Posted on 05/13/2008 5:14:31 PM PDT by Blood of Tyrants
The process becomes more important than the product.
You don't see anything wrong with attending a meeting on a subject you know nothing about.
You feel you contributed to the meeting just by being there.
You stop raising issues/problems because you know you will be the one answering them.
You fly first class across the country to attend a conference with 100+ people to discuss the fact that the project does not have enough money.
You work for an acronym, on an acronym, and your job title is an acronym.
You understand the rationalization of an acronym composed of acronyms.
You know that the location of a meeting is directly related to its importance.
(1) A meeting at Fort Hood requires a subordinate or a contractor
(2) The same meeting at Lake Tahoe requires your personal attention
You've sat at the same desk for 3 years, done the same thing for 3 years, but have had 3 different business cards.
You've run for the same office 4 times on 6 different platforms.
BUMP!
The garbagemen are the most productive workers.
How Government Job Programs Work:
Once upon a time there was a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert.
Congress said,”Someone may steal from it at night.” So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.
Then Congress said,”How does the watchman do his job without instruction?” So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one person to do time studies.
Then Congress said,”How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?” So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One to do the studies and one to write the reports.
Then Congress said,”How are these people going to get paid?” So they created the following positions, a time keeper, and a payroll officer, then hired two people.
Then Congress said,”Who will be accountable for all of these people?” So they created an administrative section and hired three people, an Administrative Officer, Assistant Administrative Officer, and a Legal Secretary.
Then Congress said,”We have had this service in operation for one year and we are already $18,000 over budget, and we must cutback overall cost.”
So they laid off the night watchman.
I hate to say it, but there are a couple of large corporations like this.....
Good Post. I would say 50% of our meetings are EGO boosters for the one responsible for setting it up. Some people just like to hear themselves speak in front of a group.
How does a government worker know when he has retired?
You know you work for the government when...
You live in New Jersey.
If you live here, you know what I’m talking about...
...Only in the People’s Democratic Republic...
LOL
To be fwd’d.
You spend a good part of the day dreaming about what you’ll be doing once you retire at 50.
| "I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts." -- Will Rogers "What you have here is a story of revenge, payback and hypocrisy, in other words, an average Friday in Washington." -- Charles Krauthammer, 1/5/2007 "People often ask me why I left the Senate, and I always tell them after eight years in Washington, I longed for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -- TV actor Fred Thompson, Former U.S. Senator "What is this oozing behemoth, this fibrous tumor, this monster of power and expense hatched from the simple human desire for civic order? How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?" -- P. J. O'Rourke, "One lesson of Sept. 11 is that a government that tries to do everything is likely to do most of it badly." -- Mark Steyn "We know that anything government does private enterprise can do for half the cost." -- Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Dr. Milton Friedman to Charlie Rose 12-26-2005 "Whenever the government runs things it always costs twice as much as should be." -- Gerald Pearse "Government purchases of military hardware, highways, energy projects, space equipment, and other items often cost 50% or 100%, or more (see here and here), above what politicians originally promise." -- Chris Edwards "When the government pays, health care's lack of affordability becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In health care, as in other things, government is the high-cost producer." -- Arnold Kling "Government does not do ANYthing as well as the private sector does, and that includes educating your children." -- Neal Boortz "It takes more weeks to get an answer from the Small Business Administration to an emergency loan application than [the number of] seconds it takes to get money from an ATM [while you're visiting] a foreign country." -- Newt Gingrich "Never trust the government to do a job, if you have a private business alternative." -- D.J. Drummond "Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison "I call this the Fundamental Problem of Political Economy. How do we limit the power that idiots have over us? ... [Milton] Friedman's insight is that a market limits the power that others have over us; conversely, limiting the power that others have over us allows us to have markets. Friedman argued that no matter how wise the officials of government may be, market competition does a better job of protecting us from idiots." -- Arnold Kling "Our bureaucrats are even more incompetent than the ones in Venezuela." -- Jim Rogers, 12-11-2002 "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell "The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." -- Ronald Reagan "Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own." -- Milton Friedman "Talk about threats to national security -- how about government so big, so complicated and so unmanageable, it can't get out of its own way?" -- Bob Schieffer "In his latest book, , co-written with his wife Heidi, [futurist Alvin] Toffler diagrams the varying speeds in which institutions change. In one chapter, the couple uses a series of figurative cars on the freeway to make their point. Zooming along at 100 MPH 'is a car representing the fastest-changing major institution in America today -- the company or business,' the Tofflers write. By contrast, a car driven by government and regulatory agencies would be puttering at a speed of 25 MPH. Meanwhile, bringing up the rear, at 10 miles per hour, shuddering along 'with a flat tire and steam coming out its radiator' is the American school system. 'Is it possible that it costs $400 billion to maintain this broken heap? The answer is yes, every year'." -- Edward B. Driscoll Jr. "Governments always start out saying they're going to help, and always wind up pushing you around." -- Peggy Noonan "Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over." -- John Stossel "The point to remember is that what government gives it must first take away." -- J.S. Caldwell "In Kelo v. New London, the United States Supreme Court held that government may take property that belongs to one person and give it to another. That is hardly surprising. Government today does little else." -- Timothy Sandefur "In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other." -- François Marie "Voltaire" Arouet, 1764 "Theft is theft even when the government approves of the thievery. Turning a democracy into a kleptocracy does not enhance the stature of the thieves, it only diminishes the legitimacy of the government." -- Justice Janice Rogers Brown "Once the coffers of the federal government are opened to the public, there will be no shutting them again." -- Grover Cleveland "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." -- George Bernard Shaw "Too many voters are already bought -- not by corporate campaign donors, but by the government itself." -- Joseph Sobran. "If you ask the government to end welfare and open the borders, they will meet you half-way by opening the borders." -- Ray Holtorf "The purpose of the government is to provide the service, and the purpose of the media is to provide the vaseline." -- old libertarian joke "I don't think it's bribery; I think it's extortion. Bribery, you know, is when the person that's giving the money does it voluntarily. What it is in Washington is extortion because they all ask for the money." -- Sen. John McCain "Politicians are politicians all of the time -- whether they're helping themselves to an extra-serving of farm-subsidy bacon, writing new laws about when their opponents can and can't run ads about them or appointing bureaucrats to enforce those laws. ... There are no angels at the FEC. There aren't any in Congress or at the White House. And the sooner arrogant reformers like Sen. McCain and Fred Wertheimer realize that they're no angels either, the better for all of us -- and for the Constitution." -- Ryan Sager "For those who fancy that government's projects are uniquely important, or for those who imagine that holding government office makes someone unusually saintly or trustworthy, entrusting government with power that we would never entrust to our neighbors or other private citizens might seem sensible. To me, it's dangerous, unjustified, and unjustifiable." -- Dr. Donald Boudreaux "Giving money and power to the government is like giving car keys and whisky to teenage boys." -- P.J. O’Rourke "Can you imagine any enterprise outside the federal government where a person makes a request, three and a half years go by before the request is finally responded to, and this is considered acceptable performance?" -- John Hinderaker "Government can screw up just about everything. Given enough power and time it will screw up everything." --Mark Thornton "You can count on government to be absurd ... every day ... all year long." -- Neal Boortz" "Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection." -- P. J. O'Rourke "It's easy to be a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you." -- Will Rogers "Anytime the Government denies knowledge, it's speaking the truth." -- John Alejandro King "The mightiest of weapons is truth. And everyone knows you're not permitted to bring a weapon into a Government building." -- John Alejandro King "Congress does two things well: nothing and overreacting." -- Rep. Mike Oxley "What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else." -- Tom Clancy, 9-2-2003 "[Peter] Drucker says that modern government can do only two things well: wage war and inflate the currency. It's the aim of my administration to prove Mr Drucker wrong." -- Richard M. Nixon "This will be the most ethical administration in the history of the United States" -- William J. Clinton "[We] intend to lead the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history." -- Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, before backing the ethically-challenged John Murtha for Majority Leader and the impeached-and-convicted former Judge Alcee Hastings for House Intelligence Committee Chairman "A government, at bottom, is nothing more than a gang of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men ... Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one and even those governments that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far from wrong to describe the best government as the common enemy of all decent citizens." -- Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks #68, 1956 "We must always remember that, as Americans, we all have a common enemy - an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government." -- Dave Barry "The impersonal hand of government can never replace the loving, metallic hand of the giant robot."-- John Alejandro King "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have."-- Karl Hess and Barry Goldwater "A government that's big enough to give you everything you want, is a government that's big enough to give you even more." -- John Alejandro King "The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer has over me is far less than that which the smallest functionary who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work." -- F. A. Hayek "Talk about the poor getting poorer tugs at the hearts of decent people and squares nicely with the agenda of big government advocates, but it doesn't square with the facts." -- Dr. Walter E. Williams "There are still people in the federal government and all levels of government who have this myopic view that it's more important for them to pursue their own career than it is to get information out [especially intelligence about imminent terrorist attacks] and to do the right thing." -- Rep. Peter King to Alan Colmes, 10-6-2005 |
When more than 40% of your gross pay goes TO the government? Oh, wait, that would be "working for the government..."
Mark
This is a direct quote from my manager...
“I can’t ignore an email you didn’t send to me.”
How’s that for management style? Don’t even get me started on his “meetings.”
Mark
“vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion” LOL
PJ rules!
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