Tag Archives: bureaucracy

Chapter 84, Heartless

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Alright, I’m back in the saddle.  For those of you who care, Cotton Patch Gospel is going great with only three performances left.  Friday, 11 Oct @ 7:30 and Saturday 12 Oct @ 2:00 and 7:30.  If you have any questions, from the audience perspective, I’m sure Stan George will fill you in!  Thanks for coming Stan!

It occurred to me the other day that there is a large percentage of the population that has little or no understanding of how bureaucracies actually work and why they’re so potentially dangerous.  For the most part, you never really have to interface with them on a day to day basis until you start getting older or you work for an agency of the government.  Sure, we all have to deal with the IRS, state and local tax collectors, and the DMV, but you really can’t grasp the true nature of bureaucracies until you’ve aged a bit and run into the immovable force of the barely competent that makes up the federal government. Or as Dr. McCoy said it in Star Trek, “The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe”.

As I’ve certainly mentioned before, I attended UPT (Undergraduate Pilot Training) at Laughlin AFB, Del Rio TX.  Peg and I became engaged a year before I started UPT and we decided it would be best if we set a date for the wedding after I graduated.  Her spanish skills are non-existent and we decided that I would have enough stress in my life without being a newlywed at the same time.  So, for the whole year of training, my input into the wedding planning involved talking to Peg on the phone every Saturday and dutifully agreeing with all of her wedding plans or, at the very least, saying “Does Hartman care?”  A rhetorical phrase I picked up from one of my instructors.  However, I did have one very critical function in the planning process and that was graduating on time.

At  the time I really didn’t grasp how easy it was to “wash back” a class and not graduate on time.  Even a minor injury could keep you from flying for several weeks and you’d find yourself delayed a month.  Bad weather, broken airplanes, busted checkrides, all of these things or combinations could wreak havoc with wedding plans but contingency planning wasn’t really part of our thought process.  Luckily, other than some really bad weather in January which forced us to fly 7 days a week in February, everything stayed on track for graduating on 4 August and an 11 August wedding date.  That is, until the bureaucracy stepped in.

There was a lovely woman who worked in the personnel office at Laughlin who had worked there for many years.  When you were about four months from graduation she would brief the class about follow on assignments and schools.  She was in charge of scheduling your life after UPT and she had figured out how to avoid all of the pitfalls of system and she had done it for decades for thousands of students.  I remember clearly her asking if there was anyone in the class that needed to take some leave after graduation before their next school.  I fully understood my role in the wedding plan so I rushed to the front of the room after the briefing and explained that I was getting married exactly one week after graduation and that I needed at least a total of two weeks off before my next school.  She smiled, congratulated me, thanked me for letting her know, and made a note.  I had fulfilled my duty, mission complete.

I think it was the first week of July when our orders came down.  I actually go mine before anyone else in the class and I was anxious to see how the next three schools would flow out.  I opened the manila envelope and panic set in.  She had, indeed, made sure that I was available for my wedding on the 11th of August, but she had scheduled me to report to survival school at Fairchild AFB, WA on the 12th of August.  A honeymoon of trudging through the woods and being smacked around in a POW camp with 30 other guys.  Good times!  I was, to say the least, a little perturbed.  I found the office of the lovely lady from personnel and I, the lowly 2nd Lt, politely asked her what had happened.  She looked up from her desk,  immediately recognized me, and then proceeded to tell me that it had worked out better for her scheduling to do it that way and that I could at least get married.  She said it all with a smile on her face and ended it with a curt “Sorry”.  Well, I figured, it is what it is.  I serve at the whim of the Air Force.  So, with my head hung low, I headed back to the squadron.  All the while trying to figure out how to break the news to Peg.

I guess I was a little distracted the rest of the day because my instructor, Bill (Buck) Vrastil finally asked me why I was so uncharacteristically forlorn.  I told him my sad story and he leapt from his chair and stormed out of the room.  Ten minutes later my flight commander and squadron commander called me into the office and asked me to tell them the story.  They had a similar reaction. As the squadron commander left the office he told me he was going to see the wing commander.  I tried to stop him.  I didn’t want to make waves. I didn’t want to buck the system.  I didn’t want the bureaucracy to get mad at me.  He told me something that I have taken to heart my whole career but which flies in the face of everything I’ve seen from the federal bureaucracy since then, “We don’t treat people this way!”.

Within an hour the wing commander and the “lovely lady” from personnel had both called me and apologized for what she had said and done.  My orders were changed.  Survival school was rescheduled.   And Peg got a honeymoon.  She was still stuck with me, but she got a honeymoon.

Now don’t get me wrong.  There are caring compassionate employees in all systems but the further up in an organization you get the less personal and compassionate it gets.  People become numbers.  Customers become liabilities and problems.  The desire to solve the problem the system was created to address becomes secondary as the bureaucracy becomes a self-perpetuating “career building” organization.  History has proven it time and time again.  Maybe altruism gets the ball rolling but careerism and empire building take over.

That is why socialized medicine cannot ever work.  The middleman will just get bigger and bigger and absorb into the bureaucracy what should be going towards medical care.  If you really think adding another layer between you and your doctor will cut costs then you might need to take advantage of some of your mental health benefits.

Chapter 62, “Numbers”

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I’m a math guy.  Not that I’m into numerology, but I find it interesting that certain numbers stick in our brains.  Numbers like 9/11, or 12/7/1941, or 411, or 8675309.  Like smells and songs they evoke vivid memories and remind us of things we don’t want to forget.  My mom can still rattle off my dad’s military service number (and it’s not his SSAN) even though it hasn’t had any useful purpose for nearly 60 years!  There’s a new number I’ve burned into my psyche and it’s 405.

405 is the number of days from the original FSA (Force Structure Announcement) last year to the announcement that the 911th Airlift Wing was not closing.  I know it doesn’t mean much to a lot of you, but to those who suffered through 405 days of uncertainty and stress it seemed like a lifetime.  Especially since it was generated by lies and incompetence.  There’s an old saying which I know you all have heard; “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”.  Well, there’s a much more dangerous version; “Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat denied”.

What makes bureaucracies so dangerous, and the larger the more dangerous they are, is the inherent lack of accountability they offer to those imbedded in them.  You know what I mean.  Those of you in the military have seen it time after time.  Someone screws up in a way that, in the private sector, would get them escorted out the door but instead there’s, magically, a new “special assistant” at headquarters or they’re simply moved to another division.  Bureaucrats, like liberals, never think they’re wrong, they just think they’re smarter than the rest of us and we just haven’t embraced their brilliance and tried hard enough.  Sadly the power they yield, or they think they yield, can destroy lives and organizations and can waste millions of taxpayers dollars with no negative consequences to them.  Here’s an example.

Some years ago my church received a property tax bill in the mail from the City of Pittsburgh for $500.  I’ve been attending the same church since I was born and, since non-profits are tax exempt, we had never paid property taxes.  So I called the city and after an hour of the standard run around, I was finally transferred to someone who could answer my question.  I was told that the tax was being assessed on the value of every square foot of land around the building, including the parking lot, since only the building itself was being used for “religious purposes”.  I argued the point that we had outdoor events for kids and regularly used the parking lot for community outreach but, in the end, I was told, “Don’t bother fighting this, we have lots of lawyers and money and you can’t afford to fight this even though you’d probably win in the end” and then the line went dead.  We’ve been writing a check ever since.  Nameless and faceless, bureaucracies never shrink and have very little motivation to become more efficient.

The difference between the private sector and the government is that, in the government, there are no consequences for failure and failure often gets you a bigger budget.  A friend of mine ran an organization that did summer tutoring for thousands of inner city kids on a shoestring budget using college kids who stayed, for free, with local families.  When the City of Pittsburgh schools saw the enormous impact the program was having they tried to shut it down by denying access to city facilities. They then rented office space, bought  furniture and hired staff to duplicate the program.  After 2 years and millions of dollars spent they gave up.  They never tutored a single child.

And that brings us back to 405.  The Air Force was willing to throw away the 10s of millions of dollars the 911th saves the budget over other bases  because there are still bureaucrats in the system who, like petulant children,  are enraged that they can’t have their way.  Even in the face of the facts and the law they continue to waste time and resources on a failed, inaccurate paradigm.  Sadly, even with the announcement several weeks ago, they won’t let go.  A friend, whose name I won’t mention, was talking to a counterpart at HHQ after the announcement last week and was told, “Just because you escaped again doesn’t mean the crosshairs aren’t still on the 911th.  It just means we haven’t hit the target yet”.

“Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat denied”  Deep pockets, no accountability and a long memory.  Just wait until they control your healthcare.