ArtTechnology.com, a Gallery of Original Expressionistic Art, Poetry, and Prose

Quintessential Government Contractor
or 
Inside Scoop on Banking Regulation
of the United States Treasury

By

Charles R. Riley

© Copyright, Charles R. Riley, 1999.

Disclaimer

Any resemblance in this work to any person, persons, businesses, or government agency is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction and art.

Enjoy the fun experiences of the quintessential government worker.

* * * *

Okay! So your boss bought into the magic of design time controls, drag and drop components, intellisense,… He tells his management that this will allow the government to hire high school dropouts to do programming at one-thousandth of the cost. His management thinks he is a genius. Of course they thought this when the client server tools were going to replace workers. Everyone has forgotten the 30 contractors they hired to do the client server work.  They were supposed to complete the work in two months.  It's been two years since they started on the project and they only have a prototype.

So you start dragging components onto a page because you have a deadline to complete a 401K benefits application for your managers.  They want to be able to manage their stock options and reserve tee off times at the country club without having to switch to another application. For the proof of concept, they argued too much clicking would harm their fingers, which were needed for pointing.  Also, they argued that it was easy for them to get confused if they have to go in and out of applications on top of having to meet tight tee off times.

It was easy dragging the components onto the page just like the advertising said. You're happy. Little do you know you are a Ginny Pig set up to see if someone really stupid could program this way. You're really smart, because you keep your mouth shut when your boss says he wants collaboration and synergy. You know he really wants you to agree with him and make him look good. Because you're honest and smart, you keep your mouth shut. The last time someone opened their mouth, because the LAN (a communications network) had problems, they blamed his coding and fired him.  

They told him the reason he was fired was because he said there was something wrong with the LAN, and it was wrong to point fingers. They pointed him to the exit. 

When the renowned and venerated Guttersnipe Consulting Firm was invited in to examine all the systems, they found problems with the LAN bandwidth, routers and in fact everything about the LAN.  Even so they never invited the fired contractor back or even sent an apology. So much for synergy.  They lured him out and slammed him.

Contractors were disposable commodities to the government.  The government wasn't allowed by law to hire people to work so they hired contractors, whom they could fire for any reason or whim.  This way the government could play god as well as save money and spend more.  The money spent on contractors wasn't recorded as spending, so they could spend more money on contractors than government employees and make it look like they spent less.  This also gave them more money to give themselves raises.

Contractors didn't see the extravagant amount paid for their work.  It would be embarrassing if the contractors knew how much money was paid for their work, so it was against the law for them to know.  The money went to a useless intermediary, who got contracts as a favor to protect the government from special interest groups.  Over time this developed into a new class system not unlike the useless Mercantile System that existed when the United States fought with Great Britain for independence.

Okay, so now you got the components on the page, but you find out there are all kinds of cryptic methods and properties you have to apply to the components to make them work.  It's like learning a whole new language. The help is not clear and there are no samples to clarify, because the technical writer couldn't understand any of it himself when he wrote the help. The management only read the advertising, which said the programming was intuitive, and they could save money on training, because anyone could drag and click components.  The components themselves knew what to do!  What they did might have made sense to themselves like some aliens talking among themselves, but they didn't do what you wanted them to do.  You ask for help from the young expert they hired because he looked groovy, spoke highly of himself, and he knew all the buzzwords. Every time you asked him anything, he gave the wrong answer.  Why did you think this time would be any different?

You decide to do the fine-tuning by coding. No one has to know.  You've done it in a thousand languages and they all work the same way, and it is simple to cut and paste from past coding projects. For some reason it doesn't work. It's worked a thousand times before, and it is not working now. You see the deadline clock ticking. You're sweating profusely. Your car needs repairs. Your children need money for colleges only rich kids from sheikdoms can afford. You couldn't convince any of them to join the Navy.

Wait a minute! You are a seasoned veteran. You don't crack under pressure. You know what to do. Backtrack. You loaded the component. It said it had to add the scripting library to do this. There is something in the scripting library that is causing this problem. Back it out, and do the coding the old way.

Yea! You tested your theory and it works. Now let's try it on the server, the computer that houses the finished program. It doesn't work. The LAN and server people say it must be your code. So you waste a day researching. You find out the server is not set up properly. Your server person says to put your request to fix it in writing. You have done this before, and the same requests were sent over and over again, and nothing was ever done. When you reminded him, he got mad at you and complained to the boss. He complained that you were prejudiced because he was from Tennessee, and he was going to sue the government. What do you do now?

You talk to other developers you know you can trust. They say they have set up a server that actually works! It has to be kept a secret, or they will lose access to the server room, and then they would all lose their jobs.

What a relief! You've only lost a week now. You can catch up with the super human effort you usually end up doing because of all the snags you run into and all the people you have to work around. Your boss is eyeing you suspiciously, when you say you've made a lot of progress, but you can't show him anything yet, because you are in the middle of some major changes.

Just then Hilda Hopper, who did all the publishing and odd jobs for the intranet, a little internet for the business, quits. She found a six-figure job at a large corporation, and she is only just out of college. Well actually, she's not quite out of college.  She lied, but who cares, they need to hire women to fill quotas.  

What is the matter with you? When you got out of college, you had to work as a laborer at the minimum wage. Then you went back to school and earned two masters and a doctorate while working as a secretary, and eventually as a computer specialist for the school, which only paid in school credits. You thought you would have a nice easy life as a college professor, when you got out, and you wouldn't have to see another computer. You could teach art! Beauty and intelligence would surround you, but then non-discriminatory practices went into practice around the country, and they could only hire women as art instructors. It was the only political correct thing to do! They were the majority of voters and they had more money.  Why should they have to work as laborers!  They deserve glamorous jobs; the tv said so.  

Well, you already made more than a college professor. Maybe it was for the best, except now instead of being surrounded by beauty and intelligence; you are surrounded by small mindedness.

Anyway, Hilda Hopper quits and leaves you all the work she used to do, but wasn't done as she was busy with more lucrative rumor mongering and back stabbing. You are told of plans to hire someone in the indefinite future to help out. In the meantime, it would make your boss look good if you did all of the work for as long as possible.

Well, you can only do so much in a day. So what if you didn't meet deadlines, and your bosses couldn't use their computers to get the best tee off times! So what if you didn't have a job. Maybe, your whole family could join the Navy?

Back to reality. You become a true multi-tasker, unlike your operating system. 

OOPS, Object Oriented Position Stacking, goes into effect.  The reports that no one else wants to do are given to you on top of the other work. This happens because you actually have 5 other bosses under the big boss, who has so many bosses above him that no one has ever been able to actually document their relationships or count them.  The government agency had to find something to do with all the mainframe programmers that were replaced to save money, so they were made into managers with better titles and higher wages, so they couldn't be fired.  So what if there were four or five managers to one programmer!  So what if they didn't know how to manage!

Even if they could manage, they didn't have time for managing.  The head of the agency continuously reorganized management so they had not time for anything but redecorating their new offices.  By the time the redecorating was done, it was time to move to comply with the latest reorganization.  This is a major reason they were always short tempered with anyone that had a question related to the work of the agency.  What did this have to do with anything.

The head of the agency was replaced every several years by political appointment based on favors that had to be repaid.  In turn, the head of the agency wined and dined the banking leaders he was regulating for political endorsements and future job opportunities for himself.    This was a great aid to the president who had his own hands busy shaking hands with corrupt military regimes in China and around the globe.  It was important to sell the technology for the corrupt military regimes to catch up with us.  They in turn could supply weapons to our enemies who had lots of money from the oil they sold us.  It all seemed to work somehow, so no one questioned it or thought it unwise.  As long as everyone knew how to play the game, everyone got to play power broker of the rich and famous.

Meanwhile, on the lowest level of government, creeping requirements are forcing you to spend more and more time in meetings with people who don't really understand what they want or what they are asking for. So you keep bringing back examples and they add on and take out requirements over and over again, so that you are getting nowhere.

Then you are suffocated with documentation by your 6 or seven bosses, and a department of documentation and inquisition. Your contracting boss wants to reach level three of the patent talent and creativity-crushing model of successful software engineering by filling out forms and attending more meetings. This adds a scientific and credible advertising angle to your contracting company, so they can better sell their services by covering their asses as well as brown-nosing.

You get the unintelligible forms; so you fill them out with any misinformation you can think of in a hurry and submit them. You are highly commended for this.

Then you attend the meetings, just long enough to sign in and sneak out.

One meeting catches your attention, so you stay. It's about back biting and picking on each other. If someone has a problem, management doesn't want to hear about it. The regular government employees, who are the managers, are jealous and say the contractors, who do the work, get special treatment, so they assign all the dirty work to you. Of course you would like to be an employee and not have to do any work except whine a lot and make yourself look overburdened and long suffering of the contractor you have to manage.  Unfortunately, there are non-discrimination laws that prevent you from being hired, because you are a white male with an unfortunate sexual orientation for the opposite sex. 

To prevent any disturbance of the managers, it was decided that if you have any comments they should be filtered through the intermediary, who will make sure they are never shared with anyone and we can all live and work as if we were contained in black boxes. This would give us objectivity in which the intermediary could plug in component developers with appropriate properties and methods. Thus the objective of proper tee off times could be met for management.

By now it's National Gay Sexual Preferences Month, so you have to spend time pretending you are gay and attend forced diversity meetings in which you are orientation correctness. You don't want to wear a dress to work just to look like you are trying to fit in, but your wife makes you put it on. She was sorry she did that because your boss takes an interest in you and insists on visiting your home, and so your wife has to pretend she is a male. Our four-year-old boy was a little hard to explain. I said he belonged to my brother who lost his life in Viet Nam. This would have made my son in his 40's, so I quickly explained that my son was a test tube baby.  I got extra brownie points for this story.  

Now I have to go to court, because one of the contracting bosses, "Legs A Lot", was under investigation. It seems the Minority Company she worked for lost its status, as a company that was given work to do because it was minority owned at least on the books. Set aside payoffs for minority owned companies is another non-discriminatory law that prevents companies and workers from being chosen based on work record or other possible qualifications for the work. Anyway she started another company based on the reputation of her legs. When she threatened to sue because of discrimination for people with hairy legs, the whole thing was dropped. The government wanted me to testify that she asked me what a credit was after allegedly working with bank regulatory agencies for many years. They were going to give me immunity and hide me in another country when it was all over. Luckily, the case was dropped.

Tensions between the, employees, developers, LAN people, and management continued to rise because everyone came to expect preferences for whining and legal shake-downs, better known as extortion. Even the mainframe people were fighting with the client server and internet developers.  The last straw was that contractors decided they did not need to wear suits to work because they did superior work compared with the employees. It was considered a sign of superiority to dress down, and the employees were up in arms about this. It had gotten physical. Employees ambushed contractors, and forced ties on them. Contractors smuggled in weapons. Developers booby-trapped the server room, and the LAN people released virulent viruses that attacked developers machines. Management hired mercenary high school dropouts, who had the qualifications of being gang members and stupid. Management had a lot in common.

Somehow I managed to create a program of breathtaking beauty before I was hospitalized with shrapnel wounds. The program really puts technology together like a work of poetry.

I thought I would recuperate in Brazil. My wife is from Rio, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I sent the following email to my team mates who were less fortunate than me and had no time for convalescing.

Hi Tech Team,

I am very fortunate, to be able to visit Brazil and live like a Brazilian. Life here is great. Cariocas really know how to live. The food is great, the city is beautiful, the people are beautiful. They have wonderful parks, clubs, and beaches. Every building and entrance has something different or exotic. The streets are lined with exotic flowers and trees. There are many beautiful squares dating back to the 1800's and earlier with buildings that look like wedding cakes. 

Even with all the economic troubles Brazil has, people are not roaming the streets as if they are lunatics like they do in the U.S.  There are poor people, but at least they don't seem insane.  Maybe it's an attitude about life.  Maybe they don't take  the business of getting ahead as seriously as we do.  Unfortunately, there is a lot of corruption and bureaucracy that prevents them from getting ahead.  I think we can learn from them.

Anyway, they do take soccer very seriously.  The big news on the day I arrived was that one of the local soccer teams burned the bus of the rival team. I didn't see anything about the economy, though there was a very helpful guide in the newspaper as to which beaches were good to go to.

Whenever I arrive here, I first notice that everyone is talking all of the time, and at the same time, and they all talk loud. This becomes like a background noise after awhile and I actually get to like it, though I don't know how anyone can understand what is being said or if it matters.  If we could adapt this means of communication, I think a lot of our problems would go away.

The food is fresh and out of this world. On the weekend there is a farmers market in Gloria, where we are staying, so there are plentiful exotic fruits and vegetables. There are many different kinds of bananas with different tastes, guava, avocado, and others, like caju, I have never heard of before. People in the north of Brazil are reported to eat a lot of caju, and this is the reason now given for why they never get the flu and are rarely ever sick. People buy their bread fresh baked on the half hour at their local bakery.  How come we work so hard to get ahead and we can't enjoy good food.

Food is a large part of the day, because food preparation takes a long time. The results are worth it though. Beef is very good and is marinated over night. There is a dish that is a mixture of meats and black beans that is called feijoada and is the national dish. There is also a dish called "heart of palm pie", that can be made with cameron (shrimp) or meat. Balinhoes, "cod fish balls", are out of this world. Rice is often served with a meal. Breakfast consists of fresh fruits, bread, cheese, and ham. A cafinzino (little coffee) is often taken after dinner, which is served in the afternoon. This coffee is sweet and sort of like a delicious coffee syrup. There are many sweet shops, and sweets are a big part of the diet. Be careful of drinking cashasa, "surger cane liquor". It will knock you out.

At the restaurants, you usually have three or more waiters hovering over you, and they try to stop you if you try to do anything yourself. I'm afraid to move or someone will rush over and ask if I need assistance. If I do manage to do anything myself, it's a grave mistake, because they become offended. American women may not like this, but they ask the male if the accompanying woman would like a second drink. Maybe they just think my wife is a heavy drinker and needs someone to watch out for her.

Unlike American restaurants, there is good service, and you are not thrown out before you finish your desert.

Below is my drawing of Gloria, where we are staying with my in-laws.  It's amusing that we were able to convince my boyfriend's parents that their son was really a girl all this time and she is married to me and our son is a real biological son.

My "wife's" aunt is staying with her parents so we have her apartment all to ourselves. It's a really nice apartment with mahogany furniture, wood floors, and a view of Flamingo Bay. There are beautiful old buildings from the early days of the city mixed in with the newer, and there is a huge park between the bay and the buildings. One part of the park has children my boy's age, who play soccer like Pele, the Brazilian soccer hero. The strange thing about this park is that when it gets dark, it is hard to find a bench. I also don't understand why there is always one man and one woman wrestling each other for space when the bench is large enough for at least four.  It must be a sport I am unaware of.

There's a Picasso exhibit at the modern art museum we are planning to see. There's also a boat tour that leaves from the Gloria Yacht Club that we plan to take.  Lots of fun things to do.

Everywhere there are interesting sights. Even the sidewalks are designed by hand with a variety of designs and colors. The beaches are especially interesting for what is missing. They also have beautiful water, mountains, and sand. We can take metro to Copacabana in 10 minutes. The metro is spotless, well designed, and they play classical music.  Maybe they know something here about living that we don't.

The people are interesting too. Everyone does everything together and everyone discusses everything they are going to do in minute detail. They discuss things so much that sometimes what is planned is never actually carried out for lack of time. I predict that Brazil will make great advances in internet technology, because of their ability to collaborate so well and because they have such a need to communicate. However, these advancements will never progress beyond theory.

Everyone seems to have a cellular phone. Even maids have them. Luckily, they were outlawed in cars. Drivers here drive with abandon as it is.

Anyway, what I wanted to ask is if I could stay here. You could send me work as long as it didn't interfere with beach time and the National Day of Chope (Beer), that is every Friday and sometimes extends into the week.

See you sooner or later,

Carlos

The trip is not all fun. My wife's aunt has cancer and has difficulty walking. Last night I assisted her in visiting her old apartment, where she believes her husband is waiting for her. Her husband died several years before. What a quaint idea having a husband of the opposite sex!

When we got to the apartment, she realized that he was no longer alive, and we returned to my in-law's apartment, where she is now staying, so they can help her. Somehow the aunt forgets each night that her husband is not alive, and this situation is revisited.

Unfortunately, the aunt doesn't want to use a walker or a wheelchair, because she says her husband wouldn't like to see her in it, so my in-laws, who are old themselves and not in the best of health, support her as she walks about the apartment or to her old apartment.  What an unusual concept!  Actually helping someone other than yourself.

…I have returned to work under court order. The battles have died down, and the contractors are now wearing disguises. They no longer wear old, dirty blue jeans, which would give them away. They no longer argue over who has dressed down the best, and is thus above everyone else in the agency for what they can get away with. Now they take pride in wearing quirky ties, sombreros, boots, and flashy suits. I think the employees will catch on.

There is always a silver lining.  Once I was working on some of the largest systems in the business of bank exams.  I coordinated data between the major banks, bank examiners, and agencies.  I knew all the systems and developed and maintained them on the mainframes, LAN, and PC.  That was the problem.  Maybe it made my supervisor nervous, and that was the reason I was fired.  Who can tell when decisions are hidden from the light of day?  

This particular supervisor said I was going behind his back to the client in the department we did the development for.  He said he knew this, because the systems were working the way the client wanted them to work.  It didn't matter that the client was also my direct supervisor.  He didn't want the systems to work, so he could convince the client's department that they needed new systems, so he could hire many new contractors for huge amounts of money, so he could become very important.  The systems he would devise would be so incredibly complex and costly that he would be made a CIO and his illiterate friend, a former secretary, would become the Chief Brown-Nose of his exclusive clique.  Together, they would take over the world.

I was told I was fired and not to talk to anyone about it.  Just leave.  

I immediately talked to my other managers and explained.  There ensued a war of managers trying to figure out who was in charge of what and who.  

To avoid bloodshed, I was shuffled to a new area of the department, that had managers without anyone to manage.  I spent several months opening cardboard boxes, until someone discovered I could program.  I was surprised they ever found out, because none of them could read, having gone to technical school.

I had a gay manager, not that he was happy, who said things like, "Open wide that crack!" and he would point his butt at me and grunt.  If I said he was a deviant, meaning he was deviating from the norm and needed help, I would be fired for being intolerant and inciting hate with my speech.  For the hate speech, I would be jailed indefinitely.  This was all made perfectly clear in diversity training, so I merely complimented my manager on his eloquence and said his insight into applying software solutions to the business needs of the clients was beyond comprehension.  

The manager also liked to spend time in meetings blaming the programmers for his troubles.  Sometimes he would hang out at my cubicle and talk about taking drugs and his boyfriends.  He bragged about the time he was having a party and he came to the door naked in front of two policemen, who were there because the neighbors complained about the noise no less.  I guess he thought I would be excited at the thought of his naked body.

One of his "friends" worked for a year as a contractor.  When his "friend" left, management checked his work, but couldn't find anything that could actually be considered software.  Before he left, they were convinced he had done something spectacular, because he was always talking about it.  They kept looking for the work, which became an ongoing position.

When I didn't get excited about my manager's naked body, he hired another friend, who sabotaged my server.  The server my program was on kept crashing.  Everyone in the agency was notified that it was my programming that ruined the server.  I checked the server and found that a setting filled the server up with log files and caused it to crash.  This is when we were told that programmers had no business going onto the servers and finding out what was wrong with them.  The server manager would no longer allow anyone to find out or correct problems on servers.  This way they could blame the developers for server problems and never have to fix anything.  I must admit this was an ingenious plan and the manager who thought of it got promoted.

When I didn't respond to the gay manager's innuendoes and suggestions, I think he grew resentful.  What really finished it for me was the time I told him in a meeting that he had no right to take his anger and resentment out on the programmers, whom he was haranguing as usual and blaming for the loss of his latest boyfriend.  He threw me out of the meeting.  I said on parting that I was thankful, it was a waste of time anyway.  Boy did he look mean.

During the day, I read an agency wide email from the most honorable Chief of Staff.  He indicated that no one would be allowed to work for the agency who didn't believe in diversity as he defined it as hiring only people of unusual sexual preferences.  He had gone to Harvard to learn this was the only way to ensure intelligent people like himself could cure discrimination with discrimination.  There were rumors and innuendoes that he had received from a reliable source.  He would act swiftly on the allegations to preempt divergent views that were not his own.  As Harvard Business Practices dictate, he would severely punish the accused without confronting them or giving them a chance to confuse issues with their input.  There was a post script at the end of the email in small type that read "The agency lawyers, who were unfortunately caught by the cleaning lady in the stairwell having sex, have been spoken to.  They agree not to have sex in the stairwell where they might get caught again, and have some morally self-righteous Catholic bigot from South America impose her values on them.  Eventually, they hope she is Americanized and moral values are dropped in favor of valuing money alone, which obviously she doesn't care about, having put herself in this embarrassing position.  We will start her conversion by paying her off to keep her mouth shut.  Let this be a lesson to all of us, who value not having values but good comfortable positions in the government."

My manager called me into a meeting at the end of the day; he was steaming.  I kept my cool even when he handed me a document that incriminated me for being critical of him.  The document said it was my fault he couldn't manage.  I didn't care if he couldn't manage.  I just wished he would leave me alone.  He wanted me to sign the document that said I agreed that I was a criminal.  Then he wanted the document back.  I said I was going to keep a copy for my lawyer.  He tried to grab the document, but I tucked it away.  He balled his fist to hit me, so I guess he didn't think it was funny.

After the meeting, I left for home as usual to start the weekend.  That Saturday, I attended a funeral of a coworker, who probably couldn't take it anymore and had the good sense to die.  He was a great guy, friendly and genuine, and I said so at the wake at the invitation of coworkers.  Someone took me aside and said he had heard I was fired, so I was worried when I went to work on the following Monday.  

I was stopped by guards, who said I couldn't go in unless someone signed me in.  A friend from work escorted me in.  I found out I was fired for abandonment of job as I had gone home for the weekend.  I cleared out my belongings from the office.  I was kind of glad to go.  I really didn't want to end up like the dead coworker.  When I got home, there was a special delivery letter from my company that said I was fired for abandonment of job and that I wasn't to go into work on Monday and that I was to have no communication with anyone at work.  It was too late.  I had already talked.  My company said they wouldn't contest my application for unemployment, if I just didn't go back to work or talk to anyone.  I was politically incorrect because I was who I was and I could not work for such a government and I was lucky to be alive.

The honorable and venerated Guttersnipe Consulting Firm recommended replacing experienced older veterans with much less expensive youngsters from India who worked for a bowl of rice a day.  Older veterans were offered a generous discount in an assisted suicide package.

I now spend my days looking in papers and on-line for jobs, but they all seem to have warnings, "Equal Opportunity Employer for Privileged Groups.  No one else need apply."

Please Note:

Electronic files on this site may be downloaded for free for personal use, and not for sale. The author retains all rights.  

If you would like to contact the artist to inquire about purchasing original expressionistic art, poetry, or prose, please click here:  assistance@arttechnology.com

ArtTechnology.com, A Gallery of Original Expressionistic Art, Poetry, and Prose