Lazy Government Workers

I was a government worker for a while, and I would never complain about the 'lazy government worker' stereotype because I wasn't one and didn't see that in my co-workers, and definitely I did see far too little compensation for the work required. Further, I was told I would have but did not in fact receive flex-time and job security in the position as compensation. The time wasting in government work is egregious - justifying every little thing you do and filling things in triplicate and making sure every gnat has notification of changes... that's a big time waste, IMNSHO. It isn't that the individual government employee is a time-waster, but that the culture of government work promotes - or perhaps just tolerates - bureaucratic time-wasting activities that are not tolerated in the public sector.

As an example, when I worked for the city of Detroit there was such a strictly enforced division of labor that we office staff were not allowed to unjam copiers. We had to put in a support request, and wait for building services to show up and unjam the machine. I can't think of a corporation, where they would even provide copier unjamming as a support service (except in very truly fouled-up mechanical cases); the waste of time for the wait while a support clerk was dispatched would not be acceptable. However, in a corporation I could probably make 5,000 copies at the office machine and not a word would be said about the inefficiency of using the copier for mass production of copies; at the state if I wanted 5,000 copies that job had to be processed through a document specialist, who would use an RFP (or not) to get the best price - again, at a time delay, but probably cheaper. It seems to me that neither is better; government spends far too much time to get things done (generally) and private companies often sacrifice economy for speed to market.

But having to pick between the two, I can say I'm glad to be back in public sector employment.