Do Your Job Badly

• Doing your job incorrectly can have lots of effects:
  • Adding errors to a report could misdirect government’s efforts
  • Poorly drafting a regulatory change could add loopholes, or could subject it to being overturned by a court
  • Ignoring procedure could render whatever actions you’re taking invalid
  • Any form of doing your job badly means someone else will have to redo it – which sucks up time and attention from other priorities
• Go slow. If you used to get 10 things done in a day, make it 5. Make it 2. Make it zero.
  • By doing bad things slowly, less bad things will get done
  • Alternately, management will have to assign someone else to assist you, which sucks resources from other priorities
  • They only have so many FTEs. If you’re doing 2 bad things but taking up a seat that should be doing 10 bad things, you’ve net stopped 8 bad things.
• Develop a case of The Stupids
  • Suddenly, you don’t remember how to do anything. Nothing gets done correctly. Whatever work you do, someone else is going to have to re-do. This avoids doing harm yourself, and wastes other people’s time.
  • You have questions. Lots of questions. Questions for your supervisor. Questions for your co-workers. Questions for everyone around. Very long questions, over and over again. Every minute they’re spending helping you, they’re not doing something else.
• Take your sick time.
  • If you’re not at work, you’re not doing any harm. You got a cough? Call out. You don’t have a cough? Pretend to have a cough and call out.
  • The best time to do this? When something really important needs to happen, and only you can do it.
  • This can work particularly well if coordinated with others so that you and all your backups are absent at the same time.
• Become selectively deaf and forgetful
  • You can continue doing most of your job correctly, but simply “not hear” or “forget to do” objectionable tasks
  • Especially if you have a good reputation as a hard worker, it may take management some time to notice
• Be an irreplaceable bottleneck
  • Federal processes are often dependent on a long chain of procedures and signoffs. One person not checking one box can grind a whole workflow to a halt. Be that person.
  • Make it as hard as possible to track what work you haven’t done. Keep sloppy records. Write undecipherable notes. Don’t inform your backups. Make it impossible for anyone else to close what you’ve left open.
  • Being irreplaceable and worse-than-useless is a double whammy. It helps provide you job security if no one else can figure out what you did. And if they do fire you, fixing the mess you left behind will be a major task.