I started this as a comment on the diary about the guy in California who killed himself after being laid off. But after I got everything down that I felt needed to be said, I realized it stands better as a diary. While I can't imagine what that man's family is going through right now, I think I do know what he might have been feeling.
I was a public employee, briefly, twice. The first time was on Capitol Hill - my dream job! - in 1997-98. That ended badly, but it was a brief setback and I rebounded quickly: a year and a half later I was in grad school at an Ivy League institution. I never missed my "dream" job, and indeed I was proud to be able to say I had chased my dream down even if it had turned into a nightmare.
But that's not what I came here to discuss. No, my second experience was by far the more relevant. After finishing my master's, I was selected for the Presidential Management Fellow program (then called Presidential Management Intern, or PMI), and accepted a job with the Department of Commerce.
I was delighted to be chosen, but the job started off bad: on my very first day, I was given a schedule of events with all the times wrong, so I kept showing up just as they were ending. I never even had a swearing in ceremony, because the schedule didn't even bother to mention that there was one. (There was, as I learned weeks later.) Although I didn't know it at the time, my security clearance was not initially approved because of some confusion on my application. I could have cleared up the problem in five minutes, if only I had been informed that the application was returned. But I wasn't informed, and I spent the next nine months handling documents I technically wasn't supposed to see because no one had told me I hadn't been cleared. I submitted my insurance forms, but they were never processed, and I didn't find out until it was too late to wait for the next open season. In the meantime, I went without insurance for well over two years.
From that lousy start, it only got worse. My office was a notoriously difficult one to get along in, thanks to a boss who was both extremely unpleasant and not given to providing training. His attitude was that if you were good enough to work there, you'd learn to swim on your own. I evidently didn't, for nine months into my term, I was told to find another job. I agreed to do so, but anyone can tell you, looking for a federal job is a months-long process. It turned out he expected me to find something new in about a week. When I didn't, he threatened to fire me. As a PMI, I was exempt from the rule he was trying to use in firing me (one year probationary period), but the HR rep in charge of telling him that, instead told him he could do anything he wanted; and she told me I was s--t out of luck.
This led to about six weeks of me looking frantically for a new job, while every time the boss saw me in the hallway, I would get a call from HR five minutes later asking if I'd found a new job yet. The boss "helpfully" demanded to know one day why I wasn't at the PMI job fair that was going on that week. I barely kept my temper as I explained that those jobs were only open to newly minted PMIs. I also tried to explain that the program was not designed to accommodate people in my position, because no one was ever supposed to be in my position. Didn't make a dime's worth of difference to him.
When I did finally find a new job, I almost didn't get it because I didn't have security clearance (even though I should have had it for nearly a year by then!). HR finally went to bat for me on that one (it was better than explaining to my old boss that she'd been lying to him about my rights!), and I got the job. But it was a seriously dead-end job, essentially a glorified receptionist. I had a master's degree, and I was answering phones and shuffling papers for a living. Don't get me wrong: I'm not beneath doing jobs like that to make ends meet until I can land a better job. But remember that I was a member of a program designed specifically to bring talented people into meaty policy jobs. I had a master's degree in the field this office was handling, and they weren't even trying to put me to good use.
Indeed, they even refused to do so. I asked for more substantial work. The boss said he didn't have any. He was replaced several months later by another boss, who opted to let me go because I wasn't really doing much of anything. (The fact that I had done all I could to change that? She never even noticed.) The whole disaster lasted about two years in all, and throughout that time I also had to put up with know-it-alls telling me how I "couldn't be fired" because I was a federal worker, or how I was guaranteed a permanent job because I was a PMI. I don't know how I managed to avoid going postal, I really don't. After several near misses for a new job, I finally got an offer. But the Commerce HR department blocked that, too, saying I had overstayed my time as a PMI and couldn't transfer. Granted, transferring as a PMI would have entailed bending the rules. But this was the same HR department that had pretended those very same rules didn't even exist back when they would have been beneficial to me. For good measure, HR also used that occasion to tell me I also couldn't stay much longer at Commerce either since I was technically a temp.
Bottom line, the PMI program was designed to attract talented young professionals to government service when they otherwise wouldn't have been interested. In my case, it had the exact opposite effect. I wouldn't work for the civil service again for a billion dollars.
In a sad postscript, a higher-up in my second job did in fact lose it a few years after I left. I knew Bill slightly, and you'd never have guessed he was capable of any such thing. It probably isn't fair to blame it on where he worked (especially since he was a political hire), but a few years in such a depressing and poorly managed place couldn't possibly have helped.
And me? Well, a disaster can often have a silver lining. I was so desperate for something completely different that I sold my car and my furniture and moved to Taiwan to teach English. It was among the best experiences of my life, and the irony of its having resulted from the single worst experience of my life was never lost on me. After a couple of years in Taiwan, I went back to school in Denver for a year; but the international bug had bitten me and I switched to a program in Paris. Then it was on to Singapore, where I am now the marketing director of an up-and-coming Internet firm. So in a really off the wall way, all that Republican nonsense about government killing productivity while the private sector nourishes it? In my case, it came true in a roundabout way.
But I will never forget the indignity and humiliation I was subjected to at Commerce, or the fact that it happened in a program in which I was supposed to receive all sorts of support, or in a field where most people think you can't be fired unless you murder somebody. Civil service is a noble calling, but it truly can be a nightmare.