The civil service, or how to stay out of the slammer, in one easy lesson

My apologies for being nearly invisible here for the past few weeks, but the best laid plans of mice and men aft times gang agley, as Robert Burns put it. Life has a nasty way of imposing its own demands on one’s writing schedule, whether you want it to or not, or even if you know what agley means or not; I know I don’t.  This morning my co-workers here at the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread reminded me that I have been laboring here for my daily bread  for twenty-six years, yesterday being the anniversary of the inglorious day that I first wandered into this dump as an employee.  This, plus the fact that we have had a slew of recent retirements here, now means that I have been laboring here longer than anyone else has been laboring here, which in itself, apart from the actual number of years I’ve been doing this, is pretty damn depressing.  Combined with the actual chronology, it was enough to make me vaguely suicidal in an annoyed sort of way. I tamped down quickly on my immediate urge to sever an artery with my own teeth and went out for some pizza.  There’s not much that a nice hot slice of pizza can’t make better, and if can’t actually make it better, pizza makes the bad news seem less depressing.  I’m thinking of wangling the pizza concession on the Day of Judgment; I figure the saved will like a nice hot slice to celebrate and the damned will need something to lift their spirits before they become toast on a more or less eternal basis. 

In any case, I should point out that twenty-six years in the civil service has convinced of one great lesson: no matter how well you’ve covered your ass, you can always cover it better.  This leads inevitably to the scandals the Internal Revenue Service has gotten itself embroiled in.  If we listen to the big shots in Washington, the targeting of the Tea Party in particular and the American conservative movement in general was just something those crazy kids out in Cincinnati dreamt up all by their lonesomes without any sort of input from the head honchos, and especially without the input of anyone within breathing distance of the former junior Senator from Illinois.  Yes sirree, no one here in Washington was involved at all.  Cincinnati is out there in flyover country, Mr. Chairman, and flyover country is a nice place to visit, or so people have told me who’ve been there, but I’ve never been there myself and I’ve never talked to anyone who has.  They do strange things out there in the Ohio River valley and it may be the fault of the funguses.  I have to tell my rheumatologist if I ever want to go to the Ohio River Valley because there are funguses there that might interfere with my medication, so no, I couldn’t tell you why those people out there might want to do this sort of thing.  It’s Ohio, Mr. Chairman, and they do things differently out there.

The problem with blaming the frontline civil servants is this: it’s bullshit.  Sorry if that offends, but after twenty-six years here I can tell you that no one, but no one, at the frontline level of the civil service, even someone in as small a shop as my egregious mold pit, sticks their neck out like this without someone higher up in the food chain telling them to do so.  The only times I have ever gotten my ass chewed out big time here is when I cut people slack I shouldn’t have in direct violation of the policies spelled out in our staff manual.  It is inconceivable to me that long-time civil servants working at the Federal level in an agency like the IRS just did this because it seemed like a good idea at the time and because they didn’t like the political opinions of the applicants; their jobs do not include vetting groups on the basis of partisan politics; civil servants are not, or at least they shouldn’t be, in the business of helping one party or another win elections.  No, the only, and I mean the only, way the people in Cincinnati did this is because their politically appointed bosses in Washington wanted this to happen, and they only way those bosses gave them these orders is because they got the approval from the top.  There may not be a smoking gun in this case, but there is no possible way that people at the frontline, the middle management, and the top tiers all decided to break the law and suppress the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans without our erstwhile Illinois Incitatus and his clique of Chicago political thugs giving them the go-ahead.  Civil servants do not think outside the box, folks, we are one with the box, we are in psychic unity with the box, we are the box. We don’t do things that can cost us our jobs, our pensions, and land our sorry asses in prison spontaneously. We just don’t, that’s all.

Still vaguely paranoid after all these years...

The thing of it is, of course, that if you’d told me in 1987 that I would still be working in this dump in 2012 I would have laughed my ass off and then told you, in a completely impolite tone of voice, that you were out of your damn mind.  Yes sir, that’s what I would have done.  None of that civil service baloney for me, are you nuts, no way, Jose! Of course, this being twenty-five years later and here I am, still toiling away in the egregious mold pit like some proletarian drudge out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, well, that’s more than a little embarrassing, I have to say.  Laughing in someone’s face when they’re right and you’re wrong is always discomfiting in retrospect. Even in currentspect, which I’m fairly certain isn’t even a word, it’s discomfiting.

Actually, I’m still wondering how I’ve managed to hang onto this job, given my absolute lack of qualifications and basic unsuitability for it. I have a degree in the basic subject matter, but I got it back in the early 1990’s when all the information I needed was in books and it was just a matter of finding the right bit of information in the right book. But at about the same time I was getting my masters degree Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the World Wide Web, thereby rendering everything I’d learned obsolete. This is annoying in and of itself, you know, because no matter how you look at it, the time and money I spent getting that damn degree is now time and money flushed down the rat hole.  And all I learned in graduate school was theory, and while in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice theory is a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Nothing I learned in graduate school prepared me for how to deal with exploding toilets, leaky roofs, crazy people defecating in the main room, adults aggrieved that they have to obey our rules, horny teenagers going at it amidst the flower pots, kids setting off fire alarms, oil burners glowing in the dark, and the dead guy in the men’s room.  I don’t remember any of that coming up at all in school, not even once.  I wonder why I’m still here sometimes. I think it’s just a lack of imagination on my part, but I could be wrong about that.

I THINK THAT I SHALL NEVER SEE, A POEM AS LOVELY AS A CUT DOWN TREE: Our happy little burg is proud of a great many things, and rightfully so, I think. We are set in an area of spectacular natural beauty, we are recovering from a decades long economic slide with an economy that is the envy of our neighbors, especially the slough of urban despond located directly across the river from us, and our population, after years of slowly slipping away across the border into deepest, darkest Connecticut, is, at long last, finally starting to grow. This is the sort of thing that any community can take a justifiable pride in. Now, there are the inevitable slips in our long trek out of the Rust Belt doldrums, of course; one could hardly go through life without expecting the occasional disaster, which keeps us interested in the proceedings as they play out through our lives. This year our minor league baseball team has finished dead last in the league standings, proving yet again that some habits are just too strong to break, shopping carts are still turning up in odd places miles from any store—this week a shopping cart containing two bottles of diet ginger ale, a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, a frozen cherry pie, and the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1910, announced that it was running for the City Council next year; and the wise council of solons who govern us have decided to buy the fire department a fireboat, complete with a huge pump that can send water shooting seven stories into the air. This is a very useful tool for getting water to the upper portions of any burning building along the waterfront, even though there are no buildings seven stories high anywhere in our happy little burg; city law forbids the construction of any building over three stories within the city limits; and there are no buildings at all along the waterfront. There are a lot of trees, however, and so this new fireboat may be our contribution to the ongoing fight against forest fires. We are, after all, a National Arbor Day Foundation Tree City.

The appellation of Tree City, which we’ve held for some thirteen or fourteen years now, if I remember correctly, is one of our happy little burg’s proudest titles. As I’ve mentioned before, we take trees seriously here, if for no other reason than the arboreal population has the human population outnumbered by a factor of at least ten to one. We treat trees as if they were members of our family, reading them bedtime stories when they are young, feeding them, watering them, trying to keep them on the moral straight and narrow as they take root in our community and flourish. So it caused no little shock and horror this past week when the astounded populace saw veritable hordes of civil service workers descend upon Main Street like so many hard-hatted Mongols on a rampage and begin hacking down trees left, right, and moderate Republican alike, reenacting some of the worst scenes of arborcidal mayhem since Walt Disney released Paul Bunyan back in 1958. None of these clods stood 63 axe handles high with his feet on the ground and his head in the sky the way old Paul did, nor did any of them have a blue ox named Babe anywhere in the vicinity, although some of them did have a bulldozer named Vermeer, a device that lacked the emotional subtlety of Girl with a Pearl Earring and, despite the name, seemed to belong more to the 20th century Soviet socialist realist school than Holland in its Golden Age, but even with these caveats, the civil servants involved were all exceptionally skilled at felling trees in an urban setting. By the time they were done, not a single tree remained anywhere on the lower approaches of Main Street, rendering the complete lack of any resemblance whatsoever between a view of our happy little burg and Vermeer’s View of Delft even more complete than it was before, if such a thing is possible.

I asked one of the gentlemen rampagers what brought on this sudden need to attack defenseless trees; surely the city government had other things to do with its time and money than cut down trees that aren’t in anyone’s way and provide much needed shade for the many pedestrians wandering up and down Main Street these days. He said he didn’t know. I asked who decided to cut the trees down in the first place, as I didn’t recall any mention of this project in the City Council minutes, which shouldn’t really surprise me, now that I think about it. The minutes of the City Council, along with those of the local board of education, are largely fictional, the actual decisions having already made over coffee and pancakes over at O’Reilly’s Bar and Breakfast. In any case, he didn’t know the answer to that question, either. What then, I asked, was the city government going to do about the sudden lack of shade on Main Street. Our hard-hatted functionary smiled at that question; apparently, I had asked something he knew the answer to at last. Once they got rid of the old trees, he said—they were turning the trees to sawdust there on the street, a process a lot louder than you might think it would be—they were going to plant new trees. He pointed to a lot down the street where a small wood had suddenly sprung up amidst the asphalt, said wood consisting of a variety of sticks standing in bags, said sticks bearing one or two leaves apiece.

I pointed out that it would take at least thirty years for any of these would be trees to give the street any significant shade and that none of them looked healthy enough to withstand more than a few assaults by dogs determined to rid themselves of excess fluid. I then pointed out that in lieu of this, why didn’t the city just leave the old trees where they were and save everyone a lot of time and bother and expense? That way Main Street would still have shade, the dogs would have somewhere to take a leak, and he and his fellow lumberjohns wouldn’t be blocking Main Street for hours at a time, making it impossible for anyone to pass from one end of the city to the other. The fellow allowed that my point made a lot of sense, but that he wasn’t there to make sense, he was there to get rid of trees, whereupon he tossed a large branch of a locust tree into the chopper’s maw, reducing several decades of nature's work to dust in a matter of moments. There is a moral here about the swiftness of bureaucrats when it comes to creating disasters, but I am not sure what it might be.