What REALLY grinds your gears?

[Buffalo Bob]

Originally Posted by over the mountain

to be fair, those private practice attys work 80 hour work weeks. in California they also get 50-100% bonus as well.

and i was in no way impugning my disdain for what Fed gov't employees (especially DOD and their contractors) on state level employees or ppl like joe who actually bust tail and provide a tremendous return in value.

the govt needs more joes and less ppl like my clients.

I did some DOD contract work, there is something for the most part where it pays considerably less working for the Feds than for the private sector. I don't know where the stories of $175 hammers and $600 toilet seats come from, I definitely wasn't making any. I was making small replacement parts for weaponry and vehicles. Every contract went to lowest qualified bidder, and whenever a job repeated it went to the lowest bidder again. Final selling price was close to what a similar item would go for in the private sector, but labeling, packing, and other paperwork as much as doubled the time needed over the same priced job going to Joe Gunsmith down the street.

A lot of the blueprints were photocopies of hand drawn ones from as far back as World War II that had never been updated. Not only were they hard to read, they had requirements for raw materials and coatings that had long been obsolete. If you didn't know the modern replacements off the top of your head or know a private sector vendor to call for the answer, don't waste your time trying to get help from the procurement officer that wrote the work order they usually don't know or know who to ask.

It blew my mind talking to some off these procurement officers who write up the contract solicitations. Some had been doing the job for decades yet did not know how to read the simplest of blueprints. You would think since most of the DOD solicitations contained blueprints they would teach their employees how to read them. I actually went to a government contractor office at March Air Force base a few times. Most of the time I walked in the employees were standing around drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. I wonder why the higher ups didn't send everyone to drafting school, when they had nothing to do they could be converting those illegible WWII blueprints to modern digital formats.