Fax and Spend

...Adelman gies—light sensors among them—are partly responsible for the bloat...

...If there's no movement in the room for 25 minutes, the light circuit shuts down...

...I've clocked the "red bag" against the fax that fails to transmit on the first try...

...The fax machine was supposed to make communication nearly instantaneous...

...No one will ever know what the government paid to have these diabolical systems installed, but I hope it is less, on an annual basis, than the $4,500 in my labor time (including benefits) which you, dear taxpayers, are shelling out for me not to talk on the phone...

...Trees, time, staff, postal service: however you count it, it's waste...

...Consequently, I now write my letters by hand...

...The only way to prevent this waste is to strip the D&Ds by hand from each set of labels produced for specific mailings...

...people do...

...After your machine tries four times to get through, it quits and belches out a busy signal...

...Chances are you're not the only one, which means the queue can be up to a few hours long...

...The ball will bounce neatly back under my desk...

...The round trip across the room costs the government two minutes of my time every hour...

...Here's what you're likely to hear: Voice Mail Machine #1: "Good day...

...Half of those were duplicates...

...I'm one of the people on those mailing lists...

...Nope...

...And that in turn means someone else has to pick up the work I cannot complete...

...But new technoloClifford Adelman is a senior associate in the Office of Research, U.S...

...These are often filled with "deads and duplicates," a category including folks who were last heard from when Truman was veep...

...At present, the only advantage it offers over the old system is to allow me to use a printer located 350 feet from my office (as opposed to the old printer located 10 feet away...

...It's the sensor's fault...

...Most of the documents I write use either official memo paper or departmental letterhead, which, of course, means yet another 700 foot round-trip to change the paper each time I want to print...

...Say you want to send a fax to a government agency on the other side of the Mall, or a national association downtown...

...It's a dead heat...

...Anyone who has recently called the government can tell you that between the time you pick up the phone and work through three voice mail machines to leave your message, four to five minutes will have elapsed...

...We don't serve them by stuffing mailboxes with duplicate publications...

...I may squirm around during all of this, but I stay in my chair...

...When I'm not on the phone leaving a message, chances are I'm at work on my computer, one that recently hooked into a local area network (LAN) system...

...Light sensors are just the beginning...

...The system was installed by the building's owner to save on the power bill...

...What are the benefits of the LAN system...

...I make about eight calls a day to federal offices...

...A bureaucrat's work must focus on the customers, which is to say the citizens...

...Before LANs, the government supplied me with a 286/12 computer with a 40-megabyte hard disk and 18 The Washington Monthly/March 1993 a 1,200 baud modem...

...Unless you or your secretary check the centrally located (read: down the hall 100 feet, through two doorways, take a right at the corridor) machine every 25 minutes, your fax may be in a holding pattern for hours, maybe even days...

...We don't serve them when our time is eaten up waiting for electronic connections...

...if you wish to speak to the telecommunications branch, press two, followed by the pound key...

...Figure in people who have moved so many times that the Mafia couldn't find them, and folks whose names appear twice or thrice, each time with a slightly different spelling or zip code (including ones that put residents of Ohio in Texas...

...I spent something on the order of 40 hours screaming about this to superiors in memos and on the phone...

...Consider the typical government agency's computer generated mailing lists...

...It's faster, more charming, and if your letter to the president is about, say, college tuition or university research overhead charges, there's a good chance you'll get a hand-inked response from me...

...The new administration is considering ways to cut at least 100,000 jobs in the civilian federal workforce over the next five years...

...This means that retrieving documents now takes five to six minutes, round trip...

...March 1993/The Washington Monthly 19...

...Then, the lights go out...

...You have reached the Office of Technological Planning, Management, and Evaluation Systems of the U.S...

...Then, when the lights go out, I'll throw it at the filing cabinets opposite my desk to trip the sensor...

...To turn the lights back on, I have to get out of my chair and walk until the sensor tells the electrical system that there's something alive in the room...

...In a typical mass mailing of a free government publication to targeted mailing lists, 10 to 15 percent of the generated labels are "deads and duplicates...

...The time I spend trekking across rooms to turn lights back on means less time to cover a given territory of tasks...

...Easy, right...

...Insert the original into the feeder, dial the number, watch the missive get sucked into the electronic maw, pick up the original, and walk away...

...With LAN and a new computer, the machine runs through so many loops and synapses that getting into a software program takes not 22 seconds, but 150 seconds...

...This technology is about as cutting edge as an Etch-A-Sketch...

...As of this writing, we're down to four items a month from my own agency, but the duplicates remain...

...There's no doubt that some agencies are bloated and, as any thorough desk audit would reveal, could take the hit...

...In that time, you could deliver your message in person...

...This article was prepared in his capacity as a private citizen, and no endorsement by the Department should be inferred...

...That turns out to be 17 minutes a day, 85 minutes a week, 4,250 minutes or approximately 71 hours per year...

...If I used the modem to dial a mainframe computer to analyze data bases, it took 42 seconds...

...It's worse than the lights...

...As recently as 1991,1 was receiving an average of 12 first class mail items a month from my own agency, going out on the third floor and coming back in on the sixth...

...If you have a touch-tone phone and wish to speak to the computer branch, press one, followed by the pound key, now...

...I don't know whether the savings are passed on to the government, but I doubt it...

...My only regret is that I won't be sending you this hypothetical letter by fax...

...Department of Blah Blah...

...To save that time (and Uncle Sam that money), I plan to buy a used basketball at a yard sale...

...At the rate of four publications a year, that means 64 hours of unnecessary labor at a cost to the government of about $3,200...

...Department of Education...

...We don't serve citizens with voice mail relays that announce nothing...

...This fax purgatory makes me nostalgic for the days when we sent spandexed bikers careening through L Street traffic or when we used the "red bag," picked up every three hours by an assistant secretary's special messenger...

...Have you ever phoned the most technologically advanced offices within any federal agency...

...The computer does not do this...

...To call up a mainframe computer and log-on to analyze large scale data takes three minutes, an eternity in computer time...

...I sit at my government desk doing what government desk-sitters do: crunch data on the computer, write memos and reports, edit documents, answer mail from citizens, and make and answer phone calls...

...It takes me the equivalent of a solid weekend at my dining room table to do this for a set of 3,500-4,000 labels...

...Nonetheless, when I turned on my antique, I could check the whole machine for viruses and get into a software program in 22 seconds...

...Then again, you're probably better off...

...we're the rest...

...Actually, technology is only part of the problem...

...If all of them are answered by voice mail relays, we're talking about 20 minutes a day or about 83 hours per year...

...At the rate I am paid (including benefits), the light sensor costs the government about $3,800 in lost labor annually...

...Illustration by Bill Holbrook...

...And, of course, it's also very difficult to serve them when the lights go out...