On Saturday, June 11, 2022 at 5:20:32 AM UTC-7, AMuzi wrote:
> On 6/10/2022 10:40 PM, John B. wrote:
> > On Fri, 10 Jun 2022 19:23:39 -0700 (PDT), Frank Krygowski
> > <frkr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Friday, June 10, 2022 at 9:32:44 PM UTC-4, John B. wrote:
> >>> On Fri, 10 Jun 2022 11:05:23 -0400, Frank Krygowski
> >>> <frkr...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On 6/9/2022 6:42 PM, John B. wrote:
> >>>>> ... in most civil service positions there is no
> >>>>> emphasis on efficiency and, in fact, a great deal of emphasis on the
> >>>>> opposite as generally a supervisor's pay grade is largely dependent on
> >>>>> the number of people he supervises and thus if the department
> >>>>> supervised demonstrates a need for more people then it is quite
> >>>>> possible that the supervisor will be raised to the next pay grade.
> >>>>> Thus inefficiency may well result in promotion.
> >>>>
> >>>> All that may be true in some instances. It's certainly not true in others.
> >>>>
> >>>> As I said recently, one person I know just changed jobs from working for
> >>>> a city government to working for a rather new manufacturing company. The
> >>>> city job involved long hours, representing the city after hours at
> >>>> various meetings, workshops, seminars etc. This is the person who who
> >>>> chipped into the city's office collection every week so people could
> >>>> have bottled water in the office. (Not that I'm a fan of bottled water.)
> >>>>
> >>>> This person now works for a company that provides free lunches, snacks
> >>>> and beverages to employees. When arranging a brunch connected with aa
> >>>> media event, this person was told "Just spend whatever you think
> >>>> necessary. There is no budget limit. They really don't care, just spend
> >>>> whatever you need to." There is no overtime work, at least for this
> >>>> person, although some very occasional travel to the west coast is
> >>>> expected. And the salary (for essentially the same job) is much, much
> >>>> higher than the city job's salary.
> >>>>
> >>>> And at least when times are prosperous and money is flowing, the "empire
> >>>> building" effect absolutely occurs in large companies, with upper
> >>>> managers seeking to hire more workers or otherwise increase the
> >>>> headcount of underlings.
> >>>>
> >>>> I suspect we can find similar examples at universities, at professional
> >>>> sports teams, at hospital systems, in the military and probably at any
> >>>> organization bigger than, oh, a large bicycle club.
> >>> Well.... I was stationed at Edwards AFB, in California, and there were
> >>> in the neighborhood of 30,000 civilian employees at the time (I
> >>> believe) and I can assure you that every one was striving be
> >>> inefficient. In fact it was so bad that the SAC personnel attached to
> >>> the Test Program actively avoided working with them as the inefficient
> >>> and outright laziness was, well sickening.
> >>>
> >>> One example:
> >>> Initially people assigned to the Test Program were sent to work in the
> >>> Base Shops as frankly there isn't all that much work to do on test
> >>> airplanes as they fly relatively seldom and I was assigned to the Base
> >>> Machine Shop, certainly the largest machine shop in the A.F. and I was
> >>> the only Military assigned there.
> >>>
> >>> So I check in with the "Shop chief" and, well, new boy? "Give him
> >>> something simple to do and see how it goes", so the shop chief gave me
> >>> a work order to make some sort of little push-pull rod. Blueprint and
> >>> all. Very professional.
> >>>
> >>> Well, the print didn't specify material so I scratched around and
> >>> found a short length of 1/4" square rod in the scrap, chucked it up,
> >>> faced the end square, and drilled and tapped it. and, well, "new guy
> >>> in town" I get a cup of coffee and sort of wander around talking with
> >>> the guys and all and the "Donut Wagon" came by so I had to get a donut
> >>> and another cupa and chat some more.
> >>>
> >>> Anyway, time goes by and I reckon that I really ought to finish my
> >>> project so I go back and cut the rod to length and face and tap the
> >>> other end and turn it in to the Inspection section who O.K. the
> >>> project and now I have to complete the work order and there is a "Time
> >>> Spent" block.... and Damn! It is almost 11:00. Good Lord! 4 hours to
> >>> make a dinky little thing like this? So, I put 1.5 hours down as job
> >>> time reckoning that it doesn't make me look like a complete flake and
> >>> off to lunch I go.
> >>>
> >>> Well, I come back from lunch and the word is out, "The Boss wants to
> >>> talk to you". So I go in to see the Boss and he is damned near in a
> >>> frenzy.DID YOU DO THIS? Well I admitted that I had, thinking "what did
> >>> I do wrong?" DID YOU FILL OUT THIS WORK ORDER? "Errr, well yes I did."
> >>> Thinking, well I'm up the creek for lying about the time spent. "DID
> >>> YOU EVEN LOOK AT THE ESTIMATED TIME REQUIRED ON THE WORK ORDER?" Well
> >>> I hadn't and confessed I hadn't. "YOU GI'S COME IN HERE AND TRY TO
> >>> MAKE US LOOK BAD! I DON'T WANT TOU HERE ANY MORE!
> >>>
> >>> Well, I'm still a bit puzzled and after the "tongue lashing" I go back
> >>> and look at the work order and the "Estimate Time Required" is shown
> >>> as 8 hours... for a job that in all honesty, excepting picking over
> >>> the junk pile to find a piece of material was, probably a 10 minute
> >>> job.
> >>>
> >>> In other words, the shop was showing that they were literally months
> >>> behind schedule and of course this meant that they needed more people
> >>> and this in turn meant that as the supervisor of more people the
> >>> "Boss" certainly deserved a higher pay grade. Right?
> >>>
> >>> And that, after watching civilian employees of the government work is
> >>> my considered opinion. You talk about one guy and I talk about
> >>> hundreds if not thousands.
> >>
> >> My point was certainly not that such inefficiency isn't common. My point is
> >> that it's not confined to civil service, which is a common implication here.
> >>
> >> This is a repeated tale, but at my first engineering job I would sometimes stop
> >> and chat with the machinists. That was before I learned to run machine tools and I
> >> was interested in learning what I could. Anyway, I asked one guy about how he
> >> chose speeds and feeds for the lathe. He said "I just set the machine as slow as
> >> it will go. Then I get to relax while it cuts. If one of the bosses asks about it, I just
> >> say that's as fast as this material can be cut."
> >>
> >> That was not a government position of any kind. It was a large factory belonging
> >> to a large American corporation.
> >>
> >> - Frank Krygowski
> >
> > All of which says something about the management, doesn't it?
> > Never happen in, the military, for example, where supervisors all
> > "came up the hard way" and can do the job as well as the workers (:-)
> >
> > But in civilian life the company I worked for had a project somewhat
> > like that. Things going slowly, etc. The client started bitching about
> > progress so the company looked into the matter and terminated all but
> > one guy on the project and hired all new people. Needless to say
> > things went quicker from then on.
> >
> Which has never happened at any government agency, bureau or
> department. Nor ever will.

One of the most inefficient things in the entire world is college. Most particularly those ultra progressive colleges that believe that teaching morons to espouse on Shelly and Keats, makes of them "gentlemen".

Great tears of frustration come from the eyes of Kragowski that I leaned enough electronics in six weeks of tech school to become and engineer and another six weeks to become sufficiently capable of the bombing systems in a B52 to trust with nuclear weapons.

What have we seen from the college system? The smart can get educated. But the stupid cannot but they are the one's paying the bills so they pass them through anyway. The entire basis of being an account is to detect statistical trends and yet we have seen that Russell was completely unable to do even simple arithmetic and would argue that two plus two didn't necessarily equal four. So we have a man supposedly an accountant that isn't as well trained as a high school dropout bookkeeper.

And Kragowski who doesn't know shit about anything at all tells us that private business runs the same way that the civil service does.

Locally we have bridges all over the bay area. They all have tolls. Because it was taking far more toll takers than necessary they finally automated the process. But how did they do that? You have to open an account that carries in it a given amount of money VIA a credit card rather than just the credit card. And you have to manually go in there and increase your amount of money in the account when it runs below a certain amount. This is the civil service manner of doing things - accept the credit card for cash but not to simply pay the toll.

That John didn't immediately go to the Commanding officer of Travis is a shame. The military at least has the power to handle these matters in a judicial manner. That "manager" should have been immediately fired and the entire system run BY the military and not FOR the military by do nothings.