Work with Gary for More Community, Less Olympia

Imagine that a facility needs a night-watchman. Before anyone is hired, the bureaucrat asks, "How can we hire someone until we know if the job is a good use of the public's money and, before we can know that, don't we need to know what the job's responsibilities are?"

So the bureaucracy assigns two people in their planning department to work on the problem. One person does time studies. Another writes the instructions and specifications for the night-watchman job.

These people get working, and they ask, "Don't we need to monitor this work to make sure that the night-watchman is performing the specified tasks correctly?"

So the quality control department gets involved. Two more people are assigned, one to do management studies and another to develop a reporting system.

These quality control people realize that they need two automated systems: one for tracking the watchman in his rounds and another for reporting.

Two people are assigned from IT, one to do the tracking system and another to do the reporting system.

A smart bureaucrat, seeing an opportunity for personal advancement asks: "Don't we need someone to manage this task force to make sure we keep the planning, quality control, and IT staffs on task?" Proposing herself as  administrative manager, she also needs an administrative assistant and a legal secretary as well, to make sure all state policies are being followed. 

In doing their analysis, the task force discovers that there are many state facilities with night-watchmen. These people are working now without formal specifications, time-studies, quality control, or automated systems. 

An urgent report explains that the state may be putting itself in the position of legal liability by hiring night-watchmen outside of the bureaucracy. If one of these night watchmen should be hurt on the job, or worse, hurt someone else who is trying to break into a facility, it could cost the state million.

They now have the justification for a much bigger budget that will "save money" by protecting the state from liability.

The task force expands their work to include all state facilities. All existing night-watchmen must be assigned additional reporting tasks in order to develop the appropriate formal specifications, time-studies, quality control, and automated systems. The growing bureaucracy promises to make their jobs simpler--eventually. Meanwhile, their jobs are harder. More people are hired to handle the new volume of information.

More information leads to the discovery of more problems, not the least of which is that some facilities are unprotected by night-watchmen. These problems require a legislative bill, the Nocturnal Facilities Protection Act. The bill authorizes more funds and more analysis of what other states are doing for nocturnal facilities protection.

Now that there is a legislation bill in the works, the public employees union bosses are naturally alerted. Their primary question is, "Can we require night-watchmen to pay union dues?"

Now, the bill gets the attention that an activist group. The bill references "night-watchMEN," a clear case of discrimination. The term is changed to "nocturnal facility monitoring personnel" and an immediate study is started to assure that the current hiring of nocturnal facility monitoring personnel is sufficiently diversified.

At this point, the program has gone on for a year. No new night-watchman has been hired. Existing night-watchmen are working harder. Reports are piling up. Money is being spent. Everyone in the bureaucracy is very happy with their progress.

Unfortunately, the economy is now slowing down. The budget is under pressure. The task force is $918,000 over budget. They must cutback.

So the task forces recommends that the state lays off the existing night existing watchmen.

Their jobs, after all, were never thoroughly vetted by the bureaucracy.  The task force will, of course, continue their vital work. After all, because of cutbacks more of the state's facilities are now unprotected.  The situation is now such a crisis that it clearly justifies a tax increase.