Good post.
There are a ton of straight white males in the federal government eligible to retire.
While many are the stereotypical “useless government worker”, many are deep in the trenches quietly carrying the load for the “diverse” workforce.
(I used to be one of them.)
This person (not me) had a job in DC as a worker bee. They were using an old computer system that had been in place since the 1960s, and were the only remaining person in the office who was there when the system was put in place.
They maintained the system since they had graduated high school—more than forty years until they retired.
What this person knew (and had even tried to explain to their many bosses over the years) what that the system had flaws that nobody could fix without crashing the system and stopping payments to thousands of people for an unknown period.
The bosses always told this person to make the fixes manually since they did not want to take the heat for the delayed payments (and feared they could be talking about many weeks of delay).
As the number of payments got larger and larger over the years, this person spent most of their workday doing the manual fixes. These were based on formulas that only they knew about—in the early days the bosses kept up to speed, but the more recent bosses were “political” types who were not interested in such “grubby” details.
So the person finally decided to retire because their current boss was a real jerk who did not understand the importance of the job and was hostile to this (now) old-timer who they viewed as a relic of the distant past.
It took three months before chaos hit.
The folks not getting the checks (from all over the country) started calling Congressional offices and screaming—demanding immediate action. When the Congressional staffers tried to figure out the problem they were sent in circles by the agency managers—none of whom wanted to take ownership of the problem.
The agency finally figured out that the stupid boss had the small unit that had the issue. The stupid boss continued to claim that the problem was not their responsibility, and refused to fix it! They tried to claim that the agency regulations did not require such payments.
The Secretary had to get a bunch of lawyers to work on the regulation question, and after a bunch of meetings the lawyers concluded that the bureaucrat was wrong and the agency had to cut the checks in a timely manner.
At the end of the day the Secretary of the Department had to intervene, spend a ton of money on an overhaul of the entire computer system, and spend a ton of more money hiring temporary staff to manually cut checks until the system was fixed.
This was because one person retired!
What is it with using “they” as a singular pronoun? In standard English “he” is used as a generic pronoun when the sex of the person is unknown or unspecified. Properly understood, this is inclusive English.
“This was because one person retired!”
This happens in the private sector as well, though companies are increasingly trying to prevent it. Many workers understand their knowledge is the only job protection (no unions), and that if the company gets enough of it they’ll be on the street and replaced with a foreigner.
The trick is to share enough knowledge to allow you to take vacations without giving everything up - and maintaining info on personal hardware (since the company has access to everything on its own). Having a lazy and/or detached boss helps; they don’t foresee the problems that may arise not just from retirement, but any departure or fatality of people in key, “one-deep” positions.