Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Your Tax Dollars At Work

I told you last week that they had scheduled me for shotgun training in the middle of my vacation. In retrospect, I should have gone just to mess with them.

But instead I went today. That was fun. It was pouring down rain when I left home so I brought my jacket and my raincoat, just to be on the safe side. Got pretty wet just going from the truck to the training building.

I was glad I wasn't in the morning class. They got soaked. By the time we got out there the rain had stopped and it turned into a sauna outside. That was freaking lovely.

It is supposed to be a three hour class. Including the range time. But they only schedule three of us for this afternoon.

Three of us.

Hey, at least they only scheduled one instructor to show up. I wouldn't have been all the surprised to see three or even four instructors.

So he stretched out the classroom time for two and a half hours and left the last half hour for actually shooting the weapon. Because if we don't actually spend three hours doing this they can't say that were are certified in shotgun training.

Seriously! We could have gotten into some really fun stuff in two and a half hours. The part of the training that we are actually required to take and understand could have been done in twenty minutes for the three of us.

But, no. All we were allowed to cover was the stuff the state makes us cover and nothing else. So we asked alot of silly "what if" questions and took some hellishly long coffee breaks.

I think it took us longer to drive to the range (about 100 yards down the road) and set up than it did for the three of us to fire off ten rounds apiece.

But hey, what am I complaining about? I got three hours of overtime for the class.

What a place.

3 comments:

  1. We have a saying at the paper, "we never have enough money to do it right, but we always have enough money to do it twice." Sounds like the Peter Principle is alive and well at your place also.

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  2. I guess I've seen worse examples of our "Tax Dollars At Work", especially over the course of the last couple of years. ;)

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  3. Joe and JPT- It's just amazing how many times they have done that over the years. Yes, I know that some of our infrastructure is over 100 years old, but come on! It's just fifty feet of pipe! How many times can you dig it up without just replacing it? It is not rocket surgery!

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