Not just military, but every arm of government bureaucracy is utterly anti-human.
In this case, we have this universally despised Census Bureau, which has no clue about the US Constitution and the limits of their authority. They apparently also have no clue how to get folks paid.
Consider this: Anyone with half a brain knows we have thousands of people unemployed, desperate enough to work for something they despise. The Census Bureau management can’t pretend they aren’t taking advantage of this. They were drooling at the prospect of having more than enough people to finish the work on time. Not just the occasional housewife needing a few extra bucks, but some pretty high quality folks who got laid off, typically from jobs paying significantly more. So they get these folks who are holding on by the skin of their teeth, make them do all this work at their own expense, and then can’t manage to pay most of them.
I get this picture of pay claims be rejected for things like the form has wrinkles, there is a stray mark on the corner of the paper, the signature flourishes went outside the box, or they lost hundreds of files and can’t be bothered to hunt for them, etc. Yes, the military saw some of this, too, so I know what I’m talking about. From what I understand, typical civil service folks are actually worse than military clerks. Individuals vary widely, but the snafus I saw in things like military pay followed me everywhere I went in uniform. I fought with the system every time. Lots of my friends did, too.
The military is loaded with crude terminology. Even the accepted term “snafu” is an acronym for foul language. It implies when things are at their best, it’s intolerable as a human experience. Now consider something. As the economy gets worse, and politics gets crazier, and tension and unrest rise, all that will get even worse. You should read some of the comments at the above link. It’s just getting started. More and more Americans will be under the gun to take any work they can get, which often would be something like this, yet in the same moment, you surrender even more of your protections. You see, the Census Bureau exempts itself, as does almost the entire federal bureaucracy, from the same strict rules the government applies to private employers.
This is what happens when you demand your government be a modern secular state. Employees become nothing more than machines. Think about how Haliburton treated their machinery in Iraq and Afghanistan under the “cost-plus” contracting, and you can estimate how Uncle Sam is going to treat you.
