"I Sure Do Like Gettin' Paid For Goofin' Off!"

I have been called lazy, overpaid, rude, obnoxious and arrogant.

I am a government worker, or to be more precise, a state government worker. In my world, state workers have only a little more respect than politicians, which isn't saying a lot to begin with.

While only a small percentage of workers can acutally be called what I opened with, the bulk of us (like myself), are very capable and extremely hardworking individuals. That said, there are times where I actually resemble my opening statement and then some.

The problem in my world, is that I can spend day after day doing exactly what the title of the post states. Case in point would be today. Our financial system that we use to generate/do our payroll went offline, so that other agencies could prepare the FY ending reports.

With no access to the computer and very little work to be done, I basically spent my afternoon doing the following:

• Reading
• Walking around
• Talking to other people
• Going outside on long breaks
• Sleeping

Excellent way for me to earn your tax dollars. The basic problem I see, is that there is too much dead weight in government. Someone new comes into power and decides to change things around. So they hire more people to facilitate this m.o. Problem is, these people don't have much to do. Soooo, the new boss starts taking duties away from other people in order to justify hiring the dead wood.

End result is you have people like me, who after learning time management skills from a busier agency, who don't have the ability to slow down or stretch out their work.

What a wonderful country. Hire people and take other people's work in order to justify hiring the other people. Yesireee Bob, your tax dollars hard at work.