In 1983 I had to make a very difficult choice about the future direction of my life and that of my family which at the time consisted of a wife and six children. Did I continue in private business or go to work for Government you see I had just been offered the job of Administrator of a Government facility in Montague.
Now for most Islanders it would be a no brainer, take the big Government job. On Prince Edward island that is seen as the goose that lays the golden eggs and I gues in lots of ways it is. But there were a lot of issues I had to work out in my head first.
With my background and coming from British Columbia you see people who worked for Government were seen as being the bottom feeders in the job market. Working for Government was widely seen as the option you took if you couldn't be successful at anything else. So here I was, faced with a dilemna. I weighed the pros and cons and tried to make an assessment of what would be the best thing for my family. here were the factors, I could make a lot more money outside of Government, but the downside was that it took a lot of time and effort. Government provided more stability and did gave you free time as it was only a 37.5 hour week, something I had never experienced. You see most of my life I worked an average of 60 hours per week and that was what seemed normal to me. But there was a downside to that it left me constantly under pressure to put in more time with my family. Work can be addictive and it can easily become the dominating factor in how you live your life. At the end of the day I decided to go to work for Government and the overwhelming reason was that it gave me time to call my own and have a life outside of work.
Now coming to Government in 1983 was actually a pleasant experience. My introduction and orientation lasted for about 30 minutes and consisted of signing some papers and setting up my payroll, but as far as what I was supposed to do, there was a job description, but that quickly proved to be virtually useless..I vividly recall my supervisor who made the trek out from Charlottetown telling me, there's been a lot of trouble here so all I can say is 'work on relationships. After 30 minutes he introduced me to my staff and then left. It was going to be a baptism by fire I could tell, one of the long term staff members told me how things operated around here, a section head informed me she didn't want anyone walking through her part of the building and another informed me he was entitled to a bigger office. Hell of a first day when my sum total time spent interacting with Government was getting my drivers license and registering a vehicle.
When I was 18 I woke up one morning and as it was raining, couldn't get any farm work done, so out of the blue I called the Government in Wilkie and said I wanted to get my drivers license, Ok they said come on in, so i trekked off to Wilkie located the office and got parking spot right in front of the door. I went in told them what I wanted and someone set me down at a desk gave me a paper with a bunch of driving questions on it and said "answer these and then give me the paper back". Seemed simple enough, I finished, turned it in she checked off the answers and said "good, that will be three dollars". I produced the money and she did her thing and gave me a slip of paper with my name on it.
Great I thought until I looked at it and it said - beginners permit, "wait a minute" I said "I wanted my drivers license". "Oh" she said, "well now that you have your beginners permit you can learn to drive" but I replied "I already know how to drive, I've been driving for a long time. I came in for the driving test. "How did you get here" she asked "I drove" I said, "but you can't drive without a lisence" she responded, "I know" I said, "thats why I came in, to get one. "Well how are you getting home" she asked, "drive" I said, "but you can't drive without someone who has a lisence with you" "really" I said "I just came in by myself, my parents were busy". We had hit an impasse.
She went and talked with a guy who came out to see me, "I want to take my driving test now " I told him, "OK lets go" he said. We settled into the car, I started it up and began to back out of the angle parking spot. "Thats enough " he said " pull back in". I guess he must have been in a hurry because we never went for the test drive. I have to admit I was kind of disappointed because before I had left to come into town I had had set up a barrel about 30 feet behind the tractor and practiced parallel parking, I wouldn't have minded showing off.
Anyway the girl asked me for another 3 dollars for my lisence and I tried arguing I had already paid once and didn't want the beginners permit anyway, I felt it was very unfair because I had only had it for 10 minutes, but she wouldn't budge. That was my first introduction to bureaucratic rules, but at least I got my license.
My second encounter with government occured about 10 years later and came close to ending badly. We had moved to Victoria BC from Saskatchewan and after being there a while I went down to the Motor Vehicle registry to get BC plates for our truck. I made the stupid mistake of heading down at about 11:30 and found myself at the back of a long line of people. At 12:00 o'clock the 2 wickets everyone was heading towards closed down and the staff went for lunch. I spent the next 1/2 hour doing the left foot - right foot shuffle in the heat until the wickets opened again at 12:30, now I wasn't as patient then as I am now so was not in the best frame of mind when my turn finally came.
I was asked to produce my registration and insurance which I did, the clerk looked them over asked me for the numbers on my license plate, "don't know" I said "can't I get them for you later". "No" he told me "I need them now", "OK I'll go get them" I said, "can you keep the papers and let me come to the front when i get back, the trucks just in the parking lot". "No " he said "you'll have to start at back, wouldn't be fair" I tried stating my case that I had been here for an hour but it wasn't going to work so I headed out the door in an unhappy state of mind because I had noticed there was about 50 people in the line.
So I went out, got the number and started at the end of the bloody line again. Now it wasn't lost on me as I plodded inch by inch towards the front again that there were 6 wickets, but only 2 were open. I could also see that there were about 10 people in the office at desks behind the counter and I couldn't help wondering if there was a good reason why some of them weren't at the front taking care of people. After another 45 minutes I finally got to the front of the line and as luck would have it the wicket that opened up when it was my turn brought me to the same guy. Once again I produced the necessary papers and gave him the number on the old license plate. "Where's the plate" he asked " on the truck " I said, "well I need it, you have to give it to me to get a new plate", "but you never told me that" I said "all you asked me for was the numbers". Now when I start to get really mad, which only happens about once every 10 years I start to have trouble breathing and I was in that state when a sentence came out of his mouth that I am sure about 10 seconds after he said he must of been thinking, now why the hell did I say that. From where I was standing it was npt only what he said but the snide little inflection he gave to " you were supposed to know".
The counter was elevated, one of those ones that you rest your elbows on, and was sitting on a stool so when I reached across and grabbed him by the tie, I was able to pull him off the stool towards me get two of my fingers behind his collar and when I gave it a bit of a twist it pretty well cut off his air. To this day I can hardly believe I did it, but the stars must have been lined up right is about the only excuse I can come up with. Anyway he was putting on quite a performance as I held him there both of us unable to speak and him with his eyes starting to bulge. His supervisor came running over and slowly I let my grip go. As I started getting my breath back I tried explaining in a slow calm voice to the supervisor what was going on. He took me to the side and we sat down at his desk and he did the transaction hinself, I have to thank him for that because I probably could have been in a lot of trouble. And the irony of the thing, I never had to turn in the plate. So those were my experiences with Government and armed with that I went to work.
I quickly discovered that once the problems that had existed in that office was neutralized working for Government could be lots of fun. You don't have to work very hard physically, there is very little pressure because the work thats there is not very demanding, and you can get some personal gratification from helping people. Added to that was the fact that in 1983 a regional office could operate without much interaction with Charlottetown, they weren't interested in you so long as you didn't ask for money and the local politicians were happy. All in all we were a pretty happy crew.
I can't exactly say when Government started to come apart, but I would guess it was about 90/91 and each successive year got a bit worse. I have tried to put my finger on what caused it and over the years as conditions deteriorated by degrees came to a few conclusions which would probably be agreed to by the rank and file of gov't workers but strenuously opposed by management.
You see the problem is always with management, because they are the ones that set the tone, they don't do the work but they have control of the work environment. I guess I first noticed it in Health & Soxial Services because it was most evident there, a proliferation of managers armed with Masters Degrees who came into Gov't with an attitude that did not demonstrate respect to those who had been working in government and essentially running it for years. When you mix that with little practical experience you create what amounts to a poisoned workplace.
Health seems to be the most fucked up Department and the impression the general public gets is that each year it demands more money but produces less. I happen to know quite a few people who work in the Health field so I have asked on different occaissions what they feel is the problem and it always comes back the same, to many managers not enough workers. Now I'm not into a hospital very often but when I am I have noticed something, a whole crew of nurses behind a counter but not many out where the patients are - hmmm starts you wondering. I had an opportunity to see the system in action one time. I was visiting in Victoria and my son in law hurt himself at his Karate school and had to be taken to the emergency room at the Royal Jubilee Hospital. I was recruited to go over and find out what his state was. I arrived and inquired at the front counter. I got nothing from the girl sitting there and was told to take a seat. Now what I noticed was that she didn't call anyone to get the information I was looking for. I also noticed that they were having a slow night because I was the only person there. After about 15 minutes I worked my way down a hall and found where they store the bodies that come into emergency. It didn't take to long until I located Rob who was flat on his back on a bed with wheels on it. He had been there for a while and was going to be taken somewhere for an x-ray. After we talked a bit a little nurse came rushing in and started doing something, and explained to us what was going on, she had been trying to set up the x-ray and had been upstairs looking for a technician. She wasn't very big so I helped her push the gurney up the hall to the elevator and we took a ride to the floor housing the necessary equipment. Down the hall we rolled and when we parked the bed she disappeared into a room and when she came out told me they would get him taken care of soon. I believe thats what she understood from her discussions with the tech. But after about 10 minutes when no one arrived I again sloothed my way around and took up a position where I could see into the staff room on the floor. There were three people sitting around a table having a great old gossippy time, so I waited and started thinking about what I had seen thus far and it wasn't much action.
Eventually the coffee klatch broke up and an x-ray was taken, a little later a photo was produced and attached to the gurney in a big envelope. At some point I realized that we could be in for a long wait as we appeared to have been abandoned so I rolled the bed over to the elevator and back to the curtained off area on the first floor we had started from. This was when I started my investigation. By this time I had determined I had a free run of the place so I went about blending in and counting activity. First I determined there was 23 people somehow associated with emergency, there were now 2 additional patients in the area. I spent an interesting 15 minutes listening to three doctors discussing the merits of burning Arbutus wood in the their fireplaces and how hard it could be on a chainsaw. Interesting but, why isn't anyone looking at the bodies.
Leaning against a wall I eavesdropped and shared the excitement of a recent wedding with a middle aged woman and her sister who was on the other end of a phone. Armed with my new found mobility and I seeing I was one of the gang now I headed unchallenged back to the reception and thought what the hell, I'll inquire about Rob. I didn't get anymore information than I had the first time but did take note that there was another case had arrived and discussion ws taking place in the waiting area about it wouldn't be long now until they would be seen. I didn't have the heart to let them know about the social club in the back.
As the evening progressed I got the distinct impression that this crew didn't give a collective damn about respecting the time of the poor saps in the emergency waiting room. Maybe medicine does that to you. I had a Doctor friend tell me once that 90% of the people he saw had no business coming in to see him. He was concerned that so much of his practice was built around , smoking, obesity, lack of exercise and poor eating habits that he was always afraid he would be lulled into such a state of apathy he would miss the real thing when it came along.
The point of the emergency room experience is that everyone there was managing the operation and except for the one little nurse no one was doing any work associated with comforting or treating the sick. And that is where the management style that Government has adopted kicks in.
Generally Government middle management which is where the growth has taken place over the past 15 years has become a place where the most important skill is being able to attend and play the meeting game. The purpose of work has gone from doing something to being a part of a big fucking, mindless, leaderless team. I would try to avoid meetings at all cost during the time I was with Government and to keep from falling asleep I used to play a little game in my head. Add up the number of people in the room, then try to figure out what the salary of each participant was, then do the Math and try to break that down to what it cost on a per minute basis for each one. Add these together and I would arrive at a cost for the meeting on a per minute basis.
Then I would try to slot each person into a category and everyone would fit. One , the bored out of their mind group. Two, the try to impress everyone with how smart you are group, Three, the avoid being pinned into saying anything bunch, Four, the agree with the majority crowd, Five, the agree with anything your supoervisor says, Six, usually there are 2 people in most meetings who actually would like to get something concrete done.
Another game I would play was to try to determine if there was anyone there who actually understood what the meeting was about and had enough knowledge of the situation to solve the problem. I came to understand there was few of these around and when you did find them they were good people to have around but they are a vanishing species. And they are vanishing because they are seen as a threat to the system. This group doesn't see the whole thing as a game where the only objective is self preservation, but as an exercise where they can contribute something meaningful that gives them self satisfaction.
You see modern Government has nothing to do with solving problems, its about managing situations and the participants position in the organization. There is no future in fixing anything. If it gets fixed, it works and you don't have to tinker with it anymore and if you can't tinker what the hell is there for a psycho nazi manager. And it becomes that simple. The administrative assistants and the clerks who do the work of Government fully understand this. When they arrive to work each morning they know what their purpose is and if they are left alone will keep everything running smoothly. Its the management who continually fuck the whole thing up by tinkering with the system in the name of progress.
If you are with government long enough you will come to understand that ideas are pegged onto a big wheel that is constantly revolving. There are no new ideas only recycled ones and with each recycling the people who have to do the work are the ones who have to figure it out again how to make it work.
Much as I hated Pierre Trudeau I have to give him credit for the clarity of some of his thinking. he was on occaission able to cut through all of the crap and zero in on the core of what was happening. About Government he made this observation; I observed quite early in my career that many organizations that were operating smoothly would have someone come along and reorganized them. I came to understand that this was a wonderful tool of management because it created the illusion of progress, but I also realized that in reality all it did was create confusion.
Every new manager in Government understands the same thing, that what they have inherited is all fucked up and they have to manage it by laying their unique brand of thinking on the staff. It doesn't matter how well something is running, there is a lemming like impulse to shake things up, and it has nothing to do with making things better. If things got better, all the managers in Government would be out of a job.
The awfull ugly truth is that you could send everyone in Government home except the accounting people, the clerks and the administration assistants and no one would even notice they weren't around for about six months.
You see there is no future in solving problems, there is only a future in managing problems, if a problem is solved there is nothing left to do that the admin people can't handle.
There are another group that are even worse than the stir the pot and get everyone riled up group and these are the create a crisis bunch. Yes believe it or not there is a whole sub-culture in Government, particularly in the health sector that owe their survival to creating crisis. Now these crisis are always hard to measure because they involve people.
This group convinces their superiors that they are run off their feet because their case load is so high that dire things are going to happen if the department doesn't take immediate action to increase staff. Its exactly what happened with McCarthyism, there was a bogeyman behind every bush and woe to the person who observes "there is no bogeyman there its just your imagination". And its real difficult to deal with the crisis bunch because its practioners are nearly always zealots and it takes more energy and there is risk involved to not agree.
Another of the unfortunate aspects of a bloated management structure is that because there isn't enough work for people to do, they spend time thinking of issues that the ordinary citizen need to be saved from. In the corporate marketing world its called creating a demand for a product you have invented but for which there is no demend for. These are similar to the crisis bunch but sometimes these guys are motivated, not just by self preservation, but by a heartfelt belief they can solve everything that ails you, your friends, society in general and maybe even the world.
The misguided approach has a fundamental flaw because it forces government into issues that we don't need saving from, it has at its roots, an elitism that believes they know more than the people they serve. Government can't and shouldn't try to solve every problem. I'll give you a poor example.
Prince Edward Island has a vehicle inspection policy. Once a year each vehicle is supposed to undergo an examination by an expert to determine its in safe working condition. Now the very best I can say about this nonsense is maybe, just maybe it can be determined that for one day each year a vehicle is in a safe condition. I think most other Provinces scrapped the inspection of passenger cars years ago when they realized how foolish this regulation was. Now I say maybe for a whole lot of reasons the first I guarantee you I can get virtually any vehicle no matter what its condition inspected and passed, why, because the world and the people in it aren't perfect and friends will do you a favour from time to time it's how PEI works.
No one sets about to drive an unsafe vehicle, I guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of PEI vehicle owners don't want their wife and kids driving around in a car where the brakes are about to blow and the front end is ready to fly apart. Believe it or not people do maintain their cars so for the 80% of Islanders who fall into this category its just a way of making a donation to a local garage. But in real life there is a powerful reality thing called time and chance and it happens to everyone. A stone can fly up and damage a brake line where you can never see it, a tire picks up a nail and blows, these things aren't prevented by vehicle inspections.
One of the things that bothers me the most is that if you don't understand cars its awfully easy to be taken to the cleaners. If you want to make a fortune in the automobile repair business learn to say "ball joints", better yet string it into a sentence ", them ball joints are in pretty bad shape". Vehicle inspections have turned PEI into the ball joint replacement capital of the world. I swear its true. Whenever I have had my car up on a hoist and being looked at by someone I don't know, I can tell you I am going to hear about my ball joints no matter what the car is in for.
Because I'm a man the comment will be low key, "should probably start to think about replacing those ball joints, probably be OK for a bit but I wouldn't leave them for to long. The bastards they are setting me up for the next guy, I think they all work together.
If you're a woman on PEI with a car, they drive the old "ball joint stake" right into your heart. "It's not really safe to drive that car much farther without changing those ball joints' they'll tell you, the more they are sure there is no man in the picture the more forceful it becomes.
One of my daughters and her children moved home a few years ago and lived with us for about 10 months. One day she called me from town in a panic, she had been in a garage getting her oil changed when they pulled the old "ball joint stake in the heart' on her.
By the panic in her voice I could tell that her perception of the situation was that if she took the car on the road the steering was going to fail, she would veer head on into a transport truck and she, her children, dog friends etc would all be instantly killed and it would happen on her way home from the garage. "Get a written quote" I said "and then come on home, nothing is going to happen to your car the ball joints are fine". How could I be so confident so ask, well its because we had put new ball joints on the car 2 months previous because they legitimately needed it.
Armed with the quotation I took the car back to the garage the next day, "lets put it up on the hoist" I said, the drool was starting to form in the mechanics mouth, but then I added "and I'll take a look at it with you." The effect on the drool was similar to covering a baby with talcum powder, there's an old expression my grandfather used to use "dryer than a popcorn fart" well, that was the new condition of his mouth. A miracle had occurred and the ball joints seemed to have healed themselves, I'm going to report you to the people who run the Vehicle Inspection Program I said, and like the little red hen, thats just what I did.
