OK, this should really get everyone’s attention and ruffle feathers of the powers that be! My wife and I were both contract evaluators at NMC until we walked out at 4 pm Thursday April 30th 09 and never went back. We came down to Florida and bought a house a couple weeks before. After we quit we were moved down here within one week and never told anyone what we were doing. In response to Cavo I will tell you how contract evaluators get paid, salary for 40 hours a week paid twice monthly. Below is the resignation e-mail I sent to the “wheels” at the NMC as well as the Commandant’s office. I’m sure that some people will call this the ranting of a disgruntled ex-employee but I am not at all disgruntled. The up side is their incompetence has made my business very successful. I really don’t care who get’s p***ed. Enjoy! Now the cat is really out of the bag!
NMC,
Consider this my letter of resignation and criticism. I can no longer work for such a dysfunctional organization. You people on the third floor have managed to take a bad idea and make it worse. I look forward to the day that I read where the Commandant has come in and cleaned out the entire ivory tower and put people in your place that know what they are doing.
The NMC is a small scale of everything that is wrong in Washington. I had no idea just how bad it was until I had the misfortune to see it in action for over a year. I have watched knee jerk reactions to every problem that came along. You have continuously made one bad decision after another and never learned anything from your mistakes.
I don’t know whose brainstorm it was to roll out the New MMC in the busiest month of the season as opposed to waiting until things slowed down. I keep in touch with mariners that I sailed with thirty years ago that are still working and the word on the ships and out in the industry is that you are a “laughing stock”. Oh, I know the Captain stands up there at “all Hands” and tells all of you what a great job you are doing and how much industry loves the new system and what a positive response you are getting.
One of the largest backlogs you have is medical, so what do you do? You come out with a six page physical to make that process more complicated. I have not seen one solution to a problem implemented that has had any thought process put in to it. You constantly grasp at straws to find solutions. For every problem you fix, you break two others. You have gone from issuing over three hundred documents a day to barely getting one hundred out the door each day. I don’t have a Doctorate degree in business but that sound suspiciously like you are going backwards.
The Code of Federal Regulations is meaningless. They do not apply to anybody who complains to their representative of Congress. The evaluators don’t know what rules they are expected to follow. One week evaluators issue documents one way, then the next week they get an e-mail telling them to do it a different way. There is absolutely no consistency. Five different teams issue documents five different ways and you thought it was bad with seventeen Regional Exam Centers. You can’t even get a few people on the one floor on the same page. With the exception of Miami, most RECs handled the work load pretty well.
The most frightening thing about your operation is you are a small fraction of the same federal government that is going to bail out the banks, the auto industries and anyone else who comes along with their hand out. You think you can fix the problems of the maritime industry where there was no problem when you can’t even manage to issue a few thousand mariner documents in a month.
You changed medical regulations for these working stiffs and then you have no staff (until lately) to evaluate the medical requirements when they apply. Who was the genius behind that one? Evaluators who deal with the customer on a daily basis make good suggestions to solve problems and you look down your nose at them. How dare a lowly contract evaluator at the bottom of the food chain challenge the bright ideas that come down the “chain of egos”? I know you call it the “chain of command” but everyone knows what it really is. Some of you have egos that come in the room ten minutes before you do. Do you ever wonder why morale on the first and second floor is not just low but nonexistent. No I don’t suppose you do.
Are you even aware that when the “Big Surge” was done to clean out the file room that the contract evaluators were looking at files, printing the drafts and putting them in the buckets to go directly down to print without even being looked at by a reviewer? Imagine that, licenses and documents being issued by the contractors with no over sight by the Coast Guard. Will you mention that in front of Congress the next time you are sitting there (which I suspect won’t be long)?
Do you have any idea what shape you are going to be in if more federal jobs open up in the area? Beware if the economy turns around and there are other good paying jobs out there. You won’t be able to retain a mail clerk.
I have to say it has been a very entertaining year. Not exactly what I thought it was going to be. I had visions of a real smooth operation and a good place to work when I moved down here from Toledo. Instead it has been total chaos from the first day we moved into that nice new “green” building that had all the carpet coming up in less than a year and the stucco falling off the outside corners of the walls. And let’s not forget the wet ceiling tiles in the Dale Larson room from the leaks in the roof. You might want to request a refund from the builder. Sometimes the low bid is not always the best job. Of course you found that out the hard way when the new contract was awarded and the company that won it promptly turned right around and threw eleven good qualified people out on the street. Now you can’t handle the work load because you have no foresight beyond the day after tomorrow. I recall laughing to myself at one of the first “all Hands” when I heard the Captain stand up at the podium and tell us “we will never again have a backlog like the RECs had”. He was right, you don’t have a backlog, you have “inventory”.
Timothy Spears