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But I work in government, so there are several in mine.

But one in particular makes me rethink my position on workplace violence on a daily basis.  You know the type that makes you daydream of dangling someone by a foot off the tallest building around, knowing that your upper body strength sucks and that it would only be a matter of minutes before they end up chunky-salsa at the feet (on the feet?) of a thousand DC tourists.

<sigh>  But I am at heart a non-violent person, so I’ll dedicate myself to destroying this person from within.  Starting with his ego, then if he doesn’t leave me alone to do the work that you, the taxpayer, pay me to do, I might move on to his career and pension.

See – this person was recently made my team-lead.  Well not *MY* team lead as I’m a consultant, but a team-lead for the group I’m consulting for.  And since then my life has been one manufactured panic after another.  Mostly because he knows *SHIT* about the group he’s the leader of, he got the position by pure virtue for senority.

Note for union people out there.  Senority is the WORST way to promote people, because it totally ignores the fact that some people are COMPLETE FUCKING MORONS.  (Yes, this is a union shop, yes he is a union member, and yes, this is exactly where unions FAIL because the fact that they have no restrictions as to who they allow INTO the union, means unions will always become a haven for the ill-tempered, incompetent, and/or lazy.)

This guy thinks because he’s worked 25 years in the same place it gives him the right to be a total prick.  It doesn’t.  All working 25 years in the same place shows is that you have a marked inability to deal with new situations, that you are incapable of learning/growing, and that you hide your particular brand of incompetence under the dual protections of federal employment and your union.

I have been in my industry for more than a decade, and have NEVER had less than six months of work queued up in front of me.  Be my guest, unemployment doesn’t fucking scare me.

So I have to go in tomorrow and discuss my attitude *AGAIN* tomorrow, and this time I think I’m just going to tell them that if they don’t want me around any more, I’m gonna walk.

Although…stopping at the Inspector General’s office on my way out might not be a bad move.

** Disclaimer – any threats of violence, real or implied, are not to be taken seriously.  Get real, I’m not stupid enough to blog about it if I actually *WERE* planning something.

If we want to reign in the deficit let’s start by fixing the absolutly stupid way our government spends money.  And let’s *START* with the defense contractors, not exclude them like everyone wants to.

This business of “I have to spend the money or I won’t get it next year” has got to stop.  It’s a large part of the reason we’re in this mess.

I spend a lot of my time working at a government agency and I watch it happen every time Q4 rolls around.  Suddenly everyone has money they have to spend and by gods they’re going to spend it, even if it’s on useless shit no-one is going to ever touch.

In one equipment cage someone has abandoned almost 200 SunRay2 client workstations.  They were bought with end-of-year money but there were actually no plans to ever put a virtual desktop infrastructure in place.

In another cage there are several hundred old Dell workstations that have been upgraded.  They are still in support.

You get the idea.  I dig through the floor and find cables that are run from one side of the datacenter to another, capped and terminated on both ends, with no actual use.  (This was the fault of the government contractor, not the agency itself.)

And I’ve been in defense contractors that have literally dumped millions of dollars into projects they KNEW were set to be cancelled just to get the money on their books.

Now don’t get me wrong, (full disclosure)  *I* am a government contractor.  However, I’m also the one who flat-rates a 40-hour week and then regularly works 60 hour weeks to ensure I get the job done.

We as a people could eliminate the deficit without laying off massive numbers of people by simply being smart about how we (agencies) spend our(American’s) money.

1. Find a way to provide incentive for government agencies to save money.  Offer a 10% bonus for savings, recognition, etc.

2. Stop with the “you didn’t spend it last year so you don’t get it this year.” bullshit.  Needs change from year to year and this practice does nothing but forces agencies to spend money uselessly.

3. Understand that shit happens.  Allow government agencies to apply-for and pull from discretionary funds for unforseen/emergency spending with justification and approval.

4. Motivation is key – Get the unions out of government offices.  The reason federal employees are so lethargic is because they know it’s almost impossible to fire them.  Unions just make this worse.

5. Get rid of the GS payscale system.  When a federal employee gets to Step-10 of their pay-scale, they know there are no significant future increases in their pay coming.   Therefore they have no motivation to do anything over and above “their job.”  Federal employee payscales should equal private industry payscales, to attract the best and brightest of the industry.  (As an example, if you are hired as a GS14-Step10, you take the job knowing you’re never going to get a significant pay-raise for merit.)

I’m curious as to other suggestions my 4 readers might have.

Well – I may have beat all the odds and stayed afloat through the bulk of the downturn, despite the fuckers in the banking industry who’s entire goal it seemed was to make sure I failed.

Well I’d like to give a hearty fuck-you to the worst offenders.

American Express

At the start of it all I was doing well.  The business was turning between $250k and $350k/year in consulting.  I was earning the frequent flyer miles like mad and was regularly writing checks to AmEx for between $5k and $10k each month.  They were making a killing off me because they took a percentage of EVERY SINGLE purchase I made with my card.  And to listen to the vendors *THEY* were paying the brunt of it, not me.

When they panicked and randomly decided to close my accounts (stranding me in Tampa, Florida I might add) my consulting work got cut in half, because the way it works is that I front the travel expenses and get reimbursed, with which they got their money.  It’s fucking how AmEx sold me on their stupid $600/year annual fee (for all of the travel bonuses of a Platinum card – which I have to admit were nice.)  If I can’t travel, I have to stick to my region.  I’m lucky enough that my region includes DC, and (barely) stretches to RTP in North Carolina and the NYC metro area.  There continued to be enough work there to keep me busy through the recession.

So they took their fee, and dumped me, forcing me to cut back on travel and to start turning away almost $150k in business in the first year.

Fuckers.  They started the slow spiral, and their bullshit is why instead of hiring 3-5 people this year I ended up going it alone.  So their bullshit kept 5 engineers out of work just in my one case.  Multiply that by all of the small businesses they probably fucked and you’ve got a strong case for American Express being the principal cause of the current unemployment numbers.  I wouldn’t cry if their offices burned to the ground tomorrow.  Not one single fucking tear.

Then Comes Bank Of America

The original evil empire.  Second only to American Express because while they did cost me quite a bit of money, American Express cost me more.

BofA Developed a nasty habit of randomly placing 10-14 day holds on my deposits in order to ensure that the bills I’m trying to pay like a good little businessman were bouncing sky high (to the tune of $35/occurence, $350/day)

Most of my deposits were made by wire-transfer…not paper.  No waiting for checks to clear, see where I’m going?

They also process debits from biggest to smallest, to ensure that they collect as many of the $35/each fees for bounces as they can get.

It works this way.  You have $900 in the bank.  You deposit another $1,000 but the bank places a 14-day hold on it.

You write checks for $1000, $250, $100, $50, and go to starbucks a half dozen times at $5/each.  They continue honoring the debit card transactions without even warning you that you’re racking up $35 fees for each one.

Now when they do their nightly processing, if the bank processes from smallest to largest, the only thing that bounces is the $1,000 check.  But when they process it from largest to smallest, everything below that bounces, so it’s a difference of them being able to charge you $37 and (9*$35=$315)

So not only did they cause the overdraft in the first place by sitting on money you’ve deposited (earning interest I might add from the day you deposit it) they engineer the situation so that you get even more thoroughly raped without the benefit of lube.

I’m starting to look much more kindly on bank robbers..  They’re doing the public a service.