...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.

Memorial Day

As a veteran who spent his entire enlistment far far away from any combat, I have great appreciation for those who sacrificed much more than I can imagine. I meant to post this days ago but my battle with food poisoning got the best of me. Tomorrow I'll try for humor instead of poetry.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
-John McCrae

I don't trust people who don't like dogs, but I always trust dogs that don't like people

First of all, I'm going to admit, the title has nothing to do with the blog post -- I just like it.  It's one of those internet quotes that may or may not belong to Bill Murray but it's funnier if he did actually say it so I just go with it.

A fun fact about government employees is that 85% of federal employees actually work outside of D.C. A lot of government employees travel frequently for work. It's why hotels offer the "government rate" not the "Wal-Mart rate." I was one of those employees that traveled a lot.

I'm going to share a story of travel and communication. I was aware I would need to audit an office which required overnight travel. I became aware of this because our administrative assistant emailed me a copy of my hotel reservation. I needed to leave in three days. At no point did my boss tell me about this trip. So in my best passive-aggressive pouty behavior I pretended like I didn't see the email. The rest of the day I did my work, avoided my inbox like it was the zika virus, and went home.

The next morning my boss asked why I had not completed my travel authorization yet. I was still was needlessly grumpy about not being told I needed to go out of town in, now, 2 days. So of course I was mature and I answered "what authorization?"  She reminded me I needed to complete the authorization right away and left. Meanwhile she never actually mentioned that I was going to be traveling.  She also never caught on that my shock about an authorization might mean that I was never told about this trip.

The next day, now t-minus 1 day until the trip, a co-worker asked what time we should meet to drive to the other office.  I told her that I was not in charge of the trip so I didn't know what time we should meet (or that we were even going...).  She then informed me that I would be driving everybody.

So I'm already annoyed that nobody had the courtesy to tell me that we were even making this office visit.  Then I'm being told that I am going to be driving everybody in my car.  After muttering self-pitying phrases on my way to my desk I see an email from our admin aide.  "Why didn't you add the cost for mileage on your travel authorization?"

Due to poor communication I was basically living in the movie Office Space.  If you're not familiar with the movie, first of all I suggest you watch it immediately, the main character is named Peter Gibbons.  Peter Gibbons is not a happy employee.  I felt like Peter Gibbons.

Airing of Grievances and Feats of Strengths

This recent govexec article is fascinating.  Not only for the content of the article, but also for the comments.  It is pretty easy to recognize who is bargaining unit and who is not within a few seconds.  Especially the guy who says "unions have no place in public service."  I'm just guessing he isn't the local president.  He also probably doesn't spend a lot of time with the guy saying "it has everything to do with poor management."  So how did public service unions and managers get to the point of a Seinfeld inspired Festivus-styled airing of grievances in a comment section of an article?  

I do not know either poster I mentioned above, but I can probably safely assume they do not have the same perspective on union-management relations.  However, that does not mean they cannot work together and actually accomplish things.  Sometimes, management and the union may have different motives for their opinions but the opinions might actually be the same.  Take this article about the TSA for example.  AFGE wants to add 6,000 TSA screeners.  If I were a manager in an airport with 2-hour lines at the check-point, I'd probably appreciate a few more screeners too.  Of course, management will accuse the union of just trying to get more dues-paying members.

How does this tie into "don't manage like this" examples? I've worked with managers that will spend more time composing an email to the local union rep sitting five feet away than actually talking to the person.  Call me old fashioned, but I think everybody can agree that context can be misinterpreted when reading an email.  Especially an email to/from somebody when you're already questioning that person's motivation for even sending the email in the first place.  I had a co-worker email back-and-forth with a union rep for over 15 minutes about the arrival time of an employee that was a few minutes late for work.  And each email got more and more argumentative.  Email is not only impersonal it also makes it easier for the sender to be a jerk.  Unless you're a total sociopath, it should be difficult to be rude to somebody in person.  That's why it is so easy to hang up on a telemarketer but so difficult to try to explain to the Salvation Army bell ringer why you don't have change for him.  

I know there is a manager out there reading this saying "Hey, why not point out what the union rep is doing wrong?"  Well this blog isn't called "How to be a better union rep".  It's call Don't Manage Like This!  Besides manager out there reading this, if you weren't so defensive maybe you would have a better relationship with your union representatives.  I would love to think that managers are always correct but based on my experiences, I am not actually myopic enough to believe that.

I think I've worked with him before

So I said I wouldn't use this blog to perpetuate stereotypes of government employees...some stereotypes are just too good not to perpetuate:

I'm also impressed by Flash's tie.  He clearly is an old-school government employee!