I'm sitting here in economic difficulty because the State of Arizona has neglected to pay me for the past four months of contract work. I have no idea, not even the slightest, if they'll ever pay me. In the mean time I'm getting depressed, because there just doesn't seem to be anything I can do to influence the Arizona Department of Education to pay its bills with anything like a reasonable degree of ethics or responsibility. Meanwhile someone in the Attorney General's office has promised to "track it down," something she's been saying for the past three months in various bureaucratic Arizonese dialects. And I'm sort of left wondering if these so-called human beings are really just broken robots... and I'm really really really glad that government doesn't have more power than it has. Because, if this were a private company that owed me money I'd have some sort of recourse. I could complain to the Public Relations department and there'd be some sort of process that would actually lead somewhere... rather than just a numbing sense of powerlessness, and the feeling that I've basically wasted the last four months.
Well, I at least have all the deliverables from those four months, and those folks in Arizona won't be seeing any of it until I'm paid... an eventuality that would cost them something like 1,000 times what they owe me. But then, losing that sort of taxpayer cash isn't something that would worry your average Arizona Department of Education bureaucrat. Which makes me wonder why we don't just give them more money, and a bigger hunk of public trust.
I wonder if anyone in a position of responsibility cares whether someone is ultimately accountable for this sort of screw up? Maybe this guy with the big paradigm-promoting grin?
Posted by Demosophist at October 4, 2003 03:09 AM | TrackBack