Sequestions.

[Flack]

This is the thread in which I will answer your questions about the government sequestration and impending furloughs.

I will start you off: "Are you about to be furloughed?"

Good question! Yes I am.

[AArdvark]

I think I already know the answer, but..

Does it suck?


and,

Are you having to take up the slack from the other workers that are being given time off and vise-versa?


THE
HOURLY WAGE
AARDVARK

[Flack]

Does it suck?

Good question!

Yes, it sucks on multiple levels. The federal government has decided that the best way to save 85 billion dollars is to send people like me home without pay one day per pay period for the rest of the fiscal year. Once the furloughs kick in, it will be 11 pay periods in a row that I am sent home without pay one day per pay period, effectively cutting my salary by 10%. And since my wife is also a federal employee she is getting the same cut as well.

It also sucks because during that time no additional costs can be incurred in regards to salaries -- that means no raises (of course; I didn't really get one anyway this year) but also no comp time, no over time, and no "time differential" pay (which is I think a bonus paid to guys like air traffic controllers for working the night shift). I worked 65 hours this week; during the sequester I will be limited to 40 hours/week and 32 hours/week on my furlough weeks. That's good and bad, I suppose, but many, many projects I am working on will suffer.

Are you having to take up the slack from the other workers that are being given time off and vise-versa?

Good question!

There's a stereotype out there that government workers are overpaid and underworked. I think many of them are. Work tends to get shifted around to people that produce results. I'm currently working on three full time projects. For all intents and purposes I have three full-time jobs at the moment (until roughly June). None of them are documented well enough that I could turn the work over to someone else. My own personal experience at the moment is that I am doing project work from 8am-5pm and then working after hours to keep up with my "day" job. Most of the people I know that are good workers are struggling to get done what they need to do in 8 hours. So the answer to your question is, there's no slack time in my day to take up someone else's work if they are gone. And even if they were, chances are, I wouldn't know how to do it.

I don't have any great insight into the government in general, only my teeny-tiny little part of it. But what I can tell you is that I expect output to slow down by at least 10% and probably more. I expect work focus to shift toward internal needs and away from public needs -- in other words, and I am just making this up, but if I worked for the TSA (I don't) and I had a choice between doing something that helped us internally and helping the line at the airport move more quickly, I would choose the former because if the former slips then the public never sees the effect of the sequestration and furloughs, but if the latter slips and lines get longer, then people see what effect it's having on us. If park rangers have the choice of, oh, not fixing a truck they need to work and closing the Grand Canyon one day a week, I can guess which one will happen. Not fixing their trucks won't make the news.

These have been GREAT QUESTIONS by AARDVARK and GREAT ANSWERS by FLACK.

[Tdarcos]

Okay, I'll change this to a question:

It is a standard practice in government that you want to make things look worse when there are cuts so you always want to cut the most obvious and clearly visible things, and anything the public has to deal with because those make it obvious that cuts "hurt," since there's no incentive not to make things hurt and lots of incentive to do so (if your agency looks like it can't do its job if you lose so much as the cost of the loss of one paperclip then it makes it less likely your agency will get budget cuts.)

I mentioned one here about 18 months ago, how the Welfare Office is supposed to handle all claims within 30 days, including my re-application for medical assistance (a subsidy program covering the $100 a month Medicare insurance premimum) but because they were so overloaded with otherwise non-needy people filing for assistance that they couldn't comply with the 30-day time limit.

Now, do you agree or disagree with my claim that cuts are generally done to make them noticeable by the publie?

[Tdarcos]

The text of this message has been moved to a different thread and if Flack will remove his message quoting it I can delete it.

[Tdarcos]

The text of this message has been moved to a different thread and if Flack will remove his message quoting it I can delete it.

[Tdarcos]

The text of this message has been moved to a different thread and if Flack will remove his message quoting it I can delete it.

[Tdarcos]

The text of this message has been moved to a different thread and if Flack will remove his message quoting it I can delete it.

[Flack]

It is a standard practice in government that you want to make things look worse when there are cuts so you always want to cut the most obvious and clearly visible things, and anything the public has to deal with because those make it obvious that cuts "hurt," since there's no incentive not to make things hurt and lots of incentive to do so (if your agency looks like it can't do its job if you lose so much as the cost of the loss of one paperclip then it makes it less likely your agency will get budget cuts.)

I mentioned one here about 18 months ago, how the Welfare Office is supposed to handle all claims within 30 days, including my re-application for medical assistance (a subsidy program covering the $100 a month Medicare insurance premimum) but because they were so overloaded with otherwise non-needy people filing for assistance that they couldn't comply with the 30-day time limit.

This is not a question. Fail.

[Flack]

There are also differences in how some people do work. We were upgrading people in one government office from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. There were me, John, and another guy whose name I can't remember, I'll call him "Milo", who were contractor employees, and everyone else were Federal employees.

I was John's assistant, he did the "heavy lifting," where he'd bring their machines in from their office, copy their files onto a server, then assign them a new machine, give me the machine, and then restore their files on the machine after I'd finish.

(Continued Next Message)

This is not a question. Fail.

[Flack]

(Continued from previous message)

My job was to install all the software that they needed, assign their default printer, set their mailbox to point to their server, and so on. I created a checklist for the process. In which I would have a list of everything they needed to be done to their machine, and as I set up an item I'd check it off.

Once all the items on the page are done, you are. You can't make a mistake and you can't miss anything. Yeah, I already know what to do - I wrote the checklist - but using one means it's much simpler and makes it impossible to forget anything.

Nobody told me to do it that way, but there were two things; if someone else ever had to do the job they might not know how, and, of course, I can make mistakes, so by sticking to the list, I can't.

(Continued next message)

This is not a question. Fail.

[Flack]

(Continued from last message)

In a one month period we had to move 65 people from their old machine to their new one, about two people a day. They'd go to training on Windows 95 and when they got back, they'd have their new machine all configured with their passwords, their files, their network settings and everything else.

So anyway, there were two teams; John and I, and Milo and one other guy. By our doing this, it allowed the Federal employees in our department to continue regular help-desk and technical support work of answering questions and sometimes going to customers to fix their problems (more on that in a separate message).

(Continued next message)

This is not a question. Fail.

[Flack]

(Continued from previous message)

So, anyway, the two teams got all 65 machines delivered on time. John and I configured 60 of them. Every single one went out to the customers perfectly; we got one (1) machine returned because the customer screwed something up.

Milo and the other guy, in the same period of time, configured 5 machines, and every single one of them came back with something wrong with them when they were sent to the customers.

So, just because you have non-government employees doing a job does not mean the job is going to be done competently, since Milo and the other guy were also contractor employees.

This is not a question. Fail.

[Tdarcos]

Flack, you do realize that when you quote a message and then add a comment, you force-lock the original message so that I can't remove it? I have copied the text to a new message to comply with the no-deletion rule, but if you'll delete the above messages that quote mine I can remove mine so we're not cluttering up the thread with irrelevant items.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Am I even letting people delete messages? I thought that was always turned off. Editing messages is about to go away again.

I have a comment and a question.

My comment is that I think this is a really shitty thing to do when people booked flights months ago. But that's me looking at things through my personal prism.

Here is my question:

At jobs I have had, there are the workers who will tirelessly "get shit done," going above and beyond the call of duty. There are the dependable workers who will work tirelessly when needed. And then there are the guys who can only focus on one thing, very slowly.

(There's a fourth category, "the fuck up," but those don't last too long.)

When cuts to hours happen, is there a sort of feeling that maybe the slow workers need to get their ass in gear? Slow workers love to talk and chat, usually. Is there a sort of unspoken thing that maybe these guys ought to get their ass in gear?

What I *suspect*, and this is based on nothing, is that the guys who can't get shit done don't know what operating at superhuman efficiency is like. So they are oblivious to how long it takes them to do things. If they COULD buckle down and be more efficient, they would. More, because there is a desire for the public to see the cuts hurting, I can totally see this kind of worker thinking, "Well, I had better slow down, too."

To be clear, I am not saying that this kind of worker is exclusively in the government. In fact, I have never encountered one such worker in the government, just IT. But it drives me crazy in times of crisis for these guys to not step it up.

[Flack]

Flack, you do realize that when you quote a message and then add a comment, you force-lock the original message so that I can't remove it?

Huh, you're right. I didn't realize that. I guess I thought you (as a normal user) would be able to edit or remove my (as another normal user) posts. I will try and remove the text from them. Does the old DOS CLS command work? I will try that.

[Flack]

It is a standard practice in government that you want to make things look worse when there are cuts so you always want to cut the most obvious and clearly visible things, and anything the public has to deal with because those make it obvious that cuts "hurt," since there's no incentive not to make things hurt and lots of incentive to do so (if your agency looks like it can't do its job if you lose so much as the cost of the loss of one paperclip then it makes it less likely your agency will get budget cuts.)

I mentioned one here about 18 months ago, how the Welfare Office is supposed to handle all claims within 30 days, including my re-application for medical assistance (a subsidy program covering the $100 a month Medicare insurance premimum) but because they were so overloaded with otherwise non-needy people filing for assistance that they couldn't comply with the 30-day time limit.

This is not a question. Fail.

CLS

[Flack]

There are also differences in how some people do work. We were upgrading people in one government office from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. There were me, John, and another guy whose name I can't remember, I'll call him "Milo", who were contractor employees, and everyone else were Federal employees.

I was John's assistant, he did the "heavy lifting," where he'd bring their machines in from their office, copy their files onto a server, then assign them a new machine, give me the machine, and then restore their files on the machine after I'd finish.

(Continued Next Message)

This is not a question. Fail.

CLS

[Flack]

(Continued from previous message)

My job was to install all the software that they needed, assign their default printer, set their mailbox to point to their server, and so on. I created a checklist for the process. In which I would have a list of everything they needed to be done to their machine, and as I set up an item I'd check it off.

Once all the items on the page are done, you are. You can't make a mistake and you can't miss anything. Yeah, I already know what to do - I wrote the checklist - but using one means it's much simpler and makes it impossible to forget anything.

Nobody told me to do it that way, but there were two things; if someone else ever had to do the job they might not know how, and, of course, I can make mistakes, so by sticking to the list, I can't.

(Continued next message)

This is not a question. Fail.

CLS

[Flack]

(Continued from last message)

In a one month period we had to move 65 people from their old machine to their new one, about two people a day. They'd go to training on Windows 95 and when they got back, they'd have their new machine all configured with their passwords, their files, their network settings and everything else.

So anyway, there were two teams; John and I, and Milo and one other guy. By our doing this, it allowed the Federal employees in our department to continue regular help-desk and technical support work of answering questions and sometimes going to customers to fix their problems (more on that in a separate message).

(Continued next message)

This is not a question. Fail.

CLS