Today I’m going to complain about the government. Since we mentioned politicians already, might as well kick their asses again. But specifically – public offices. If you’ve ever felt powerless against the big machine of Government Organisation, welcome to the club.
This is something I really dislike. When you join the government forces as a young person I assume you have all the will and energy to change things and make everything smoother and better. But then you end up in this labyrinth of procedures, processes and bureaucratic habits and you become “one of them”. It’s interesting how the public sector can extremely quickly progress abut the governments can’t.
Take NASA. They took the last 60 years of experience and… threw it away. Most of the current space launches are by private companies. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because they’re focused on profit. And they’re focused on profit because it’s their money they spend. You see I believe that the government’s biggest flaw is that they’re spending not their own money and they’re spending big. If you take a private enterprise, I’d say almost all of them would do a better job than a government.
Let’s put it in an example. You go to work, you work physically and leave sweat and blood on your shirt every day. You come back home with $100 daily payment and buy food for the table, counting every single dollar when you pay at the store. On the way home though you find $20 on the street and what do you do? You spend it on cigarettes or booze or icecream. Easy money, no one cares.
The worst part of it is that we citizens are completely powerless in this machine of bureaucracy. Very often you try to sort something out and all you ask is to be heard for 5 minutes or done something that is really not that difficult. And you hit the wall, you hear “can’t do” and you come back crying. It hits you and hurts so much that we live in the society that millions of us chip in for this “organisation” and we sponsor them, gives them jobs and ask them to spend our money wisely, but when it comes to them listening to you – they just don’t care.
Now usual at this stage there would be some punch line, I would give some ideas or creative solutions. But seriously I’ve been hit by this situation so many times that I don’t think there will ever be a solution. Just yesterday I tried to upload a document with a digital signature to one of the government agencies and it was rejected 3 times by the government official, the photo (I don’t have a scanner) got rejected too. You just feel like they punch you in the guts every time they have an opportunity. So no, there’s no punchline. There’s just Ralf showing you that I’m the same as you. I have daily shitty days too and I love visiting government organisations as much as you do! God help us all…