Reactance

ZT 47857

Once, not so long ago… in a mysterious government agency, which is not located in London, Canada…

Even Flo refused to concede. The others sat in silence. It was straightforward, I told her. Though an experienced investigator before being our Chief Inspector, she was still human. It could have been the Rosetta Stone, the solution to all life’s problems, but I used it against her. Human neural wiring hasn’t changed; the objective has shrunk. What was a spear to survival is now meager psychological dissonance to character preservation - instead of protecting life, it protects the ego. Flo sought to employ the Ostrich Protocol. But with no sand and a short neck, her eyes instead spoke mortification.

Alive was the opposite of soul-crushing beige walls in government buildings. Surges of vitality in my home office replaced the cold comfort of vindications in the cubicle farm. Surely it wasn’t the coffee this time; it was the unspoken acknowledgement of foresight. No “I told you so” was needed (I once made that mistake in the office).

Why go to the office, anyway? The virus is out to kill us, and I can do policy work at home. More-so, our Domestic Instrument Preservation Society investigators’ job is ninety percent fieldwork. No one needs to suffer the commute. Likewise, DIPS is closer to where we need to be. Investigators can get to sharply-neglected knives sooner, save meat tenderizers from life-flattening abuse before it happens again, and squeeze confessions from those who would exploit juicers, while their emotional residue was still fresh.

Black frying pans were my specialty. Each season rescuing rusty cast-iron pans from broken homes was better than the next. But secondary trauma took its toll over time. I’ve been with DIPS in the Housing Intervention Tribunal for well over ten years, but for the last several: interpreting law, approving regulations, writing policy, and perfecting the recipe for our investigations to withstand scrutiny from any court of law. So, how did we come to this point? Well…

Jeremy, the deputy inspector, and I kept an unspoken routine. We were each other’s second set of eyes before getting our work across the Chief’s desk. No one wanted to be in the room when Flo found work to be sub-par, or good-enough for that matter. Remote work relinquished the fear of being a physical target for anger. Bludgeoning fury across a desk transformed to near-invisible shifts in tone and pinpricks of administrative formality through the series of tubes connecting our computers together. The soft-copy litmus test? If Flo used her signature in an email.

Oceans of legislative text, legal precedents, and regulatory victories defined my career in the Tribunal before working with DIPS. My analysis shaped entire statutes and my testimony was cited in nine different appellate court rulings—it would be eight—but I count the dismissed leave to appeal as my “supreme court case.” By my standard, and no one else’s, I pride myself on the bureaucrat I had become. When at-risk utensil protective orders became easier for judges to approve, recognition should be given to the DIPS investigator who used one to prevent potato peeler persecution, not the people who did the boring crap behind the scenes. Now, after navigating that sprawling, complex legacy of results and influence, I was currently tasked by Jeremy with something far more soul-crushing: reviewing a mandatory new form, the Personal Access Notice for Telework Submission; because, like all other employers, we were caught with our pants down when stay-at-home orders were issued.

Porch-under-foot in the community saving spatulas to a desk job pushing digital paper. But I know my work is still vital. Because of what I do, somewhere, today, a perfectly preserved spatula is still able to safely flip that delicious waffle out of its irony home. Ironically, this week’s vital work was reviewing our parent administration’s permission request to create the new request notice submission to the Tribunal’s Division of Form Redundancy Division.

“Garden” was an odd word choice. Of course it was completely reasonable to prohibit a remote worker from drinking alcohol or consuming recreational marijuana in public during work hours or with their Tribunal laptop. Who on earth thought the form’s first example of a public place should be a beer garden? ‘Bar’ was just fine, so I added a comment to the document: “Why not a ‘bar’ or ‘saloon’?” I didn’t want to force the use of ‘bar,’ and thought giving a decoy would have the author scoff and think they made the more sensible choice with ‘bar.’ There must be at least 42 better choices than ‘beer garden.’

Deep thought refocused, away from beer to signature blocks, and something was off. The instructions read that the supervisor approved or denied the request; however, only when denied would it go to Flo. She would be the deciding factor when a supervisor said ‘no’ to their staff. And then? Evil Flo, the out-of-touch executive who just wants people in the office; or Heavy Flo, the Chief who periodically throws her weight around, looking for blood, undermining supervisors and reversing their decisions.

Release did not come that day. It arrived several orbital periods of the Moon around the Earth later. For the time being, I voiced my concerns. Three times. The access notice submission approval form procedure was imbalanced, and lacked a second level of accountability. I’m stubborn. Not proud of that, so I never did Make A Mount In my office to display the trophy Over A Mole recipe that won me the blue ribbon at the Hill fest (all I did was use shallots instead of white onions and expensive chocolate). However, I always made big deals out of small things that could become problematic in the future.

M.C. Mali Compli

With the record wrapped, dear reader, you know how we got here. Policy had been published, Pearl helped me get it out to my team and register their equipment, and I approved everyone to continue their Jam at home—all Ten of my folks. I needed to get it done pretty quick, as I had substantial medical and convalescent leave coming up.

Before I left, I also had to take care of a project that succumbed to scope creep; I needed to hire three represented project positions to finish it up while I was out. Put simply, the project was digitizing select hard-copy reports because their preservation requirement changed from several years to over 30 years. Think boxes of sensitive reports, tens of thousands of pages, scanning, categorizing, cataloging, and brain rot. They were off an running when one day, shortly before my leave, I was invited to a meeting because “Flo hadn’t seen them recently.”

“Why are they at home?”

“Because I approved it.”

“You’re letting them take the boxes home? That’s sensitive information.”

“No more sensitive than what investigators gather every day, no more sensitive than what I have on my laptop right now.”

“They need to be in the office.”

“They are… when they need to be. Exchanging boxes, shipping them back and forth to archives, working in-person with my project lead.”

“No, I mean I don’t approve their working from home.”

Why not just say it? A Butt-In-Seat-Yuppie is all that matters. As long as you see a BISY employee in the office, they must be more productive than at home, right? Looking BISY is dead, not resting because of the pandemic. It’s passed on! The mandatory in-office policy is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet leaded gasoline! This is a late concept! It’s a stiff, bereft of sensibility! It rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed it to the albatross of bureaucracy, it would be pushing up the daisies! Elvis has left the building, and the physical office has joined the choir-invisible! THIS IS A THEORETICAL CADAVER, AN ANTIQUATED THESIS, A CONCEPTUAL RELIC, AN EX-COCKATIEL!

“But I do. I used the policy.” The policy says this isn’t your decision. “They met all criteria. I added the specifics as to when in-office time may be needed, and then approved it. I’m not going to now treat them differently than others on my team.” I also need to consider the union aspect. “What does it look like when I approve some employees using the policy, but not use it when denying others?”

“No, use the policy. You need to deny them.”

“I can’t change a decision with no change in circumstances and no basis for the change.” What us ‘fancy’ legal folk call arbitrary and capricious. “I stand by the decision I made using the policy. I won’t choose a different outcome and manufacture a policy-compliant scenario to get there.”

I have my integrity to consider. Likewise, you readers probably know all about lawsuits against government agencies over ‘policy violations.’ When a DIPS investigator doesn’t follow policy, and a kitchen utensil gets harmed, we get sued. It cuts both ways though; words have meanings, and policies use them to set requirements.

For example, there’s a huge risk when an investigator doesn’t get an abused blender’s warranty records as policy requires. Its motor burns out, and the lawsuit lands on my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ desk. The other angle: if a telework policy tells me to consider complementary conditions [A], [B], [C], and [D] in my decision, I will. What I will not do, is add [E] in order to get the outcome I want (or the acute outcome I am told I want). Each one is a policy violation, and each one exposes the Tribunal to risk. More importantly, it’s not just utensils that can get hurt; employees can be waylaid into a zero-sum game of bitterness: we force a loss of autonomy on their part, and welcome them in helping DIPS lose morer.

“The policy and instructions are straightforward. I decided to approve, but if I did deny, then you would decide. That’s not the case here.”

And after a length of silence, long enough to tell a story like this.

“I have to go to another meeting, this isn’t over.”

I held onto that job in much the say way that JohnMclane, played by Bruce Willis, didn’t Hans Gruber, played by Alan Rickman, in the scene beginning around the two-hour mark, culminating at about 2:02:38, in the 1988 movie “Die Hard.”

Comfortably Numb

Back from leave and under a mountain of unread email, I took another job in HIT, but the same parent administration. As part of on-boarding, I needed to get my new boss’ approval to work from home. So, I grabbed that damn form and acknowledged I wouldn’t go to the… saloon when working. The form was revised. Two things, 1) they changed beer garden to saloon; 2) that means somebody went back to my warnings and made my recommended changes; and 1) saloon.

I had to see it. Within all the DIPS email tossed my way during leave, I dug and found Flo’s announcement of the revision:

Please use the attached new version of this form going forward. Without my approval, employees cannot work at home without P.A.N.T.S. Be advised that the implementation of this revised policy constitutes a finalized administrative determination. Subsequent operational vectors, therefore, preclude any and all consideration of alternative recourse or individualized accommodation.

No exceptions.

Thank you,

Flo Y. D. Pinkerton, Chief, DIPS/HIT
0-(112)-358-1321
pink.flo.yd@hit.gov
(for some reason I have to say this was sent from my iMac, not my iPhone)