Last Friday night, while heading to Utah to go boating, we passed a car on the freeway that made me pause. It was 7:21 PM on a Friday night, and a White Dodge Caravan license NV EX 48654 was driving along the freeway. The driver, a male of significantly high melanin content in his early fifties, was driving at an excessive rate of speed. I wondered what official business in which he might be engaged at that hour, given that these vehicles are conspicuously marked “for official use only”. I know it is such a pain for me to obtain permission to use a motorpool vehicle when transporting hazardous chemicals that I frequently throw them in my own car and take the risk to avoid the hassle.
I doubt very much that this person was on official business. I think, like so many others in government, he was using a government vehicle on personal time for personal reasons. Of course I can’t prove it, but what government agency has business on a Friday evening? My own department came down on us lately for doing work outside normal business hours because the liability insurance only covers us during our regularly scheduled work day. Consequently, my boss makes sure we are gone when it’s time to go home unless we obtain express prior written consent to do something outside those hours due to time or something similar.
This incident made me reflect on what I do during my day. Years ago, a woman I sort of liked but who really liked me angrily called me after I ignored a series of text messages from her. When I answered, I told her that the state pays me to work at work, not to talk to her, and she reluctantly ceded the issue. Frequently I use personal items for work like my car, and I used to donate time to get work done when there was work to do, but with extra scrutiny and tighter budgets, I make sure that I do what I am supposed to and no more. Even on days when there is little to actually do because we have no students around, they insist that we are at or near our desks all day, and I had one “desk audit” a week or so back, just to make sure I wasn’t skipping out early.
We are stewards in government of tax money. I try very hard to spend it wisely. Some people think it constitutes a way to save or advance themselves. When I heard about the people in Detroit complaining about their pensions being cut, I heard claims that “if we had known this, we would have taken better paying jobs and saved on our own.” Hogwash. If you were a saver, you would save regardless of your wage; I am not relying on the government to pay me in perpetuity. They took these jobs because they wanted a safety net, possibly because nobody else would pay them to use company stuff to do personal work.
Although not unique to government, these miscreants aggregate there. One of my students told me a sad story of corruption in the private sector of a contractor he had who stole things from the Rampart casino to do work at a private resident and then charged the resident. This person’s deeds have caught up with him, and so now he cant get a job, but if he were in government, it would be very difficult if not impossible to fire him, depending on his melanin and estrogen content. This next week, I am transporting microscopes to different locations, and I am careful to make sure the paperwork is in so that people don’t think I’m taking them for personal use. They don’t belong to me. They belong to you.
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