I am a salaried employee for the government… Well, my employer is a government contractor, which pretty much translates to my checks coming from Uncle Sam, and the government wants a punch card for your labored hours.  It’s an old convention that likely spawned out of some kind of factory union, and has stayed the course for decades now.  For the same reason that it is illegal to drive with an un-caged bear in Missouri (caged is okay), or illegal to take a lion to the theater in Maryland, or why it’s illegal to serve wine in a tea cup if you live in Kansas; just because.  Sometimes old laws are like bad habits that you just can’t seem to get rid of.

I had an awesome meeting today about time cards (sarcasm).  It was all formalized with handouts and filled with corporate threats of termination, lots of fun.  Keep in mind that the company is only about 50 people strong, not exactly Northop Gramman numbers here.  It opened up a 30 minute bitch session by the entire staff, about being cheated out of unpaid hours.  The whole thing fell on deaf ears, since the guy giving the speech was just the poor sap who was delivering the message.  That message being, “there will be changes in the company.”  It was all too similar to Office Space, management discussing changes, the staff apathetically nodding as they peer around the room for a victim to throw under the bus if things get serious.  The whole idea of time cards is child’s play to start, something you hope for as a high school student who tries to cheat the system by clocking in 1 minute early to earn that extra $0.10 a day.  But I think it really boiled over when everyone was told that they’re unpaid hours and vacation would not be reimbursed in exchange for their overtime.  Basically, compensation time is going away, and overtime is unpaid and unrewarded.  Needless to say that it wasn’t pretty in there…

Let face it, working for the government sucks, it’s boring and tedious.  Most of the people in the company are there for the status quo hours and low expectations to deliver.  It involves 3.5 weeks of paperwork, 0.5 weeks of coding, and 0.5 weeks of meetings.  I know it doesn’t add up right?  Hmm, well subtract the coding… Okay now we’re back on track.  So, as I was saying, there is a lot of “stuff” that Uncle Sam likes to see; very little of it actually being a product.  The truly initiated, like myself and others there, have business ventures outside of those 4 walls to help keep our skills up and our sanity in check.  We don’t fight to stay here because we love our jobs, we do it because the hours are fair and the money is very competitive (for a 40hr week).  Those factors are what let us go home and kiss our kids goodnight at the end of the day.  Take either of those two perks away and all you have is emptiness, despair, and borderline depression.  We are all professionals here, and that is why people still find ways to muster up some pride in an otherwise tasteless industry.  When corporate culture starts to take over, it is a sure sign of the first mass exodus.  It is hard to say if I’ll get swept up in the same storm.

The truly sad part of all of this is that my employer is following the government strategy guide to success.  Ultimately, the owner is positioned to make a lot of money for himself, but in the process will destroy the culture that made it a decent place to work for.  It is the growing pains, like the ugly phase that we go through as children.  Right now the company has bad hair and over-sized teeth, and it’s head is a little too big for it’s body.  Everyone is feeling very awkward and I’ve reached a point were I don’t even know the names of some people in the company.  Honestly, I can’t say that I care to all that much.  It’s not that we are so big that I can’t manage them, it’s that we are acting so big and it bothers my sense of morals.  It keeps me up, late at night, to think of how my tax dollars are spent.  Sitting at 50% overhead employees and growing, it is hard to imagine that we were once a well oiled machine that would focus on building products, not billing contracts.  In the end, the company will probably secure a contract that is too big for them and sell out to a larger company that has the resources to take it off their hands.  It is how this business works; get noticed, get big contracts, get bought.  I doubt that I would see a penny of that, but I’m still happy for the owner.  I just wish they understood (or cared) how much they’ve hurt their reputation amongst the staff, and how they’ve all but destroyed a culture that has been in place for over a decade of existence.