State Dept.: 75-year wait for Clinton aide emails

[SheilaT]

30. Many years ago, as in 1980, I was working for the Federal Government.

In the Army Archives, to be specific. I was a sort of student intern. My history teacher at Northern Virginia Community College had told us about these positions. I applied and was hired.

It was an interesting experience on many levels. First off, it became clear to me very quickly that an important aspect of this position was to adjust the student-interns to such things as going to work on a regular basis. Showing up on time. Stuff like that. I was already over 30, and was far beyond this stuff.

I did several projects in the six months or so I was there. One was the Machine Readable Project. At the time the federal government was in the process of becoming computerized, and this project was intended to establish protocols for saving computer (machine readable) records in a way that more or less matched the standards for paper records. To do this, a survey had been sent out to every army installation around the world asking them what they were doing at that point to preserve these records. I was tasked with collating and turning into another machine readable format (i.e. IBM punchcards) what they'd sent back to us. The woman who instructed me in what to do with these surveys spent over an hour giving me ten minutes' worth of information. She made it clear she thought this would take two weeks or so. I was done in less than two hours. It wasn't hard. But I was in an office where people were painfully under-employed. The particular woman who'd spent so long telling me about this task spent about six hours every day just staring at the wall. She honestly had at best two hours of work every day. At the time I thought she was incompetent, or an idiot, but I've come to understand that it wasn't her fault she had almost nothing to occupy her time.

A bit later, I was assigned the Agent Orange Project. I was to go through a very long list of documents, and fill out order cards calling up those which seemed to have any connection to the Agent Orange stuff in Vietnam. Already Vietnam Vets were claiming that they had illnesses and deformed children because of exposure to the defoliant. I only had the titles of the reports to go by, and I was told that I should err on the side of generosity: anything that looked remotely connected, I should order. The first day I must have filled out fifty orders, and the next day probably a hundred more. The day after that my boss got an angry phone call from the records center saying they couldn't possibly fill those order so quickly. I was restricted to 25 orders per week.

The third project I worked on was a filing project. Keep in mind I was working for the Army Archives, the people who set the rules about what should and should not be retained at U.S. Army installations around the world. They kept huge three ring binders of their rules. The rules were updated periodically. You'd think this was the one place in the entire United States Government and the United States Army that would have these rules completely up to date, wouldn't you? I was assigned to file the updates that no one had gotten to recently. I want to add here that I had been an airline ticket agent for ten years, immediately prior to this job. One of the delightful things I got to do was to update the Rules Tariff, these VERY LARGE binders that had all of the rules and regulations relating to airlines. Things like the routes we flew, the stuff about the clubs at the airports, what we had to do if a flight was cancelled or delayed. Stuff like that. We got updates more or less on a weekly basis. It was a steady part time job to make sure the Rules Tariff was up to date.

So back to my government job. I might want to point out that I was a GS-2, the absolutely lowest of the low. I think there may have been, back before President Lincoln, jobs that were categorized as GS-1, but no longer. In the office I worked in, the next lowest employee was a GS-7. Many of them were GS-9. My own boss was a GS-11, and his boss was a GS-13. The gulf between us was huge. Sort of like an enlisted man just out of basic training, compared to a Colonel or General. Trust me, I don't exaggerate here.

Back to the job. I was often bored, and as you can already see I was vastly more efficient than they were used to. I'd actually gotten in the habit of shuffling between two offices until I figured no one really knew where I was, and I'd go home an hour or so early, because I had nothing to do. It's possible that Dr. Hatcher, my boss, was somewhat on to me, but since I was doing about three or four times the work they expected, he let it slide. In fact, I was told by more than one person that if I'd been a real employee rather than the student intern I was, I'd have been promoted out of there so fast I'd probably not have known what was happening. So I was asked to update the manuals. This was 1980. The last time the manuals had been updated had been 1967. I had TWELVE YEARS of unfiled updates to deal with. TWELVE YEARS!!. The up side was that I was kept occupied for about two, maybe three weeks. At the end, when I had everything caught up, I went into the office of the head honcho, the GS-13, and very tremulously told him that while I didn't mind doing the work, I was horrified that the revisions hadn't been filed for so long. He pressed me as to what I thought should be done, and I finally told him the task should be assigned to someone. And that he, or someone else, needed to monitor this and make sure the revisions were filed. I have no idea if this was done. I suppose, were I to go back there, I'd find unfiled revisions dating back to 1980.

The entire point of this rather lengthy post is that the government is capable of much obstruction, much delay. There simply is not the sense of urgency that exists in the outside world, the notion that getting something done in a timely manner is important. Similarly, the legal profession operates in its own time sense which has almost no connection to the world most of us live in. I've been a paralegal. I know.

The State Department could hire more people. Maybe those who already work there could actually work more than two hours a day. If you turned this over to a mid level law firm they'd be done in a year. To someone like me? Six months.