From Og at Neanderpundit
His stuff is always good but today, it is out of the park:
You're not the boss of me!
Well, yes, actually, I am.
I hear this attitude a lot from government employees, and it always torques me off.
If you run a business, you know damned well that you have to cater to the customer, and that means at the individual customer level. Sometimes that means going far beyond the norm for an individual customer who has gone out of his way to be cranky that day, and sometimes it means losing money on a customer to keep them happy.
In realworldland, this happens all the time. Any time a business is dependent upon it's customers to make payroll, everyone works a bit harder and goes the extra mile to make sure that each customer is satisfied, and that goes double for the 'Problem' customers. Sure, you take care of the good customers, who aren't assholes, but you pay extra special attention to the problem children, because they make up a good portion of your income as well. Difficult customers are the prodigal sons of free enterprise, to be pampered and coddled and welcomed back into the fold whenever they return. because they will return. And they carry something with them that you will, if you run a business, go through a good deal of shit for. Ca$h.
The larger a company gets, the more likely you are to have a group of people who will be tickled to spend their workday fucking off, but will go out of their way to make sure they look busy and appear to be accomplishing things when anyone important is around. In small business these don't last long, as a general rule, because sooner or later someone is going to rat them out to the boss- and unless it's the boss' layabout nephew, that employee will be looking for a new gig. In bigger businesses, generations of professional layabouts have been warning one another to 'look busy!' when the boss is headed their way, and by making sure they are never caught fucking off, they have avoided dismissal. Think of this as the Homer Simpson syndrome. Eventually, unions came along and turned fucking off into a lucrative occupation, with great benefits and an excellent retirement package.
Og segues into Civil Service and has this to offer:
Eventually those civil servants learned something. Since they had gotten their gigs, a lot of the time, by being politically connected to someone, they discovered they could be surly, inefficient, lazy, and keep their gigs. Sure, a lot of people would complain, and they basked in the satisfaction of being out of reach of those people whose lives they made hell. And this situation is at it's very pinnacle today.
On the County level, we have some fantastic people and a few really crappy people. State level, the ratio of fantastic to crappy is a lot lower and on the Federal level, the number of fantastic people can be counted on one hand and you still have your pinkie free to hold your doughnut while you drink your coffee. Read the whole thing and talk about it with your friends -- we can climb out of this cesspit but there needs to be a lot of communication taking place before 2016.
President Carter's biggest downfall was the sense of malaise that people felt after his first term.
We have that now on steroids. It is time to recover from the ground up. Local, County, State and then Federal. Hold their feet to the fire -- these people work for us.
