Well, today was yet another exhausting day. Only this time, I know what to blame it on: that stupid hurricane that didn’t even hit us. Her chaos continues to spawn trouble. It couldn’t be anything like a fundamental problem with my employer….

Discussing this problem is going to require me to come out with more information on where I work than I ever have before. While I’m going to continue discussing things in frustrating generalities, it won’t take much thought for most citizens of Houston to make an educated guess or two. So be it. I’m not going to take the final step of actually posting my workplace, because all the reasons I don’t are still valid–especially that in no way do I want anyone who reads this blog contacting me at my workplace. I don’t have the time, and you aren’t going to get special consideration. I’d make a snarky comment on the type of consideration I’m likely to give anyone who jacks with me at work, but there’s no doubt a policy against that. So the window you get on the innards of the city from my writing is your consideration, and I will continue to keep the “porous wall” up between blogging and work. (If anybody gets the urge to post their guesses in the comments, expect to find them edited or deleted, right or wrong.)

Now, on with the show… Our department actually generates revenue for the City, so smooth operation is a must. Every month we go through a cycle that covers the whole city. We can’t fall behind, because if we don’t make the monthly cycle, the city’s revenue stream slows down, and even a day or two fallback has significant impact. If we miss a day (and sometimes, we do for reasons beyond our control) we have to take measures to catch back up — unfortunately, even if it means quality suffers. (What, you thought your government was about anything but keeping the money coming in? Please, come in. I have a bridge for sale…) To be fair to my employer, we’re in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t bind, because even if we do the work late, it’s a bad thing, and we are going to hear about it from the public.

So, on a given day, if we can’t do the necessary work to generate the numbers that generate the revenue stream, and we can’t let it back up to do later, then we have only one thing we can do.

We make up the numbers.

Now that’s really being unfair to the city, because we don’t just pluck numbers out of thin air; we have a pretty good set of tools and we can usually get the number right to within one or two points. Unfortunately,while at the top end of the scale, even an error of several points doesn’t make an appreciable change, at the bottom end of the scale, an error of a single point may represent a 33% jump — and by the time we get to the dollars and cents, it may mean a 300% jump. And on the scale we’re working here, if we miss our guess on 5% of the calculations in a given day, it is going to result in a LOT of pissed-off people. Hundreds, if not a thousand. Per day.

Well, we had to guess for about 3 days because we didn’t have the people needed to generate the numbers we needed to base the calculations on. And with what we do, a mistake may not be immediately obvious, but when we get through the next monthly round, if we blew it, it gets really obvious.

Guess what? It’s been just over a month since we had to do that. And we’re starting to hear about it, because we weren’t perfect. Of course, everyone always calls at the same time (lunch, Monday @ 8am to 5pm, Friday at 4:30pm, or anytime around the first of the month), then they wonder why they can’t get through or have to hold forever. Of course these people would never think to call sometime other than when everyone else would think to call, which means we have to pull people off of other duties in order to answer the calls. So then their work doesn’t get done. We could hire people to twiddle their thumbs 75% of the time just so’s the average citizen could get instant (or at least quicker) service the other 25%, but hey, folks think us city workers are lazy enough.

(Side note: it’s not that we’re lazy, it’s that we know we aren’t going to get any more money by working harder. I could go on about this, but that will derail the post too much, so I have saved it for the future. However, there’s other reasons that I will segué into below.)

While skipping a cycle can causes problems, it’s actually possible to use the numbers from 2 months back (when we did do the work) and the current figures (when we did the work again), to retroactively adjust the figures to what they should have been, and then adjust the impact to the citizens. Now here’s the problem:

We didn’t do that pro-actively. We are only doing it re-actively. Worse, it has to be done almost totally manually, with a thorough paper trail and lots of signatures (at least two, maybe as many as four or five). In short, it’s a goddamn pain in the ass. And it’s eating up our time, keeping us from doing all the other things that need done and fixing all the other problems that need fixing. And since I just got all that extra responsibility (but no extra pay, of course), I have to help other employees when they run into oddball problems. By the way, did I ever mention that while I have all these extra new duties, I still have all my old ones too? I’m bushed. Although typing this post has helped relax me.

Now I imagine that anyone who’s ever used the cut and paste function in any document probably looked at the prior paragraph and went “Are you people insane? Why hasn’t this been automated?” Well, there’s two reasons. And the #1 reason is that the city auditors are fucking assholes stuck in the Age of Paper. (#2 is that we don’t pay enough to have programmers worth squat, but I’m only addressing that one tangentally). The auditors want to see signatures. They want to see multiple individual’s signatures on every single change in that revenue stream, no matter how small. And they want plenty of backup. Multiple printouts. Worksheets. Tapes from the desk calculator. And it’s all got to be done in thus-and-such a way so we can film it later for the archive, even if it’s more time-consuming. These are bean-counters who want to be able to sneak up on someone and scream, “A-HA!!! YOU COUNTED THAT PEA AS A BEAN!! GOTCHA!!!!!”

So we have a god-awful, clumsy-ass, slow, labor-intensive system that, frankly has not been modernized since 1987. Even then, only hardware, data storage, retrieval, and the most routine calculations have been automated. Millions of dollars and 28 years later, the only thing that’s changed is that micro-computers make it possible to generate pretty graphs to go along with all the reports that no one has time to read, let alone the skill to analyze in a meaningful fashion. I’ve had enough exposure to statistics, sampling, and probablity theory to know that the people around me haven’t. In the city, technical (read: PC and professional) training abounds, to give people job skills and required certifications. Not much else. (The city really needs to promote people getting Public Administration degrees more).

You can’t train people to think. You can give them the tools so that they think productively. But then the city would have to pay them more.

And one of the things that I think is that if you create a backwards system that retards productivity, hire a chronically underpaid workforce to run that system, attrit the workforce until the basics can’t be covered, play stupid “gotcha games” with the rest, offer little or no advancement, call the employees stupid for not agreeing to whatever impossible demand from John Q Public, and then the JQP treats them as second-class citizens . . . . the result is going to be a very un-motivated work force.

So don’t whine to me that we botched the figures. *yawn* I’m too ignorant to be apathetic.

–Ubu Roi

(For the slow of wit, yes, that was supposed to be sarcastic irony.)