My DOGE Tale: ‘I Don’t Work Here’
Elon Musk’s Government Scrutiny Recalls My Story of Corporate Bureaucracy
If you enjoy this article, please click Like (❤️) to help others find my work.
Few movie characters have risen from a supporting role to a lovable place in the minds of so many the way Milton Waddams from Office Space (1999) has.
Portrayed brilliantly by Stephen Root, the ornery and overlooked Milton is both disgruntled with and disparaged by his office culture at fictional company Initech.
His superiors clearly want him to leave, but they don’t seem to have the guts to fire him, preferring to make his job so unpalatable and unprofitable to him — they stop paying his salary at one point! — that Milton will quit on his own.
It doesn’t happen.
I won’t spoil the details and especially end of the movie for you, but Milton and Initech continue their toxic relationship for the entire story.
The movie and particularly Milton have become folk heroes to those stuck in jobs that frustrate them, working for colleagues and superiors who seem to be going through the impersonal motions of bureaucratic office life.
‘I Don’t Work Here’
I had a somewhat Milton-esque experience for a few years at a previous employer, with an important twist: I liked my job and all the people I interacted with on a daily basis!
I began freelancing in Master Control and Engineering for a TV and radio broadcaster in 2014. Exactly nine weeks after I started, the corporation announced my small team would be eliminated and the tasks sent down to a central hub in Houston. One catch: The chief engineer would be able to keep one freelancer (me!) to help with some duties while massive building renovations happened at our facility.
Even though I was a freelancer earning only hourly wages (no benefits package in my compensation), it’s the most fun I had at any job. I learned a ton of technical skills. I did interesting, varied, productive work. And I got paid for it.
Gradually, I discovered, along with the chief engineer and station accountant, that no one I worked with was approving my weekly timesheets (which determined how I got paid). And, yet, through a miracle of bureaucracy, in which it’s easy to lose track of expenses and people and to keep automatically doing electronic tasks, I received a check each pay period.
It became so hilarious to me and the local accountant that we created an imaginary TV sitcom called “I Don’t Work Here,” about an employee who is known by everyone except the people who pay him; a guy who doesn’t exist in the corporate structure, but who works every day in full view of dozens of other employees (who do actually exist, per corporate).
Well, about 14 months into what was supposed to be a five-month gig, corporate found me! They freaked out and called the local facility to have me fired immediately. The local guys bargained with corporate to simply move me onto their budget — they had room in the station finances for a part-timer — rather than jettisoning me altogether.
Corporate agreed to this arrangement.
Corporate then immediately forgot any of this ever happened, never transferred me to the local station’s budget, but kept paying me every pay period. They had lost me, again.
Another 14 months went by; corporate found me, again. They freaked out, again. They wanted me fired, again.
This time, however, a couple of higher-ups in engineering at the regional and corporate level went to bat for me; I had helped them with a major systems upgrade that affected the entire company and all affiliates. They found a regular position for me “on the books” in which the people paying me were fully aware that I existed.
Thus ended my hilarious three-year stint as the “I Don’t Work Here” guy who kept flying under the radar of the corporate accountants and HR denizens. Soon afterward, I’d land a newly created position with an Operations division at the company, which put a weird twist on “I Don’t Work Here” (but that’s a story for another day, heh).
Wag the DOGE
Perhaps you’ve heard of Elon Musk and DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), and the stories of waste and fraud they’ve reported.
As someone who’s dealt with bureaucracy at several orders of magnitude smaller than the federal government, I bet plenty of very expensive things aren’t fully understood by anyone there.
Remy at Reason has a funny parody song (watch embedded video below or at YouTube) to give you some of the basics of the runaway government spending that has been somewhat-to-entirely unaccountable:
In the non-satire variety, Business Insider has a decent running list of DOGE’s rumblings.
And if you trust government sources, the official doge.gov site gives updates straight from the canine’s canines.
If Musk and DOGE can spur big reductions in the size and scope of the federal government, it will be a good thing. Yes, that means fewer government jobs. But government jobs aren’t productive jobs, so it’s a net gain for the macro-economy and all of us who do productive work in the private sector.
Government-employed activities regularly crowd out the good-neighborly economic efforts in society.
While I don’t wish for the kind of toxicity endured by Milton and Initech in Office Space, I do hope that far fewer people and resources will be employed by all levels of the fundamentally evil, monopoly-violence institution known as “government.”
Really, no one should work there.
I do Comment here …
Maybe we don’t work here, but we can still express ourselves in the Comments section.
Ever had a job where you felt like the management folks lost track of you?
Got any ideas for a wacky sitcom based on your work experience?
What do you think of DOGE’s efforts?
Anything else interest you about today’s topics?
Share your thoughts below …
—
Want some extra spiritual reading for Lent? I suggest the book, Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen, available at:
Amazon (paperback & Kindle)
Barnes&Noble (paperback)
Lulu (paperback)
Find me on X: GoodNeighBadCit
And, as always: May you be a good neighbor, even if it makes you a bad citizen.
Q: Ever had a job where you felt like the management folks lost track of you?
A: Yes, but not in the sense that I was receiving paychecks while ownership didn’t know I was in their employ; quite the opposite. About a dozen years ago, one member of our four-person editing staff had to take time off for eye surgery, one eye at a time. During his medical leave, I absorbed his duties. For nine months out of a year-long ordeal, I worked extra hours for the same pay.
The next year, ownership realized they could reduce the editing staff by one position and get the same amount of productivity. So they terminated the position of the employee who had taken medical leave. To be fair, the three of us remaining — all salaried — divided his work among us. But we had to put in more hours. And vacations and family leave meant there were stretches when two of us did the work that had been handled by four previously.
One might guess where this was going. Eventually, ownership cut the editing staff down to two — which meant working 60-80 hours per week (unless one of us took vacation; nothing like working 16 hours a day for 13 days).
This lasted about 9 months. Then ownership realized our supervisor had been turning in fraudulent expense sheets for about 10 years, pocketing the equivalent of one of our salaries each year. That’s when I quit.
Great read, Dom! Reminds me of that Seinfeld episode with Kramer “I don’t even work here!” “That’s what makes this so difficult”