I've never liked going to the DMV or post office because I knew I’d come out of the experience with a horrible sense of futility at the inefficiencies of government institutions. I’ve always pictured a bureaucrat as that guy who reads a book at his desk in plain sight of a line of people queued up to receive some kind of service. Or the lady behind a desk who responds to your question with a death stare - as if asking her to do her job were the worst thing in the world. Or this guy.
You can imagine my sense of dread, then, when I realized that I am one of these degenerates of society. I work for the UVA library system as a desk assistant, and the extent of my “job” is to sit at a desk and do my own homework. While may occasionally check in a book or answer a patron's question, the bulk of my time working the desk is spent doing homework or reading for fun. My boss consistently impresses upon me and the other student workers to log every question asked so that the positions held at the library don’t seem redundant and they can continue to get a sizable budget for their needs, but usually we really don't receive that many questions or circulation movement compared to other libraries. The worst inefficiency at the library however, is the collection of very large (and very high-tech) monitors that the library never uses but has bought for the sake of spending any surplus in the budget.
This is a pretty clear and downright sad demonstration of what it looks like for a department of a public institution to run with little sense of competition, and where the entire focus of the department staff is on maximizing their budget so that they can have more power in the institution. I've got a deep feeling in my gut that I should be upset about this, but at the end of the day I'm employed in this system so I really can't complain about its inefficiencies.
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