Government waste. *gigglesnort*

[Fitz]

So...

We have this dude here whose job it was to order a rack for a server infrastructure that i'm building.

He ordered the wrong *expletive deleted*it.

He KNEW it was wrong, and ordered it anyways because "one vendor said it wouldn't work... but one of them DIDNT say it wouldnt work, so i ordered it from him"

me: "So, the second vendor said it would work?"

him: "No, he just DIDNT say it WOULDNT work"

me: "Are you bleeping kidding me?"

he doesnt want to send it back because it'll be "a contracting nightmare"

so now he's trying to redneck engineer the rack to work with our hardware.


I'm reporting him for the "waste" part of "fraud, waste, and abuse"

But the funny part was the end of the conversation...


me: "You know all that debt and spending talk on the news?"

him: "yeah"

me: "You're part of the problem, guy."

him: "What?"

me: "You just wasted a metric buttload of taxpayer money.. and i'm going to be shouting it from the rooftops."

[Devonai]

I hear you can cram 7.62 into a 5.56 chamber if you try hard enough.

[Scout26]

Would it be wrong to beat him senseless with said rack?

well, it wouldn't take much beating as he's already lacking any sense....

[Fitz]

Common sense prevailed. Told the contracting officer to STFU and get the right stuff

[RevDisk]

Yea, I'm not surprised.  Can't tell ya how many folks act surprised when I show competence.  Hell, I act surprised when I see competence.  It's bloody rare these days.

[BReilley]

Yea, I'm not surprised.  Can't tell ya how many folks act surprised when I show competence.  Hell, I act surprised when I see competence.  It's bloody rare these days.

Competence is out of fashion most anywhere these days.

[Scout26]

Fitz, show him this.

Dear .gov Buying Person,


Before you go and spend my money (and yes it is my money), understand where it came from.  I had to go out and kiss someone's butt to get a job.  I then had to continue to kiss that same butt and several others for 8-14 hours per day away from my family.  I do that to put food on the table and roof over my family's head.

And then, instead of me being able to keep all of what I've worked my ass off to earn, some goon with guns comes and takes about 40% right off the top, with out so much as a "Thank You", just a the threat of Guns and Jail if they think I'm not giving them enough.

So when you spend any money, remember it's money you reached in and took out of my wallet.  It's money you took from clothes off my kids' back. Food off of their plates.   So you treat every last penny as if I'm watching, because I am.

-Dave Liddy
Taxpayer.

[209]

Spent a lot of years in the service of the federal government, worked for a large helicopter manufacturer building birds for the government, and now have worked for a state government for years.  I am always amazed at the waste I see.

About 8 years ago, I was tasked with purchasing tactical gear.  One of the items was a tac helmet.  The ones I picked come in two sizes- sm/med and large.  My proposal clearly articulated that and stated we would need hat sizes to purchase the right ones.  As luck would have it, when the proposal was improved, I was out on a comp injury.  So one of my superiors was tasked in ordering them.  He contacted one vendor and the guy told him about the sizes and suggested he get hat sizes and order appropriately.  So he called another vendor who said "most people can use a sm/med".  So he ordered from him.    Same helmet but I guess the second vendor sold a magical helmet or something.  So we get 20 sm/med helmets which sit there until about six months later when I return to work.  I issue them and find there are about 5 people with "pumpkin noggies" who need larges.  Too late to send them back without paying a restocking fee.  So I'm told by said superior to fix the problem "without spending money".     Still haven't figured out how to do that so not everyone has a helmet yet.  Stupid people everywhere.

[mtnbkr]

I spent 10 years as a FedGov contractor (IT).  While I saw waste here and there, I never saw such callous disregard for it.  There was always an effort made to "do it right" and the Fed folks on the project were always conscious of not wasting money needlessly.

Fast forward to my entirely civilian job...

The only time those people (my own company and our customers) are interested in saving money is when it means cutting headcount or adding more work to already overloaded staff.   The same companies will piss away millions on barely used hardware (only used a month but we can't reuse it) or pointless projects.  Hire another person?  That's unpossible!

Chris

[Fitz]

Me and the PM had a talk today. He apparently gave the guy who made the purchase a HUGE ration of *$&^ about it.

Good.

[HankB]

I work for a large corporation. [rant mode]Our last CEO didn't know anything about running a company except for Six Sigma and cutting headcount. (Problems DID arise when we began getting orders for certain products . . . and didn't have the people to manufacture them. But it wasn't HIS fault, oh no . . . ) And in the midst of the people cutting, they upgraded the company's air force to NEW Gulfstream V's. (I think we have at least 4.)

Our current CEO doesn't know anything except cutting employee benefits - he eliminated annual stock option grants for about 6 or 7 thousand people, froze salaries for a year, has used Obamacare as an excuse to curtail retiree medical benefits, and has held salary increases this year to just over 1% . . . except for executive compensation, which has gone up 59% . . . and of course the company's executive resort remains.

They cut back on things like donuts & coffee at meetings, but even though we have video conference rooms, some of our seagull managers still do a lot of travel. (Seagull managers . . . fly in, make a lot of noise, cr@p on everything, and fly out . . . just like seagulls.)

Waste abounds. [/rant mode]

[roo_ster]

Fitz, show him this.

Dear .gov Buying Person,


Before you go and spend my money (and yes it is my money), understand where it came from.  I had to go out and kiss someone's butt to get a job.  I then had to continue to kiss that same butt and several others for 8-14 hours per day away from my family.  I do that to put food on the table and roof over my family's head.

And then, instead of me being able to keep all of what I've worked my ass off to earn, some goon with guns comes and takes about 40% right off the top, with out so much as a "Thank You", just a the threat of Guns and Jail if they think I'm not giving them enough.

So when you spend any money, remember it's money you reached in and took out of my wallet.  It's money you took from clothes off my kids' back. Food off of their plates.   So you treat every last penny as if I'm watching, because I am.

-Dave Liddy
Taxpayer.

This.

[Regolith]

My dad worked for the BLM until he retired in January. At one point, they needed a tractor-trailer lowboy rig to move some heavy equipment, so he tracked one down and found a used Mac truck in decent shape, along with the trailer, for $89,000 (he drove trucks when he was younger, so he had a pretty good yard stick for evaluating it).

He sends it in for approval.  Denied.  So instead, the higher-ups went out and bought a Kenworth tractor for $130,000, a trailer for $30,000, find out the trailer doesn't work, surplus it and get maybe $10,000 out of it, and bought another trailer for $15,000.