Government Work

The TV show Ghosted is fantastic! Every time I watch it, I can count on at least one good laugh. It’s not just about ghosts, either. It’s kind of a Men in Black or Agents of SHIELD or X-Files kind of situation where there are lots strange creatures that the guys in a secret supernatural government office have to hunt down and keep under control. 

While the show itself is a blast, the show’s premise is worrisome. In another life, I worked in a little-known and exceedingly dull corner of the federal government. As a former employee of the massive, lumbering bureaucratic labyrinth that is the U.S. government, I know we shouldn’t put something important like managing ghosts, demons, and other assorted unexplained phenomena in the shaky hands of public servants. What if they mess it up? What if they trap ghosts, then accidentally release them, like that dope in the first Ghostbusters movie? What if they put aside their important work so they can take extra long lunches on Fridays (or Mondays of Thursdays)? What if their training is less than outstanding, as it was in my case?

When I was first hired to shuffle papers in a gray-walled pile of bricks on Chicago’s near north side, we had to go through an unnecessarily long training process. As if that would somehow help make us efficient at our jobs or something. There was one particular woman who was responsible for training a large class of new hires over the course of three months. Much of what she did was spend an inordinate amount of time explaining how to route pieces of paper from one corner of our organization to another. The only thing more painfully boring than teaching it was listening to her teach it.

The boredom was only broken up by occasional moments of fingernails-on-the-blackboard irritation because this trainer always said the word “viva” when she meant “via.” Always. And she insisted on using “viva” in every third sentence that came out of her mouth. She’d say something like, “This sheet of white paper is supposed to go to the Accounting Department, but it has to get there viva the supervisor’s office.” She meant via, of course, because she was saying the boring white paper gets to accounting by way of the supervisor.

Every single time she said it, the guy sitting next to me would start singing Elvis’s classic hit Viva Las Vegas under his breath. Every. Single. Time. In retrospect, I don’t know which was more annoying: The trainer who didn’t understand that different words had different meanings or the guy next to me with his Elvis impression. Oh, wait, yes I do know. It was definitely the trainer because a) she was getting paid more to be a cretin without language skills and b) if she knew the proper word, the guy next to me wouldn’t have had any excuse to sing.

Anyway, the point is these are the kinds of people who work for the federal government. Do you want them in charge of keeping you safe from things that go bump in the night? Can they be trusted to run Area 51? Would they even know how to find Area 51 without going viva the accounting manager’s desk? In other words, if the idea behind shows like Ghosted is to be believed, you’d better make friends with the creatures under your bed, because the government might not be able to protect you.