Posted on 08/04/2014 9:51:27 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
PHOENIX — On her 71st workday in the basement, Paula Pedene had something fun to look forward to. She had an errand to run, up on the first floor.
“Today, I get to go get the papers. Exciting!” she said. “I get to go upstairs and, you know, see people.”
The task itself was no thrill: Retrieve the morning’s newspapers and bring them back to the library of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital. The pleasure was in the journey. Down a long, sunlit hallway. Back again, seeing friends in the bustle of the hospital’s main floor.
Then, Pedene got back in the elevator and hit “B.” The day’s big excitement was over. It was 7:40 a.m.
“I will not be able to do this forever,” Pedene said later that day.
Pedene, 56, is the former chief spokeswoman for this VA hospital. Now, she is living in a bureaucrat’s urban legend. After complaining to higher-ups about mismanagement at this hospital, she has been reassigned — indefinitely — to a desk in the basement.
In the Phoenix case, investigators are still trying to determine whether Pedene was punished because of her earlier complaints. If she is, that would make her part of a long, ugly tradition in the federal bureaucracy — workers sent to a cubicle in exile.
In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to break rooms, broom closets and basements. It’s a clever punishment, good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law.
The whole thing can look minor on paper. They moved your office. So what? But the change is designed to afflict the striving soul of a federal worker, with a mix of isolation, idle time and lost prestige.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
An introvert’s dream come true!
Does it come with a red stapler?......................
If you need to continue working someplace, perhaps to qualify for the full pension you’ve invested 20 years in already, you’d be insane to complain or whistle-blow about anything. You will be punished. A Fortune 500 company I worked for fired an employee who filed a discrimination act complaint which virtually guaranteed him a government lawyer. But it would have been worse for him if he’d not been fired. They also had an “ethics” hotline and insisted we call them before we called the Pentagon’s number. You’d have been crazy to call it. The president was a former union thug who beat people. They sent him to charm school twice so he could eat with polite people and you could tell it didn’t take.
Isolation? Great! Leave me the he__ alone!
Idle time? Since when has THAT ever been a complaint for federal leeches?
Loss of prestige? Is this a job or a country club?
This kind of thing happened in City Government about 20 years ago. The head of the Planning Dept got crossways of the Mayor. The former head of the Planning Dept was “promoted” to head “brick counter” in the basement until he could retire.
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