I went today, even though I have a decent paying job in a field I find interesting,** to interview for a civil service position. First of all, I had to deal with the problem that our Illustrious Leader has sagely and presciently put the unholy kibosh on the actual hiring of civil servants for the time being, but the American government being what it is, interviews for expected positions that may never actually be filled still occur. When people talk about the "deep state," they don't realize that what they are actually talking about is less any willful expression of actors at any level of federal employment and more just the dumb, rolling inertia you get from an underclass of worker bees whose default presumption is that everything they say or do will immediately and forever be entirely ignored. Sure, at the other end it could look like the united fist of defiance when viewed in comparison to a rash, violent, even stupid change of policy course but in reality it's just a bunch of shit that would have happened anyway because nobody from management down or from the bottom up is looking in either direction toward the other. What seems to be a decision is actually the result of the pure absence of one. There's nothing a federal worker is more allergic to than putting their name at the bottom of a memo prescribing any kind of action or (god forbid) expenditure. It's perfectly possible for the will of a new government to wend its way down into the root and base of civil service, but by the time the drips seep into the bedrock and have time enough to freeze and expand and split anything apart, the next administration or four will have arrived and the process will have to start all over again.
The interview was for a job in a building in which I've worked now for a decade, with people with whom I have worked extensively for that same decade, which in some ways was fantastic (no need for vague or potentially misleading bigging myself up by way of introduction) and other ways a sticky morass of awkward wheel spinning (I don't actually know how to describe our internal organizational structures the way a newly scrubbed outsider might since I never, ever have to think of what they might be). Sure, they know my strengths. But they have also been made aware of the ways in which I suck. I like to think there aren't a whole lot of the latter, but there's no way to talk around them to people who have witnessed them in action. You try to drown one intern in one toilet one time and nobody ever lets you live it down.
How did it go? Who even fucking knows. I didn't swallow my tongue and they didn't offer me the job on the spot. So... somewhere in between those two things.
Here's what I do know. The people who work for me right now all appreciate me. I found this out when each of them, privately and individually, expressed horror at the idea that they could potentially apply for and get the job I have now. I decided to take that as them understanding the effort it takes to do what I do, which is to be a manager for people exactly like them. It was a rare and pure moment of internal and external examination and present-mindfulness that would be buddha-like if it weren't achieved in a place painted mostly in a shade of institutional salmon. I'm pretty sure Zen and despair are mutually exclusive.
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*On a Thursday, between 1 and 5 in the afternoon.
**Some people are interested in being ground into powder by a merciless and crushing bureaucracy. Don't you fucking judge me.
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