Stories From Under A Bootheel (Rants, Laughs, and Tears)

Bonus Chapter Part 1 The 30-30-40 Rule

 Clearly, I don't know when to stop. This bonus chapter is not really for my grandkids as much as it is for my Wattpad readers. It is about the many bureaucratic screw ups I encountered during my time working as an engineer in the Air Force. I was thinking you might find some of them interesting.

The Air Logistics Center at McClellan was primarily manned by civilians in order to provide the needed continuity and expertise needed to run the major operation of providing the necessary logistics support for a large portion of the Air Force. This included support for all the Communications Electronics and Meteorological (CEM) equipment from radios to radars and anemometers to lightning sensors. And of course, several major aircraft including the then new FB-111 and the A-10 as well as a host of older craft. All of which required significant logistic support.

Without continuity you have problems like the contractor who kept furnishing defective valves for the F-105 drop tanks. When the valves' faults were first discovered, procurement simply sent the faulty valves to the surplus warehouse where they were to be sold as scrap metal. Procurement then started the process to procure more. Unfortunately, there was an unscrupulous contractor who realized he could simply purchase the ones that had been sent to surplus and then resell the same defective valves back to the government at a profit.

The reason the valves were defective was that the procurement package (the specs and drawings used to procure the valves) was itself defective and nobody in engineering had caught it. The aircraft itself had been modified which necessitated a small change to the physical configuration of the valve that went between the aircraft and the drop tanks. The old valves would no longer fit. Yet the procurement package still contained the specs for the old valve.

They kept using the same defective procurement package which kept resulting in the same unusable valves being procured. After this cycle had repeated several times, an enterprising civilian Systems Manager for the F-105 went down to Surplus and band sawed all the unusable valves in half so they could not be repurchased. He then went to Engineering and had them update the procurement package. I later had the privilege of working with this manager and that is how I heard the story. 

Not all of the civilian workforce were as diligent as the aforementioned system manager. In fact, many were your typical bureaucrats doing only what they had to which often meant just showing up. Several times I spotted workers asleep at their desks. I mentioned this to my friend Mike who was the General's aide. The General was in charge of the entire logistic center of about fifty thousand employees.

Mike related to me the 30-30-40 rule that the General had explained to him when Mike had brought up a similar concern. The General told Mike that he was aware that at least 30% of the workforce was contributing nothing toward the base's mission. But there were another 30% that was actually negatively impacting the mission. That left 40% doing positive work most of which was just offsetting the negative impact of the 30% doing negative work. So basically only 10% of the workforce was actually moving the mission forward. The General told Mike, "Don't worry about the people who are doing nothing. Figure out what we can do about the 30% who are doing negative work."

Interestingly, I heard a similar explanation when I went to work for Boeing. I was told Boeing would hire 10 engineers when only one was required because out of the ten there would be only one that could do the job. The other nine were basically featherbedding. Featherbedding is the practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers. It is much more common than I ever imagined in my idealistic youth, but even resistors serve a purpose in an electrical circuit. We can't all be transistors.