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Good enough for government work

Apr 14, 2009
By .
Irksome

There are times when a unionized employee has been aggrieved and it is appropriate to exercise one's contractual rights. Then there is James Kauchis, an accounting clerk at Broome County, New York's Department of Social Services. Kauchis recently filed for compensation for his missed lunch hour on April 3. Far be it from me to deny a man his contractually required lunch hour but he was stuck in his office because the building was on lockdown by the police following the Binghamton citizenship exam massacre. The DSS even got permission to have pizza delivered to the staff. It is hard to contemplate the sheer size and density of the balls this man must have.

I am the son of two former public employees so I chafe a little when I hear people complain about the lack of initiative of government employees. Partly because I know how many uncompensated hours my parents spent at their jobs but mostly because I've seen just how lazy private sector employees are.

On the other hand, I worked for a short while at the Port Authority and saw people who knew how to minimize the amount of time they spent at the office while still receiving their full pay with amazing precision. Whether it was by going to the bathroom five minutes before punching out every day (so that it was on company time) or turning every cold into a week-long hiatus (because a continued absence was only one absence), I knew that my run of the mill lack of interest in productivity was strictly minor league.

None of these city slickers, however, have the sheer chutzpah of Binghamton's Mr. Kauchis. I know that I could never withstand this sort of scrutiny (see, for example, the time of this posting) but I'd love to see an audit of Kauchis' computer during the time he had to 'work' through lunch.

Last 5 posts by Charles

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2 Comments

  1. Chris  •  Apr 14, 2009 @3:00 pm

    I don't miss living in upstate NY one bit, and Binghamton's a terrible place. I did, however, spens a summer working at the Tioga Country department of social services (one county over) and they were good folks.

  2. Ezra  •  Apr 14, 2009 @3:11 pm

    I worked at the Federal Reserve Bank, and we had a few folks who were quite good at wringing every last thing out of the system there. In particular I remember one employee who's expense requests were apparently arranged by Enron. They would do things like expense the interest rate on their credit card for purchases during travel. It was pretty amazing.