Kevin Carson takes on the Fish! Philosophy: http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/05/fish-philosophy-beatings-will-continue.html#links He posts a reader’s experience with it in the workplace.
I am lucky in that I have never worked anywhere where there was an organized effort to improve morale by making workers pretend to be happy. Most places I have worked tolerated grousing, even expected it, and anti-grousing directives were made only on the authority of individual supervisors rather than as an organization-wide policy.
I got a lesson in anti-grousing in one of the worst jobs I ever had. I was a staff attorney at the Board of Veterans Appeals in DC, the entity to which veterans appealed decisions by VA regional offices. There were about 200 lawyers doing the work of twenty, and everything was regimented and measured and micromanaged down to the last detail.
At some point, some efficiency expert had decided how long it should take a staff attorney to work up a particular kind of case. Service connected death? 480 minutes. Disability rating dispute? 240 minutes. Waiver of overpayment? 320 minutes. Each staff attorney was evaluated for efficiency on the basis of hours worked divided by total minute values of cases worked up. I always hit 120% about two months into the quarter and had to twiddle my thumbs the rest of the time or get in trouble for doing too many cases. We were judged on quality based on errors that a special error finding section found in our work. These were spelling and grammar errors, not legal errors, mind you, and I always got 100%. I had nothing better to do than make sure every decision I authored was perfect. That and make a paper clip chain a hundred yards long.
You had to be an idiot to fail to make the grade in that job, but quite a few of the staff attorneys and Board members were barely competent. Every decision on an issue was pretty much the same as every other decision on that issue, so you were just rewriting the same crap over and over again. Service connected death cases really only took an hour to do, not 8 hours. Since the Board almost always denied appeals, you couldn’t go wrong writing up denials all the time. Nobody counted it against you if the Board sent a decision back for edits; it was only the final draft that counted. Sure, doing lots of rewrites slowed you down a little, but if you followed the Board’s rewrite instructions to the letter, you were safe.
The Board members, once staff lawyers like us, hated it whenever we showed any initiative or creativity or looked at cases from an unusual angle, but I was bored enough to try this from time to time and to advocate my point of view with some zeal. The Board members would belittle me and tell me to shut up and write cases up like usual. If I was so smart, why was I working at the BVA? After all, Board members were the folks who had thrived in the soul destroying environment of the BVA, and any sign that you still had a soul was like an unconscious canary in a coal mine.
The mindlessness, boredom, and lack of respect eventually got to anyone who was not completely brain dead, and it was common practice to complain about the system and the Board and what have you. If you didn’t complain, you would go nuts, like my alien abductee office mate, or become devoid of all self esteem. One guy actually had cards printed up with the title United States Attorney and explained that he was technically an attorney who worked for the United States, so self esteem bereft had he become.
I was in my second year at the BVA when my section got a new senior attorney, Wayne, who was also an “Acting Board Member” and next on the list to become a Board member for real. This guy never complained about anything, and if any of the rest of us complained he would say “Nobody’s stopping you from leaving” and point at the door. The BVA was perfect as far as he was concerned, and he was challenged by the requirements of the job and did not understand our discontent at all. To him, discontent was threatening the environment that he had mastered and in which he was succeeding.
After several months of this crap from Wayne, I took him up on his advice and abruptly quit by walking out the door, down the hall and into the section chief’s office to resign. I had been planning to leave the BVA in any event and was waiting for one of Wayne’s invitations to leave so I could screw with him. Since I was the highest rated staff attorney in the entire agency (equivalent to being the smartest moron on the short bus), this caused some consternation, and I was asked by the Chairman, my section chief and a personnel officer why I was leaving when I was doing so well. I told everyone that it was Wayne’s suggestion that inspired me to leave, that his squelching complaints was the last straw. He tried to deny it and to get me to stop saying that my leaving was his fault during my two weeks’ notice period.
I don’t know if Wayne’s career was impacted by my leaving, but I sure hope so.
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3 comments:
I hope so too. He sounds like one of the worst brown-nosers alive.
It's a nice story. When I worked at a VA hospital, it was common practice to make ironic comments about the clueless management. Example: One Memorial Day, we had a "moment of silence." The guy on the intercom said "Let us have a moment of silence for our veterans who have blah blah woof woof," and then got quiet for over a minute. We assumed that *was* the moment of silence, and got quiet ourselves. Then he came back on and said "We will now begin our moment of silence...." I jokingly said to a coworker that the VA was probably the only place on Earth that they couldn't even organize a moment of silence without fucking it up.
The exception was one orderly, a middle-aged woman who worshipped authority and admired what she called "workaholics" to the point of insanity. I once commented on a really badly planned job management had done gravelling a dirt parking lot. During winter thaws and the spring rains, cars churned the sparsely gravelled lot to a hazardous mud pit. And the people who laid it out had mismeasured it in laying out the parking spaces, so there was an unusable gap on one side. It was, I said, "typical VA." Her response: "You ought to say 'Good ol' Va,' because they pay our checks." I should add that, as I later found out, she was a paranoid schizophrenic and became violent and incoherent when she went off her meds.
If you think the Board was bad then, you should work there now. The job is actually more challenging since veterans can now appeal Board decisions to a court. This is thanks in large part to all those pro forma denials you guys used to do. They have gotten away from the minute values for cases but they’re still measuring and micromanaging the sweatshop. They found another efficiency expert who turned out to be some sexual harassing idiot who had served in the military with the then Chairman and Vice Chairman. There’s now an annual production standard that’s been broken down into a weekly quota no matter what kind of cases you’re doing. You’re in deep shit if you fall behind even if you’re out sick or on leave. For those attorneys that work for a Judge (even though the law establishing the Board calls then Members of the Board, they masturbate their egos by now calling themselves Veterans Law Judges) that is stupid, has a psychiatric pathology, or just wants to make your life more miserable, the production quota just adds to the misery. Like your experience in the past, the measure of quality and success at the Board is not how well you know and apply the law but in how many cases you can get signed and out the door. Oh yes, we can’t forget kissing the ass of the Vice Chairman and his kindred turds as the way to get ahead. Complaining is still not well received.
As for your “friend,” he’s still works there. He’s a supervisory Judge and is generally considered to be a decent one. Considering some of the incompetent and malevolent asses that are in charge now, he almost walks on top of the cesspool that’s the Board.
You are pathetic - at least get your facts straight. In your wildest dreams, you were never the "highest rated" attorney at the Board. Ron B. was - long before and long after your brief tenure. Reading your complaints made me LOL - do you remember what a personality disorder is? You have what is described in DSM IV as 301.81 - Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Grandiose feelings of self importance, reacts poorly to criticism, preoccupied with fantasy of how "great" an attorney you were (LOL), unrealistic sense of entitlement, lack of empathy toward others, and obviously envious of those who were successful at the Board.
Those of us who remember you wonder if you ever made it as an attorney, or for that matter, were you ever successful in anything you did in your life?
To conclude: GET OVER IT. It's been at least 15 years since you worked at the Board. What kind of life do you have that you can't let go of a job you held briefly, and did poorly many years ago?
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