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Perhaps
it’s just me and maybe I’m weird or something (don’t answer this) but it puzzles
me how some people can have a job where they do nothing all day long. This would
sincerely drive me mad. I like to work. I enjoy working and I don’t know what
I would do if I didn’t have to work. However this does not seem to be the normal
for some folks.
Several years ago I had a chance to visit with a friend
of mine from my old Army days in Korea. We had a nice chat, went to dinner and
back to his house for coffee. During the conversation he told me that he only
had ‘about seven more years to hide out before he could retire.’ My first thought
was that he was an outlaw and was wanted for some terrible crime. But, nope that
wasn’t the case…..he had a job as a maintenance service man for a number of government
buildings and was on call for any problems that might crop up from time to time.
He told me that since he had so many building to look after no one ever knew where
he was at any given time, so he just stayed home and worked on his hobbies until
he go a call to go and repair something. I asked him why he didn’t go to various
building and look for things that needed fixing before someone called him and
you would have thought I asked him something like… ‘What kind of gasoline would
you use on yourself if you wanted to set yourself on fire?’
“Why would
I want to do that?” he asked me. I didn’t try to explain it; I just finished my
coffee and headed out to the hotel.
A couple of weeks ago, I pulled into
a local McDonalds for a cup of coffee. I asked the lady at the drive in window
how things were going. She told me…. ‘Terrible, I haven’t stopped since I got
here…the cars just keep coming….’ I noticed the next time I passed through this
same location, she wasn’t there any longer. To her, the fact that … ‘cars just
kept coming’ was a bad thing. Obviously this young lady did not own the store
or she would have appreciated the fact that business was good for that morning.
In her mind a lot of business was a bad thing, not a good thing. In today’s economy
anyone having ‘lots of business’ is certainly a good problem to have.
This past week we saw the new employment figures for last month. It seems most
of the new jobs created were governmental jobs as opposed to private sector positions.
In my mind this is not a good thing for this country as more government jobs do
not increase the economy. Increasing the size of government reduces the amount
of taxpayers contributing to our overall tax base. Government agencies are non
profit entities.
All of our governmental agencies are screaming due to
reduced tax revenues and a general economic malaise. I think one suggestion might
be to examine what jobs are actually necessary and or which ones could be combined
or eliminated altogether.
For example, all of us are concerned over the
current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. There was a report in our paper the other
day about a governmental agency that monitors ‘tar balls’ on the beaches. Now
the spill has put these folks into overdrive, but my question is what have they
done until now? They interviewed one governmental employee who said he has monitored
at ‘least 55 miles of beach front for the past 15 years’ and usually reported
3-4 tar ball sightings a year, mostly the size of small pebbles.
My question
is surely this is not all this guy does all day long, month after month. Do we
pay folks to patrol so many miles of coastline to look for tar balls year after
year? I mean how long can this take in any one given day? What does this guy do
the rest of the time? Does he sit in some governmental office space and wait for
the phone to ring when a beachcomber sees some tar washing up on his 55 mile patrol
area? Has he really been doing this full time for 15 years? Has he got a truck
with red lights and siren so he can race to the ‘tar ball’ scene? I’m really curious
to find out what kind of a deal this is all about.
I’m sure the people
along the Gulf coast will not lack for work until this disaster has passed. I
just question how efficient and productive their work has been up until now.
©
Peary Perry
Letters From North
America -
June 9, 2010 column
Syndicated weekly in 80 newspapers
Comments go to pperry@austin.rr.com |
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