Of More Last Things

I continue to experience things for the last time. Yesterday was probably the last scheduled meeting of our unit that I will attend, although there’s always the possibility of hastily called gatherings to deal with one crisis or another. I saw it as an opportunity to—one last time—offer my opinions, formed by over six years of assessing intake cases, for how the process might be streamlined. As my regular readers well know, I am painfully slow to catch on to the reality of circumstances. There is no one here, at least at the administrative and management levels, who are in the least bit interested in what the grunts think. The assistant director recently released our performance measures. I was a little surprised, frankly, because any improvement over the previous year was marginal at best, perhaps a percentage point or two better. In all fairness, it was enough to raise our ranking from 52nd in the nation to 49th. But the notion is still firmly ingrained in this organization that policy and procedure must be developed by people who don’t have a clue how to do what must be done. In our latest reorganization, people were appointed to administrate and manage an intake process that none of them could do themselves if put in a room full of applications and left alone. National rankings and statistics prove that government in Nevada is plagued by precisely this phenomenon, and for as long as those people remain in power it is hard to figure out how they will ever get better. So why, you may ask me, knowing all this did you foolhardily open your mouth? That’s a very good question.