Sherman R. Frederick/Properly Subversive
There’s a breakfast joint near me that serves a solid breakfast, quickly and with good cheer. It’s nothing fancy, but it has the full range of items – eggs, hash browns, pancakes, etc, – and what it does it does very well.
Sherman Frederick
Last time I was there, last Saturday in fact, my breakfast joint was packed. Our party of four got the very last table in the joint. Yet, we had water and coffee within 60 seconds of sitting down. After ordering, it took precisely 5 minutes and four seconds for our food to arrive. I know this because I used the stopwatch on my iPhone to time it. (I frequently time the service because the efficiency never ceases to amaze me.)
We all know such places, whether we live in a big city or a rural town. A really good breakfast joint is not a one-off. So, the know-how exists. Why can’t government offices run more like a good breakfast joint? I seriously put that question to you today.
The principles are the same, it seems to me. You open at a certain time. When customers arrive you greet them, seat them, provide a service and send them away, hopefully satisfied.
Been to the DMV lately?
I’ve been to several in multiple states. They always feel like a maze of lines directing you here and there, usually with a wait, then sometimes redirecting you to another line and a wait. The staff seem to have burr in their underwear, treating you more as an irritant than a customer.
DVM isn’t alone in this. A lot of government services and some big private-sector institutions (think hospitals) suffer from the same vibe. Whatever the management in government is doing, why can’t it be more like a good breakfast place? Perhaps, in addition to making government workers take classes on the proper use of pronouns, they could also invite the owner of the nearest good breakfast joint in to talk about what it is to provide efficient service.
How do they do it? How do they prepare? What do they do with a grumpy waitress who doesn’t want to be there?
If your favorite breakfast joint can do it, so can your government. Is that suggesting too much?
SCOTLAND’S FOLLY
The woke brand of crazy oppression enveloping Scotland right now is hard to watch. The government there enacted the Hate Crime and Public Order Act. It criminalizes speech that hurts the feelings of protected classes of people – such as the old, the queer, the religious, the disabled and transgenders.
This is not idle speculation. The supporters of the bill say this is exactly what it is intended to do. Siobhian Brown, for example, the Scottish National Party’s minister for community safety, warned the nation on the eve of passage that those who misgender others online – such as calling a trans woman ‘he’ – will get you “investigated” by authorities.
It caused a stir of hate in Scotland – a hate for their goofy government. Even Harry Potter’s mom, J. K Rowling, is pissed. She fired off a post that listed 10 prominent Scottish trans people, calling them all by their biological pronouns.
‘’I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offense under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Rowling wrote.
Police did just that after getting criminal complaints from hurt woke citizens. Police eventually determined that stating biological fact was not criminal. But, the fact that Scotland considered muzzling the nation’s most famous living author illustrates how crazy this new law is and how it exposes the ugly underbelly of the woke movement.
Liberals in the name of kindness so easily slip into oppression. Group comfort demands forced silence. It’s the path of all liberal oppressors in history from Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China to Cambodia’s Pol Pot banning private property and books.
The Scottish National Party isn’t on par with the Cultural Revolution — yet — but the unvarnished truth is that the SNP leadership has more affinity for Mao Tse-tung than Margaret Thatcher’s. Its website says it is taking “bold steps to build a fairer, greener and more equal Scotland.”
I know what “more equal” means in the virtue signaling world of the woke. It means less freedom for the people the government doesn’t like.
ONE MORE THING
– “Liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them” – Lenny Bruce
Sherman R. Frederick is a member of the Nevada Press Association’s Hall of Fame. He can be reached at ShermFrederick@gmail.com. You can enjoy more of his work at https://shermanfrederick.
Anyone who visits Auto Club know the difference, walk in and served within a couple minutes. A smile and “how can I help you”. So helpful, they know they are in the customer service business. If they don’t perform, they are out, in government, if you don’t perform, so what. I served in government for 40 years and it was much easier the hire then to fire, so we had lots of extra ‘customer service people” and a few good workers. Government needs to come down in size and anyone should be able to go, any non-performers regardless of ethnicity.