Quote of the week

• A mayor in my district tried to get supplies for his constituents, who were hit directly by the hurricane. He called for help and was put on hold for 45 minutes. Eventually, a bureaucrat promised to write a memo to his supervisor...
--Bobby Jindal

Yup. Sounds like a bureaucracy.
You see, bureaucrats don't solve problems and fix them.
They see a problem, hold committee meetings, devise a plan, write it up, and then implement it.

Now, to get government help, you do paperwork.

The mayor trying to get help was only one of thousands of mayors...and one secretary to screen...remember, unlike businesses, you can't have people part time to call in during the busy season.....to get another secretary, you have to advertise the post, interview, then have a committee inspect them...and then you can hire them...when the paperwork is done...

In other words, you can't just call in your cousin's wife to help for a couple weeks, like in a private business...

So the overworked secretary gets the call, and does a memo...which goes to HER chief...and is placed in a pile...he judges which need to be done, and then delegates it to someone else...and in three days, you may or may not get your stuff...(and every step is documented on another piece of paper).

Again, no "on call" people to help with the rush...

Yes, maybe you could "borrow" from another government department, but that means you have to retrain them according to regulations...and you have to check all their papers are in order...and you have to do every step required, or three months later you, the lowly bureaucrat, will be punished for not having the proper paperwork...

So volunteer firemen were required to take a "sexual harassment" course before going into the hurricane area under FEMA...

When I was in the Indian health service, it took three months to change jobs: And all my papers were on file...

In one of our new clinics which opened in 2004, they had room for three new doctors. When we moved to the Philippines in Feb 2005, they had just gotten the first doctor hired...mainly because of paper work problems, since there were several excellent local docs and one or two gov't docs who wanted to work there...

In other words: It's not FEMA...it's the nature of the beast...i.e. bureaucracy.

So a lot of the complaints ignore this fact of life....and what is worse, politicize the complaints about a problem that is inherant in bureaucracy itself...