Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes some person has a significant achievement, but the resources weren’t approved, so it was all quite embarrassing.

This is a true story that occurred in the last century. A person at work had a neighbor who worked at a different government agency. The other agency had a colossal failure with some data recordings. The recordings were ruined as was all the data collected from the field in a year. A year wasted!

The person who worked at my agency told his neighbor to give him a recording. He brought the recording in to work (not allowed) and worked on recovering the data from it. He invented a method to recover the data from the ruined recordings. The neighbor gave him all the recordings from the year, he recovered all the data from a year’s worth of ruined recordings, and saved the other agency a year’s budget. Wow! Amazing! SIGNIFICANT!

Months later, a memorandum of thanks appeared on the desk of our agency’s director. It was personally from the director of the agency whose data had been rescued.

What was this? What rescue? What recovery? Who did this? What? Where? How? How much did it cost?

A month or two of digging, and the culprit was found. Someone performed unauthorized work for another agency and sneaked data in and out of a building (another unauthorized no no).

Yet, the director of our agency was lauded for great work. Well, you cannot refuse such adoration and thanks. You cannot fire and jail a hero. And you cannot reward such an unauthorized hero. If the word gets out, everyone will try to do good regardless of authorization and we just can’t have that. After all, there are legal restrictions.

I could tell several other stories of significant achievements that were, nonetheless, quite embarrassing. You can’t fire heroes. You can’t reward unauthorized heroes too visibly.

At this point, I am supposed to provide some lessons learned and words of wisdom. After all these years, I am still stumped. Sometimes persons achieve something significant that embarrasses many other persons. That’s life, and us smart folks shrug.