My government job taught me amazing lessons. I wish Kamala Harris learned them

Vice President Kamala Harris claims she worked at McDonald’s as a teenager, but that job is missing from her early resumes and memoir. I sympathize with her since I also omitted from resumes my teenage summer job sloughing on the payroll of the Virginia Highway Department. But that job taught me more about the nature of government than any high school or college class I ever took. 

As a 16-year-old flag man, I held up traffic while highway employees idled away the hours. I did “roadkill ridealongs” with Bud, an amiable, beefy truck driver who was always chewing the cheapest, nastiest “ceegar” ever made — Swisher Sweets. The cigars I smoked cost a nickel more than Bud’s, but I tried not to put on airs around him. 

We were supposed to dig a hole to bury any dead animal along the road. This could take half an hour or longer. Bud’s approach was more efficient. We would get our shovels firmly under the animal — wait until no cars were passing by — and then heave the carcass into the bushes. It was important not to let the job crowd the time available for smoking. 

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I was assigned to a crew that might have been the biggest slackers south of the Potomac and east of the Mississippi. Working slowly to slipshod standards was their code of honor. Anyone who worked harder was viewed as a nuisance, if not a menace. 

The most important thing I learned from that crew was how not to shovel. Any bonehead can grunt and heave material from Spot A to Spot B. It takes practice and savvy to turn a mule-like activity into an art.  

To not shovel right, the shovel handle should rest above the belt buckle while one leans slightly forward. It’s important not to have both hands in your pockets while leaning, since that could prevent onlookers from recognizing “work-in-progress.”  

The key is to appear to be studiously calculating where your next burst of effort will provide maximum returns for the task. One should exude the same keen-eyed concentration a falcon shows before swooping down on its prey. 

One of this crew’s tasks that summer was to build a new road. The assistant foreman was indignant: “Why does the state government have us do this? Private businesses could build the road much more efficiently, and cheaper, too.” I was puzzled by his comment, but by the end of the summer I heartily agreed.  

The highway department could not competently organize anything beyond painting stripes in the middle of a road. Even the placement of highway direction signs was routinely botched. The more highway officials became involved in a decision, the more certain the final result would be boneheaded. The bureaucracy seemingly conspired against the intelligence of every employee. 

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There was one exception to the highway job’s languid cadence. From 4:30 p.m. onwards each workday, teams returned to headquarters and commenced The Big Fret. Employees congregated in a sitting room (with no clock on the wall) to wait silently, almost breathlessly. Then — at some moment — one of the veterans decided it was 5 p.m. and everyone jumped up as if fleeing a ship that had struck an iceberg.  

While I easily acclimated to this lethargy, I was pure hustle on Friday nights unloading trucks full of boxes of old books at a local bindery. That gig paid a flat rate, in cash, that usually worked out to double or triple the highway department wage. 

The most important thing I learned from that crew was how not to shovel. Any bonehead can grunt and heave material from Spot A to Spot B. It takes practice and savvy to turn a mule-like activity into an art.  

The goal with the highway department was to conserve energy, while the goal at the book bindery was to conserve time — to finish as quickly as possible and move on with your life. With government work, time routinely acquired a negative value — something to be killed. I recognized early on that killing time was a crime against life itself. 

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All or almost all of Harris’s work experience is for the government – either forcing people to obey specific laws (as a prosecutor) or creating new laws they will be forced to obey (as a senator). Perhaps Harris never experienced ground-level government perpetual incompetence.  

Did Harris learn anything aside from the love of power? That occupational hazard didn’t exist that summer with the Virginia highway department. But Harris has had plenty of experience over the decades heaving boondoggles into the bushes.