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2004-03-15

The other day at work I saw a woman come into the bathroom, wash her hands, go into a stall, flush the toilet, then sit down and pee. It was backwards day and I didn�t even know it!

The public service is full of these people � germ-phobes, recluses, eccentrics, social maladroits and assorted weirdos at various points on the mental illness spectrum. Then there�s the white trash contingent: women who think acid wash jeans and stiletto heels are the apex of professional fashion; women who have the public service to thank that their carefully-coiffed perms are not hidden beneath a hairnet.

The public service creates an amniotic haven for these people. The public service will not go bankrupt if it doesn�t provide cutting-edge service; therefore, there�s no competitive impetus to engage a motivated, competent, streamlined workforce. You can find a filing job for your crazy cousin as a favour to your aunt, and twenty years later your crazy cousin will still be arranging files according to their texture and taking hour-long breaks to wash his hands a hundred and eighty-seven times; except now he�ll have the title of �Information Management Officer� and he�ll be making more than his homecare worker. Nobody ever gets fired here. The disciplinary process is so convoluted and ineffectual that you basically have to make the evening news before you�re sacked. If someone is at the point where they�re making an active nuisance of themselves or refusing to do any work at all, managers have a standard practice of providing positive references to find jobs for them elsewhere.

And that is why I ended my week on Friday listening to the branch charity case tell me how much he likes Shania Twain. Sometimes he tells me how much he likes Jesus. I�d like to observe the cognitive short circuit that would ensue if I told him that Jesus, in fact, hates Shania Twain (as would any saviour with a lick of common sense); but I�m too busy these days washing all the doorknobs with bleach.

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