Locker Room Talk

As we have seen far too often in the news, powerful people do stupid things to vulnerable people.  My blog is meant to be a funny and lighthearted look at the mistakes managers make. But let me be clear there’s nothing funny about harassment in the workplace. Managers should do everything they can to ensure a comfortable and safe workplace. That’s true for Hollywood for Congress and for federal offices.

When Trump's Access Hollywood tape came out (in case you lived in a cave, click here) I remember a lot of politicians saying "I have a daughter" or "I have a wife" when they issued their statements of faux disgust.  If you can only feel disgusted by disgusting behavior because you have a daughter, than maybe you're not a good judge of moral behavior.

I have a daughter, and when she was born there was nothing better than when she fell asleep on my stomach six-pack, but even when I only had a son, I could have told you the Access Hollywood tape should have taught us more than Fire and Fury.

You shouldn't need to experience sexual harassment to understand how offensive it is in the work place.  Here's my story: Prior to becoming a government manager, I worked in a nonprofit organization. I was a caseworker for homeless clients. I shared a small office with three other employees and our desks were back to back. After working there for about six months my coworker handed me a letter on my way out the door.  She told me not to read it until I get to the car . I should note I was engaged at the time and the coworker was about twice my age. As I opened the letter I saw the first line that said “I know this will never work and it might sound crazy." Was she ever right. It did sound crazy. The letter went on and on about how she was madly in love with me. Even though her son was nearly my age she thought we might be able to work it out. Even though I was getting married soon that she would be better for me. It was all very bizarre. It was the only time I ever dealt with anything like that at work. So I took the letter and I went to my boss and the first thing he asked me was if anything happened between us. I said no I just got this letter out of the blue. He asked again, anything going on between you guys? And I said "No, I think she’s just crazy." He told me that I needed to tell her. So I did so over email to make sure she would get it. My boss told me that would end it.  It did not, of course. Over the next year she would do things like text me saying she wished I was on the beach in San Diego or things like giving me the address to her house so I could park there while I went to a concert. Each time I would share the information with my boss. And each time he would do nothing about it. That lasted for more than a year. It happened before and after my wedding.  I relayed probably 10 different events to my boss and each time he did absolutely nothing.  I was in grad school and I needed the job.  So until I found a new job, I just put up with it.

When I finally found a new job, I wrote an email to my boss and told him about the hellish environment I dealt with for more than a year.  I also CC'd our board of directors.  My boss quit a few weeks later and my former co-worker stayed in her job for another year.

I never felt my job was at risk by reporting the harassment and I know what I was experiencing was much less significant than what many people go through.  Mostly, I was just very uncomfortable at work and thankfully I was dating a very supportive woman who trusted what I was telling her.  I'd like to think that even without that incident I would be as hard on harassment and bullying as I am now, but I'm not sure if I'd understand it as much.  So if you're a manager and somebody comes to you with their experience, deal with it right away.  You owe it to your staff.  If you don't want to deal with it, find a new job.

You’ll shoot your eye out kid

So the tax cut is law. I will not take sides on the merits of the actual act itself, but I would lik to discuss the underlying merits of the argument for tax cuts. Paul Ryan cited the corporate tax rate of Ireland and other countries when he said we need to cut corporate taxes to remain competitive. Ireland is a nation of less than 5,000,000. Their military has just over 9,000 members. About 0.2% of their nation is in the Defence Forces of Ireland (of course defense has a c in it...). The United States is about 70x bigger than Ireland. And the United States military is more than 140x bigger than Ireland’s in terms of personnel. When it comes to the cost, the US spends about $600billion on the military (3.3% of the GDP). Ireland spends about $1.2billion on their defense forces (about 0.3% of the GDP).

I say this not to denegrate the Irish Army, but to point out that we can have low taxes or the worlds largest military. It is not possible to do both without either going broke or changing how we operate.  Ireland does not have foreign bases and nuclear submarines. They also chose to use their tax revenue for things like national health care and a government owned national railway. In America we chose to have tanks and stealth bombers. Ireland also taxes capital gains at 32% and with their VAT the tax rate on highest earners is about 52%. So they make up for a low corporate tax rate by a higher personal tax. We lie to ourselves and lower both.

As Steve Bannon said, the goal of the administration is the deconstruction of the administrative state. Take away corporate tax revenue and you take away funding from organizations. Take away funding from government organizations and the service degrades. When the service is finally so poor they privatize the industry and rich bankers get more money.

So while we’ll all enjoy the tax cut, we won’t enjoy the new 12 month wait for a passport and the cut to your social security benefits. I believe most government employees and managers want to do well. Stripping them of funding will only cause them to leave or provide poor service. Regardless of how the manager performs, the deconstruction of the administrative state is a real concept and it is really dangerous to the belief our country will continue to be compassionate.  We can joke all we want about lazy feds, but when those feds are gone, good luck getting service from a private company responsible for providing your Medicare benefits while being motivated by profit.

Torpor

I have been unsure if I wanted to continue with my blog after the 2016 election.  The blog was not meant to be political.  But in mid to late 2016, it was hard not to connect politics to nearly everything.  So for a while, I've left the blog dormant.  Well, I have awoke from hibernation and I'll try my best not to be partisan.  (Torpor, for those of you like me who had not heard that word before today, is like hibernation, but not quite). 

Federal employees are limited in their political statements during an election by the Hatch Act.  The Hatch Act is more than 75 years old and is supposed to prevent federal employees from using their positions to influence elections.  The election is over.  Politicians are fair game, even for those of us covered by the Hatch Act.  So federal workers are free to wake from your slumber and spring into action like this:

 

I worked with some people that were pro-Clinton, some that were anti-Clinton, and one that was pro-Trump.  Those last two are not necessarily the same thing.  As a talented instigator, I could join either crowd and get them easily riled up, before they got frustrated and walked away insisting that they could no longer discuss the election due to the Hatch Act.  The only person who refused to engage was the one Trump supporter. 

While I used to enjoy reading about politics and keeping up-to-date on politics, the 2016 election cycle sapped me of any cynical enjoyment I got out of thinking one candidate or another might destroy our political system.  Because we elected a guy who actually said he is going to do that.  And sometimes when chaos meets reality, it is not pretty. 

So I'm going to start posting frequently and avoid politics as much as possible. 

(*This is what the news feels like when you're trying to avoid politics!)

I need limits!

When my email inbox size limit at work went from 100mb to unlimited something happened, I lost control of my inbox. Friday I opened my email an I noticed I had more than 7200 emails in my inbox. That's not even counting the hundreds in my sent box. The sent box is a good example of how I previously purged emails before the limitless inbox. I have a personal folder named "sent items" (creative, I know). That folder has thousands of sent emails because frankly, to conserve inbox space I just moved my sent items to a personal folder. So I may need an organization class.

After seeing that I had more than 7,000 emails saved, including more than 100 unread (hopefully those weren't important), I went on a mass purging. I deleted more than 1,000 emails in 30 minutes. I didn't bother to look at my current inbox space usage because I don't think it is a storage problem, just an unorganized mess of a problem!

Managers will often try to give their employees some slack in situations. Some people can't handle it and they need limits!!! Just ask me, but clearly don't email me.

Million Dollar IT Guy

Everybody knows how indispensable the "IT guy" is at work.  IT can mean a lot of different things.  To the professionals in the field it might mean a network security analyst or a programmer.  To the average bureaucrat it means printer repair man, password helper, and even "guy who loads the paper in the copier."  

Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite writers.  He is brief yet concise and somehow always manages to be entertaining.  Before all of his success writing books, he was just a writer for the New Yorker.  One of his best columns he wrote for the New Yorker was titled Million-Dollar Murray.  Basically, it tells the story of a homeless man in Reno.  Gladwell explains that between police and hospital coverage, society paid more than $1,000,000 to cover Murray's homelessness.  He did the math and realized it would be cheaper to hire a full-time social worker for the homeless man and to provide the him with a place to stay than it was to allow him to be homeless.  Homelessness, he declared, was cheaper to solve than to manage.  

So, where does the printer repair man IT expert fit in with Murray the homeless man?  

Well I overheard a co-worker who locked himself out of the network.  So of course the first person he goes to is our LAN expert.  Not surprising, the LAN guy couldn't help.  Although he is an "IT Guy," he was sadly, not the right kind.  But he did point him in the direction of the network help desk that assists with people who lock themselves out.  I listened to the co-worker and the network guy go back and forth for more than two hours trying to reset the password.  We'll call my co-worker Murray for this example.  I'm pretty sure this was not the first time he has locked himself out.  I'm pretty sure, because less than a week earlier, he did the exact same thing.  So Murray had easily spent about $300 of his own salary + another $300 of the network guy's time.  Considering he currently does this on a bi-weekly basis, I think it might be cheaper to hire a full-time employee to follow him around every day to make sure he doesn't forget his password!  He may not be a million-dollar Murray, but he is on his way!

...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!