More comedy video from James Klusaritz here.@jamesleonidas2 #Working #Jobfirstday #Comedysketch ♬ original sound - James Klusaritz
April 22, 2025
Do you picture the desk jobs of others like this?
I think this is, essentially, how Elon Musk pictures 90% of the federal workforce:
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Well, he did learn that was 90% of Twitter, so it's a reasonable assumption, particularly in the brave new world of remote work.
I worked for a defense contractor many years ago, and there was a DoD guy whose job was to maintain the printers and distribute the results. Over the years, the printers needed less and less maintenance, so by the time I was there his job consisted of an hour or so in the morning, then either reading the paper or sleeping with his head back. Office door open the whole time.
That’s Wally from Dilbert
"I think this is, essentially, how Elon Musk pictures 90% of the federal workforce" Should be easy to prove him wrong.
It is kinda funny when management is so loose and disorganized that they don't notice these things.
Humorous but extremely unrealistic. In this age of computers, everyone is on "The net" and being tracked. Most likely, this guy would have a timesheet and have to put down what projects he worked on and have it approved by his boss. That's how most big corporations work with "desk jobs". And the Government agencies (local, state, federal)
But there seems to be a real desire among retirees and private sector workers who don't have desk jobs to believe everyone is goofing off except them.
The real "goof-offs" are in academia and associated NGOs. Not only do these people not work 12 months a year, nobody is really tracking what they're doing. If they show up at the scheduled meetings, answer emails, and appear online, people think they're doing some sort of "Work". They don't really produce a product. What exactly are all the College Administrators doing? No one knows.
Yep,
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/02/25/gettyimages-564722771_custom-38fcb6d94dc7ddc3c532f80a912d0d2e64397bf9-s1200.jpg
https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/1e80923acf00a8af4619ce7d7c277efb
Any number of government employees aren't merely lazy, but obviously malingering or malcontent. They thought they were protected, and against a standard Republican president they would be right. By removing malcontents, President Trump doesn't merely save on payouts to them, he removes an obstruction to business both private and public. Lawfare teams, DEI officers, CIA embeds, foreign spies: all can be removed for advantages.
Unproductive Personhood. What solution would liberals offer to relieve these "burdens" of State?
Actually it would be better if more of them were like this. The things they actually do are harmful to the rest of the country.
We could shut down the federal government and most people in the country would not notice a difference until they got to keep more of their paychecks.
Then the economy would start delivering more wealth to the middle working class. The true purpose of our bureaucracy is to limit the wealth of the people who work and keep capital cheap for the oligarchs.
To be fair, I picture two kinds of government office workers. One of them is this guy. The other is someone struggling with the work of three people, because government regulations and union contracts prohibit this guy from taking on any of that workload.
I actually do know a person who is employed by a state government and almost literally does nothing. A meeting or so a week. Over $100k/year.
I'm a retired defense contractor who worked with and for government employees for decades. In my experience, that 90% estimate is too low. Yes, there were some good ones, but I can count the really excellent ones on one hand and have multiple fingers left over.
Hiring is easy. Firing is hard.
"I think this is, essentially, how Elon Musk pictures 90% of the federal workforce"
I think that's how > 50% of the US population sees 90% of teh Federal workforce.
And 90% of the rest are working to screw us over
I have a friend who is a civil engineer for Caltrans. They had a project that got funded but lacked some other approval, so he was moved to a position and was waiting for work to be assigned. He waited for weeks. He asked if they needed any other stuff done - no just wait. Then he started watched netflix at work. Because for 9 months he had nothing to do.
And he was trying to work. I have seen this happen in the private sector where a hotel head chef got a contract but the hotel was not finished, so for one year he was paid to not work.
One day my young daughter asked me if my neighbor had a job. He worked for the EPA and always seemed to be home. This was before remote work.
Howard said,
"...so by the time I was there his job consisted of an hour or so in the morning, then either reading the paper or sleeping with his head back. Office door open the whole time."
I worked for that guy, he was also an alcoholic. Bored at work? Take up drinking, it makes life easier!
They exist in regular old industry, too. Usually they are the guys who were there when the facilities were installed, who know how that big old pipe runs through the walls from the basement to the attic, and how to avoid having it flood the office with seawge when the safety valves get their annual safety inspections. Easier to keep them on for that annual event than to train someone else or have the office flooded. When they retire the smart 10% of the office quits because they don't like having their desks flooded with sewage. His name was Dave at Motorola MOS-13 in Austin. He would talk your ear off if you didn't walk away and get back to work.
What we need is a bounty system for government employees to report the indolence of their coworkers.
Too mean? It's called qui tam action when applied to people in the dreaded private sector.
I worked 18 months at large professional services firm that kept its white-collar workers in enormous bullpens without partitions between desks. Think vast space filled with rows of conjoined desktops, seated employees back-to-back and facing one another, row after row after row. Zero privacy; spies, tattletales, voracious gossipers and backstabbers everywhere. Frequent mandatory overtime extended into all-nighters. Partners and Associated Partners pacing the central aisle, watching the serfs toil away. There were several employees assigned to bullpen who prided themselves in being there without actually performing much work, dillydallying and socializing which was balanced out by genuine nutcases who prided themselves on their enormous output and 80-hour workweeks.
Knew within first day I'd made a terrible choice to join this company as a midlevel professional; took me 18 months to extricate myself. Have battle scars to show for it.
I have firsthand knowledge of several government employees at federal, state, and local levels. As observed by others, some are very hard-working AND hampered in their work by at least seemingly needless regulation (Chesterton's Fence alert, though). Some do nothing or next to nothing because their jobs give them nothing or next to nothing to do (I held one of those government jobs in college). (I believe that this category exists because I was one of them, wanting to be useful because most people do seem to want to be useful, but unable to discern any path to utility - just a paycheck. From there, inertia takes over.) Some do nothing because they want to do nothing, and try to hide that fact.
If we could eliminate the positions of the third group, revamp the positions of the second group to make them actually useful if possible, or eliminate those positions if not, and get truly (on-balance) needless regulation out of the way of the first group, wouldn't that be a good outcome, I muse. And then I talk with my oldest, who admits that he does see the government as a works program, at least in part, and I heave a sigh.
One of the things missed by this video was handing stuff I had no desire to work on to the new guy.
That's pretty funny. It reminde me of the movie, Office Space.
COVID and work from home launched an arms race. Employers got keyboard stroke counters, keyloggers, and other software to see if employees actually are working. The workers got mouse jigglers and other software to make the bosses think that they were. So now the bosses have mouse mover detectors and similar programs. Certainly, a few employees' whole job must just be to check if other employees are using mouse jigglers. Maybe an honest admission that nobody was doing any work worth doing would smooth things over.
People who think all Govt employees are like this should sit quietly in a corner of a National Weather Service office as severe weather is occurring, or as a hurricane is approaching land.
there is evidence how Musk pictures the Federal work force is accurate. That's why the left wants him dead...
MadisonMan said...
People who think all Govt employees are like this should sit quietly in a corner of a National Weather Service office as severe weather is occurring, or as a hurricane is approaching land.
Sure, when things get busy it gets harder to hide that you are not productive. Your argument is a bit of a strawman. There are government employees in every organization that are mouth breathers. Not all government employees are mouth breathers. I think almost all of us can get behind those two facts. The question is, what percentage of employees in a government organization are mouth breathers? I am sure some organizations have a much, much higher percentage than others.
People who think all Govt employees are like this...
I must've missed the part where somebody said all government employees are like this.
Remember when they were told to list 5 things they did the previous week and they all had unhinged panic attacks?
With great sadness I've concluded that Elon Musk and the teenage (data) virgins recruited for DOGE would have all been fired as regular federal interns. ANY federal employee hired to manage and maintain personnel databases would have minimal knowledge of the record corruption, missing values, errors, and workaround processes required with every legacy system. These are ELEMENTARY database facts in the real world.
Yet, naive Musk listened to his virgins and then spouted off about phantom federal employees (never mind that the vetting process is 3x harder than getting a passport), and imagined there were a zillion immortal social security recipients.
Musk's goal of finding $2T in waste, fraud, and abuse became $1T and now only $150B. He's delivered on 7.5% of his fantasy. It's time for Musk to return to his office instead of phoning in his management as a remote worker (at best), and maybe he can reverse Tesla's 50% loss of value since December.
Expectations versus reality.
Enigma said..."With great sadness I've concluded..."
I think a lot of what you said is correct. As soon as I heard some of the stories of alleged fraud or incompetence, I immediately recognized them as clever or expedient workarounds for real-world scenarios that were not anticipated when a tech system was first put in place and, for any number of reasons, "fixing" the system would be infeasible.
At the start of my technical career, I was almost offended by the existence of such tech hacks and workarounds, but as I took on more managerial responsibilities, I started to understand how difficult it can be to deal with a hundred things that must be fixed when you only have the resources to fix a dozen of them. You find ways. Any large private sector company that has been in business for two decades or more will have its share of these, no matter how well run it is. Unfortunately, there are a lot of structural reasons why it is 100x worse in government. Even when the desire is there, it is a very hard problem to solve. Worse, you usually need to spend much, much more in the short term to fix the problem for the long term.
On the one hand, I've known a few diligent, professional hard working government employees. On the other hand, I have forty years of experience with motor vehicle bureaus in various states, I have visited the tax offices of several towns in person, and I personally know the guy who runs the maintenance garage at my local public works department.
"The question is, what percentage of employees in a government organization are mouth breathers?"
You missed the point.
What percentage of government organizations even necessary?
True storey. The mayor of a large Illinois city called a meeting of all eight city engineers. Nine engineers showed up. "Who are you?" . "I'm Bill soandso the airport engineer." "We didn't even know we had an airport engineer. How long have you been working for the city?" "Eight years." "How come you've never come to asny of the other meetings?" Well. The agendas never mentioned the airport so I thought I was always doing a good job ."
He was let go the next day.
MadisonMan said...
People who think all Govt employees are like this should sit quietly in a corner of a National Weather Service office as severe weather is occurring, or as a hurricane is approaching land.
So in the National Weather Service maybe 2% of the time they actually get some work done, and the rest of the time they fuck off?
This, MadisonMan, is your defense of Federal "workers"?
That is what most of America think when they envision government workers. They are either drones, trying to not get caught being useless, or busybodies, ideologically inclined to try to trample people's rights in the name of their favorite delusion.
Tim said...
"That is what most of America think when they envision government workers."
I think of the Department of Motor Vehicles only much, much bigger.
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