Indentured servitude

 I answered the phone at the museum the other day and got asked if we could use someone who has a community service requirement to fulfill. For quite a few years now one of the requirements for "welfare" has been that you earn your Food Stamps or your TANF vouchers by performing community service. This scheme is usually referred to as "workfare." At first blush, this does not appear to be such a horrible requirement.

Except it is. It's basically a punishment detail for having the nerve to be poor. The person I talked with said the work requirement was 35 hours per week between her and her partner. Okay. If a person worked for minimum wage for 35 hours per week, he or she would earn $253.75 before taxes. Figure roughly 4 weeks in a month and you're talking $1015. In Michigan, as of 2014 the average monthly SNAP benefit was $127 per person and $246 per household. If someone has to do community service for over 140 hours per month, that's a pretty steep price to pay for their food stamps. If someone is "earning" their welfare benefit, then they're working for quite literally pennies.

It gets worse. The workfare requirement was originally designed to help people transition into actual jobs. You know, help instill a work ethic. The plan was to push people who were unemployed into finding paying work. Except (and you know there's always an except) when it comes to this community service requirement it doesn't matter if you're one of the unfortunates who qualifies as "working poor." You can be part of a household where one spouse works full-time but the household is large enough and the wage is low enough that you qualify for SNAP. Guess what? The other spouse has to do community service. Workfare will quite literally force a family to put their kids into daycare or incur babysitting costs they otherwise would not need, all in the name of instilling a work ethic in a stay-at-home parent.

Workfare isn't particularly effective at moving people into actual jobs in any case. The organizations where a person is assigned to do their community service generally aren't interested in transitioning anyone into a paying position -- why should they when they've got the labor for free? -- and the work assigned rarely provides any meaningful training or experience. It also isn't effective in reducing the cost of anti-poverty programs. The World Bank, which has an obvious vested interest in supporting workfare, has done a number of studies that show that it's more cost-effective to simply give the poor cash benefits with no strings attached than it is to impose a workfare requirement. But if governments did that the punishment and humiliation aspects would vanish, and that would defeat the real purpose of the programs, which is to make welfare programs so unpleasant that no one applies for them.

In any case, I might actually buy into the notion of asking benefit recipients to do community service if it was calculated so the hours required matched up with a real world wage, but this bullshit of forcing people to work for pennies? It's dehumanizing, it's devaluing their labor. It's telling the poor they're worthless, or close to it. If their work had any meaning, the program would calculate the hours differently, make it a closer match between a legal wage and the amount they're going to receive. But when it's the equivalent of $1/hour or less? Then it's pretty obvious the work doesn't mean anything; it's the punishment part that's important.

Still, I did not say no to the offer of exploited labor. This is a small rural community; opportunities for community service are limited in number, and I have to give the people credit for having the guts to cold call the museum to ask if they could "volunteer" there. I will feel odd about it, but if it's something they have to do, I'm not going to make things even harder for them. (Side note: one of my pet peeves is the perversion of the word "volunteer." You're not a volunteer if you've been told the activity is required. A more accurate term would be "indentured servant.")

Oddly enough, I had been thinking about talking to the clerk of court to see about getting the other category of community service workers, the ones who end up paying for their DUIs or disorderly conduct by having to pick up trash or wash police cars. The one upside to this is we may get more competent help. With people sentenced to community service by the courts I figure we'd get guys who could do maintenance stuff (sweep, mop, wash windows) but probably not anything more complicated than that. Through workfare, we may end up with a "volunteer" who's computer literate.

More stuff I never thought I'd need to learn

How to do payroll.

A few months ago the historical society submitted a proposal to the Michigan Council for the Humanities for a local history project, although it's actually more of an ethnographic, anthropological type project. We said we wanted to collect oral histories that focused on the emergence of Indian gaming and the impact of Indian gaming (i.e., casinos) on the local area. We thought Big, which is what I always  do when writing grant applications. Ask for the maximum and hope you get a small piece of it.

I didn't think we actually had a prayer of being given the money. To be honest, I was sure our proposal did not meet SMART* criteria. I had no clue how we'd operationalize the thesis, assuming we even had a thesis, which I'm not sure we do. To me it all seemed remarkably vague. But, what the heck, doing proposals, even ones you don't think will get funded, is good practice.

A few days ago we received an email. Holy wah. The proposal was approved, and not just approved but approved for the full amount they were willing to give: $25,000. This is definitely a case of "be careful what you wish for." We're being handed a sizable chunk of change, all of which I'm going to end up having to track. I'm the Society's treasurer; ergo, I'm the Fiscal Officer for this grant. And unlike other grants we've received that mostly went for paying for stuff, this grant is going to spent on services: the person who does the interviews, the videographer standing (or sitting) close by with the camera, the person who transcribes tapes into pdfs, and so on. You know, people who just might end up on payrolls. People who will (and it pains me to type this) need to have taxes withheld from their wages. Social Security, Medicare, federal income, state income. . . it's not a happy thought.

I spent several hours today wandering around the Internal Revenue and State of Michigan websites feeling my eyes glaze over as I read page after page of bureaucratese and studying various forms trying to figure out what does or does not apply to the Historical Society. Part of me (a big part of me) is hoping that everyone who gets paid for their work on this project will opt to consider themselves independent contractors and let us weasel by with just giving them 1099s. I do know this is one grant where we're going to have to account for every penny spent -- the word "audit" pops up a lot in the information that accompanied the "Congratulations!" email. I tend to be remarkably anal about tracking the museum's money now so the actual documenting the money being spent shouldn't be difficult. I'm just not too thrilled with learning how to do the paperwork.

As for why we're focusing on the topic of Indian gaming, it's because Indian casinos were sort of born here in Baraga County. The case that always gets cited is California v. Cabazon, but an earlier case in which the United States government sued a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community for illegally operating a casino laid the groundwork for Indian gaming nation-wide. In US v Dakota, the courts decided that an individual tribal member could not own or operate a casino, but a tribe as whole had rights individuals did not. Ergo, a tribal-owned casino might be legal. End result 30 years later? A multi-million dollar business and some really interesting history that needs to get documented before everyone who was there at the beginning is dead.

*Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely

I'm not into genealogy but

finding this yesterday was kind of cool.

I was at the county clerk's office to do research for the historical society. I've mentioned before people pay us to go check the various indexes for births, deaths, marriages, whatever. I had no luck whatsoever with the research request that sent me to the county administrative building, but when I asked the deputy clerk about divorce records, we started looking at the various indexes shelved in the room. She noticed the Declaration of Intention book and had no idea what it was. Neither did I. So we pulled it off the shelf and started flipping through it.

It didn't actually tell me anything I didn't already know, i.e., I knew the date when my grandfather arrived in Baraga County. It didn't come as a surprise to see evidence he was still here a year or two after he got off the train in Summit. At this point in time he was probably still working for his uncle, although at some point he decided to go up to the Copper Country and get a mining job instead.

One thing that did intrigue me was the existence of the form itself. Wherever the Declaration of Intention fell in the bureaucratic scheme of things, it wasn't used very long. The book they're in is the usual humongous volume that's a couple inches thick. The forms start sometime in the early 1900s (I did not look to see when the first one is dated) and go up to about 1905 and that's it. It's a huge book, but less than one-fourth of the forms got used. The deputy clerk and I were speculating (and laughing) about the verbiage on the form. It basically asks resident foreigners to declare that they're not anarchists. I have a hunch this was part of the U.S. Congress's reaction to Leon Czolgosz's assassination of William McKinley in 1901. In any case, we agreed that asking anarchists to swear that they're not would be about as useful as asking members of Al Qaeda to say they were radical terrorists if they happen to try coming into the country. If your intentions are evil, you're certainly not going to be honest about it when you're asked to complete some paperwork. It appears going through the motions, making it look like you're trying to do something even when it's obvious it won't work, has a long tradition in politics.

As for divorces, it turns out there is no index. You need to have a good idea of the date and then just start working your way through them, something I had no interest in doing yesterday. Maybe next week.

A slight digression: I'm never sure if I should be grateful or unhappy that the former historical society president set a firm precedent with the clerk's office of allowing us (the historical society/museum) serve as a proxy for people wanting genealogical information. Under Michigan law, the only index I should be allowed to search is the death index; marriage and birth are both restricted to family members. Thanks to Jim, however, we're able to continue doing the type of research he did for years. There are days (like yesterday) when it's fun to do the work, and other days when I'm totally convinced we need to make our fees much, much higher. And for sure there are days when I silently wish the County Clerk would tell me we can't do it anymore.

And another slight digression: Once again I was blown away by how perfect Martin Voetsch's handwriting was. Of all the county clerks, I think he wrote the best cursive. A couple of his successors also had great handwriting, but he's the only one who wrote in more of a copperplate style than Palmer penmanship. (This is the type of minutiae a person ends up focusing on when they're stuck doing research for money on topics that don't really interest them.)

A follow-up on the 990-EZ nightmare

I actually had a good experience with the IRS yesterday. Readers (all two of you) may recall that a few months ago I did some pissing and moaning about the fact our small county historical society, an organization that's got barely enough members to keep going and that operates on a shoestring so thin it could be used as a trout-fishing line, got hit with the requirement to complete the 990-EZ. The 990-EZ is not particularly easy; it's multiple pages long and entails an equally lengthy attachment (Schedule A, your income, sources of income, and expenses going back 5 years) which in turn apparently leads to the requirement to complete Schedule B (a detailed list of your donors and how much they gave). Not that we actually have to deal with Schedule B -- it applies only to individual donations of more than $5,000. Still, when doing Schedule A, you get to explain why Schedule B doesn't apply. Dealing with the mountain of forms last fall was kind of a nightmare. But it got done.

Unfortunately, at some point I checked a box on the return that I shouldn't have checked. One of the things waiting for me in the pile of mail when I got back to the museum was a letter from the IRS asking for More Paperwork, including completion of something called Part III on Schedule A and submission of Schedule B, which even if it doesn't apply to us still requires an explanation of why it doesn't apply. I spent the better part of a day making little whimpering sounds and resisting the urge to just curl up in a corner while asking the S.O. to find an institution to which he could commit me for awhile. I really didn't want to have to deal with this stuff anymore.

Finally, coincidentally after consuming more caffeine than I really should have, it occurred to me to call the toll-free number given on the form. I was reluctant. I'd heard the news stories about people being placed on hold for an hour or more and then never actually getting through to a human. But I picked up the phone, went through the usual menu of choices, heard a message saying the wait time was "3 to 5 minutes," and prepared to wait much, much longer than that. Except it wasn't long at all, 2 to 3 minutes tops, and the person I spoke with was actually helpful. Unbelievable.

Bottom line: he walked me through the return we'd submitted, explained what the mistake had been, told me how to fix it, provided an address with the mailstop number for the right department so it'll go straight to Exempt Organizations Accounts instead of passing through multiple other hands first, and also gave me advice on what to do for the current tax year. Tax-exempt organizations file on a different schedule than individuals, but I'd been a little unclear on just what the dates were for that schedule. Now I know. I also know what to do if we ever get a letter again. We're such a small and poor nonprofit that we should never ever have to do a long form; the 990-EZ is a form of torture reserved for groups who have budgets over $150,000 annually. So if we get a letter saying we have to file that form the first step is to call the toll-free IRS number for the EO Accounts. I could have saved myself a lot of work last fall if I'd done that when that first letter came. Live and learn.

The silver lining, and there is one, is that thinking I had no choice but to go back to 2009 in order to complete the 990-EZ forced me (and be extension the society as a whole) to look at our budget holistically. It was an interesting exercise and should have positive benefits down the road. That may be wishful thinking on my part, but you never know. . .

It was a Harlan Ellison sort of day

I spent the afternoon at the museum alternating between cursing the Internal Revenue Service and muttering about now-deceased members of the historical society. For various reasons, known (as far as I can tell) only to some desk monkey at the IRS, the historical society has gotten stuck with the task of completing a 990-EZ. The 990-EZ is five pages long and asks for so much information that I can't help but wonder just what else they could possibly ask for on the regular 990. I hope I never get to find out because the 990-EZ is enough of a nightmare on its own.

Among other things, in addition to the five pages of questions, it asks for two attachments: Schedule A and Schedule O. Schedule A is where a nonprofit gets to break down its finances for the past five years; Schedule O is basically a sheet of lined paper where you get to lie about anything that doesn't fit neatly into predetermined categories. And when I say break down I mean exactly that: how much income did we receive in the form of grants, donations, membership dues; how much came from fund-raising efforts; how much was interest or dividends? How much in-kind support did we get from local government or other entities? How much did we spend on maintenance, rent, whatever. And lots lots more, all the way back to 2009. I really, really hate detail work, especially when I'm sure there's some sort of deadline (which I've probably missed) hanging over my head.

I have to say in all honesty that the forms would not actually be that hard to deal with if the data existed to plug into the appropriate blank spaces. Long and boring, yes, but technically difficult? No, assuming, of course, that one has actual financial records to refer to while filling in the blanks.

I managed to come up with some numbers for 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010. The easiest year to do was the most recent -- 2013. That's the year I became treasurer and set up the Excel spreadsheet. 2012, 2011, and 2010 weren't bad either. My predecessor was well-organized. She didn't use an old-fashioned ledger or do a spreadsheet, but her monthly hard copy reports are nice and clear. The biggest problem I had with the those years it was sometimes impossible to separate out donations from other income -- the monthly treasurer's reports would occasionally do a lump sum (Sales & Donations) that aggregated data that should have been kept separate.

Keeping income streams separate, incidentally, is an issue that I've brought up at numerous meetings -- we need to draw nice sharp lines between the money we take in as admission fees, the money that gets spent in the gift shop, and the money people are nice enough to drop in the donations jar. These are distinctions that the IRS definitely draws but most of the society members have trouble recognizing. I'd been obsessing about it because I'd like us to have a nice firm visitor count but maybe if I bring it up at a meeting in the context of retaining our nonprofit status it'll sink in. But that's a minor quibble in the overall scheme of things, considering I hit a blank wall when I got 5 years back in the files.

2009 is a black hole. I can't find any treasurer's reports. Ditto bank statements. Nothing. Nada. Someone mentioned a few months back that one of the sons of the society's deceased president had a bunch of stuff he'd found in his father's house that he was planning to bring to the museum. He never did. I have this rather sick feeling that there were a whole lot of historical society records that had been sitting at the dead guy's home office and have since gone to the landfill in Ontonagon County. This is the shoe that I've been waiting to hear drop for the past 22 months. It finally dropped. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later. The deceased president had a really hard time drawing lines between the various areas of his life. He was involved in a lot of different things in the community, and they all overlapped. It didn't help that he'd been president of the historical society for so many years that to him the museum had become an extension of his own home and vice versa. I figured that out when I was going through the vertical files last year. And the more I saw of that, the more I worried that sooner or later it was going to end up biting us in the butt.

Well, it's now later, we've been bitten, and it's not fun to deal with. We're a 501(c)3. We should have been keeping meticulous records. We didn't, and as the current treasurer I get to untangle the mess. I don't think the IRS is going to do anything nasty to us, but you never know. After all, they cursed us with the 990-EZ because the 990-N (an electronic post card that basically says, hey, we still exist) got filed a couple weeks late. Maybe I should stop referring to the professional paper pushers as desk monkeys. Either that, I need to remember that even desk monkeys can bite.

It did occur to me (again) that the Tea Party types who were fulminating about the IRS the other year really had nothing to bitch about. The IRS drives everyone crazy; they're an equal opportunity annoyance.

Adventures in bureaucracy: state level

I have occasionally noted that I am a member of the county historical society and volunteer at the museum the society operates. Back in 2013 I was elected treasurer of the organization. This means I get to deal with all the paperwork we receive from entities such as the United States Department of the Treasury (i.e., the IRS) and the State of Michigan.

Well, when I checked the mail yesterday the State's Treasury Department had dropped an annoying missive into the society's lap. The State of Michigan, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that all businesses (and that includes nonprofits) must register online with the division responsible for collecting Sales, Use, and Withholding taxes. This is fine with me. I think it's a great idea. Anything that in theory makes life simpler for everyone strikes me as good. If reporting can be reduced down to filling out an online form once a year and hitting the send key, it's a win.

So I cheerfully typed in the URL required to reach the registration site. That's when I discovered the State (or the moronic contractor they hired) had done something bizarre. To register your business you have to enter identifying information as an individual. You begin by creating a user ID that will consist of your last name, first initial, and 4 numerical digits of your choosing. Okay. We're the Baraga County Historical Society. Does that mean our name is SocietyB1234? And for the part that asks for first name, middle initial, and last name, are we Baraga C Society? Apparently not. The system won't take it. I spent a rather frustrating twenty minutes or so trying to come up with a work-around for filling in a form designed for humans only. A good chunk of that time was spent trying to find a way to contact the State to ask for help.

Well, good luck with that one, too, because there is no Contact or Help provided other than a link to an 800 number that on screen claims to have operators standing by 24/7 but instead lands you at the usual voice mail tree that does the oh-so-predictable infinite looping. Our tax dollars at work. I did find a Contact form for the Governor's office so filled that form out asking how a corporation would register as opposed to an individual business owner. After all, corporations may be people now but they still don't have people-type names.

I realized as I was doing this that I could have come up with a simple solution: I could have either filled the form out using my own name or I could have made something up. I resisted for several reasons. First, I have no desire to have my name permanently linked to the society or the museum. There's already too much mail arriving addressed to me or one of the other officers c/o the museum when it should be addressed to the organization itself instead of to a representative. The museum in theory is going to be around for many decades; the other members and I are just passing through. Second, if I created an alias for the museum, sooner or later some bell in the labyrinth of the state bureaucracy would ring, some desk monkey would rouse himself from his nap, mutter "This isn't right," and Explanations would be Demanded.

The thing that baffles me about the whole experience. . . well, it doesn't really baffle me because I know that the typical contractor tends to be both lazy and not particularly creative. . . is why didn't they design a fill-in form that did the obvious? You know, ask for the business name, then the name of a contact person or officer, and go from there? It's so bizarre. It's like whoever designed the form assumed every business in the state is a sole proprietorship. Very, very strange.

As for why we have to worry about this type of stuff when we're so small and make less money annually than some teenage babysitters rake in, as long as we're a recognized nonprofit corporation we do have to comply with rules for annual reporting. We may not have any paid employees at the moment and the receipts from the gift shop fall well below the threshold for nonprofits for paying sales taxes, but we still have to do the same paperwork as any other business. It's not that big a deal to do when we're putting zeroes in most of the spaces on the forms. And who knows? One of these days a tour bus could pull into the parking lot and disgorge a horde of shopaholic tourists who empty the gift shop to the point where the State gets lucky. I can dream.

Adventures in bureaucracy: the Veterans Administration

The S.O. appears to be trapped in bureaucratic limbo with the V.A. He has a disability claim based on hearing loss wending its way at an arthritic snail's pace through the system. About every 90 days he receives a letter saying "Do not despair, pitiful claimant, we haven't forgotten you." Okay, so maybe they don't actually call him a pitiful claimant (or poor schmuck, an equally appropriate term), but that's the gist of it. Until it's resolved, we're stuck staying close to home. We know from past experience that the claim will go from absolutely nothing apparently happening to a demand being made that he report for a physical to verify the hearing loss ASAP, as close to yesterday as possible, because if you don't make it to that physical, the claim is denied and you get to start the whole sorry process all over again. And if you call to try to reschedule the appointment for the physical, you'll get trapped in the voice mail tree and you're just fucked.

Upside: I should have plenty of time to finish the quilt I'm working on before we go anywhere in the RV.

Downside: We have to cancel the campground hosting gig because it would unfair to wait any longer without letting the park know we can't do it.

Even bigger downside: We could end up stuck here for the entire Mud Season.

As to why he has to go in for an audiology exam to verify partial deafness when it was the VA's medical system that decided he needed hearing aids to begin with? That's just one of life's little mysteries.

Business as usual at the IRS

I've been watching with some bemusement the current kerfuffle about the Internal Revenue Service scrutinizing applications by quasi-political groups seeking tax exempt nonprofit status. A number of questions have crossed my mind, including the obvious -- why the heck would groups that were created for political lobbying be referred to as "social welfare" organizations? -- but one thing struck me that doesn't seem to have been worth noting by the various talking heads. A number of the Tea Party organizations complained bitterly about the length of time it took for their applications to be processed. Most did eventually receive the desired tax exempt status, but in some cases it took over a year. 

Having had a personal experience with a small nonprofit group that was trying to obtain a related form of tax exemption, the 501(c)3, I must say the Tea Partiers have nothing to bitch about. Thirteen months for their paperwork to get processed? Pshaw. That's business as usual for the IRS. The group I was involved with was a local historical society -- an extremely small and poor group with an annual income of barely $1,000 (most of which goes for paying for liability insurance on a community hall) -- that was raising funds to do repair work on said hall. We decided to open a savings account so the money could earn a pittance in interest while it sat in the bank. At some point the account did generate interest; the bank sent the requisite information to the IRS, and, lo and behold, a year or two later our group began receiving correspondence asking for information on our budget, i.e., just how much money were we raking in annually and why weren't we paying taxes on it? Apparently if you show signs of having any income high enough that it can be rounded up to a whole dollar amount, the Internal Revenue Service wants its cut. That's when our correspondence with the IRS began.

They'd send us a letter, usually accompanied by a form of some sort. We'd respond. Several months would go by. They'd send us another letter. We'd respond. This went on for well over a year. The process was neither fast nor easy. It required multiple forms, a thick stack of copies of our financial records and incorporation papers, and a lot of patience. Eventually, a letter did arrive saying that our organization did indeed qualify for tax exemption.

In short, the length of time the process took for the Tea Party groups was totally within the norm for the way the IRS does business, regardless of whether it's with organizations or with individuals. They are the government. Nothing they do is fast or easy.

Incidentally, I do find it a tad bizarre that organizations that devote their time and energy to complaining that the government is inefficient should express surprise that the bureaucracy moved slowly. I also find it highly ironic that the same folks who rant about the need to downsize government are now saying (as I heard on NPR yesterday) that the IRS needs to hire more staff so applications don't take a year to process. The stupid, it burns.

Yet another reason to scoff at conspiracy theories

Every so often one of my slightly less than sane acquaintances will regale me with tales of government conspiracies: President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, there are alien spaceships stashed in Area 51, the Bush administration was behind 9/11, FEMA is setting up concentration camps, and so on. I laugh at all of them. The federal government is capable of many things, but a successful conspiracy is not one of them. I've worked for the government. I know how thoroughly incompetent it can be. Yes, we got a lot of stuff right.Give the government some clearly defined tasks, and those tasks will be taken care of in a reasonably proficient manner.

On the other hand, there are gems like the one that landed in my In Box yesterday:

Coming Soon: Electronic 1099R Income and Tax Withholding Statement Later this year OPM will be asking annuitant and survivor beneficiaries to visit Services Online to opt-in to receive the Tax Year 2013 electronic 1099R. The Services Online website allows you to view and print your 1099R in electronic form instantly. Watch for more information in the coming months! In the meantime, if you haven't accessed Services Online lately, you may prepare for the upcoming online elections and check on your annuity status and so much more by going to www.servicesonline.opm.gov. Don't worry if you don't remember your password. You can request a new one from the main page of Services Online. If you have set up your security questions and have an email address on file, you may choose to receive your password by email. However, if you don't have an email address on file or haven't set up your security questions your password will be sent by mail. Unfortunately, Services Online is currently unavailable for use by persons OPM has approved as "Representative Payees" for annuitants and survivors. REMINDER: While in Services Online, please verify that your e-mail address is correct in order to receive updates throughout the year. If you have a valid email address and security questions set up within Services Online you will be able to receive your password changes via email.

If I don't have an email address on file, how do they expect me to receive the message?

Perhaps in a day or two a hard copy version of that message will appear in the snail mail box, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it. 

The clock lies

The countdown clock is off a bit -- the Great Escape is now barely 4 days away. The U-Haul is reserved for noon on Friday, and by Sunday morning we should be somewhere in Tennessee heading north. We are getting into that phase of moving that's always a nuisance: wanting to finish packing, but unable to because I can't decide if I'll need something in the next 72 hours or not.

Thanks to a fortunate coincidence, though, it appears I will be gainfully employed awhile longer. I was in the process of persuading my manager to allow me to telework when Large Nameless Agency took the issue out of our hands. It was coming dangerously close to me trotting out an ultimatum: I telework, or I retire. That discussion has now been postponed for a few weeks.

It appears LNA screwed up (what a shock!) in planning for the upcoming office shuffle. The journal is slated to exit its current leased office space to move into space in one of the buildings on the main LNA campus. That space has to be remodeled to accommodate the "densification" of personnel (i.e., walls have to be ripped out so existing offices can be made smaller and more cubicles can be crammed into the square footage). And where were the cubicles and office furniture (workstations, etc) going to come from to put into that new space, you ask? Recycling, of course. They're going to take our current work stations and cubicles and move them.

A good plan, but one that contains an obvious flaw: those work stations are being used. What happens to the employees while the fixtures in the leased office space are disassembled, moved, and then reassembled? Where do they go?

Answer: they telework. The word came down last week that everyone at the journal gets to work from home for most of November and part of December. Everyone on the journal staff has to be out of his or her current space by November 10; they'll get to move into the new LNA office space sometime after December 5. Mass panic ensued, with one exception.

Me. The person over in the corner quietly doing the happy dance. I've just been told to work from home. No one's bothered asking where "home" is. I have been trying to tell them, but, as usual, everyone is so focused on their own problems that it's not really sinking in when I say stuff like "I need Friday off to load the U-Haul" and "Here's my Michigan phone number." Oh well, I tried.

Major score

The office chair of my dreams found mingling with a pack of ordinary, ergonomically horrible chairs in one of the vacated cubicles. Hard to believe the person lucky enough to have it didn't insist on having it moved to his or her new workspace because it is so much better than the typical el cheapo furniture.

I love this chair. Too bad I won't get to enjoy it very long. Oh well, 9 work days of sitting in comfort is better than none at all.

I am mildly surprised none of my coworkers snagged it before I did -- we've all been circling through the vacated work spaces foraging for office supplies (binders, hole punches, various other odds and ends we can never manage to persuade our admin person to order for us). I wonder if the first buzzard to spot some fresh roadkill experiences the same sense of elation?

Weirdness at work

It was a fairly strange week at work. The evacuation of the building has begun, the great migration to other locations  triggered by the Director's decision to not renew the lease on space in buildings in one particular office park. There had been some quiet shuffling as various work groups started packing up their files, emptying their cubicles, and vanishing, but it was subtle. One day there'd be someone in a cubicle; the next day he'd be gone. Those of us whose moves are scheduled for later in the fall did not, however, expect to witness the cubicles themselves being disassembled and hauled out the door. It was an odd feeling trying to work while in the not-too-distant background it sounded like the building was being demolished.

It was a bit intriguing to see just how much crap people had left behind in cubicles, the stuff they didn't feel like moving or actively throwing away: zillions of 3-ring binders, for example, and lots and lots of highlighters. There were several really large bins full of miscellaneous junk that's probably going to vanish into a government warehouse and grow dust for decades, although I suppose it could show up at a GSA surplus sale as "miscellaneous office supplies."

Then, as the week progressed, I got to witness as one of my colleagues, a person who always has had a TMI problem, not only shot herself in the foot, so to speak, but managed to throw our team lead under the bus in the process. It was bizarre. The team lead made it clear this was a favor, please don't mention it to anyone, and what does the co-worker do? Over-shares, as usual, and, even worse, over-shares with the one person who should have been kept in the dark. I found out about it only because my team lead came to me needing to talk to someone because she was so upset -- the tire tracks on her back were still smoking.

I've never understood the compulsion some people have to over-share, to indulge in confessions long before the figurative cattle prod  or bamboo splinters are in the room, but this colleague does it all the time: babbles on and on until a confession has been made to violating some agency convention or OPM rule. Once the transgression is out in the open, of course, what's a manager supposed to do? If it's strictly verbal, you can kind of cringe and pretend you didn't hear it, especially if it's something relatively minor (e.g., taking a longer lunch break than the officially allotted time) and doesn't impact work overall. But when the person is dumb enough to put it into an e-mail? And then copy people higher up the food chain than just our immediate supervisors? Why not just start wearing a tee-shirt with PLEASE FIRE ME printed on it in giant letters?

As for my team lead, my advice to her was to tell the people higher up the food chain that we think a medication our co-worker is currently taking is causing a few odd cognitive side effects. It is a medication that does have confusion and memory loss as documented problems, so maybe they'll buy the notion that the woman was temporarily confused . . . if only because by pretending that's true, they can avoid having to do anything about the team lead bending the rules a tad when she probably shouldn't have.

Oh well. . . fairly soon nothing that happens in the office will be much of an issue for me. I'll have to go back to watching Jerry Springer for entertainment. I've completed most of the paperwork requesting a telework arrangement, have started packing up the apartment, and should be back in Michigan by Halloween. I know there are things I'm going to miss about Atlanta (the ready availability of Mexican Coke, the DeKalb County library system), but being in an actual office at LNA isn't one of them.

Working hard or hardly working?

This week is Georgia Telework Week. Georgia's governor actually did something reasonably sane (or at least innocuous) not long ago, and signed a proclamation declaring September 11 through the 17th Georgia Telework Week. Employers are supposed to encourage workers who can do so to work from home. Large Nameless Agency announced it was encouraging all division managers to have everyone who could telework do it for two days. Sounded good to me.

So here I am, at home, in my jammies and bunny slippers, so to speak, "teleworking." Or I would be if I had anything to do. In one of those typical feast or famine situations LNA is so good at creating, I have no work to do. I'm caught up. If I were sitting in the office, I'd be doing almost the same thing I'm doing here -- wandering around the Intertubes, playing an occasional game of Sudoku, and maybe writing a personal letter or two, but with the additional factor of being grateful my monitor isn't visible from the office doorway. I've always thought teleworking would be a good thing to do -- after all, I can do nothing at home and get paid for it as easily as I can do nothing in the office for 8 hours.

I do occasionally wonder how one of my colleagues manages to stay sane. He's fast, too, and is always well ahead of the production schedule. The issue we're supposedly halfway into editing right now is November, but, like me, I know this guy is already into his January assignments (all one of them, at this point; the Editor in Chief needs to pick up the pace on accepting stuff). I think he meditates a lot -- or has mastered the art of sleeping with his eyes open. There are times when I wander past his office, glance in, and he's sitting there in some sort of trance, looking like an android where someone's flipped the switch to Off. I at least keep a stash of magazines in a filing cabinet so there's always a copy of Orion or Smithsonian to fall back on. I don't think my colleague does.

I'm never really sure if the reason I manage to stay ahead of the game when it comes to work is because I'm halfway good at what I do and reasonably efficient, or if I'm really, really bad. The performance reviews we get at work are completely meaningless, so who knows? The criteria for "fully successful" are all purely subjective; there are no metrics. I do know I tend to edit light -- I don't change an author's words just because I would have said something differently; as long as a sentence is understandable and grammatically correct, I'm probably going to leave it alone -- but I also know that I see stuff, major howlers, that my colleagues missed in galleys . . . and they all supposedly agonize over an article for many days before deciding it's ready for production. I never agonize. I figure if the authors are happy with what they see in the edited proofs, it's good to go -- it's going to be their names on the title page, not mine, and I have no desire to step on their voice.

At least with the journal, the gaps with no work whatsoever are fairly short. We're a monthly, stuff comes in all the time, the lulls are relatively infrequent. That wasn't true of my first two years at LNA. I was assigned to a workgroup in the writer-editor services branch (which no longer exists, but that's another story) to work as an "author's editor." LNA has a policy that every article for external publication, every research piece the scientists submit to journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, Clinical Infectious Diseases, etc., has to be checked by an actual editor before it can be cleared for submission. They want to be sure that not only is the science accurate, but that LNA's researchers aren't going to embarrass themselves with bad writing. It was not a bad gig, I got to read some interesting material, but the work flow was totally dependent on when/if LNA researchers submitted something for clearance and requested editorial services. I'd get one thing at a time, for example, a 2500 word article on tuberculosis and drug resistance, and be told I had three weeks in which to edit it. Three weeks! To check a ten page paper. It was a project that in most cases could be done in a few hours -- a full day at best. I never did milk those projects for the full time allotted, but I also never turned them in as soon as I finished them. I've had tadpoles before, and I know how production quotas work. Besides, you never know when you're going to get handed something that's sufficiently nasty that it really does take ten times longer to finish than you thought it would. 

In any case, I'd finish a project, let my team lead know I was ready for something else. . . and then I'd sit. . . and sit. . . and sit. . . day after day waiting for something else to land in the In Box. There is a reason I became the Sudoku Queen of Corporate Square. When the journal advertised for a copy editor, all the experienced editors in my work group, including my team lead, told me not to apply. "They work really, really hard over there." "The deadline pressure is horrible." "They're just overwhelmed all the time; they can't keep up." It sounded pretty damn good compared to being paid to sit and stare at cubicle walls 8 hours a day.

The work load is a little heavier, but it's also totally predictable -- the journal is a monthly, so we all know that every month each copy editor will have a minimum of 7 articles to edit, more likely 8 or 9, and that we all have one or two other responsibilities. As publications go, we don't have a particularly brutal production schedule, nor are we understaffed, at least not on the copyediting side. It's pretty easy to keep up with the pace of production once you're oriented to the schedule. The only mystery is how good or bad the articles will be, i.e., how much clean-up will they need. Some research shops run like well-oiled machines -- their principal investigator has overseen enough submissions to our journal that the papers come in formatted exactly the way our style dictates; they're close to publishable without us doing a thing other than running it through our software for formatting. Others are a mess. I've seen a few where the initial impression is "This is written in Klingon." Most fall somewhere in between. 

Large Nameless Agency about to star in movie

If this trailer has me thinking about living in a bubble and never talking to another human being, I wonder just how frightening the movie itself is going to be? They did actually film a scene or two here at LNA, so I'm a tad curious as to what the film itself will be like. Supposedly no zombies, though, which I'm sure is going to disappoint many audience members.

Densifying

Densifying. It's become the word du jour at Large Nameless Agency. The budget is shrinking, so what's one way to survive in these austere times? Eliminate leased office space and pack the human resources into the structures that LNA actually owns. Densify. Which in turns means figuring out how to fit a thousand people into a building designed for use by a third that number on a campus that is already chronically short of parking spaces and is inadequately served by public transit.

There has been much moaning and gnashing of teeth since the word came down a week or so ago that we would be relocating sometime shortly after the start of the new fiscal year. I view the relocation as a handy excuse for promoting telework for all the same reasons upper level management at LNA does: relieve pressure on office space, reduce the demand for parking, elminate stress from people's lives. Whether or not our manager (who really does not like the concept of telework, even though she works from home herself on a regular basis) will accept an increased level of telework by the peasants in her fiefdom is still debatable, but she may not have much choice.

In the meantime, I'll just keep looking at the countdown calendar and thinking quietly that no matter what happens, fairly soon it's not going to be my problem. Now if they'd only add technical writer-editors to the list of occupations LNA wants to offer buyouts to in an effort to entice people to retire, I'd be a happy camper.

You're not my type

I'm an INTJ. Almost no one is my type.

I speak, of course, of that darling of the psuedosciences and manipulative management techniques, the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory. I first encountered Myers-Briggs as an undergraduate at Michigan Tech in the 1980s. At the time I was majoring in social sciences with a Science, Technology and Society concentration -- and within that concentration my focus was on technology and work. That meant taking a fair number of business courses as electives. If the school had been doing declared majors and minors at that point in time, I'd have described it as "major in STS with a minor in industrial sociology." Sort of.

In any case, one of the business professors was thoroughly enamored of Myers-Briggs. She loved it. Of course, this was the woman who was so good at what she did that when I made the mistake of taking her class on "leadership," a course that required massive amounts of teamwork and cooperation, I got to watch it splinter so badly that 20+ years later there are participants from that class who still aren't speaking to each other. I don't think we did the Myers-Briggs in class, just talked about it a lot and how it related to other tools and theories management can use to manipulate workers create a good working environment, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I didn't actually take the Myers Briggs until I went to counseling to talk through what I wanted to do after Tech: leap straight into the workplace or go to grad school. And, if grad school, which made the most sense: law school or going for a graduate degree in history or sociology?

I don't know if the Myers Briggs results influenced the grad school decision at all. I do know the conclusion that I was an INTJ who fell so far into the psychotic loner quadrant that it's amazing I ever emerge from my cave to interact with anyone didn't come as much of a shock. It's also not much of a surprise that I am at my happiest working at a task that allows me to work independently, no "team members" annoying me with their stunning incompetence, and that is relatively structured (i.e., clear beginning, process, and end).

I've been thinking about the Myers Briggs lately because I've been observing a co-worker slowly sliding over the edge into complete meltdown and possible padded room territory, and a lot of it comes down to a simple (and common) misunderstanding of human nature. We all on some level believe everyone else is just like us, and, when we hit reality, too often the explanations we come up for why people aren't behaving the way we think they should are just flatout wrong.

Now, I don't know if it would have made much of a difference to my crazy coworker if Large Nameless Agency had a halfway decent employee orientation or a better training program, but it certainly wouldn't have hurt if LNA did a few of the things some of my previous employers did, like subjecting all the peons to a session with Myers Briggs in the name of "team building." (Similar exercises at LNA are strictly voluntary, with a minuscule number of sessions offered considering what a humongous bureaucracy the agency is. The overall management philosophy when it comes to orienting people to either the agency or a specific job is more along the lines of "Let's toss you into the shark tank and see how fast you can learn to swim.") Dubious though I am about the principles underlying Myers Briggs, it is useful to have it hammered into you that everyone is Different: different cognitive styles, different things that motivate them, different responses to being around other people. Or, to put it in Myers Briggs jargon, different people have different preferences. Bottom line, if people don't behave the way you expect them to, don't take it personally.

If my crazy coworker had at some point encountered Myers Briggs, when she started with the journal she might have picked up on the fact that her new coworkers were not particularly social people: they're pleasant enough, they're friendly in an off-handed way, but they're not real big on getting together for lunch, gathering in a crowd around the coffee pot for idle chatter, or socializing much in general, and that they're like that with everyone. They're a rather reserved bunch overall. Considering that people tend to drift into occupations that match up with their emotional and cognitive needs, it's not surprising that people who work at a job -- copy editing, for example -- that requires working alone in a quiet space would tend to be more than a tad private.

Unfortunately, my coworker took it personally. She's one of those bubbly, highly social people who thrives on small talk and idle chitchat -- she doesn't want to just say a casual good morning and get on with work; she wants actual conversations. Even more unfortunately, she interpreted people's being rather off-handed in their social interactions, their lack of interest in lingering over the coffee pot, and their polite refusals to go bowling or get together outside the workplace as "they don't like me. They don't want me here."

It's bizarre. Even worse, it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy. She keeps reinforcing it. Because she thinks no one likes her, her behavior is getting stranger and stranger, so people want to spend even less time interacting with her. The less time people spend with her, the more convinced she becomes that not only do they not like her, there's an active campaign to get rid of her. The downward spiral continues. She sees plots and cabals where none exist, and the rest of us just kind of shake our heads in disbelief and contemplate the potential joys of teleworking so we would no longer have a ringside seat for weirdness.

Retirement's definitely looking better and better.

Adventures in bureaucracy

I've finally moved, at least in cyberspace. Back in July 2009, shortly after Large Nameless Agency acquired a new Director, a re-organization was announced. As part of the effort to get rid of the cooties left by the previous administration, a great reshuffling would occur, various centers and divisions would vanish in the name of efficiency (and, not coincidentally, provide an excuse to jettison upper-level management that had been cronies of the old Director)(for awhile the standing joke at staff meetings was "What Center director got fired this week?"), and it would all be done quickly.

Those of us working at the sort of job I have (i.e., anyone below a GS-13, you know, the people who do the actual work at the agency) were told no worries, the changes will be mostly on paper, the work won't change, and you won't physically have to go anywhere. The only thing that will change, and it will happen soon, is that you'll notice your electronic address, the part of your email identity that tells recipients who you are, will reflect the new reality. Pshaw. In true bureaucratic fashion, it took many, many months for my identity to switch from MyName(LNA/CenterWithinLNA/Division/Branch) to MyName(LNA/MysteryAbbreviation/NoLongerExistentCenter). That identity, we were told, was a placeholder. We were told what the Mystery Abbreviation stood for, but no one had a clue what it did (if anything) or why our old center was still showing up if it had been eliminated. 

Well, the permanent change has finally occurred, a mere 21 months after it was first announced it would happen. I noticed not long ago that I am now MyName(LNA/NewDivision/NewCenter). Oddly enough, though, only one other person in my work group is showing that new address in emails; everyone else is still stuck in the placeholder. Bureaucracies definitely move in mysterious ways.

We're all going to die

Today's the 4-year anniversary of me starting work at Large Nameless Agency. What have I learned in those four years? 

Well, if there's ever a full-blown outbreak of a killer disease, we should all kiss our collective ass goodbye. By the time LNA manages to come to a conclusion and drafts an action plan after endless rounds of meetings and squabbling over just who gets to tell teams where to go first, the zombie apocalypse will have wiped out all but a handful of hardcore survivalists hunkered down in bunkers. When an agency takes a month to figure out just where to physically assign a new employee because a couple of branch chiefs are getting territorial over who controls a vacant cubicle, it's got a bad case of bureaucratic sclerosis. We have a student intern coming for a 10-week stint this summer, and I swear it's taking longer to secure a work space for her and ensure the necessary tools are in place (e.g., a computer) than she'll spend working for us. It's bizarre.

Then again, I've seen the same thing happen many times in the past 4 years: new employees come in and no one knows where to physically place them -- after you've overheard a few phone conversations where someone is calling around begging for a cubicle, an abandoned monkey cage, a janitor's closet, a space of some sort to park the new guy in, you start to wonder if anyone at LNA ever does any advance planning. Why do they hire people if they don't know what they're going to do with those employees once they're here?

My own experience with LNA should have been a clue that what seemed like initially like an unexpected glitch was in fact standard operating procedure for this outfit: I spent almost a full month in a "temporary" cubicle while the branch chief tried to figure out where to stick me and several other new hires back in 2007. They'd hired us all, knew we were coming, and yet when we arrived, nothing was in place. From the reactions, you'd think it was all a total surprise, like it was unexpectedly raining new employees and they'd had nothing to do with posting the positions or interviewing and then selecting the candidates.  Very, very strange.  Eventually I and two colleagues were told we'd been assigned cubicle space in a building, and that everything was set up and waiting for us there.

We went to check out the new space. You know what we found? Totally empty cubicles. There weren't even chairs. When we asked about chairs, we were told to "go borrow some from a meeting room." When we asked about computers, the answer was "ITSO says they're there." Oh? Then why is the cubicle completely empty? It took another week to get the cubicles set up with computers, and probably another full week to get them working. When we asked about office supplies -- some post it notes, some pens, whatever -- we were each handed three red lead pencils, and that was it.

I don't even want to think about what a mess the human resources office made of getting my accrued leave, existing insurance plan, and other items transferred over from the Park Service. The best way to describe it is to simply say, if there was something they could manage to fuck up, they did.

All things considered, I'm more than a little surprised I'm still here. Maybe it was just a case of the combination of the Atlanta smog, heat, and humidity drained me so much the first few months that I didn't have the energy to think about leaving -- and by the time I did, I'd gotten used to the dysfunctions.

Amazing events

That rarest of rare events happened at work this week:  someone got fired.

Yesterday she was there, today she's gone, and it's like she never existed:  her former cubicle stripped of anything that might have indicated it was once occupied and her presence so swiftly purged from Large Nameless Agency that her name vanished from the on-line employee directory almost as soon as the elevator doors closed behind her.

Granted, she was a contractor, not a direct employee, and contractors are much, much easier to purge than permanent federal employees, but even so. . . someone got fired. I have been observing contractors sitting on their collective ass doing as little work as humanly possible, milking contracts for many months past when a project was supposed to be done, since I started at Large Nameless Agency -- and this is the first time I've seen one shown the door. I am astounded.

I am, of course, conflicted. On the one hand, I do feel some twinges of sympathy for any poor sap who ends up terminated for cause in today's economy: jobs are close to impossible to get even when you've got stellar references and job hunt by choice, so I do find myself hoping she's got a safety net of some sort to fall back on (like a relative with an empty guest room) because she just went from having a pretty decent income to having none -- when you get fired for cause (and she apparently did; she allegedly lied to the project manager), you can't collect unemployment compensation.

On the other hand, I've been watching her take a project that could have been done in a month and stretch it out over almost two years, so mostly what I'm thinking is, "It's about damn time."

Thinking about work

I was going to do some whining, but realized I don't care enough.