My Experience Working for the Federal Government

And why you can't treat humans as ones and zeros

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: six years spent at the United States Coast Guard.

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Course 1

The Main: Pork Fat

I stood in my friend’s cubicle, among a row of other cubicles, one of many cell block stems that hung off a hundred-yard spine running the length of our nondescript, one-story office building. In front of me, on the screen of his federal work computer, was a Microsoft Excel sheet. More rows and cells, because everything in an office takes inspiration from prison.

Like a contraband Penthouse pulled out from under his mattress, he spread the sheet wide and showed me the illicit material: a table that laid out his life for the next three decades, complete with promotions and scheduled yearly raises from now until his retirement at age 65. As long as he stayed right here, in this spot, all of this would eventually come true. Every step change, every cost of living raise, every holiday, every Monday, every goal, every dream– an entire life story already scripted, condensed into a few dozen rows and columns.

For him, it was freedom. For me, I felt sentenced to life. It was my Andy Dufresne moment and I was willing to crawl through a tunnel of shit to get out.

When I first started in the federal workforce six years before, I was young and newly married and– I’ll be honest– flat broke. After my nomadic post-college years, I spent an aimless period cleaning and detailing boats and barbacking at a three-story Irish pub, both body-breaking jobs in different seasons of the year. Cigarettes and alcohol were necessary companions. For me, it just wasn’t sustainable. Luckily, I had a beat-up bachelor’s degree somewhere in my back pocket, and that, along with a recommendation from a friend, was good enough to get me hired on a contract for the Department of Defense. It also came with a secret-level clearance, which is kind of like a Disney Fastpass into a lifetime of federal work.

The year was 2012, and the contract had something to do with digitizing equipment manuals for the Army. Everything until that point had just been paper manuals, so if a field manual was destroyed or damaged, you’d have to print out an entirely new manual and mail it to them. I think so, anyway. Either way, our job was to convert the contents of those manuals into searchable text for database usage (i.e. XML); my job in particular was to just edit and identify any errors or updates within the text. I came into the job with all the gusto of a person with a new lease on life– I was going to work my heart out from 9 to 5 and show how valuable I was as an employee.

I did my best, but it was a bit hard to stay inspired when all the managers sat around and bullshitted in their corner offices all day. The culture disintegrated quickly. On numerous occasions, coworkers ran up and down the cubicle rows engaging in Nerf gun battles; meanwhile, I was attempting to QA the information on an M1 Abrams radar system. Nobody cared. It was a disorienting experience. I had just come from a manual labor job where I put in a hard eight hours of physical work every day, and now I was here, where nothing seemed to get done and nobody cared because the paycheck still showed up anyway. Unsurprisingly, that contract was cut six months after I started. People who had moved cross country and leased new apartments months earlier were suddenly out of a job.

Technically, that first job wasn’t a government job. It was a contracting job in support of the federal government. But that was enough to get my foot in the door of the federal government; soon after I landed at the United States Coast Guard. It was another entry-level type contractor role, but the office was a mix of federal government employees (standard GS and retired military), as well as contractors.

My entry level job at the Coast Guard was just printing out hard copies of thousand-page manuals and sending them via FedEx to bases around the U.S., along with a CD with PDFs. There was no searchable database for this information or online repository for manuals that cross-referenced with parts repositories. The division in which I worked was responsible for bringing all these manuals into the 21st century, as the Department of Homeland Security was woefully behind in this area.

Within my first month on the job, there was a government shutdown that lasted two and half weeks; the entire office was empty except for a dozen contractors who still had to work with little guidance or direction. It was weird. Mostly we did nothing, but we were supposed to be doing something. During these shutdowns (there were three while I worked there), many federal employees bemoaned the pause in pay even though every single one of them knew they’d all get full back pay for that time off. It was easy to tell which employees didn’t have a cent of savings to their name. In the end, these shutdowns were essentially extended vacations where nobody in the government worked, they all got paid a month later, and somehow, the world still functioned. It kind of spoke volumes.

Each day I’d go into work in a nondescript building that sat off base in Curtis Bay, Maryland. My tasks were menial but I worked hard to get them done. Government employees get a bad rap, some of them deservedly so, but my team (both federal and contracted) worked hard. Within a year, I was promoted to an opening on a new team, manually coding technical manuals into XML. It was also tedious and monotonous, but I could listen to podcasts all day, which helped pass the time.

Nevertheless, the whole thing was a bit Severance-like. We were inputting all this information into an archaic markup language that was then converted to PDF that may or may not ever be used by anyone, ever. A lot of the XML was repetitive, so I had to create command line scripts to automate some things, since we had no GUI of any kind. We were also doing technical editing at the same time. We were good at it, but labored over the dumbest style points in the manuals, convincing ourselves these were hills to die on. We’d pick apart tiny errors and kick them back to subject matter experts who rolled their eyes at us, knowing that none of this mattered. Because eventually, the engineers on the ships would just fix it however they wanted since they’d been doing it for years already. Those Oxford commas in the equipment lists were destined to die in the dark bowels of a cutter (what the Coast Guard calls a ship); their lives served no purpose whatsoever.

The USCGC Eagle was a pretty sweet ship to take from the Nazis

For the first couple years, everything seemed like a normal job. It was a generally quiet office with people showing up and leaving at their scheduled times. Then, like someone stepping from a bright summer day into a dark cellar, your eyes start to adjust and the shadows come to life.

I have a theory that directionless work destroys souls in the weirdest of ways. We were in a place that looked normal and seemed normal, all tidy rows of cubicles and computers and scheduled staff meetings. But the work was so mundane, our existence so gray, that there always seemed to be a stew of aberrance simmering below the surface, an underlying current of behavioral norms trying to break free.

There was my team lead who drank two dozen cans of Diet Coke in a single day, ate a pound of straight lunchmeat for lunch, and got three hours of sleep each night. The equipment manager who had eight phones on his desk for Pokémon Go, literally trying to catch them all. Another team lead who was fired after he got caught having sex with his twenty-something-year-old subordinate behind Target during the workday (turns out, the chat logs aren’t the best way to keep an affair hidden). Your co-worker who reveals he got a blow job from the quiet goth girl, while at his cubicle, while on the clock, while someone almost walked down his aisle. And yet another team lead who hooked up with the same goth girl, off the clock, while his wife was pregnant. There was also the co-worker that got caught masturbating in the bathroom stall, for which he was reprimanded but not fired.

Then there was the funniest guy in the office, with the most magnetic personality, who went to the liquor store every day at lunch. He came in one Monday morning and joked about how he and his friends were in a car crash, and while at the hospital a nurse gave him a pamphlet on alcoholism because he seemed stone sober while blowing a .35 BAC. He was a really good guy, just charming through and through. He was also good at hiding things and eventually the disease got the best of him, dying at 33 years of age.

There were the times I was interrupted by the loud snoring in the cubicle next to me, the sloth of a man who lumbered from one chair to another and always took off his pants the whole way before sitting in the bathroom stall. Most of the time he was sleeping. Except for when he shit his pants in the same cubicle and had to get his wife to pick him up.

I can’t forget about Roman, who would come by my cubicle and stay for an uninvited half-hour conversation at any given moment, multiple times throughout the day. An old-timer in his sixties who was essentially unfireable, he just did… whatever, admitting that he was just riding it out until he could collect full Social Security at 70 years old. Several times a day he would go out to the parking lot and smoke cigars in his car. The rest of the time was spent at other people’s cubicles. He was retired, but not.

Here’s one story that was relayed to me, that I’ll never forget: a GS-15 (the highest step in the government scale) who worked in the section next to me was an avid RV-er who loved to take long road trips. There was a part for a cutter that needed to be delivered out to a base in Washington state. Instead of sending it via UPS or FedEx, he convinced his branch chief to let him take it out there himself with his RV, to kill two birds with one stone. And that’s how he ended up taking a cross-country road trip on the taxpayer’s dime, while also getting paid the federal mileage rate for the whole damn thing. Work smarter, not harder.

There were engineers who did real work, but I sensed even their frustration at times. The award of federal contracts is such a mess that contracts would just keep going to ship builders whose quality control was abysmal. Case in point: Louisiana-based Bollinger Shipyards settled a lawsuit with the United States alleging the shipbuilder lied about the seaworthiness of several aging Coast Guard vessels it was contracted to lengthen to extend their lifespan. Basically, it just chopped the cutters in half, then tried to add a middle piece and weld them back together, like a Frankensteinian warship. Predictably, the hulls began buckling and eventually, the $65 million ships were scrapped and used as target practice for the U.S. Navy somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. Bollinger remains the primary ship builder of Fast Response Cutters for the United States Coast Guard.

Those are just a handful of the stories I remember, of which there are a great many more. If you live anywhere near the belly of the beast in Washington, D.C., you’ve surely heard plenty of them. I once had a friend who worked for Social Security, who literally had an Xbox stored under his desk. Each day, he’d go into work, shut his office door, and play Call of Duty for eight hours.

None of these things would be possible without the bloat, the bureaucracy at its best.

Because government offices, when left unchecked, never get smaller. They just continue to grow, no matter if the work fluctuates or the mission demands it. When a certain section or department is awarded a federal budget, whoever runs that department wants to know they’ll always be funded. Initially, the price is right and the employees are paid and everyone works as everyone should. Each year, they’re given a budget for everything in the department, which covers employee pay, office supplies, etc. If they don’t use this money, it’s appropriated somewhere else and they lose it. Of course, no manager wants to give up any money allocated to them in their budget, so they make damn sure it’s spent somewhere. If a surplus exists and it’s the end of a fiscal year, the spending becomes comically wild.

Oftentimes, this takes the form of upgrading the office. For example, none of us needed new office chairs, but as the fiscal year came to a close we were encouraged to ask for Herman Miller Aeron chairs at $1500 apiece. New computer monitors, pens, footrests– anything to use up the extra money in the budget. This wasn’t just our office or department; this is what every office in the federal government does.

This mindset is the same one used to retain employees. You never know when you’ll need more employees, so you just justify having the ones you have and asking for more money next year. It doesn’t matter if they’re doing any work, it matters that you don’t lose your budget.

Which is why the bloat continues, on and on.

In this scenario, everyone’s job is relatively secure. Really, almost bulletproof. Once you’re in, especially a branch like the DoD or SSA or Homeland Security, it’s almost impossible to get fired or for your position to be eliminated. In this type of environment, with no incentive to perform or contribute, things slow down. Work is done, but only by a few people. Layers of bureaucratic red tape pile up. Systems get antiquated.

At some point, I realized that working in the federal government means your skillset will wither and die. In many cases, anything you do inside a public office is the absolute base level of anything done in the private sector, because the government systems are three decades behind everything else. For example, I was helping build database files and other repositories for our technical manuals, but there were no tools at our disposal to do so. No programs, no modernizations, nothing. So we had people (including myself), learning and writing and employing MS-DOS command scripts, a skill that is useful to literally nobody but legacy system admins. This was 2019.

This is why nobody was surprised when the Chinese hacked into the Office of Personnel Management and swiped the entire database of personally identifiable information, including my own Social Security number and address and date of birth and personnel file. Nobody cares about this stuff until Elon’s team of muskrats starts poking around.

At that time, I was going back to school, taking night classes for web development, learning HTML and CSS and Javascript. I was actually pretty good at it, but realized I had no chance of using any of that in my current position. If you learn a useful skill, especially one involving technology, you can almost guarantee it’ll go to waste within a federal office unless you’re supporting national security within a three-letter agency.

You can kind of see my path through this, and why I wanted to get out. I don’t judge the federal workers who want to take care of their families with a steady job for the next three decades, who come in and do their work and leave, day after day, year after year. There’s actually something admirable about that, even. But me? I need to build and create and move forward. I want to take some risks and see what happens. If I see a better way to do something, I want to know that someone will listen to me and see the value in my contributions. I don’t want my work to be hamstrung across six levels of management and months of meetings. The paycheck isn’t my end goal. A government office is the opposite of all of those things. The golden handcuffs exist for a reason– they’re the tradeoff for sacrificing all of that.

That’s not to say I wasn’t grateful for my job within the Coast Guard. It played an important part in my life, allowing me to get my feet under me after a decade of aimless wandering. The golden handcuffs were shiny and secure for a time, allowing me to collect a steady paycheck, start a 401k, and save up for a down payment for a house. Also, most people I worked with were really great coworkers. We went to Orioles games, happy hours, had fantasy football leagues, played pick-up basketball, recapped Game of Thrones, and shared our lives together. All my managers were easygoing and supportive and really made it the best place it could be. Plenty of my coworkers worked hard and did the job they were asked to do, day in and day out.

In the appropriate capacity, federal workers are necessary– we do have a country to run, after all. But I can say that I’ve seen firsthand the amount of waste that goes on. Plenty can be cut and everyone knows this to be true. It’s why there aren’t riots in the streets right now. It’s hard for the public to have sympathy for federal workers going back into office when every day, the people who actually keep this country going on a daily basis– sanitation workers, construction workers, warehouse workers, hospital staff and retail employees– have always had to do this and get paid far less with zero protections, poor benefits, and no retirement.

That said, the way reform is being carried out at this moment is haphazard and dangerous. There is obvious waste and mismanagement across the entire federal government, much of it hidden in plain sight. Large, gelatinous chunks of fat that can be cut off from its hind quarters. That’s an objective fact that both political parties have long promised to curtail. But when it comes to cutting that fat, it matters how the knife is applied. We’re not dealing with ones and zeros here, we’re dealing with actual humans– real life Americans– who have families and mortgages and kids in school and hopes and dreams. To go full grim reaper and draw the scythe across whole swaths without regard to the downstream effects of that– well, it’s not helping to make America great again. It’s sowing fear and despair and resentment, two things of which this country is not in short supply. Humanity, once again, seems to be lost in the mix.

Which brings me back to the federal workforce. I can’t tell if it changes people for the worse, or if the worst people change it.

I know it changed me. It opened my eyes to the federal government at its best and its worst and how they both existed in the same building. I was happy while I was there, but when the environment began to bring me down, when my work seemed unnecessary and pointless and I was becoming the thing I hated, when my purpose was lost and I saw that my life was only defined by me showing up and the money coming in– I knew I had to get out.

I made the right decision to work there and I made the right decision to leave. Both things can be true. Turns out it was pretty good timing.

As uncertain as it is for most federal employees right now, I hope that others can find the same path I did, that they can gather the courage to take a new leap into a better place. What better time than now to unlock the golden handcuffs, exit your cell, crawl out the tunnel, and feel the sun on your face?

Fear can hold you prisoner, but hope can set you free. So get busy living or get busy dying. Because if Andy Dufresene did it, and if Robbe Reddinger did it, why can’t you?

Course 2

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

This past week was a classic case of Maryland, where I shoveled snow on Wednesday and I was able to run in 60-degree weather today. The Eagles won the Super Bowl, so while it isn’t the best possible outcome for the NFL season, it was a win for my home state and a loss for Swifties, so that works for me.

My kids have been watching and rewatching Hilda, which is a pretty fantastic animated series on Netflix, so I thought I’d find something similar for them to watch (they had off school for three days this week, and the weather has been generally miserable, and we had to work, so more shows it was). I found that a lot of people recommended Over The Garden Wall, an animated miniseries from the Cartoon Network that came out in 2014. It’s weird and funny and creepy and a bit like a darker Studio Ghibli production.

Anyway, all was going well until a beautiful little girl was possessed by an evil spirit in episode 8. So bedtime should be interesting tonight. Lessons learned.

Other things I wrote this week:

• TYR L-1 Lifter Review // Shoe Review for Believe in the Run

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to the most recent episode here.

Ingredients List

🎵 : These are the songs I’m listening to now // Songs that I’ve been enjoying the past few weeks, some new and some old

📖 : “Stories of Your Life and Others” by Ted Chiang // I actually had never read any of Chiang’s work, but a friend recommended this collection of short stories and I’ve been working through it. The dude has won like every prestigious prize, but honestly, I think some of his stories suck. However, others are great, notably “Tower of Babylon” and “Hell is the Absence of God.”

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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