Less revenge, I suspect, than poetic justice.

Early in my career I worked for the Chicago Department of Human Services as a Supportive Services Counselor with the old CETA Federal job training program. My second boss just didn’t like me - we just didn’t get along. She recommended that I be moved from direct service (which is where I really thought I belonged) into program compliance monitoring (which I really thought I would hate), and essentially transferred me, kicking & screaming, against my will.

Eventually, the Feds, who were breathing down our necks, recognized that it wasn’t Kosher for the monitoring to be housed in the operating division (the Manpower Division) and they insisted that the unit be centralized and moved into another division (Program Compliance & Reporting). I was one of the people chosen for this new configuration.

In the meantime, my former boss had been promoted and also moved downtown to a higher position in Manpower.

The monitoring unit floundered under the new regs and requirements. No one in our new division really knew anything about what we were supposed to be doing. One of the reasons for the move was that the Feds didn’t like the idea that when we were permanently assigned to field offices we were constantly monitoring the same contractors. They didn’t want the monitors to be developing relationships with the various sites, so they insisted that under the new arrangement monitors be assigned randomly. Now we had something like 600 worksites to monitor, scattered throughout Chicago, with 10 people. If we were to do true random assignment, we’d be spending 80% of our time just traveling between sites and getting to that many sites monthly with that few people would be impossible.

I decided we needed a system. I tried to get the other members of the unit to sit down with me & develop one, but they had no interest. So I took it upon myself to come up with so...