The real voice of an online civil servant?
The Ottawa Citizen runs a weekly column purporting to shed some insight into the lives of senior civil servants and their staff. Problem is, their EX feature is often self-indulgent and takes 700 words to work through a 20 word problem. (Boss doesn’t know how to use computers. Boss doesn’t recognize work of underlings. Boss would be lost without executive assistant)
Which is why Civil Serf, a relatively new blog from an anonymous British civil servant, is so appealing.
Unfortunately, that anonymous civil servant seems to be dealing with frustration, irritation and maybe anger issues. This is a normal state for most civil servants nowadays, but does not bode well for the longevity of the blog.
Civil servants bring an unappreciated skill to blogging: they are well used to writing briefing notes and explanatory material that couch difficult ideas and conflicting opinions in mealy-mouthed words and conditional clauses.
It’s an unusual power usually left underutilized.
February 21st, 2008 10:19
The anonymous author E.X. has also slowly but surely tipped his hand over the years as to his identity. The cumulative clues are all there in the pieces online - strictly speaking, the number of youngish, male low/mid-level government Anglo executives who’ve not lived in Ottawa their entire lives but yet have extensive central agency experience and a flair for creative writing is simply not that high.
Particularly telling are instances where quite specific content lines up with very particular departmental initiatives, like in “Online Anarchy” or “Talking about my Generation” : http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/features/exfiles/stories2.html. A few Google searches (either in News/Canada or limited to domain gc.ca) make it fairly clear which federal departments have been looking at these issues around the time these articles went up.
Using the other hints, the possibilities narrow rapidly. Ottawa just isn’t that big a town.