...and young

I have a confession to make, I was in the military when I was younger. There, I said it. Nothing to fear, I'm not going to snap and lose it.  I don't own an arsenal of weapons that I keep loaded next to my bed because I have nightmares. And I don't self-medicate with beer and whiskey to try to calm down. Those are all examples of veteran stereotypes I've heard before.

My experience in the military was not something you'd see in theaters. I was never near combat, rarely handled a weapon, and half the people I worked with were civilians who probably spent their youth protesting against Vietnam. While my experience was not a typical Hollywood blockbuster, I think it was typical of most veterans experiences.

With the Obama administration's personnel changes, hiring veterans in government has become en vogue. So much so, that it isn't uncommon to hear managers complain they ONLY hire veterans (see the comments in this article and in this article).

With managers often convinced they need to only hire veterans, they often hire veterans quicker than they need to.  And when these hiring decisions are based on the damaged veteran stereotype, agencies are not always satisfied with the results.  If the manager is 55 years old and has never been in the military, he/she may have watched too much TV and assume all veterans are homeless and substance abusers.  "We might as well hire this guy!  He's just as bad off as they all are!"  Managers need to remember that the current Pathways hiring authority is a result of abuses of the FCIP program by managers in the recent past.

The problem that hiring managers and the general public suffer from is a lack of understanding about veterans.  It is easier to lump all veterans into the PTSD category than to actually get to know the person and discover that he was actually an Army programmer and has a Master's degree from one of the best engineering schools in the country.  Even when people mean well, they fall into the trap.  In this outstanding Wall Street Journal essay the author details his time in the Marines and his experiences after he returned home.  My favorite part is the moment an older woman started rubbing the author's back like he was a "startled horse in a thunderstorm."  People assume we're all damaged and need pity.  In this GovExec article the author provides a hypothetical meeting between a veteran and a presidential candidate.  She interviews seven people to get their opinion.  Only two of the seven didn't mention a topic related to PTSD, suicide, or mental health.  The problem with the type of article the author attempted is that she assumes all veterans are easily categorized into neat groups.  The truth is that some are conservative, some are liberal, and a lot are apathetic.  And not all of us are about to snap at any moment.

The best veteran-related article I've read is from a guy who doesn't fit any veteran stereotype.  He guest wrote a piece in the Village Voice in 2005.  If you hire people, and you don't know anything about veterans, just remember Mr. McNeil's line in his article: "One of the many wonderful things about the American military is that we usually end up successfully executing plans. Imagine driving from San Diego to Chicago with a map of Coney Island and ending up in the right place anyway."

Happy 4th of July!

The Hatfields, the McCoys, and the Admin Aides

Government employees' career arcs are often measured in decades. It is not entirely uncommon for a government employee to have the same coworkers for more than 20 years. That familiarity can breed esprit de corps, lifelong friendships, and of course bitter decade long feuds.

I worked with two women who refused to talk to each other because of a perceived slight that happened 7 years earlier. One felt that the other interfered with her attempts to flirt with the building security guard by also flirting with the security guard.  Both of these employees, and the security guard, were married at the time by the way.  One employee later went on to supervise the other during a time period in which they still refused to speak.  I'll have to remember to tag this blog entry under "productive" and "mature".

In a different office we had multiple teams and each team was assigned an admin aide.  The admin aide on my team refused to work with the admin aide assigned to a team with which we frequently worked.  I asked our admin aide why she disliked the other one so much.  Her answer was "oh, go ask her, she knows."  So I did. When I asked the other admin aide she loudly stated "I haven't liked her since she sat next to me in the old building and took the credit for all of my work."  I asked, "what old building?"  She told me it was the building where our department was assigned before I was hired...10 years earlier.

Before I am accused of only using gender specific examples, please allow me to share the story of *Barry and *Geoff (*not their real names).  These were two middle age guys who disliked another guy in the office so much, that they would be the poster children for modern anti-bullying efforts.  While the first two examples were people that would refuse to talk to each other like they were pre-teen school girls, these two guys treated the office like it was a junior high locker room (I'm not projecting my own experiences...).  They singled out the guy they didn't like and would encourage other co-workers to shut him out of office functions.  Not literally of course, but they would treat the lunch room like their own personal Forrest Gump bus.

So as the manager, and a decent human being, when I found out these two were picking on one of my employees I spoke to them individually. I went the route of the prisoners dilemma and they caved and each one fingered the other as the main instigator. After spouting off some rehearsed lines about how disappointed I was in them and how I expected an immediate change in behavior, I asked them both why they picked on the guy in the first place. They both said when the victim was hired he asked Barry's wife, who of course worked in the office too (tag under relationships), if she wanted to go out for dinner. He had no idea she was Barry's wife and apologized when she told him she was married. This had all happened 15 years before I got to the office.  This poor bastard was putting up with this for 15 years! Thank God we didn't work for the post office!

Can't we all just get along?

I am a bureaucrat that can actually say I worked as both a federal employee and a service industry worker. I may not have been actually refilling empty draft beer glasses, but my government job required me to interact with the public every day. Every. Single. Day.

I am no longer in a direct public service position but I will admit that I miss my interactions and my ability to serve the people who lived in my community.  Even if some of those same people fantasize about dressing up like they're in a call of duty game and spending two months on a federal property they've taken over to protest my overreach. The anti-government types tend to forget that when they're talking about "the government" they're usually referring to normal people like you and me.

I understand some people get frustrated by paying taxes, but I don't understand how demonizing every government employee helps your cause. In my last post I mentioned I came down with food poisoning. In the days that followed, I lost about five pounds. It worked, but it probably wasn't the best or most pleasant way of losing five pounds. So chill out militia folks, and find a better way to pay less in taxes without accusing your neighbor of trying to steal your land. Sure, it gets your point across, but it isn't the most pleasant way of doing so for anyone involved.