Job rant

Locally, there's a minor controversy about whether supervisors for the local county department of public works should get overtime when they come in after their normal working hours to plow snow during the winter. The county decided they shouldn't, and should get comp time instead, but the debate on the local newspaper site about it made me think quite a bit about my own job.

The short of it is, I have seen few places where the concept of "professionalism" has been so fucked up.

In theory, we're "professionals." We don't get overtime (mostly because there's never any budget for any -- one year we had a grand total of 40 available overtime hours for a department of 300 people, and those were already all spoken for). But in practice, we're just goddamn expensive drive-thru jockeys, mostly because the people "managing" us have no idea what we do anyway, so they fall back on whatever "management skills" they learned taking claims in a field office.

Thus, we have a bunch of "managers" who seem to think that it's much more important that you physically be in some specific point in space-time from 9:30 to 6, and what you actually do while you're there isn't particularly important. As if what I do can be magically turned on at some specific hour and it turns itself off when I walk out the door. Man, if I had operated like that the first 25 years of my working life, a lot of shit wouldn't get done.

So, here's a deal: you pay me (in theory) an annual salary. Decide what you want me to do in that year, and it'll be done. Probably more than done. But don't tell me when to think, when to show up, or bitch at me because I didn't sign a little piece of paper at some specific time. Nowhere in my job description does the phrase "signing little pieces of paper" occur. For good reason. I wouldn't have bothered taking the job if it did.

And for the last dozen years they could have paid some work-to-rule federal contractor double my salary to do half of what I've done.

Fucking get a job, you "managers." You're nothing more than overpaid clerks waiting to retire and being a pain in the ass of the people who actually get things done around here. Eat me.