I’m sure there are people who are good at getting things done in government. I am not one of them.
For me, dealing with bureaucracy is frustrating in the extreme. I have what I need to survive here. On the other hand, I believe modern men are only as good as their tools. The society with the best tools always dominates. I wish my tools were better sometimes.
Let me expound on this a little bit – I offered to bring my own weapons to this war. I guess that was thinking way too far outside the box. My pistol and rifle are collecting dust at home. Things like that are just not done, apparently. So I use the rifle issued and the pistol issued, even though they could have gone to someone else and I could have brought and carried my own arguably better equipment, saving the US Army some money while improving my comfort level in the event I happened to need to defend myself or others from an enemy.
I wanted to have my Bushmaster Varminter with me in this war. It’s scoped, uses the same ammo as the M16A2 I actually carry, and is a better weapon. It is missing the three round burst mode of the M16A2. I’ll never use the three round burst mode, so that’s irrelevant. The pistol I wanted to bring, a Glock 23, is a much better pistol than the one I’m issued. It’s a .40, which has more stopping power than the Army’s official 9mm Beretta. I would even have brought Geneva convention approved full metal jacket ammo.
Let’s ignore the bureaucratic machine that keeps me from bringing my own higher than standard quality personal weapons to the battlefield since I’ll probably never fire a shot in country. Instead, let’s take a look at how the bureaucratic apparatus and mindset negatively affect my ability to perform at peak levels doing what I do best – enhancing binary data.
What could I use to do my job better, besides a cloned version of myself to double my productivity and allow for a 24-hour, 7 day a week shift? A better computer. I’m doing high end computing, editing graphics, moving files from point A to point B and coordinating the flow of information on a fairly large web site. I’m doing it with an entry level personal computer. I had to cannibalize RAM to achieve even the minimum acceptable performance. In fact, the computer I use didn’t work when it came into my hands. I had to take parts out of two other computers and build my own working system in order to perform my current job. I’ve asked several people what it would take to get a better computer – one designed for doing what I do – and the answers are never what I consider reasonable. Write a letter justifying why you need it seems to be the first step. OK, I can do that. But then figuring out where to turn it in and how long it will actually take to get the system discourages me. I don’t have any expertise dealing with GSA approved vendors. I need the help of a specialist. It’s not worth the time involved to find one. Especially after hearing that an American flag ordered by the unit we replaced took 9 months to actually work its way through the system. I’ll be gone in 9 months so why bother?
What else could I use that would enhance my job? The right software. A phone that has voicemail. How about a fat data pipe? I could do my job 500% more efficiently using my own personal equipment sitting in my own office back in my house in rural Georgia than I can here in Baghdad on my cheapo cobbled together PC on a flaky 5KBps at full steam connection.
It could be worse. It could be much worse. But it could also be better. One day maybe I’ll master form filing and so on, but the gleam in my eye will have gone out by then, and I won’t be as much use to people. Innovation doesn’t happen in a bureaucratically top heavy environment. It gets stifled and the best you can ever expect is mediocrity. I wish there were more hours in a day. I wish I had four hands instead of two. I wish I knew a good supply guy who could just make stuff appear. I’ve heard they exist…
I better go check if my files have uploaded yet.