2003-08-28 - 2:31 p.m.

Why State Workers Are Lazy

A month ago I (and every other state employee who works in my office) was handed a memo asking us to nominate any co-worker we feel does outstanding work. The nominations were for the department's merit awards.

As a public employee, my salary is the same as the guys who don�t come to work or those that come to work and use public resources to run their real estate businesses while doing no government work. Then there are the other employees like Short Round who do nothing, but take credit for everybody else's hard work.

Naturally I wanted to nominate Bronco, because she is the best engineer I've ever met. If you ask her a question and she doesn't have an answer immediately, she�ll research your question, write a memo explaining the answer to it, and send it to you and anybody else who may need to know the memo within a day or two. She is fast, bright, and most importantly interested in caring for the health and welfare of the general public. She also is well liked by private sector and public sector engineers who work with her.

So I asked my boss to help me fill out the paper work for her. He said he thinks she should get an award, but couldn't because her boss should be the one to fill out the award papers and he didn't want to step on this other guy's toes. He added that traditionally awards are given out be people who manage or supervise others.

So I then went to her project manager. Again, the guy would be happy to write the nomination and agreed Bronco is the best there is. However, being a young and new senior engineer, he also felt that her immediate boss should approve the application first.

The Wrinkle

So the problem is that Bronco's boss is also Short Round's boss. This guy then told me that while Bronco deserved the award that he only would submit an award if everybody got one. His reasoning? If you give a merit award to the people who deserve it, the others who didn't do outstanding work would be sad. Sad??!!??

Right! That was his logic. So he went on, "If everybody got awards, they'd feel better. And the group would get more respect."

Respect? This isn't about respect to me. It honestly is all about acknowledging who is working and who is not. Giving an award to a state employee who only bothers to come to work 4 out of 5 days a week is wrong. It encourages that sort of behavior.

So how fucked up is this?

-=-

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