I wonder at his immediate reaction if you told him you'd just had it yourself. Would he step back? Make sure his mask was extra snug for no particular reason? As they say in the old country, it's one thing to summon the Devil, it's another to see him coming.
$10 says he doesn’t work in a government building, or if he does, has been told at least once by a supervisor to keep a distance. also I love it when people claim working for the government as if that gives them some magical knowledge. Right now buddy, that likely means you’re more stupid and misinformed than the general population.
I worked in a government building in Texas. That is how they managed it. However, it was when 6ft apart wasnt possible. And yup,very often we are the first ones to hear the bullshit.
In my exprience, "government employees," whether they be federal, state, or local, are some of the dumbest, laziest, most obtuse people you will ever meet. Y'all want to hear some stories? Because I've got 'em...
I was in a FEMA facility in Austin, and it was nearly vacant. The rule was "mask to enter", 6ft apart at all times, and if you were within 6ft of someone, say passing in the hallway, wear a mask. It wasn't exactly either/or, and it wasn't very well enforced. @dixiebandit69: yeah, go ahead. Fire em my way. I'll match you with some "private sector employee" stories as well. It's almost like...well, lazy and dumb people have all sorts of jobs, now don't they?
Just to be clear, the guy said he "Works in a government building" not "Works for the government." He could've been the contract night shift toilet cleaner for all I know, but he was adamant that social distancing was completely unnecessary if you wear a mask. Because he works in a government building.
I'm a government employee. I see a mix in our little government, I keep busy but I don't work 10 hour days and weekends like I did in my last private sector job. A few colleagues work steady and take their jobs seriously and there are a few that I suspect spend a good part of their time surfing the Internet.
My sister is a government employee... she's got one of the best work ethics I've ever seen. So good, in fact, that some of her fellow union members thought it would be a good idea to meet her in the parking garage after work and "discuss different ways" that she could stop making the rest of them look bad because they were getting reprimanded for only doing 20% of the work. Threats were made. My BIL and a few of his friends had a similar "discussion" with the ring leader about how he may not ever want to be seen by my sister again. I'm kind of glad I didn't hear about any of this until it was well over and done with. Anyway, she ended up winning a $150k lawsuit and got moved to another agency where she's still working as hard as ever. Turns out that's a good thing, as she's now dealing with Workman's Comp claims right now, and there's been an exponential increase in cases that need reviewing due to the COVID and nowhere near enough staff to process them. Oh, and she's got MS... so she is beyond careful with COVID protections, and is currently working from home full time until at least next year. Interestingly enough, here in Ontario, if you contract COVID at the workplace, or a workplace breakout happens, the company is on the hook for it... medical, paid time off, etc.
And for those of you interested, here's the FAQ from WSIB around COVID: https://www.wsib.ca/en/faqs-about-claims-and-covid-19 It's interesting to read that and compare it to other regional handling of the pandemic.
I've been a government employee at two different jobs. I like to think I worked hard to fulfill my duties and have a positive effect on others, and that I was pleasant and educational with the public I interacted with. I saw a couple lazy ones at my old job, but they were a serious minority. People are people and their job does not usually define them. All sorts of people in all sorts of jobs.
I think, more than anything, it's the protection that a government job offers shitty employees that is the issue for me. There are some bad ones, and they have full and amazing benefits, pensions, etc, while it's almost impossible to fire them once they get hired... strong unions that protect them, too much, in my opinion. I'm thankful for the health and welfare benefits that my sister has with her job, as it's the best coverage available for her MS, but the job is almost treated like getting tenure at a university... damn near impossible to get fired once you're in. And no motivation to be efficient, as a group.... just a cog in the machine plodding slowly forward.
That is a true point. The lazy lady I immediately thought of had supervisor rank and was only a few years away from being eligible to retire. Some borderline lazy people did all their job duties but were emotionally checked out and did little more, but this lady would straight up not do her work. She had a niche role that involved being the intermediate for certain types of communication so her job metrics were a little harder to quantify compared to my job. I'm sure it would have been a lot of effort to actually fire her.
This and budget process. "Use it or lose it" funding. A process so fucked up it's hard to wrap my head around who thinks it's a good idea. Punishing departments for not spending all of their funding. Stuffing all the spending into the very end of the FY and all of the sudden you see a whole new fleet of cars/equipment/toilet paper/whatever show up that isn't needed and nowhere to store it. The most asinine shit imaginable. The concept of honest and meaningful performance reviews, gap analysis, 9-boxing etc are lost on the public sector. There is no incentive for efficiency, there is no incentive to do better because it's all a never ending stream of OPM.
I absolutely lost my shit in 2018 when I got told to "remind your staff of their use it or lose it leave". These are adults. One of them, an army vet I have the world of respect for, didn't take leave for 6 years. He didn't need to, and it expired. It's not like I need to remind him to handle the rest of his life, he knows how fucking vacation time works.
This is very common even outside of the government area. Big companies have this problem all the time: at a certain level, the senior management loses sight of anything happening in the individual business units. Thus, if their results come in as expected and their business units came in under budget, they clearly did not "need" the money they asked for. I actually feel like my company is fairly well run but we do end-of-budget-cycle spends as well.
I'm surprised by this. There would be a lot of questions in my industry if someone pulled that, such as why is your forecast so far off? What did you miss in your estimates? What is this large expenditure? Who authorized it? In other words, there would be haircuts unless you have a radical explanation for large cost savings like a new technique that you will now teach all other business units, though, I doubt you would survive spending the savings to hide the underrun. In all reality though, an underrun of any magnitude would be caught on the workbench earlier in the year, actuals can't underrun target that long without someone looking for a reforecast and change E/R for end of year in my industry.
https://newrepublic.com/article/158737/consuming-distance Pretty solid read on how the lockdown and virus are impacting economies around the world.
Uh, if your industry rakes every middle manager over the coals for missing his year-long projected numbers by a couple percent, I'd hate to work in your industry. The reality is that a yearly budget forecast is challenging and imprecise, and if an organization (or industry) refuses to acknowledge that, they're just in denial about what's reasonable. Anyway, I think you're taking my point entirely too seriously/specifically. All I'm saying is that most people don't want to underspend their yearly budget, either for practical reasons (we have this money, we should do good things with it), or future budgetary reasons (I don't want my budget cut/I want my budget to look accurate), and it's not uncommon for budgets which get underspent to get trimmed in the future.
I think you are missing what I am saying. Your industry might be different, but generally, you manage yearly budgets against actuals monthly. Underruns/Overruns get reforecast regularly; unless your industry is different, there are quarterly reporting requirements. So, to get to the end of the year with any large underrun being unnoticed would be highly questionable. There is no need to say we are going to hide an underrun to do something good in my business - we build training budgets, swag budgets, party budgets, charitable donation budgets, CAPEX budgets, etc. In the industry I belong to this is all part of P&L management, it isn't being raked over the coals, most of my industry are either ESOPs or there are significant performance-based bonus structures based at least in part on profitability. You want to know where you stand at all times and figure out how to do it better. We don't worry about next year, next year is a new year. When we get there, your budget from last year may grow or shrink depending on planning - nobody has their own kingdom.