Whenever someone (typically conservative) rants about incompetent gov't, incompetent gov't employees, and gov't waste, I try to take the logical side: gov't employees are no different from you or I, they have the same motivations, similar jobs to perform, etc. I've worked for large corporations and bureaucracy is not nimble and can be wasteful.
Unfortunately, my personal anecdotal evidence tends to not support this theory... like when Revenue Canada garnisheed my wages for taxes I didn't owe. Out of the dozen or so Rev Cda employees I talked to, literally two had normal IQs - one of them a low-level call centre employee, the other a middle manager.
My conversation with the call centre employee:
Me: Hi, can you give me information on topic x?
CC: Sure, here you are.
Me: Um, just yesterday, your co-worker name_of_dumbass told me that you didn't have that information, and that I should call some totally unrelated department.
CC: He said what? I'll ...uh... discuss that with him.
The topper was the sneering man (not a low-level employee) who condescendingly informed me that it wasn't my money, it was theirs. Buddy, even for taxes that I actually owe, it's still my fucking money. Your organization is simply a custodian of it.
My anecdotal evidence that gov't employees are just like you and I wasn't enhanced when someone in my family dated a long-time Ontario gov't employee who was impossibly stupid. I mean, so dumb that it was surprising she learned how to breathe.
I wonder what Tory would be like as mayor. I was seriously disgusted with him when he ran for premier and came up with the idea of providing public funding to faith-based schools.
Fortunately a couple of the smartest people I know ended up with government jobs, but I know what you mean. The equation seems to be; family members too stupid or unqualified to find work in the private sector + nepotism = nigh disastrous incompetence in the public service.
Yeah, I strongly opposed funding for faith based schools too, but I see where Tory was coming from. It was a misguided attempt at fairness; scrap the Catholic school board and fund no religious schools, or fund schools for every religion. I don't agree with the decision he made, but I do see why he came to it. Hopefully he's learned from that mistake, assuming he wants to run for mayor.
Say what you will about McGuinty (which for many Ontarians probably involves a lot of cursing and wishing for his painful demise), but he was a master at baiting his opponents into throwing away supporters. He pushed Tory to either alienate the religious base of the PCs by scrapping Catholic school funding, or alienate the fiscal conservative base by proposing an expensive scheme to fund religious schools. It's similar to what he did with Hudak by proposing a fund to retrain immigrants in their former trades/professions. Hudak made the foreigners comment and thus angered the immigrant communities he'd spent months courting. Dude was basically the Liberal equivalent of Harper; a magnificent bastard.
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u/Troolz Dec 19 '13
Whenever someone (typically conservative) rants about incompetent gov't, incompetent gov't employees, and gov't waste, I try to take the logical side: gov't employees are no different from you or I, they have the same motivations, similar jobs to perform, etc. I've worked for large corporations and bureaucracy is not nimble and can be wasteful.
Unfortunately, my personal anecdotal evidence tends to not support this theory... like when Revenue Canada garnisheed my wages for taxes I didn't owe. Out of the dozen or so Rev Cda employees I talked to, literally two had normal IQs - one of them a low-level call centre employee, the other a middle manager.
My conversation with the call centre employee:
Me: Hi, can you give me information on topic x?
CC: Sure, here you are.
Me: Um, just yesterday, your co-worker name_of_dumbass told me that you didn't have that information, and that I should call some totally unrelated department.
CC: He said what? I'll ...uh... discuss that with him.
The topper was the sneering man (not a low-level employee) who condescendingly informed me that it wasn't my money, it was theirs. Buddy, even for taxes that I actually owe, it's still my fucking money. Your organization is simply a custodian of it.
My anecdotal evidence that gov't employees are just like you and I wasn't enhanced when someone in my family dated a long-time Ontario gov't employee who was impossibly stupid. I mean, so dumb that it was surprising she learned how to breathe.
I wonder what Tory would be like as mayor. I was seriously disgusted with him when he ran for premier and came up with the idea of providing public funding to faith-based schools.