T-T-T-Transitions

That was the B-Side to Changes. Not many people know that. Basically, I stole Stephanie's joke sort of.

Well, I had a pretty good transition story about some current situations in the English department here at good ole U of H, but then I though "Uh oh. What if the people in question read this blog?" They probably don't, since basically most of our readers are Jane's blog's readers. And people searching for ways to get condoms out of their eyes. But I'm playing it safe.

So my transition story is about the one time I graduated college and then realized at the last minute "Hey, I need a job or something. This school thing is over." So, having a million options with a BA in English (and a minor in Asian history, for some reason), I decided to apply to a lot of middle school or high school teaching positions. You used to be able to do that in Florida if you weren't certified, as long as your degree was in the subject you were teaching. Well, at the last minute, just when I hoped, I mean, worried that I was not going to be hired by anybody, I was hired by a great little school by the name of Kissimmee Middle School. Oh, maybe I should disguise that name in case parents are looking for great schools for their kids and decide against that one. (Disclaimer: I taught there five years ago. I'm sure it's a way awesome school now.)

Anyway, when I was hired, the principal told me that he didn't want to hire me, and that I would probably be a bad teacher, but that he was going to give me a shot anyway. It turns out he was right, and I was a bad teacher, but I'd like to think it was the fault of the bureaucracy and other teachers. And I guess my fault for being so mean, too. But because I've told stories of how bad it was to teach there before, here's the abridged list version.

- When I told the administration that I felt that around 30 of my students needed to be held back because they could barely read, they told me they couldn't afford to fail them, and would just pass any students I failed anyway. The more students a school fails, the less money they receive. But the more students a school fails, they more money they need because they will have more students. So of the 30 students I actually turned in Fs for, the school failed 2.

- Our school was a "C" school by Florida standards. In Florida, schools are assigned money by how high a grade they get. A schools get more money, F schools get the least. Our school was a "C" school, but not because of grades. In fact, I was told our students would never get higher grades on standardized tests or general academics. It was just the demographics. So to maintain a "C" grade, the school bought hundreds of computers, because technology level was used in calculating the grade. Now, most of these computers were not hooked up, and there was nobody to teach the students how to use them, but because there were computers physically located at the school, our letter grade was maintained.

- The geography teacher on my team really hated me. She told the students not to listen to anything I said, and that I did not know what I was talking about. I'm not sure where this hatred originated. But she did have a hand in getting the science teacher fired. Now, when the kids were taught sex ed they split them up into boys and girls. The science teacher got the boys, and the geography teacher got the girls. (Thank fucking god I did not have to teach sex ed.) Anyway, they decided they needed to be "hip" with the kids. The science teacher decided to tell dirty jokes. Which was a bad idea and he got fired for it after the geography teacher told some students what to tell the principal. However, the geography teacher decided that to be hip she should tell the girls how much she loves blowjobs, and how she loves giving her husband blowjobs first thing in the morning, and that the girls should give their boyfriends oral sex to avoid pregnancy. For some reason, that seems a lot worse to me than dirty jokes. But this was the same teacher who told the students that Hitler was gay, and that's what caused the holocaust, and also one day when a football player (13) took off his shirt in her class she came to me afterwards saying "He did not look 13, let me tell you." Gross.

Anyway, that's not really a transition story. I guess it was the transition from school to the real world, and it was miserable. But on the other hand, I got real paid.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I am well familiar with transition. From moving once a year and breaking into the "real world", to having a different hair cut/color every few months - the one constant in life is change.

Transitions at work are always...fun. Working at a place with high turnover (hmm..like a library?), really makes you appreciate change and adapt. One month you can have a coworker you love, the next month they quit and a person who makes you wish you were deaf takes their place. (That is, after 3 months of screwing around the county does before they hire anyone). It's that constant shift in group dynamics that throws me for a loop sometimes. However, I suppose if I didn't have such annoyances, I wouldn't have any good stories either - and I'm sure everyone is well aware I love to tell a good story.

Some examples: Our reference librarian quit after I was there about a year. No tears were cried, I assure you, because she was the most unreasonable, short-tempered, nasty person I had met who worked with the public. (Nick, you know who I'm talking about). Shortly before she left, they hired someone in the other reference position (so she wasn't literally taking her position, but in essence she was). I was hopeful that she would be better than our other, but as time wore on I found out she wasn't.

She wasn't quite as mean, though she had her moments, but was just on another level (an illogical one) as far as her thinking. She got too stressed out if she was at the desk by herself (she liked to wander away from the desk for about 20 minutes at a time, and then those pesky patrons would come up wanting help, and she had to drag herself away from the stacks - can you believe the nerve of them?) Sometimes her way of finding the answer to a question made no sense, and at least once she accused me of opening her email and writing to someone, and then later, stealing notepads from the desk. She quit a couple of months ago, and I can only pray that the new person will be different. I can't help but think that maybe you have to have a certain personality to work reference - or maybe the position turns you into a bitch if you work it long enough.

Sadly, that's not the only change in employment that wasn't for the best. I used to have a coworker I loved to work with. We had the same taste in books, so she was always giving me new series to read, and in general was great to talk to. Well she quit and started working for a school in Branford because it was closer to home, and she could spend time with her sons during vacation, before they went off to college. About 3 months later a new person comes on, and again I thought she was alright at first.

Now she's been here for awhile, and every minute around her makes me want to pull my hair out, or move - that position in S Korea looks better everyday. She never listens, and she is always trying to guess what you're going to say. There's a reason - her husband's tongue was removed because of cancer or something, so I understand why she does it, but she needs to realize that most people (probably 99%) would rather just talk instead of having her guess (incorrectly). Here is a sample conversation:

Her: What did you do this weekend?

Me: Well I -

Her: Did you go to the Azalea Festival? I didn't even know it was going on, did you know?

Me: I did, but -

Her: You didn't want to go? Don't you like flowers? Or do you? I don't know...

Me: Well -

Her: Have you heard about such-and such going on next week? Blah, blah, blah....

That's the point that I start wondering if the edge on the ruler is sharp enough to slit my wrists. I thought it would stop when we got the other computer at the desk, and I could resume my web browsing as before, but it hasn't. To drive the point home, one of my other coworkers, who is the most patient person I know, is fed up with her.

To compound these problems, we just switched to a new system, so those of us who are faster at picking things up have to pick up the slack, and help train the slower ones. Everyday is an uphill battle it seems. Sometimes I just have to tell myself "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can - keep myself from stroking out today"

Transitioning out of the Department of Defense

[Before I begin *my* piece, I'd like you to read this excerpt from an article by Jeremy Scahill, as it's pertinent.]

On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting--many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation--Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.

"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."

The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757--American Airlines Flight 77--smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war--laid out just a day before--on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military." [Written by Jeremy Scahill for The Nation. Click here to read the full article.]

*******

In March 2003 I began working for Defense Security Service (DSS), an agency which was part of the Department of Defense (DOD). My job title was Special Agent, and my job was to conduct background investigations on US military personnel, DOD civilian personnel and DOD contractors – anyone who might need a DOD security clearance. In March 2003, 9/11 was still a very recent event. The war in Afghanistan was well underway and the war in Iraq was just beginning. The threat of terrorism loomed larger than life. It was a time when nearly every phrase uttered by a politician contained the words “national security.” One would therefore assume that my agency, as the people determining who should and who should not gain access to classified materials and locations, would have been viewed as an integral part of the DOD. However, that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

When I joined DSS in March 2003, the agency was alive with rumors of a possible transfer of DSS out of the DOD and into another agency: the Office of Personnel Management (OPM – the agency which manages the HR side of the US government). At that time, OPM was already using private contractors to conduct background investigations on people requiring lower level clearances. There were rumors that our entire agency was to be privatized in order to make the security clearance business more cost-effective. Private contractors contracted by OPM were paid by the numbers of cases they closed. DSS employees received a government salary based on years on years of employment.

Now, all jobs should set standards for their employees, and certainly there are many jobs in the world in which basing pay on the amount of projects completed is perfectly acceptable. You might assume, however, that the US government would be willing to pay top dollar in order to ensure that security clearances weren’t being issued to budding terrorists. But you would be wrong.

Higher-ups in the DOD felt that the agency was paying DSS far too much money per investigation… money which could be better spent in Iraq. Then OPM offered to do the job for less. The transition of DSS out of DOD and into OPM took roughly one year. DSS was renamed the Center for Federal Investigative Services (CFIS).

One of the first things that OPM did during the transition was to get rid of most of the IT staff, with the idea being that each office did not need its own IT specialist. Instead, they created a sparsely-staffed call center for employees with computer problems to call. Many of my coworkers were above the age of fifty and not overly computer literate. The loss of our IT guy meant that those of us in the office who were younger and more computer savvy frequently spent hours assisting coworkers with their computers. And since the next thing that OPM did was to provide us with a completely different set of software, we were kept very busy indeed!

When I first arrived at DSS in 2003, they were using a case-writing/reporting software which worked in conjunction with Microsoft Office and Access 97. I remember wondering why they were using something so out of date. Little did I know what was to come! As part of our transition to OPM, we received “new” case management software. The program was DOS-based and had been written in 1984. OPM representatives went to great lengths to assure us that this “new” software was so much better than the software we’d been using. We were told, among other things, that it was faster, easier to use, and more efficient. Now I don’t know how recently (if ever) any of you have worked in DOS (I hadn’t since I was a kid), but faster, easier to use, and more efficient are hardly the adjectives DOS inspires. The new system was cumbersome, slow, and difficult to use even once you knew how. Report writing, which had previously been the easiest part of the investigatory process became the most difficult part overnight. Additionally, in order to transmit ones reports, one had to log into the mainframe. Unfortunately, the system was not designed to accommodate that many users. There were several occasions when I would try for hours (after coming home from work) to transmit a case, and was unable to do so until after midnight. More efficient? The truth of the matter was, the DOS-based program was cheaper to run.

Additionally, OPM decided that DSS had been too lax in its production standards. Under DSS, agents received points for each interview conducted. Short interviews and records reviews earned a small number of points, whereas lengthy interviews (some interviews took hours; others took days) earned a much larger number of points. We needed to earn a certain number of points per month for our performance to be considered fully successful. Under OPM the system was revised drastically. OPM expected to conduct a certain number of interviews per day, period. This meant that if you had a serious interview that spanned two or three days, you could still be rated unsuccessful if you were unable to catch up on your numbers. You might have just stopped a spy from getting a clearance, but if you weren’t making your numbers it didn’t matter. If you took too long to close a case, you were wasting Uncle Sam’s money. It didn’t matter that you’d done a good job. Speed was valued far more than quality.

Four months after DSS formally became CFIS, I quit and changed careers entirely. But that’s a tale of transition for another day.

Transitions

Sorry so late, guys. I posted a comment earlier this morning saying that I signed on just to find out what the topic was when I suddenly remembered that Glenn posted the last one, which means its my turn now. I repeat it because I just checked, and it didn't seem to post *shrug.*

The reason I've been so slammed lately is because Friday was the last day my company was known as DFI International. From now on, it's DeticaDFI. I got pulled into some of the transitional communication issues on top of my already big workload, so I've been pretty swamped.

But that got me thinking about transitions. There's been a lot of whispers since they announced that the company was bought in February, especially since we didn't have any warning until they were doing the final paperwork-- Detica is a publicly owned company in England on the London stock exchange, so legally they weren't allowed to announce it early to anyone but the seniors. A lot of people wondered if they would loose their jobs, if some of the more useless managers would loose their jobs, if we would loose some of our contracts, if we would be able to dump our sub-contractors, if we would have to give up happy hour Fridays, etc., etc.

I have to say, though, that the senior management team has done a very good job of have meeting after meeting after meeting (including parties and bribes of free food and drinks) to make sure we're all ok with it. In fact, by today's rooftop happy hour, we were all sick of hearing the motivational speeches. Now, since the final paperwork and approval just went through and we were only today officially DeticaDFI, the full effect of the integration remains to be seen. But it has caused some stress.

I've noticed I've been forgetting a lot of stuff lately, even though I would swear I did it. I've been a little irritable. I've had slight trouble sleeping (and I am usually a very sound and easy sleeper). I've almost dreaded going to work some days, just because I knew I had so much to do there. In all, I'm glad this is official now and I can relax a little about it.

I think all transitions cause a lot of stress and can throw us all into a bit of a tailspin if we're not careful. So tell me about your transitions: perhaps from high school to college, college to employment, moving from one place to another, whatever. How have they affected you?