This cost of government bureaucracy!

pitch wrote:
You know I worked for the government in a wage grade position for 34 years. Not one pay period in that 34 years did I not work for every penny of my check.
Is there a ton of money wasted? Yes we all know that there is. Are there times that things are poorly managed? Yes we all know that is true also.
Don't blame poor Andr'e down in that hole, he is doing what he was ordered to do. Start looking at the people sitting in the offices, the ones that are educated past their brains ability to absorb, the ones who had a dream and a book on how things SHOULD be done.
The federal government seems very large from the outside, but in reality it is a small community, where if a manager wants to advance, he keeps his head down and mouth shut.
There was one instance when a particularly onerous edict was handed down from on high, that I said to my manager, "Bill, when you go to these meetings, does it look like a bunch of bobbleheads sitting around the table?", He couldn't answer, just gave me a wry smile and said, "If you only knew."

And while that photo looks so clever, we really don't know who all those other people are, or what their responsibilities are. Could two or three of them be lookie loos who just happened to be walking by? Could a couple of them be with the power company, the phone company or the water company who were sent out to repair whatever is broken in the hole Andre is digging? Maybe another is Andre's supervisor who just stopped by to make sure Andre had everything he needed to get to the problem. Maybe another is the driver for the excavator that is just outside of the picture which is available should they decide that the digging is too hard for Andre and they will have to spend the time and money and inconvenience to dig up a much larger area by using a machine. Maybe another is someone from the highway department or the city trying to determine if they need to close down the road and re-route traffic. Maybe another one or two of the people are people in the area who have a service outage because of what ever Andre is digging up and they are trying to get an estimate when their power/water/phone is going to get back on. Again, it is a snapshot in time, and we have no idea what was happening minutes before or what happened five minutes later.