Hi Everyone,
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Today’s blog has nothing to do with St. Patrick. In fact today’s blog is an extension of a blog I posted last year. As the title states, this blog is about governments and just like everything else in my life I am not short of material. This of course excludes my friends who work for the government. Here’s today’s blog.
There are two things that people need to know about governments. One is that all governments have employees who are part of a very strong union. That means, they are extremely difficult to fire and they know it. The second thing is that a lot of government jobs are downright easy, mindless really and yet the number of life-altering mistakes made by government employees is only growing. This is what I mean.
Most government employees push paper from one area to the next. I am serious. They push paper into slots that hold paper for us or they push paper over counters at us. Few government employees push paper into envelopes because they tend to outsource that. Since the government, to my knowledge, has yet to find a way to outsource faxes, a government employee addresses them. They too are on paper.
After all of the paper has been pushed it is placed somewhere. It could be right beside the person we pushed the paper to on the other side of the counter. That person, a government employee, is supposed to check our pushed paper and correct any errors and/or ask questions to ensure that our pushed paperwork is in order. Once our paperwork is in order, the paper is placed somewhere and someone pushes a bunch of keys, otherwise known as data entry. When done accurately, data entry properly records the contents of the pushed paper and that the pushed paper has been received. That paper is usually scanned into a computer and it may be photocopied before it gets filed. Everything for the government gets filed somewhere at least once. Yes, the pushing and the accumulation of real and electronic paper never ends. This is why. The government makes a lot of mistakes!
If you were wondering why government employees make so many mistakes, I have a few theories. One is that government employees are people. People have emotions. They feel things. That means that they feel like doing something and don’t feel like doing something. If they decide to, they can flip and flop from one feeling, to the next in seconds, with little to no regard for anyone but themselves. Few jobs allow people to feel things in this manner and get away with it for any length of time. In business, feelings, emotions are rarely expressed in a touchy feely kind of way because that is seen as a weakness. Business people are in the business of making money. The government, in my experience, isn’t because it is not their money, it’s the taxpayers! And taxpayers pay for more than just wages, benefits and retirement packages of government employees.
Because government employees are people with feelings and they are, in my opinion, given free rein to explore all of their real and imagined feelings, government employees pick and choose who they will perform their jobs for to the fullest and who they won’t. Couple that with the fact that the majority of government employees are females with raging hormones of PMS and pre and post menopause, if they aren’t already menopausal, feelings hit a whole new level. I bet the government forgot about the record breaking levels hormones can reach when they decided to break the glass ceiling!
When it comes to government employees, feelings, emotions, in my experience, take priority over properly serving the public they are paid to do, hence the growing number of mistakes. Now the question of the day is, are all of those mistakes really mistakes, or are those mistakes simply the result of someone’s feelings, emotions, hormones getting in the way of what they are paid to do? Here’s another theory.
It has been my experience that few people like to be corrected. This is true if it is even for their good. Until I recognized the benefits of being corrected, I didn’t like it either. And then I grew up. Being corrected, when one is wrong, is good. Being a right-fighter when one is wrong is not. I am not really a big fan of feelings, emotions. I like facts. Facts are black and white. Feelings, emotions are not. Both are fickle.
Here’s a head’s up. Few people really care about your feelings, emotions. If you want sympathy, empathy, call your significant other, mother, father, child, friend, or pay someone to get your head read! Those last few sentences are for everyone and especially for government employees! This is why.
When someone decides to apply to work for the government, it is not because there is a fully loaded gun pointed at their head. It is because the pay is better than good, the benefits are better than average and the retirement package is called a golden parachute for a reason. With that said some government employees, after a period of time may begin to believe that their government job has turned into a great set of golden handcuffs. Instead of leaving their job they stay. The reason for this is because they already know they could never find another lax job with the same or better pay, benefit package and retirement plan so they haul their miserable asses to a job they don’t like, make ridiculous mistakes based on how they decide they are going to feel and screw up everyone’s life in the process because they know that the union will protect them and they can’t get fired! This is what I mean.
My last blog is an excellent example of how the raging, misguided female hormones can really screw up one’s life. But as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, when it comes to the government, I am not short on material! This is exactly why.
In February, I went to 2275 Midland to address something at the Landlord and Tenant Board office. Just for the record, I could have faxed my paperwork to them but chose not to. That was an excellent decision on my part, or so I thought. The reason is that after I pushed my paperwork to a (female) government employee, we began discussing a few things. She told me I had to fill out more paperwork and I told her I never had to do that before and why. Apparently her coworker had taken some short cuts, and I had to do it her way. Then we began discussing some other things. I was pissed off! How can three separate people at three different times tell me the exact same thing and she is telling me to do something else I asked her? I am a logical person and what she was telling me didn’t make sense. I told her that also.
To make a long and boring story short, I’m guessing she “misplaced” my paperwork. Normally this too would piss me off. Luckily, when I asked her to photocopy my paperwork she did. My paperwork, according to the Landlord and Tenant Board does not exist anywhere in any of my files with them. Interestingly it does exist in mine. I’m looking at the original and the photocopies of it right now.
Hmmm. Did that paperwork really get “misplaced”? Nothing I have ever faxed them or delivered to them in person has gone missing before. Could it be that perhaps someone, like the woman I had discussions with, decided to “misplace” my paperwork? Maybe she filed it under “S” for shred! Something happened to it, because according to them they can’t find it.
Maybe she didn’t like my stating a few facts. Maybe I hurt or upset her feelings, emotions and her hormones got way out of whack! Maybe she, rightly or wrongly, thought I should mind my own business, shut up, sit down and fill out her paperwork! That brings me to my next two points.
The first is that it shouldn’t matter if a government employee likes or dislikes anyone or their comments. It is not their job to pass judgment meaning that their feelings, emotions and hormones should never keep them from the facts. At that junior level position, because that is exactly what it is regardless of how many years they have worked there, is to pleasantly push paper, carefully ask questions to ensure all of the paperwork is done properly, push buttons with the highest level of accuracy and move on to the next customer because that is what we, the public are. Few government employees would agree with me and I’m okay with that.
What I am not okay with is the fact that if people don’t meet the visual standards and/or exceed the mental capabilities of a government employee they will allow their feelings, emotions and raging hormones to override any fact based logic. Taxpayers, in my opinion, should not be held hostage to how someone feels or doesn’t feel. That is not what we should be paying for but we are! Do taxpayers now also have to grease the palms of government employees to get anything done properly? It appears that we do!
You know, if the government wants to cut back on their work-load and save some money, maybe it should get their act together. After all, that is what taxpayers are paying for! And that brings me back to an above point. If the government was an actual business with private and not public money it would be, in my opinion, running at 30% capacity and be bankrupt in less than a month at best! But the government is run on public, taxpayer money, so the number of life-altering mistakes made by government employees never ends! I am serious. And the really scary thing about the growing number of life-altering mistakes is that not only is no one made to be accountable, it is twice as much work for anyone to fix! But the worst part of all of this is that the taxpaying citizen, you know the people who pay the wages, benefits and retirement packages of the government employees who made the mistakes in the first place are the ones who end up doing most of the work of fixing the mistakes of the government employee!
That’s a lot of real and electronic paper that is getting pushed around. Taxpayers care about the pushed paper, but not a lot of government employees do. All of that goes back to the fact that government employees are part of a very strong union and it is very difficult, if not impossible to fire them. I don’t know how many government employees there are in Canada but I’m starting to think it is right up there with Greece! You know the other country where no one in the government gets fired! The country where if Greeks want anything done half-right, have to grease the palms of the government employees!
Here are some related links,
http://arebelsrant.com/dealing-with-governments/
http://arebelsrant.com/wheres-the-heat-2/
Have a safe a fun St. Patrick’s Day everyone and thank you for reading, A. Rebel’s Rant! ;D
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