Life of a State Employee...
You thought you knew, but you had no idea.
I get up before the sun most mornings so that I can get to work on time, just like a lot of other people I get ready and hit the road. I arrive at work, some days on time, some days I'm a few minutes late but I almost always leave late at the end of the day. I put my things away and sit down at my desk and start working right away.
I am a receptionist so my job requires dealing a lot with answering the phones. People call me all day long wanting to know where they can find this or that, how they fill out paperwork for different things, who can they talk to that will explain this to them, and sometimes they just want someone to talk to so they call with some lame question and then keep me on the phone for 20 minutes talking about how much things have changed in the last 40 years. As I sit at my desk a deluge of work hits and carries me through until I take my alloted hour for lunch. Once lunch is over I'm back at my desk working hard until it's time to go home for the day. Obviously there is down time on occasion where the work has slowed and while I wait on someone else to finish their part before I can start mine, I may check my email or I might get up and walk down the hall for a few seconds. If it seems an awful lot like what you do every day, that's because it's not different at all.
So if my job, day in and day out, isn't that different from everyone else's, why do people trash talk State Employees every day? Just like any other office there are bad apples, those fools that mess things up for everyone by being later than necessary every single day, by stealing office supplies, by calling in sick weekly, by sitting around and being utterly unhelpful. Why is it that these are the only State Employees that get recognized? Why is it that those of us who work hard and are honest caring people get the short end of the stick? Why is it that when someone is upset with the fact that things aren't moving at the pace they want, they blame it on us being State Employees... never mind the fact that 65,000 other people were in line before you so that's why you haven't heard anything from us yet!
I work with some of the most hard working State Employees. I work for the Department of Agriculture, an agency that busts it's ass to provide free and severely discounted services to the public at large. An agency that helps put food on your table...literally! We support farmers and the farmers provide meat, vegetables, milk, eggs, and so on to your local grocery stores and Farmer's Markets. Why then do people want to call me and yell at me because we can no long afford to mail out hundreds of thousands of reports to growers state wide? Why do they blame it on the laziness of State Employees? Why do I get tossed onto the butt end of a joke about lame ass lazy State Employees? We are not all the same, just because some fool over at the Department of Transportation decided he was going to embezzle thousands of dollars in steel or some genius over in the Department of Revenue was too lazy to check his numbers and lost a ton of money somewhere along the way, it doesn't mean that every State Employee is some self entitled jerk that lazes around the office eating bon bons with their chair back and their feet on top of the desk. Just like you we get up every day and go to a job we're not always fond of so that we can put food on our tables and gas in our cars. So the next time you decide you want to bash a State Employee...please think about the fact that there are actually more good, hard working, State Employees than there are of the slothful, disturbingly lazy ones.
*This rant was brought to you by: Ariel's bad days at work*
I get up before the sun most mornings so that I can get to work on time, just like a lot of other people I get ready and hit the road. I arrive at work, some days on time, some days I'm a few minutes late but I almost always leave late at the end of the day. I put my things away and sit down at my desk and start working right away.
I am a receptionist so my job requires dealing a lot with answering the phones. People call me all day long wanting to know where they can find this or that, how they fill out paperwork for different things, who can they talk to that will explain this to them, and sometimes they just want someone to talk to so they call with some lame question and then keep me on the phone for 20 minutes talking about how much things have changed in the last 40 years. As I sit at my desk a deluge of work hits and carries me through until I take my alloted hour for lunch. Once lunch is over I'm back at my desk working hard until it's time to go home for the day. Obviously there is down time on occasion where the work has slowed and while I wait on someone else to finish their part before I can start mine, I may check my email or I might get up and walk down the hall for a few seconds. If it seems an awful lot like what you do every day, that's because it's not different at all.
So if my job, day in and day out, isn't that different from everyone else's, why do people trash talk State Employees every day? Just like any other office there are bad apples, those fools that mess things up for everyone by being later than necessary every single day, by stealing office supplies, by calling in sick weekly, by sitting around and being utterly unhelpful. Why is it that these are the only State Employees that get recognized? Why is it that those of us who work hard and are honest caring people get the short end of the stick? Why is it that when someone is upset with the fact that things aren't moving at the pace they want, they blame it on us being State Employees... never mind the fact that 65,000 other people were in line before you so that's why you haven't heard anything from us yet!
I work with some of the most hard working State Employees. I work for the Department of Agriculture, an agency that busts it's ass to provide free and severely discounted services to the public at large. An agency that helps put food on your table...literally! We support farmers and the farmers provide meat, vegetables, milk, eggs, and so on to your local grocery stores and Farmer's Markets. Why then do people want to call me and yell at me because we can no long afford to mail out hundreds of thousands of reports to growers state wide? Why do they blame it on the laziness of State Employees? Why do I get tossed onto the butt end of a joke about lame ass lazy State Employees? We are not all the same, just because some fool over at the Department of Transportation decided he was going to embezzle thousands of dollars in steel or some genius over in the Department of Revenue was too lazy to check his numbers and lost a ton of money somewhere along the way, it doesn't mean that every State Employee is some self entitled jerk that lazes around the office eating bon bons with their chair back and their feet on top of the desk. Just like you we get up every day and go to a job we're not always fond of so that we can put food on our tables and gas in our cars. So the next time you decide you want to bash a State Employee...please think about the fact that there are actually more good, hard working, State Employees than there are of the slothful, disturbingly lazy ones.
*This rant was brought to you by: Ariel's bad days at work*
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