I had wanted to write just a quick “general complaint” for a while about government as a “business”. Every job out there works with “customers” at some level or another. Your customers may be employees of the same company in a different department or even the standard definition of customers being the general public. The first thing you are taught going into these jobs is that the “customer is always right”. No matter how dumb their request is or how ignorant they may be you always…even in the worst cases, need to sugar coat it when you tell them they are wrong.
This all boils down to what drives businesses to be better, if the customer doesn’t spend their money with you, they’ll spend it somewhere else.
Somewhere where this is turned on its ear is government. It really started to annoy me for the first time when I sat in a line of about 15 people at the DMV waiting for 2 totally incompetent and lifeless individuals to “help me”. I watched as the most mundane tasks, which a mentally handicap chimpanzee with a limp could have completed in record, took them forever to complete. After sitting in line for entirely too long while the line moved 1 person, I decided I could not wait another 3 hours for this, I needed to go back to work, for a real company that had real customers.
The next place that I saw this was the licensing center. This was a much shorter wait due to the fact that no one was in there however I had to deal with the same quality of individuals. I sat there listening to how Sally had talked to Edna and oh my goodness… yada yada yada….not work appropriate and someone shoot me in the face this wait is painful!
The painful truth that is evident in both of these locations was that their pay checks are not dependent on their company surviving. Their paychecks are depending on the fact that everyone doesn’t want to get arrested for breaking the laws of proper licensing. They do something that all of us have to pay for both in taxes and in the fees we pay for these “services”. If these were services that were done in the general business world they would have been automated years ago to streamline the process but they do not need to be, because of the lack of competition.
Moral of the story….there is no moral to this story, I’m just ranting.
Oh and…maybe lick your drivers license before you hand it to them so that they might catch a cold tomorrow….making their day horrible tomorrow in return for making your day horrible today!
