"Oh well..." should not be a motto. But that's how it is. What can you do?
You have to understand that there's a system. A perfect system where
no one is accountable and thus nothing gets done which is problematic but also not because it's no one's fault. All shortcomings of government employees can be traced to
too much bureaucracy, and the failure of legislation to increase
governmental efficiency can be traced to
lazy government employees. We don't know who these lazy government employees are - we never actually see them - but they make
hard working public servants like us look bad and we never mention them out of fear that we may actually be them.
I wouldn't be the first to call it welfare. Not because you're lazy... exactly. Because you arrive with a fresh hope and dignity on your face and that lasts precisely as long as you can go without asking, "Shouldn't we be doing it
this way?" Thereafter, you
sit quietly in your cubicle, not making much noise about the fact that you have nothing of substance to do because
the official definition of substance is paperwork and you'll always have enough of that. You wait to be put to good use and you aren't and then you quit caring. You become
institutionalized. It's just
a staring contest between you and Uncle Sam or Cousin Ted or whoever you work for. It's too much trouble for them to fire you, they hope you'll resign. It's too much trouble for you to resign, so you
passive-agressively try to get fired.
Your government lives in fear of itself. Fear that it will offend itself, fear that it will embarass itself, but mostly fear that it will be fallible. Your government wants to be a team player in a gang of stoolies. And your public servants get cynical and terrified and leave or they get resigned and on their 65th birthday you buy them lunch at some generic mid-range fast food restaurant. Your government, made up of public servants, remains the same impotent beast and the
pointing fingers of new recruits are chopped off at the door.
Every government employee has defiant guilt in their eyes.
The system sucks, but I can't do anything about it. I'd like to, but. It's been that way since I got here. Sure, but tell that to the Secretary/Governor/President. Yeah, right. Good luck.
That's the way it is.
Oh well...