My colleague and longtime friend (we'll call her KC), who is also a Certified Public Accountant, called me the other day for some hilarious chatter. Her husband had lost his job as an engineer with General Motors, so they had to leave Michigan for the Southeast last year. She just became employed, a few months ago, at a huge government contractor in a Senior accounting/finance role. Like me, her background is in public accounting, where your ability to stay employed is a direct result of your ability to 1) efficiently serve clients, and 2) keep your billable hours at a high percentage rate. After all, you are a revenue center billing clients for your service production. Thus, as she told me, she is used to lots of stress plus the rewards that go along with serving clients well.

So she starts working this new job and tells me she's completely bored. She has almost nothing to do, but because she's a "Senior," she has more work than most. She says that some areas of the company have absolutely no supervisors - meaning no one to oversee whether or not the work is being performed in a timely, cost-efficient manner. They started her on overtime a few weeks ago. Because she had nothing to do, someone thought she should work more hours doing nothing. So she said she has been working the overtime and has helped out some lower-level staffers that were not getting their work done because they too had little to do, and that sort of thing only breeds the lack of ambition, lack of work ethic, and the desire to do even less. She says the working pace across the company is pathetically slow and uninspiring. And this comes from someone who was admittedly slower-paced than most of her CPA colleagues in her previous work.

She says that each time someone has a celebration - any celebration, like a birthday or work anniversary or other trivial event, her whole group will go out for a 3-hour lunch (on the house), and just whoop it up. She says these things often have her going out to lunch on some thing that needs to be celebrated, and the group returns to the office at 3:00pm, and they go home at 3:30. The tab, of course, is on the company, who proceeds to bill those expenses to the client because their client is government, where no profit or loss is tabulated and thus no cost-cutting programs need be enacted and no overbills need be investigated. Government doesn't produce profits and losses and therefore has no yardstick with which to measure its current performance or develop its strategic objectives going forward. Businesses build 5-year strategic plans while governments take one fiscal year at a time and base their spending budget on guesstimates of the year's annual take from the theft pool.

When my friend told me about the unnecessary overtime (at time-and-a-half), the slacker's pace, and the long, endless celebrations over trivial events, one can be sure that this work ethic and spending habits are not what has brought Wal-Mart inventory to its customers at super-low prices. Government slackerism also does not produce top Stanford graduates bringing us yet another wonderful development from Google, Palm, Blackberry, or Apple. With government, there are no shareholders to answer to; there are only taxpayers with endless wallets who are threatened with suspended privileges, the taking back of property, and imprisonment if they don't oblige the government's monoploy on theft and redistribution.