My Adventures Inside Government Bureaucracy

Photo credit: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bureaucracy.asp

Back in the 1980s, I decided to return to school and earn a Master’s Degree in History. (Eventually I discovered that a Master’s Degree in History is almost worthless, so I kept at it until I’d earned a Ph.D. But that’s another story.) I received a small scholarship and took out a student loan, but I still needed to work in order to buy food and pay rent. One summer, Chuck, a student in my Latin class helped me secure a position as a student assistant in the Issuance Division of the California Department of Forestry (CDF), and I found myself fully immersed in the bureaucratic world of the California State Government. It was quite possibly the best education I’ve ever received.

You hear about bureaucracies, but you can’t really know how crazy they are until you’re mired in the middle of one. I mean, Kafka wasn’t exaggerating.

Let’s start with my job duties. The division employed four student assistants at a bit more than minimum wage (no benefits). Our principle task was to edit interdepartmental memos. That’s right. We proofread office memos and corrected the spelling and grammar. That was our job for eight hours a day, five days a week.

[An aside on memos. Remember, this was back in the 1980s. Not only did we not have internet or email, we barely had working computers, and none of them were linked in any way to any other computers. The memos were typed on special paper forms and distributed by couriers. Our corrections were handwritten with pens.]

Now, in case I gave you the impression that this job was a grind, let me add that we only received maybe two memos a day, and each one was typically less than half a page long, though some could be up to four or five pages. Some days, we didn’t receive any. You guessed it—we had lots and lots of free time. Chuck and I spent much of it quizzing each other on our Latin vocabulary, and we both wound up acing our Latin class. (Another of our colleagues, David, spent most of his time reading James Joyce and trying to convince the rest of us that Joyce was the most brilliant writer in human history. David was a nice guy, and scary intelligent, but the rest of us spent a lot of time avoiding him.)

So here is how it worked. One of the divisions, let’s say Accounting, would issue a memo to the other divisions of CDF. Usually the memo would propose a change to the division’s procedural manual, but it could be about most anything, from general office policy to specific job duties. Once we student assistants in Issuance made our corrections, if any, we would forward the memo to four or five Department supervisors, depending on the subject of the memo.

It’s the nature of people in charge to want to throw in their own two cents to anything that crosses their desk. That means that our corrected memos would usually be sent back to us with additional corrections from the supervisors, which would have to be proofread for spelling and grammar. The re-corrected memos would then have to go back to the supervisors, and, you guessed it, they would often add additional corrections or suggestions. It wasn’t unusual for memos to circulate for weeks or months. I remember one memo that had been circulating for two years, and was still circulating when I left. It’s probably circulating today.

Sometimes a memo in circulation would be superseded by a new memo. This was a huge nightmare, because the new memo couldn’t take effect until the old memo had been approved. But, of course, the supervisors wouldn’t approve the old memo because it was out of date! So now we’d have two memos circulating endlessly, both addressing the same procedure or issue.

We student assistants reported to an office manager who spent his days looking at hot-rod magazines and perusing real-estate brochures advertising property in Oregon. He never seemed to do anything else, and we wondered what his job responsibilities were supposed to be. One day, Chuck found an official description of his duties, and it turned out that we were doing his job. That’s right: his job was to see that the memos were edited and distributed, and he’d hired four student assistants to do it for him! He collected a decent salary (along with a full slate of State of California benefits) to make sure four college students completed his assigned duties while he looked at his magazines and brochures. Nice work if you can get it!

And then there were the turf battles, which are legendary in bureaucracies. At CDF, I learned that people who work in bureaucracies tend to be tightly focused on their individual jobs and seldom see the big picture. They know that their main function, apart from their official duties, is to defend their own job at all costs. This leads to some strange and pointless conflicts.

I found myself in the middle of one of these battles one time when Accounting issued a memo that included a new form. The process ground to an immediate halt when I forwarded the corrected memo to the Supervisor (and only employee) of the Forms Division. She threw a fit! “Accounting can’t design new forms—only Forms can design forms!” She instructed me to have the author of the memo call her to discuss the matter. I called Accounting and told the author of the memo that the Supervisor of Forms wanted her to call her immediately. Accounting informed me that since Forms was having the issue with the memo, it was incumbent on Forms to call Accounting, not the other way around. I called the Supervisor of Forms, who insisted that since Accounting required a new form, it was necessary for Accounting to place a call to Forms and submit an official request.

At that point, I simply refused to participate any further in their dispute. To my knowledge, no new form was designed and the new procedure was never implemented. For all I know, the author of the memo and the Supervisor of Forms may still be sitting by their phones waiting for the other to call.

My favorite memory of my government job may have been when my own supervisor, the Supervisor of Issuance, declared that our division was going to change its name to Administrative Information (AI). It seems that some of the CDF bureaucrats higher up the ladder were questioning whether an Issuance Division was necessary to the department, and our division head needed to find a way to defend her position. She figured (correctly, as it turned out) that a division called Administrative Information would sound more vital than a division called Issuance. She also added a new task for her student assistants. From then on, we spent at least one day a week helping the other divisions of CDF by stuffing their mail into envelopes. Our division was saved!

As a part of the big change, we student assistants were asked to design a logo and a motto for the newly named Administrative Information division. Because an ai is a type of sloth, we thought that an illustration of a sloth hanging from a tree would be a perfect logo for a division that moved very slowly and accomplished very little. To her credit, the head of AI was quite amused by the suggestion, but she didn’t approve it. We came up with a stylized interweaving of the letters ‘A’ and ‘I’ instead. It was boring, but it got approved. My friend and I wrote her a motto in Latin, too. We tried for something with a salacious double meaning, but, unfortunately, she caught on and blocked it. She was actually pretty intelligent. I can’t remember what we finally settled on.

If I remember correctly, I worked at CDF for about a year while taking classes at night. But it might have only been for half a year. Or a summer. The whole experience is a bit hazy in my mind, and only partly because it was nearly 40 years ago. I can’t imagine government offices are any less absurd now, and with modern technology it’s probably a lot crazier now than it was back then, if for no other reason than the number of voices that can contribute simultaneously to every small decision. I shudder at the thought of bureaucrats in a zoom meeting—each one focused on making sure they came across as necessary functionaries in the department—spending hours discussing word choices, sentence structure, and grammar.

If my government experience sounds awful, rest assured it wasn’t. I had a lot of fun, became quite skilled at Latin (until I forgot it all), and I learned a great deal about human nature and about how our government functions. And, by God, I made sure those memos circulating through the California Department of Forestry were well-written and grammatically correct! No need to thank me, though: the experience was all the reward I needed.