A Walk Down Memory Lane
I wasn't always this way...a floater in the toilet bowl of the workplace. I used to be a hard worker. I gave 110 percent. In fact I worked myself up from the lowest level of service to one of the highest you can achieve without actually bossing other people around. I did this without the benefit of higher education or a decent wardrobe, which is no mean accomplishment.

I still do everything they ask of me. I still finish my assignments on time. I have an excellent attendance record and I have over a month's worth of vacation on the books.

So, what has changed? Well, fundamentally I see my job as completely futile and unnecessary where as historically I had only seen it as partially futile and unnecessary.

Civil Service has severed the tenuous connection between performance and pay. Politics in bureaucracy as eliminated any semblance of logic in the decision making process. Upper management are inevitably appointees that are better at smooching someone's backside that running an organization.

Sometimes I wonder why government works at all.

Okay, so that wasn't very funny...hmmm, how to lighten the mood. Maybe I can dredge up an anecdote:

Our facilities person got a phone call from the bathroom (from a cell phone, I know what you are thinking!) asking for a roll of toilet paper because the poor guy was in an embarrassing situation. Bum out with not even a butt gasket to come to the rescue. Now a woman could possibly dredge a few scraps of tissue smeared with lipstick from her purse to help matters out, but men have nowhere to hide emergency butt wiping supplies.

Our facilities person hurried to the supply closet and got a roll of toilet paper for the poor fellow, but he failed to specify *which* bathroom he was stuck in. We were in four buildings with two men's bathrooms in each building, meaning that the hunt was on.

Poor Lisa, toilet paper in hand, spent twenty minutes going from bathroom to bathroom, knocking on the door and trying to hand out toilet paper. She never did find the guy. Maybe someone gave him a hand over while she was searching for him. I like to think so, because the alternative is just too nasty to contemplate.