ONE MORE FIND

At city hall we are in a quest for discovery. Of what depends on whom you ask. For me it is about looking for the most efficient way of getting the job of local government done. Whereas for some of the employees it is about finding the best excuse they can think of to stick somebody with their greatest headaches.

And lucky me, I get to be in the middle of this verbal ping-pong match. Honestly I ought to know better than expect the die-hard, lazy career bureaucratic leeches that work at city hall to think it terms of efficiency.

I don’t know, I guess I just get into those periodic moods where convince myself that this time will be different. Some temporary state of stupidity infects my thinking and I get full of the kind of confidence that I imagine plagued the Captain of the Titanic in terms of thinking ice bergs were no problem. I can’t say that he actually viewed it that way, I’m just saying if he did it was that kind of positivism that leads to complete mental vulnerability that comes over my own brain too often.

It never of course comes to be a reality for me in terms of just how dumb this it till the “meetings.” Those are the glorious experiences where I get to sit and listen to all the manure my help can spread in hopes of ducking some chore they hate.

Perhaps the saddest thing is how I actually allow myself to go through in the first place. I know that for the sake of creating the illusion of efficiency each will do their best to detail why some grunt job would be better done by some other department.

Naturally in the same frame of logic these individuals will always argue how a given task that is a piece of cake is one that would be better done by their department. So I think you are getting the picture here, this is all about back-stabbing, lying and shafting the other guy while making your own life easier.

There are times when I would probably enjoy this whole game. However when it occurs at a time when I am myself trying to find a way to dump off a few crappy chores on some employee, then I get a little bored with the whole process. Yeah I know it is called being a hypocrite, but it works for me.

Anyway the only redeeming thing in all of this is when I play the barter game. I pretend to buy into one of the employee’s crap and act like I’m going to go along with their con job. Then after they are so high from the illusion they pulled one over on me I toss out my little chore that I have decided for the sake of efficiency would best be done by their department.

I always love the look they give me. It is sort of a combination of being smug and disappointed at the same time. In the end of course I gauge the whole process in terms of winning by how much I manage to get rid of chores I hate. As for the efficiency part, well there are always plenty of speeches I’ve written and keep in a drawer to make it sound like this whole silly game is one more find for progress!