All US federal government employees will have to share what they’ve been working on in the last week or face dismissal, Elon Musk said Saturday. Musk said that employees will be receiving an email "shortly" requesting to "understand what they got done last week". A lack of response, Musk said, "will be taken as a resignation."
What a pity there was no Elon Musk around when I did a six-month-contract with a government department in Canberra - which shall remain unnamed to protect the living dead! - which, while supposed to detect fraud, was euphemistically called the Fraud AWARENESS Unit.
The only frauds that I was aware of were the half-a-dozen highly paid public servants who never worked but instead, in all earnesty, discussed the colour and flavour of the donuts one of them would be sent out to buy for the next coffee break. Despite them trying very hard, this didn't quite fill the entire day, and so they also evolved their own parlour game of inventing collective nouns which lasted for the rest of the day.
My own suggestion of 'a sinecure of public servants' didn't pass muster as its etymological Latin roots of 'sine cura' (‘without care') didn't mention what their daily routines were totally devoid of, namely work, although the director, no less, of the unit had written his PhD thesis on the economies in the Middle East entirely in company time, as it were. He had never been to the Middle East, and so when he became aware that I had actually lived and worked there, he in all seriousness asked me to proof-read his thesis, again in company time. Naturally, I declined.
Despite their long training in doing absolutely nothing and doing so with absolute dedication, there was only so much time they could waste discussing the colour and flavour of the donuts however frequent the coffee breaks, and they were even getting close to running out of new collective nouns, when each week the Government Gazette arrived.
This driest-of-dry publication advertised all the vacant positions in the public service which were perused by all public servants not so much for the nature of the job or the required qualifications but the advertised pay grade. A position with a pay grade above their own was immediately applied for and thus a sense of work and achievement was restored.
What a pity we have no Elon Musk to oversee our public service! He could've turned Canberra into a ghost town by the end of this week!
