Unsoft's List

p o o r & d i s o r g a n i z e d

I've been back in public service for about a year and a half now, and so far I gotta say I'm very satisfied with the net outcome of my decision. I like my job.

When I worked for consultants, I was always forced to feel somehow negatively separated from the people I worked for. There have been consultant bosses who enjoyed what I provided for them, and were grateful - at least in $ome manner. There were so many more who considered me useful, but somehow beneath their work ethic.

I admit it, I don't like to work really hard at appearances. My philosophy is one of allowing systems to tend toward their nature, and evaluating their usefulness in a natural, somewhat more chaotic condition before trying to impose more order. I'm not an "entropy carrier". I'm not "organized". I don't benefit from working within too much organization, even if somebody else does all my organizing for me. If I am expected to put forth the effort to organize my environment, I'm just expending energy to the end of making things more difficult for myself.

What is organization really, other than dumbing down? It's like pop music. It's taking a process or a system and making it more appealing to a larger population by means of lowest common denominators. Trying to make it more universally accessible.

I have questions about our traditional ideas about work ethic, also. In the public engineering sector, the primary focus of work is to facilitate public projects and civil infrastructure development - period. Work directly and primarily enriches living communities. In the analogous private market, the major focus of work is to market and sell services (ususlly to public sector entities). This has a primary effect of enriching corporate investors and executives (typically with once-laundered tax dollars), and only a secondary (at best) effect of benefit to quality of life across the board.

How is it that allowing myself to be bought low and sold high in order to add value to the financial portfolios of the already wealthy (many times at the expense of public assets or safety) is somehow meeting a higher ethical standard than going to work directly for the public at large?

Nobody's getting rich here, especially not me, and I feel so much better about that.