God bless the internet

As many of you know, my law firm does not allow its employees to have access to the internet at work. It's really pretty maddening, especially when my employers run out of things for me to do and take two days to find something new. I can't just dick around on the internet, oh no... they want me to stare at the wall or distract my coworkers with idle chatter and decrease THEIR productivity.

That aside, as much as I hate their policies, it makes great business sense. With unfettered access to the internet, we all know how easy it is to procrastinate. The government, employer of too many idiots to count, has at least taken some steps to remedy this by getting rid of Minesweeper and all those Windows games from their computers. Makes sense to me. But what they really should do is cut off all internet access except for a few necessary sites, like my job does. Granted, legislative assistants and such need to have access to the internet to research issues important to their congresspeople and constituents. But government is wasteful enough, and this Post article estimates that the average government worker wastes 100 hours per year futzing on the internet.

Take the approximately 2 million federal employees, multiply that by the 100 hours of wasted time -- that's 200 million hours of manpower -- and then multiply by... let's say $12/hr. I think that's a pretty conservative estimate. That's 2.4 billion dollars taxpayers are paying federal workers to look up ceramic cats on eBay, play Family Feud online, or what have you. Take 160 million American taxpayers, and that's $15 per taxpayer. Take that $15, buy some stuff, and you got yourself a stew goin'!

Another estimate can be gained by using the salary rate at which advances stop being competitive (source: a friend of mine who works in the Bureau of Labor Statistics), which is $75,000 annually. Assume people work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks. That's $36/hr. That's 7.2 billion dollars, or $45 per taxpayer. Now that's a mug you don't want to chug. Oh no.

The funny thing is that this waste may not be the most alarming part of this article. The Congressman who led the charge against employees wasting time playing Minesweeper "said he has never used a computer." A Congressman. Who has never used a computer. Astounding. Representative government? How representative is a Congressman who has never used the internet??? A staple of life for the last 5-10 YEARS!! This is not a Parliament of Whores or a Confederacy of Dunces, it's a geruntocracy. Too many goddamned old people.

"If employees are playing computer games in the office in large numbers, that's a management problem, which needs to be attacked by managers assigning work and checking to make sure it is done," said Constance Horner, who worked in the Reagan and Bush administrations. What planet is old Connie on? It is damned near impossible to fire a federal employee. The friend I cited earlier, the one who works in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said that after three years of working for the government, it is essentially impossible to get fired. How can you attack a management problem if your workers have no incentive to perform? The federal government increases pay based on time served, as is my understanding (again, same source), so why bother working hard if all you have to do is show up? The only real incentive to perform is the threat of losing your livelihood, your health insurance, etc., if it turns out you suck at what you do. People don't need their jobs for workin' or for driving to, as some would have us believe. They need it because they need to pay for shit.

As much as it's a pain in the ass for me, as an employee of a company that restricts internet usage, it's a damned good way to increase productivity. I think the federal government should firewall the internet wherever possible. One guy from the National Academy of Public Administration said that "the real issue is, is the employee producing? Are the taxpayers getting their money's worth? Not what each person is doing minute by minute." How the hell does that make any sense? If the taxpayers are getting their moneys worth with x number of employees wasting y number of hours on the internet, you can afford to fire a bunch of them because the other ones clearly don't have enough work to do. Too bad you can't fire federal employees.

This just has to be one of the reasons we're getting outpaced by other countries. The American worker has gotten complacent and lazy, and management, at least it seems on the federal level, is failing to remedy these problems. It may suck not to have internet, but you sure as hell get a lot more work done, I can tell you from personal experience...