on February 15, 2016 [41 favorites]






So I arrived, acquired a large office in a remote corner of said facility, and continued with my march towards greatness. Then, something strange and wonderful happened. In outlook, an EMail appeared with my name in the "Courtesy Copy" field. Apparently, a new Vice President had decided to delegate the responsibilities that once were mine to another department. Immediately frightened for my job and my well being, I was tempted to scream out - yet, thankfully, I remained silent. I continued to come into the office on time every day, picked up the random pieces of my old job that were left scattered in the transition, and waited for the word.

That, my friends, was 4 months ago to the day. After 30 days, I became convinced that I was a forgotten, non digestible entity in the corporate stomach. No man ever comes over to ask me for anything - although I am but a Manager, and Directors roam the hallways like rabid hyenas, I am much too senior to all of them for them to attempt an attack. Every once in a while, the phone will ring, and an old acquantance will ask for help solving a problem - I gladly comply. Sometimes, I let the phone ring... but the voicemail light never comes on. They move on to the next target, under the false assumption that I am much too busy to be bothered.

posted by leotrotsky at 6:53 AM on February 15, 2016 [14 favorites]


I think I'd spend my time on the Frankfurt School and building up a really comprehensive knowledge of the European novel between about 1780 and 1850.

I'd probably dick around on the internet.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:54 AM on February 15, 2016 [27 favorites]


I have slipped through the cracks at my company and have not done anything in the past month.

That guy pulled that off for months before getting a new job! The conclusion is pretty good:

About two weeks after my previous post, I interviewed for my current job and was offered a position so I had to find a way to quit without drawing any attention to myself. I waited all week until Friday at 3pm, which is when all the pay cheques are sent out, and then I waited another hour and a half before I went to HR to submit my resignation. As I expected the HR person I was directed to speak to about ending my employment was barely functioning (it was 4:30 on a Friday). She barely acknowledged me and just gave me a form to fill out and told me she would enter all the information into the system on Monday morning and then follow up with me. After that I walked out of the building and decided to treat myself to some ice cream before I went home to finish packing up my things for my move the next day. I did receive a call from the HR lady Monday morning and she asked why I was listed as being a part of a defunct department and who my supervisor was. I kinda panicked and told her I didn't know what she was talking about and that all of my information should be in the system before telling her I had to go and hanging up. I guess that worked because I have not received any other calls or emails from that company for the last two months.
posted by dismas at 6:58 AM on February 15, 2016 [7 favorites]


"I wouldn't say I've been missing it, Bob."
posted by octobersurprise at 7:01 AM on February 15, 2016 [45 favorites]


OK, that article was "meh", but the comments and their links so far have been FANTASTIC.
posted by seasparrow at 7:01 AM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


My general anxiety level would not allow such subterfuge. It would be moments before I would become a babbling wreck in someone's office.
posted by Splunge at 7:03 AM on February 15, 2016 [6 favorites]


Yeah, I think I'd spend my time on the Frankfurt School and building up a really comprehensive knowledge of the European novel between about 1780 and 1850. Focusing on Spinoza seems fiddly, somehow.

I don't know, I can imagine him inspiring quite the treatise. e.g.

AXIOM. 1. Everyone who works, works either for themselves or for someone else.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:07 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


From update #3:

Anyways, on to the events of last Friday's company picnic. I did think about not showing up like many of you suggested but I was sure there was an attendance sheet so I thought of another way to go about things. I arrived at the picnic about 15 mins early when everyone was still busy setting up things, found the attendance sheet (or rather booklet) at the sign in table which was thankfully unattended, and discretely rifled through it until I found my name and signed next to it. I then shuffled away to the parking lot, and drove home to spend the rest of the day drinking beer and watching an ungodly number of Narcos episodes.

"Mr. Simpson, I don't use the word 'hero' lightly..."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:08 AM on February 15, 2016 [26 favorites]


We had a guy like this. His title was "Information Security Officer" or some guff like that. At one time on his position he had been very busy but then all the projects he started were done and he had no new projects. His one remaining task was to send a weekly report to the CIO, which I'm pretty sure took him less than an hour to write. Nobody seemed to notice or care that he spent most of his day talking about doing DMT or playing foosball in the break room.

He was the chillest "infosec" person I ever met.
posted by Doleful Creature at 7:11 AM on February 15, 2016 [8 favorites]


A Spaniard I could see doing this, but you'd never find a German slacking off like this.

MORE AUSTERITY!

/hamburger
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 7:13 AM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


A real-life Wally...
posted by jim in austin at 7:18 AM on February 15, 2016


If the travel shows are to be believed, most people in Spain at least work until lunch, then drink a few bottles of wine at their mother's house.
posted by Brian B. at 7:19 AM on February 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


The opening lines in the article are really the best part:
Only when Joaquín García, a Spanish civil servant, was due to collect an award for two decades of loyal and dedicated service did anyone realise that he had not, in fact, shown up to work for at least six years – and possibly as many as 14.
And his fine €27,000 (£21,000 or ~$30,000) was equivalent to one year of pay. Not bad, considering he hadn't been working at least six year.


Brian B.: If the travel shows are to be believed, most people in Spain at least work until lunch, then drink a few bottles of wine at their mother's house.

And in lore, everyone then takes a nice siesta, comes back to work for a bit, then has a light dinner, parties for hours, and then has a serious dinner before going to bed at midnight, only to start the next day at 6 AM with a serious jolt of caffeine so they can do it all again.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:22 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


In a stupid spat between two departments, I was not allowed to do anything for nearly a year. I worked for Eastern Region, and I was the SME for a technology that Western Region really needed. The head of Eastern Region wanted to show how powerful he was, so he forbade Western Region from booking any of my time. I think Western managed to cajole about three weeks work out of me by demanding cooperation from the CEO, but there was a good 11 months of doing fuck-all.

What did I do? I had a solid coffee schedule. I went to every meeting. I filed time and expenses meticulously. I pretended to enjoy chats with the dickhead Eastern Region head when he came by to impart “business wisdom”. I did as much surfing the web as I could on a heavily blocked and monitored connection. I taught myself GIS. I lead many technical committees for the industry association, which made dickhead Eastern Region head proud by association.

This is the main reason that my view of the redeeming quality of work is rather dim.
posted by scruss at 7:30 AM on February 15, 2016 [10 favorites]


scruss: "This is the main reason that my view of the redeeming quality of work is rather dim."

There is nothing that a huge ego can't royally fuck up.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 7:35 AM on February 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


This happened to a brother-in-law who worked for a (very) big telecoms company. His group were told that their project was terminating and that they had six months to find another post, inside or outside the company.

Times were tight and there were few internal positions available. Six months came and went and... nothing. He even went and asked HR, who said they were waiting for instructions.

He worked out of home, and had over six months with salary, company car, phone and internet being paid, and officially nothing to do.

He wound up finding another position in the same company, but said it was the weirdest experience.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 7:37 AM on February 15, 2016


You wonder how often this really happens at government jobs, when there is no profit motive providing pressure to reduce labor costs.

More likely, you'd see incompetent, unmotivated people shuffled to low-pressure jobs where they can't hurt anything, and these people just cruise on auto-pilot. They're not literally MIA, still showing up 9-to-5, but definitely under-utilized. And if you asked them, they'd tell you they were working hard, and they'd believe it.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:39 AM on February 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


where there is no profit motive providing pressure to reduce labor costs.

I've witnessed the same occur in the private sector where the counterweight to the large-scale, nebulous profit motive is a manager who's afraid that losing headcount will cause a permanent decrease, so a person is kept on board for no reason at all except to hold onto a position.

We called that guy "doorstop".
posted by fatbird at 7:43 AM on February 15, 2016 [7 favorites]


I once had a job supervising security guards. A lot of guard jobs are just to do nothing, publicly and visibly. You would not believe how hard it is, to get people to do nothing. They want something to do, and the things they found to do were almost always bad.
posted by elizilla at 7:45 AM on February 15, 2016 [71 favorites]


And if you asked them, they'd tell you they were working hard, and they'd believe it.

On the internet everyone believes they're working hard.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:47 AM on February 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


The stories of people sitting at their desk surfing the internet says a lot about us Mefites sitting here at our desks surfing the internet ;)
posted by Twain Device at 7:49 AM on February 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


They want something to do, and the things they found to do were almost always bad.

See also "the killing-people-and-breaking-things members of the military during peacetime".
posted by Etrigan at 7:49 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


More likely, you'd see incompetent, unmotivated people shuffled to low-pressure jobs where they can't hurt anything, and these people just cruise on auto-pilot.

Unless they're friends with someone, or are good at agreeing with the higher-ups, and then as the saying goes, "shit floats."

Government isn't in the position to "reduce labor costs," but get certain things done that often lack clear financial incentive, and deliver goods or services to a broader public. Private roads, police, fire and school are prohibitively expensive for a significant number of people, but having those everywhere serves the greater good.

Want a more efficient government? Pay enough that you can compete with private sector, so the only thing drawing people to a job isn't security and stability. Otherwise, motivated people come in, get experience and leave. (I say this as someone whose only chance for a raise is if I get into management, because the state doesn't even provide cost of living adjustments to our pay. Yeah, you're doing a great job keeping people like me interested in the job for the long-term.)
posted by filthy light thief at 7:51 AM on February 15, 2016 [8 favorites]


A, um, person I know *cough* got hired as a Computer Programmer Trainee for the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles in a certain southeastern wang-shaped state back about 16 years ago. The "training" took about five minutes per day to complete, since this particular person had just finished an excellent tech-school computer programming course. Whenever this person went to their supervisor to let her know that they were ready for another assignment, at approximately 8:06 am, they were waved off, and likewise discouraged by colleagues from letting it be known that they were available to do more work. The person caught up on novels, and spent the rest of the days searching for a different job. This job lasted about six months, the person was was given an outstanding performance review and reference before being offered a higher-paying job in the private sector. A few weeks later, a newly elected Republican governor decided to make the Department more Streamlined and Efficient, and half the staff got shitcanned.
posted by Cookiebastard at 7:56 AM on February 15, 2016 [14 favorites]


I was trying to figure out this Spanish story from 2010 was being reported in a UK newspaper in 2016. The article is basically a rewrite of this El Mundo article, which was written after an appeals court upheld the penalty last month. So it took nearly 6 years to apply the penalty. I was also confused about the worker's reported age of 69 years; Spain's retirement age is 65. But presumably he's 69 now and was about to retire when his fraud was discovered.

It's a funny story, but it's emblematic of a real problem in civil service in countries the world round, the lack of competence and performance management of employees. That's particularly relevant in Spain, a country that nearly went broke a few years ago. 22% of Spaniards are still unemployed and this asshole's been cashing paychecks for doing nothing for years.
posted by Nelson at 7:59 AM on February 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


You wonder how often this really happens at government jobs, when there is no profit motive providing pressure to reduce labor costs.

Ex-government contractor here. And not the kind making big bucks. The answer is ... best not to think about it. We underlings, having zero power to do anything other than suck it up, generally consoled ourselves that far more was being wasted elsewhere in the gov't.

Filthy Light Thief is right re: better pay. Never gonna happen though, based on what I've seen.

Another problem that I saw was that all promotion was based on seniority. Relevant skills were ... not. This led to a lot of wasted resources (and the resources were very limited so it was hurting a lot of things, besides just wasting taxpayer $), and considerable anger from junior staff who did have said skills but had no hope of being in a position of leadership for decades.

For all that, I should say, in terms of mission and fit with my career desires, it was the best job I ever had. Then the funding ran out and a bunch of us were unceremoniously thrown out the door. Yay, government jobs. /s
posted by aperturescientist at 8:04 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


I once had a job supervising security guards. A lot of guard jobs are just to do nothing, publicly and visibly. You would not believe how hard it is, to get people to do nothing. They want something to do, and the things they found to do were almost always bad.

During my time as a brewery worker the worst fights were over the mops and brooms. You could do all kinds of awful shit to each other and the company and nobody cared but take somebody's claimed mop and watch out. Everybody wanted to be able to grab a mop and start sweeping if a supervisor came by.
posted by srboisvert at 8:11 AM on February 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


I had a contract with a very large tech corporation a couple of years ago, ostensibly to oversee the content side of their big new blog site. They were B2B but sorta-realised that they needed to put on some B2C clothes to appear relevant.

It was a three-month contract, and the idea was I'd ghost-write a bunch of stuff, set up various regular contributors from within the company, develop The Narrative and generally act as launch editor.

After three months, I'd done everything asked of me but nothing was really happening. The launch date kept getting kicked down the road and the site itself was languishing in a half-finished mode. There were lots of meetings, an expensive project management/CMS running in the background, infinite emails and conf calls, but it was all extremely vague.

It got quite embarrassing; I really had to be there at the launch to be able to leave it to my successor in a running state, but no launch was happening. I was on a very decent contract day rate, too, but there are only so many content-related things you can do when nothing's getting published. Part of my job was persuading C-level execs to produce stuff, but they got very bored with that when nothing was happening as a result, so all that got poisoned pretty quickly; external partners who I also had to rope in were sympathetic but this was all extra work for people with no upside for them, so everything just clotted up.

It turned out, eventually, that the site itself (based on Wordpress) was stuck in corporate limbo. The IT people in the company wouldn't let Marketing run the site, because it was tech, but Marketing wouldn't give Tech control, because it was all coming out the marketing budget. So IT had the project, but refused to work on it until Marketing gave them the money, and Marketing wouldn't give them the money unless they had control.

It was a simple Wordpress install. I could have got it up and running in a couple of days all by myself, but no, it was sucking up god knows how much executive resource and raw cash just drifting in purgatory.

This is by no means a comprehensive picture of the turf wars and conflicting interests that bubbled away in the tasty stew, and I am still amazed that the organisation makes any money at all. let alone as much as it does, but it ended up with me working for the best part of a year doing very little work that actually needed doing, until the whole thing was taken in-house. It actually did me a deal of harm, because I tend to need to believe in what I'm doing or I go wonky, so on reflection I should have got out early, but large amounts of regular cash are hard to walk away from when you're freelance and the world you grew up in - journalism - is falling apart in the Internet's Death Star beam.

I have absolutely no problem whatsoever believing in any scenario where a large organisation is so badly run that it is entirely possible to have entire careers doing absolutely nothing and never getting called on it. In fact, I would imagine that there is a considerable cadre of such people who have spotted this and have the steeliness and cheek to play the game, and good luck to them. Large organisations contain monumental amounts of institutional sinfulness, and feed away, my pretties, feed away.
posted by Devonian at 8:26 AM on February 15, 2016 [17 favorites]


I once had a job supervising security guards. A lot of guard jobs are just to do nothing, publicly and visibly. You would not believe how hard it is, to get people to do nothing. They want something to do, and the things they found to do were almost always bad.

It seems a bit daft having to guard him when he's a guard ...
posted by cotterpin at 8:32 AM on February 15, 2016 [10 favorites]


I had a friend take a temporary position to work on a specific project. Her work entailed entry-level stuff and no knowledge of the business area. When the project ended, they kept her on because there was no definite end date on her contract. However, whenever she tried to do any work--which she continually attempted!--they asked her not to because she wasn't trained. They didn't even want her answering the phones. She tried to get them to train her, but no dice, presumably because that took extra time. She found it agonizing. There is only so much reading one can do in a day.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:38 AM on February 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


I once had a job supervising security guards.

My brother-in-law did this job in a giant department store, working nights, except he was a guard too and all the guards were financially incentivised to spy on all the other guards. Nearly all of them also had day jobs and were permanently exhausted, so your purpose every night was to try and find somewhere to catch a bit of sleep, while avoiding all the other security guys who were also either trying to sleep or trying to catch sleepers, live or by CCTV.
posted by colie at 8:39 AM on February 15, 2016 [25 favorites]


I had a contract with a very large tech corporation a couple of years ago...

*squints eyes* Did you ... did you make *MY* company's website? This sounds far too familiar, so I can only assume that no OTHER company could possibly be as unorganized on the self-marketing front...
posted by jillithd at 8:54 AM on February 15, 2016


HO WATCHES
E WATCHMEN

posted by comealongpole at 8:54 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


jillithd - I have every reason to believe my experience is not uncommon across many companies in its particular sector, and indeed others. Bur do Memail me if you want to find out for sure...
posted by Devonian at 9:07 AM on February 15, 2016


I lived in Spain on and off for nearly 30 years and so this comes as no great surprise.
I have known many bureaucrats and civil servants some as friends. In fact everyone in Spain knows someone who is related to, or is close friends with a functionario. In many cases it is the only way to get things done or not done. Papers are moved up and down piles quite blatently. It is part of the culture.
I once had a friend who had a minor car crash with another car and they delayed it a week as one of the car´s insurance papers had expired.
Functionarios finish work at 1500 hrs, go to lunch and then often to their other job which is frequently paid "on the black". That this guy could manoeuvre so that his superiors, if they cared, thought he was working for another department speaks volumes. No one really cares.
I had a friend who went to work every day for months to sit at empty table with no typewriter or computer or telephone. It was in the administrative offices of a public market and the quota had to be filled otherwise the budget would be cut. She devoured a lot of books and knitted a lot of sweaters.
posted by adamvasco at 9:09 AM on February 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


Someone I knew worked night security at a very well known organization near the UN building. He would spend his nightly rounds snooping in people's desks. Ultimately he figured out the combination to the party storage room, which was full of liquor. After getting drunk he picked the lock to the main security office. He was looking for his boss's cocaine stash. Luckily for him he didn't find it. His supervisor fired him shortly after.
posted by Splunge at 9:14 AM on February 15, 2016 [6 favorites]


I was mostly being silly, Devonian. I am guessing our experience is more common than anyone wants to admit. :)
posted by jillithd at 9:18 AM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


I am somewhat fascinated by all this. All corporations and governments are very public in their deification of efficiency, offering services and products to others to enhance it or proclaiming their own obsession with organising themselves as efficiently as possible.

And yet, there is so much inefficiency. I long since realised that a deal of this is utterly deliberate. For example, a lot of marketing is set up to move large sums of money around, everything else being secondary. This I know because I've frequently been involved on the periphery of marketing but with a lot of insight into the actual mechanisms: not actually in the machine, but staring under the hood. A lot of strangeness went away when I learned to look at the deals not as being about what they said they were about - because they so rarely did what was advertised, and it never seemed to matter - and instead looked at the flow of money and the job structures around it. Then it make a great deal of sense, whereas before it made very little.

At first, this was shocking, but after a while I got to admire it, in a way. I disliked the inherent hypocrisy and the way the machine treated people who actually cared about the ostensible meaning of what they did, but if you got past that then you could have a lot of fun playing the game. It was economically useful, it beat working down the mines, and you could actually create culturally interesting structures and outputs if you wanted to and were good at handling frustration and ego, not necessarily always your own.

I'm sure the same pattern repeats in other places, and indeed the very richest and most powerful spring from the purest forms of moving other people's money around. As none of those movements are ostenisbly there to make the bankers rich, all that cash in their pockets must be the result of truly world-order inefficiency - the heat given off by the motor - but oddly, this is not how they present themselves and their work. They fiercely encourage efficiency in others, after all.

I'd rather it wasn't so, as we could do with more work being done in science and medicine and teaching and generally making ourselves better at looking after each other, but we don't need all seven billion of us beavering away at Making Things Happen Fo' Real in thrall to the gods of efficiency and productivity. But what's the right balance?

I don't know how to find out. People are sensible, and know what would happen if they honestly revealed how much of their workling life was spent in actual useful work; the system demands hypocrisy to function.

In the UK, there's an interesting scheme called CHIRP which collects anonymous reports of safety concerns from aviation and marine professionals. It works, in that it reveals otherwise invisible structural and specific cases where risk is not being managed properly. It removes blame in the interests of knowledge.

I'd love to have a similar scheme for people to report on corporate life, obviously not from a safety perspective - fortunately, few of the things we do will actually kill people if we get it wrong - but as an anthropological survey of what people actually do in companies and what's actually beind the temple curtains in the holy places of Efficiency.

Because I do not entirely believe in that god, and resent its theocracy.
posted by Devonian at 9:51 AM on February 15, 2016 [20 favorites]


I'm sure that was uncomfortable when they called him in to ask wtf, but I sure would rather be him than the one who certified his time and attendance records for years with absolutely no verification. Or even complaint that I was paying with my budget line someone I wasn't getting any useful (to me) work out of.
posted by ctmf at 10:01 AM on February 15, 2016


A guy I know was a manager in charge of running a processing plant. Apparently the plant itself was profitable, but the company that owned it went under so it was shut down. Everyone was let go except for the manager (I think stuff like security and janitorial was contracted). So for as long as maybe half a year this guy was a manager with nothing to do. He'd check on the building every once and a while, make sure he was up to date on his email and everything, but nothing.

This is a bit different than the other stories because people were definitely aware of his situation. At one point the company told him they were going to reduce his salary to a fraction of what it was due to his "duties". It wasn't enough to live on, so he told them he might as well just find another job, then they backed off and continued paying him his normal salary. I think it had something to do with believing that they'd get a better price selling a plant with a manager attached.

I asked him if he was hiring, but no dice.
posted by ODiV at 10:01 AM on February 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


I knew someone who got hired for a six-month software contract at a big aerospace company you're heard of. The contract was for a single, very well defined project that just so happened to have had its time estimates wildly over-estimated, and the dude wound up finishing the entire project in just a hair over a month. He spent the entire rest of the five month period working quietly on some personal game design projects.

When the contract period was up the Powers that Be were so thrilled with the work that they offered him a permanent position then and there. He considered taking it as a great way to boost his burgeoning game development career, but ultimately decided against it.
posted by Itaxpica at 10:09 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


You wonder how often this really happens at government jobs, when there is no profit motive providing pressure to reduce labor costs.

So they solve this by taking your honest estimate of the minimum amount of money you need to operate and giving you less. I don't have a profit motive, but I sure don't have enough money to pay useless people. I'm already going to fail, but I'd like to get as close to success as possible.
posted by ctmf at 10:14 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


The day you realize that any company you work for is 99% run by bullshit/creates bullshit, is both a saddening (if you came into the job idealistically) and liberating day.

Provided you never say it out loud.

Sometimes I have trouble with the second part.
posted by emjaybee at 10:27 AM on February 15, 2016 [13 favorites]


My brother-in-law did this job in a giant department store, working nights, except he was a guard too and all the guards were financially incentivised to spy on all the other guards. Nearly all of them also had day jobs and were permanently exhausted, so your purpose every night was to try and find somewhere to catch a bit of sleep, while avoiding all the other security guys who were also either trying to sleep or trying to catch sleepers, live or by CCTV.

Sounds like an idea for a video game...
posted by Slothrup at 10:44 AM on February 15, 2016 [21 favorites]


I work for a large federal agency. My experience over the last 12 years is not that there are a lot of excess employees getting fat on the taxpayer's dollar, and we've been losing staff for years, but that our time is often spent on minutiae that accomplish nothing of apparent value. We could be much more efficient in our work if we didn't have to waste so much time on endless layers of reporting, but nobody gets promoted for eliminating old rules and policies that have outlived their utility. You get promoted by creating new layers of bureaucracy because it demonstrates initiative, etc. So, it's the ages-old story of misaligned incentives. In many cases, the political needs of the agency demand stifling levels of oversight (sunshine is good, but there can be too much of it) that prevents if from focusing on its actual job. I don't have a good answer for how to fix it because 1) we work for the taxpayers, and we *should* be held accountable, and 2) politics always trumps policy because we're all terrified of being on the front page of the Washington Post.
posted by wintermind at 10:59 AM on February 15, 2016 [13 favorites]


My brother-in-law did this job in a giant department store, working nights, except he was a guard too and all the guards were financially incentivised to spy on all the other guards. Nearly all of them also had day jobs and were permanently exhausted, so your purpose every night was to try and find somewhere to catch a bit of sleep, while avoiding all the other security guys who were also either trying to sleep or trying to catch sleepers, live or by CCTV.

Sounds like an idea for a video game...

FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S 4: DREAM WARRIORS
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:02 AM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


That reddit post reminds me of this ask metafilter question from a few years ago which was annoyingly unresolved. I have wondered often what happened, if you're reading anonymous mefite let me know!
posted by jamesonandwater at 11:25 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


The El Mundo article says:
Aseguran que fue víctima de un caso de mobbing por parte del equipo del PP, que, al acceder al Ayuntamiento en 1995, decidió «quitárselo de encima». Un año después, según estas fuentes, le habrían encargado no la supervisión de La Martona, sino de la depuradora de Cádiz-San Fernando, que entonces estaba en fase de construcción y tardaría años en terminarse, con lo que «no había nada que hacer».
"[The people close to García] say that he's the victim of mobbing from the side of the [conservative] Popular Party staff, who, when they got to the town government in 1995, decided to "get rid of him". One year later, according to these sources, they would have him manage not the supervision of La Martona [the job he was initially doing] but the Cádiz-San Fernando water treatment plant, which by then was under construction and wouldn't be finished in many years, so there was nothing to do."

I know nothing about this case, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit that it had gone like this. There's a lot of vindictiveness between political assignations in local governments. Even more nowadays that the mayor of Cádiz is from Podemos.
posted by sukeban at 11:29 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


To expand a bit: every time the ruling party at the local to regional level changes, A LOT of people are replaced by politically congruent others. Andalucía has been a socialdemocrat fiefdom since the Transition and for historical reasons that go back a few centuries there is a lot of class-based resentment between the unemployed poor (who vote left) and the landowning, crusty upper and upper-middle class (who vote right). So even if the replacement of politically placed civil servants every time the ruling party changes is more or less widespread in all the country, there's a lot more at play in Andalucía.
posted by sukeban at 11:39 AM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


It seems a bit daft having to guard him when he's a guard ...

Actually one of more profound questions in human life.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
posted by Slithy_Tove at 11:42 AM on February 15, 2016


If any of you people have one of these jobs tucked away, I'll take it.

I'm serious. Message me.

You think this is a joke but it's not

There is only so much reading one can do in a day.

This is a dirty lie
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 12:00 PM on February 15, 2016 [20 favorites]


Yeah, I'd totally focus on Spinoza.
posted by persona au gratin at 12:00 PM on February 15, 2016


I had a friend who worked as an electrician for the local authority. For four or five years, he paid a colleague to take care of his work for him, while he established and ran his own business.

It was only when he started to get an inkling that they were possibly starting to figure out he wasn't there much that he eventually resigned. Otherwise, he'd still be doing it.

Want a more efficient government? Pay enough that you can compete with private sector, so the only thing drawing people to a job isn't security and stability.

In this part of the world (the North of England -- though I'm pretty sure it's true everywhere but the South East), public sector jobs not only have more security and stability than the private sector, they also have better terms and conditions and better pay as well.

British trade unions are pretty well dominated by the public sector now.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:00 PM on February 15, 2016


Wasn't there a news story a while back about a guy who tried to outsource his own desk job to India (and pocket the change)?
posted by colie at 12:10 PM on February 15, 2016


My experience working alongside a small government sub-department is that services are gradually discontinued, jobs are either left unfilled for years or eliminated by attrition, and remaining staff are shifted at will to other sub-departments. (Non-governmental agencies are expected to pick up the slack, despite having even fewer resources and less accountability than the government folks.) An incompetent person in the right position might stick around for years, but you're unlikely to have no work to do; you either get the responsibilities of the unfilled or eliminated positions, or you get reassigned. It bemuses me that this would be considered an example of the system "working well."
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:17 PM on February 15, 2016


the quota had to be filled otherwise the budget would be cut

I had a position like this for eight months, three years ago. It was torture. Thankfully it's common enough in France (where there are also fonctionnaires) that I can tell it as-is and people nod and groan along with me.

Seriously, at one point they had me correcting address spellings in their massive database... by hand. Because the automated French public database of street spellings occasionally made mistakes. Yes. I also had to discover which were mistakes (based on postcode FWIW, no I do not know why they couldn't figure out an SQL query to do this, no I was not allowed to use SQL myself). The upside being that several thousand people got retirement cheques they hadn't received in years. Did I mention people groan along with me when I tell this story?
posted by fraula at 12:17 PM on February 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


colie: This guy, but it was to China.
posted by Etrigan at 12:58 PM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


If free market capitalism was as efficient as it pretends to be, 80% of us would be jobless.
posted by Captain Fetid at 2:17 PM on February 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


"The stories of people sitting at their desk surfing the internet says a lot about us Mefites sitting here at our desks surfing the internet "

Maybe it tells us that we're stupid, for just giving away all that serious websurfing for free.
posted by markkraft at 2:54 PM on February 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


I and my whole team at Large Three Lettered Computer Company were laid off in a downsizing resource action. Almost everyone else got two months to finish up their projects but I was assigned to help train the outsourced replacement team so I got an extended termination date. So I and one other engineer spent the next eight months training a visiting team of engineers from India and we had a great time hanging out, eating great Indian food and teaching them to do our jobs.

So eight months pass, the new team goes back to Bangalore and it's January and our manager's manager tells us that they screwed up and the corporate resource action expired on December 31 and now they can't lay us off. I guess that you can't just lay off two guys, it needs to be part of some big corporate action to be legitimate. But we have nothing to do. We're QA developers and the product's gone and the only people left in the building are customer service people. So we have no tasks to do but management can't find the right corporate levers to legally get rid of us.

I'd have quit but they were paying for my graduate education and I had 2.5 more years to graduate and after that I was contractually obligated to work for another two year for the company to pay off my tuition. So I couldn't leave for almost five years but there was nothing there for me to do. I had this gorgeous private window office on the 20th floor right at the point here in Pittsburgh with amazing views and no tasks other than answer the occasional question from the Bangalore team who were doing fine and never needed any help from me.

This went on for another two and a half years until I was in my last semester of grad school and they finally found a downsizing HR action to attach me to and gave me a month's notice. They also gave me three month's full pay severance and forgave all of my school tuition and fees and paid for my health insurance for six more months. So I got almost three years of a decent salary and a $60K CMU degree for doing almost zero work.
posted by octothorpe at 5:20 PM on February 15, 2016 [37 favorites]


Those who are wondering how this could happen have never worked for the government.
posted by king walnut at 5:54 PM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


My experience over the last 12 years is not that there are a lot of excess employees getting fat on the taxpayer's dollar, and we've been losing staff for years, but that our time is often spent on minutiae that accomplish nothing of apparent value. We could be much more efficient in our work if we didn't have to waste so much time on endless layers of reporting, but nobody gets promoted for eliminating old rules and policies that have outlived their utility. You get promoted by creating new layers of bureaucracy because it demonstrates initiative, etc.

As a fellow employee of a large federal agency, I agree with this 100%.
posted by photo guy at 6:51 PM on February 15, 2016


Those who are wondering how this could happen have never worked for the government.

Those who are wondering how this could happen have never worked in a bureaucracy of appreciable size, public sector or private. It happens to any large organization of sufficient duration and varying importance.

I've worked my entire career at organizations with thousands of people--and my personal worst in terms of make-work was the private, all-but-for-profit university where we had 6 directors and 5 workers in my location. Yes, that means there were more administrators than people to be administrated. God, what a hive of dysfunction and stupidity that place was.
posted by librarylis at 7:01 PM on February 15, 2016 [9 favorites]


I did approximately no work during the summer and fall of 2001. At the time, I was a contractor for Lucent, and a few of you may still remember the fall of that great enterprise. Come May, or perhaps June of that year, it was declared that anybody eligible to retire, under the generous terms put on offer (an extra five years of service and five year seniority or somesuch) should retire then or expect to see nothing. So everybody in management who wasn't a young rising star, and quite a few of the rank and file were out over the course of a couple of weeks, leaving nothing but a cloud of dust behind as they left. Meanwhile, there appears to have been a general sense that carrying any extra head-count was poison. The end result was that every front line manager left in our department was battling to avoid being responsible for us, and there were no grown ups left to make a decision. The web guys still had some clean up to do, but I'd just gotten my computers into a reasonably steady state, leaving me nothing. And this being the summer and fall of 2001, there wasn't much call for a fairly junior server guy in Chicago, so I couldn't find a job. And the money wasn't bad (I dare say it might be a hair better than I'm getting today), so I wasn't about to quit. And so I kept going to work, and occasionally calling whoever my nominal manager that week was in hopes of getting something to do.
posted by wotsac at 7:49 PM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


I used to work in an office where someone openly played Candy Crush all day, on a computer that was in full view of the rest of the office. Occasionally they would answer the phone, but otherwise I'd say 95% of their time was Candy Crush. They'd been there for years, and everyone seemed to know about it, including the higher-ups. No one seemed to pay any attention to it at all.

I don't want to think too deeply about it, but this thread gives me an odd sense of peace in the world.
posted by teponaztli at 2:47 AM on February 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


The day you realize that any company you work for is 99% run by bullshit/creates bullshit, is both a saddening (if you came into the job idealistically) and liberating day.

You either quit a good employee or work long enough to see yourself not give a fuck.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 3:41 AM on February 16, 2016


My experience with the National Park Service was not that it was over-staffed and no one was lost, but that once someone was in a job getting them out for doing poorly, or getting someone to retire when they were no longer productive and were basically retiring-in-place was nearly impossible. So everyone knew these folks were doing next to nothing (to the point of coming to small round table meetings and sleeping through them, happily snoring away in front of us all) but rather than rocking the boat and going through the steps to move them on, their work was either not done or done by others. People were even promoted rather than deal with the difficulty in getting them out. It was infuriating to me because I couldn't advance in my department at all because of one of these paper weights. I loved that job but eventually had to leave because there was no point to staying. So my position just got filled over and over. I check in every so often in hopes that the person might have died, she won't leave that job in any other way.
posted by Belle O'Cosity at 9:15 PM on February 16, 2016


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