After reading James Bovard’s blistering account in the Wall Street Journal of working a summer job for the old Virginia Highway Department back in 1973, all I can say is, yikes, I sure hope the corporate culture of the Virginia Department of Transportation has changed in the last 38 years.
As a 16-year-old flagman, Bovard writes, he was assigned to a crew that “might have been the biggest slackers south of the Potomac and east of the Alleghenies. Working slowly to slipshod standards was their code of honor. Anyone who worked harder was viewed as a nuisance, if not a menace.”
Bovard recounts a number of amusing stories, such as going on dead animal patrol. Rather than follow the required procedure of burying a dead animal along the side of the road, which might actually entail work, he and his mentor, a cigar-smoking, jelly-bellied truck drive named Bud, would wait until no cars were passing and use their shovels to heave the carcass into the bushes.
The youth also learned how not to shovel. To not shovel right, he writes, lean against the shovel handle. But don’t keep both hands in your pocket, a sure tip-off that you’re not doing anything. “The key is to appear to be studiously calculating where your next burst of effort will provide maximum returns for the task.”
Bovard’s bottom line: “The Highway Department could not competently organize anything more complex than painting stripes in the middle of a road. Even the placement of highway direction signs was routinely botched.”