I moved to New York City and struggled for 6 months to find a job in banking, but finally had to settle for a job with the Government. I worked for the Personnel Department in The New York City Housing Authority which was heralded as one of the better run government organizations in New Your City. I was paid $32,000 to do nothing as the assistant to a woman who made $80,000 doing less than I did. I was working in a personnel department with 300 unneeded employees, no computers, and a strong resistance to any sense of efficiency. After six months, one week after I gave my two week notice, they fired me.
I complained about the application process which required applicants filling out the same information on over 15 pages! I was told that I didn’t fully appreciate the system so they assigned me to checking applications myself.
They had a summer jobs program where people would work from June to August. I would receive the applications in May, but the applications wouldn’t be reviewed by the Department of Personnel until at least October. So even if there were a problem with an applicant, they wouldn’t know it until the person had completed working! Thus the whole process was clearly a waste. (In a similar vein, a few weeks earlier I had learned of a recent incident where the Department of Personnel checked an application 2 years after the person was hired at a housing center, and they found that their employee was a formerly convicted rapist!)
When I received the application, I had to check a person’s ID, sign my name, and write in my job title "Staff Analyst". On some of the applications rather than writing my official job title, I wrote things like "cog-in-the-wheel", "bureaucrat", "paper-pusher", etc. I was often doing stuff like this because 95% of all government documents have copies made and then are put into files and never seen again. But this time someone saw my handiwork.
One of my superiors held up one of my applications where I had written that I worked at "The Inefficient New York Housing Authority" and asked, "Can we send this to the department of personnel?!" I said, "why not? We are inefficient." Then I broke down and appologized, "I am sorry, I didn’t mean to insult anyone, I will correct the apps that I wrote jokes on, etc" I was afraid that my co-workers might interpret my actions as an affront against them, but I was surprised to find that I was the hero of the day. Almost everyone working for government (except the people in charge) openly admit that the place is a disaster and they were thrilled that I had spoken out.
I was scheduled to meet with the director that day at 4:45PM; so I was joking all day, "What’s he gonna do? Fire me?!! Ha, ha, ha!" Sure enough he went into some tirade about how I defaced government documents, and he fired me. I mentioned how the whole process was a waste, but he really didn’t care.
I went around the office giving final good-byes, but most people didn’t believe me. One guy even took my termination letter and remarked, "this looks so real! How’d you do that?" Another person tried to help me with ways to get this incident off my record. But I told her, "are you kidding? I consider it an honor to be fired for trying to stop prolific waste." Although the government traditionally doesn’t fire anyone, they are quick to act when they fear change.
My department needed copies of some documents from the Department of Personnel, but they said the documents were top secret (for no apparent reason) and could not leave the office. In the office there was one copy machine that they wouldn’t let us use because they said it was "almost broken". So I was instructed with my co-worker to copy all the documents by hand! The job surely would have taken 1-2 weeks.
After about 15 minutes, I took the entire stack of papers under my jacket and said I had to go to the bathroom. I went down the street to the copy shop and had copies made of every sheet. My co-worker was shocked that I would do such a crazy thing. Our two week project was done in 15 minutes, so we took the rest of the day off. When we brought the photo copied documents back to our office we were only slightly reprimanded for breaking tradition
I generally had nothing to do, but once my boss actually gave me a project. I was to track letters that came into the office to see that they were responded to. What I found was that if someone sent a letter that said, "Can I have a job?" that letter would need to pass over 30 messy unorganized desks before the response was sent out. Consequently I found that over 60% of all letters to the department were completely lost and never responded to. I showed my boss the results and she said we couldn’t do anything.
The 300 person department’s only function was to keep track of 2000 employees which they were trying to do without any computers. Since most of the staff had nothing to do and since most the work that was done could be done automatically if they had computers, I proposed the department buy a Pentium computer, set up a software program for tracking employees, and fire 297 of the 300 employees. Unfortunately my idea was ignored.