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Are you one of those lucky people who works in a vast cubicle farm, or oversees those who do? If so, you may be interested in "The Moral Life of Cubicles," by David Franz, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Virginia, in The New Atlantis. Franz has an interesting take on how cubicle-based workplaces came into being. Aside from the obvious cost savings associated in replacing individual offices with prefabricated work units, there was this:

Offices in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to their critics burdensome remnants of an older age, symbolic shackles of bureaucracy—a system as inhuman as it was ineffective. Cubicles, by contrast, seemed to lack the fixity, and the constraints of bureaucracy of the old office. Moreover, cubicles eliminated the hierarchical distinctions between managers and workers; every cubicle had an open door, everyone was equally a worker. Empowering and humane, cubicles seemed to create a workplace with a soul.

It hasn't quite worked out that way, has it?

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Here's an excerpt from a piece in the Sunday Denver Post by Fred Brown, the paper's retired capitol bureau chief:

A reader recently forwarded what amounts to a gibberish generator. It's a list of 30 words, numbered 0 to 9 in each of three columns. The trick is to think of a three-digit number, then match those numbers with a word from each column. The result is a three-word phrase of stunningly bureaucratic buzzwords. For example, today's date, 323, yields "parallel, monitored mobility."

This highly amusing device is known as the Systematic Buzz Phrase Generator. I'd never heard of it, but apparently it's been around since 1968. And is it any surprise at all that the person who created it, a guy by the name of Philip Broughton, was a federal employee at the Public Health Service?

Here, by the way, are some other phrases the generator randomly turns out: "integrated reciprocal flexibility" (031) and "functional transitional contingency" (469). It strikes me that those are every bit as meaningful today as they would have been 40 years ago.

Once you get past issues of basic pay and benefits, nothing raises the ire of federal employees faster than dress codes -- especially those involving uniforms. The Air Force waded into this tricky area last summer by moving to require all of its air reserve technicians to wear uniforms on the job. The technicians technically are civilian federal employees, but they're required to be in the reserves as a condition of their employment. They always have worn uniforms while in military status, but they used to have the choice of deciding whether or not to suit up while working in their civilian capacity.

The shift to required uniform wear has drawn the ire of Joel Perry, vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 1764 at Travis Air Force Base in California. In a letter to the editor of the Vacaville, Calif., Reporter, Perry ripped the new approach, noting that air reserve technicians have served well under the old policy since 1958. "To have them play dress-up soldier to please the Air Force Reserve commander is a waste of taxpayers' money and a detriment to the welfare of the ART employees who serve this nation," he wrote.

The NCAA basketball tournament is just around the corner, and in private-sector workplaces around the country, that means one thing: It's time to start cranking out those brackets for the office pool. Last year, I was told by several readers that the same wasn't really true in federal offices (although some former federal employees have acknowledged the existence of pools).

Now comes the Interagency Ethics Council to throw cold water on the whole idea, reporting that the Small Business Administration has officially informed its employees that pools are verboten. "First," the agency noted, "regulations promulgated by the General Services Administration (GSA) bar anyone from participating in games for money or personal property, the operating of gambling devices or the conduct of a lottery or pool, while in or on property controlled by GSA." And second, "Office of Personnel Management (OPM) government-wide standards of conduct regulations, ... prohibit federal employees from conducting or participating 'in any gambling activity including the operation of a gambling device, in conducting a lottery or pool, a game for money or property, or selling or purchasing a numbers slip or ticket' while on government-owned or leased property or while on government duty."

That sure makes it seems like college basketball aficianados are out of luck. Unless maybe we elect a bracket-loving presidential candidate.

The issue of professional liability insurance for federal managers hit the mainstream media again Sunday, with a New York Times story about CIA officers who are turning to Wright & Company for policies to cover their legal costs in the event they get hauled into federal court or become ensnared in a congressional investigation.

As the story notes, FBI agents, Secret Service officers, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees also have purchased the insurance. They're not the only ones. In the late 1990s, professional liability insurance became popular at the IRS after reform legislation provided a new avenue for agency employees to file complaints against their supervisors.

Exactly who should get the insurance has long been open to question. The Justice Department typically represents federal employees in proceedings resulting from actions taken in the course of their job duties, but some managers see the benefit of having personal representation, too.

In a 1998 report, the Office of Personnel Management found that in the previous five years, only 14 federal employees had been found personally liable in lawsuits brought against them in relation to their government duties. And in only one reported case did an employee actually have to pay damages. The Justice Department reported that it had received about 7,000 requests for representation from federal employees in the same period, and had rejected 150 of those requests, or 2 percent.

The insurance costs about $300 a year, and the government pays half the premium for supervisors and certain other employees.

Most of the recent scary stories about the loss or theft of federal employees' personally identifiable information involve the theoretical possibility that such data could be used for fraudulent purposes. Now comes a story where it came much closer to really happening.

On Jan. 5, four people were arrested in Bensalem Township, Pa., for attempted identity fraud, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. One of the suspects had two pages of a 1994 report that included names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, salary information and other data about roughly 100 employees of the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division in Dahlgren, Va. The listed employees all had last names beginning with the letter B.

Officials don't know whether the suspects have all of the pages of the report, but as many as 10,000 employees may be at risk of identity theft. Dahlgren officials say they notified employees on Jan. 10 of the situation via an all-hands e-mail. Those possibily affected could have worked at the Naval Facilities Command, NSWC Dahlgren, NSWC White Oak, Md., NSWC Panama City, Fla., the Joint Warfare Analysis Center, the Naval Space Command and the Aegis Training and Readiness Center. The Navy has set up a call center at 1-800-352-7967 to provide more information.

(Hat tip: Fedsmith.)

The General Services Administration has declared that it's OK to cruise around federal buildings on Segway scooters, Federal Computer Week reports. Under an interim rule, people with certain impairments are allowed to use the two-wheeled personal transporters to get around. But "the policy does not cover motorcycles, mopeds, tricycles or bicycles."

You may be aware that while there are strict limits on gifts that federal employees can accept from outside sources, there is a widely used exemption for free admission to "widely attended gatherings." But what exactly is a "widely attended gathering"? The Office of Government Ethics has issued some guidance on that question.

(Hat tip: IEC Journal)

Now that President Bush has made it official that most feds don't have to work on Christmas Eve, OPM has come up with some details on his order.

Those of you who already planned to take annual leave that day should note this proviso: "If an employee has scheduled "use or lose" annual leave for December 24, 2007, and is unable to reschedule that leave for use before the end of the leave year (i.e., January 5, 2008), the leave will be forfeited."

White House counsel Fred Fielding has sent a memo to agencies urging them to provide Hatch Act briefings to all of their employees by the end of the year, IEC Journal reports.

"The 2008 election cycle will present many opportunities for federal employees to be involved in the political process," Fielding writes in the memo, "either through their own initiative or through outreach from campaigns." But agencies, he said, need to "ensure that those federal employees who choose to participate in political activity do so in accordance with the high ethical standards the president expects."

Fielding's office will be conducting its own set of Hatch Act briefings for White House staff. Judging from a whole series of events that have unfolded this year, that seems like a prudent idea.

It's the holiday season, and you know what that means: party invitations from vendors. If you're in need of some ethical guidance on how to handle them, the Defense Department General Counsel's Standards of Conduct Office has issued a helpful list of rules and regulations.

(Hat tip: IEC Journal)

Before the flap over the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Halloween party fades into the mists of time, I can't resist asking a question: Somebody shows up to the party wearing a set of stereotypical cliches in the form of "dreadlocks, dark makeup and prison stripes," and their costume is deemed most original? What was everybody else at the party wearing? White sheets?

On second thought, I don't want to know the answer to that.

Congratulations, Prince William County, Va.: You've managed to attract your first federal agency. InsideNoVa.com reports that in less than three months, almost 300 FBI agents and other bureau personnel will move from facilities in Tysons Corner to a brand new building at a business and technology park just outside Manassas.

Did I read this story in The Hill correctly? I can't believe I did. Because it says that House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has charged that DHS has so many vacancies in key positions that it resembles Swiss cheese. And that former DHS Deputy Secretary Michael P. Jackson actually wrote the following words to Thompson in a letter of response:

DHS’s leadership team would more fairly be compared to a fully intact wheel of the undisputed king of cheeses, Parmigiano Reggiano, carefully nurtured to maturity and ripe for superlative service. The number of unencumbered positions … is virtually nil.

The Center for Investigative Reporting and Salon have teamed up on a new report arguing that "federal whistleblowers almost never receive legal protection after they take action."

Among the alleged reprisals detailed:

• Joseph D. Whitson Jr. was a civilian chemist in the Air Force who spoke out about superiors falsifying drug test results. His desk was moved to a room in the basement and his job duties stripped.

• Vernie Gee Sr. was an agricultural inspector who sounded the alarm about tainted meat in the U.S. food supply and inspectors taking bribes from slaughterhouses. Gee was beaten up by a plant worker during an inspection -- and then reprimanded by superiors for fighting.
• George Randall Taylor, a chief of police at a Navy base in Bermuda, exposed coverups of rapes on the base. He was then forced into a psychiatric hospital.
• Before Teresa Chambers was fired from the Park Police, she found used condoms on her car, and someone pepper-sprayed her office door.

Of course, the report also notes that recent whistleblower cases "included one in which an employee sought protection after reporting missing candy bars at a government commissary. In another case, a worker complained about colleagues using a drinking fountain as a spittoon. One government worker was discovered by investigators to have fabricated his entire complaint. Most such cases, however, are weeded out of the system."

My favorite part, though, was the video highlighting the efforts of one of the pioneers of whistleblower protection legislation: Sen. Richard M. Nixon.

Longtime Environmental Protection Agency employees don't exactly have fond memories of their former headquarters at the Waterside Mall complex in Washington. Maybe, EPA's deputy administrator writes, that's because of the sick building syndrome at the facility, or the high crime in the neighborhood. Whatever the reason, 300 people will gather today at Waterside Mall for a ‘demolition party’ celebrating its demise.

Relatively few Americans understand the power of the Combined Federal Campaign. Now you can add Rush Limbaugh to the list.

This just in from Network World's "Layer 8" blog: a new study shows that cursing in the workplace can be a positive thing.

Regular use of profanity to express and reinforce solidarity among staff, enabling them to express their feelings, such as frustration, and develop social relationships, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UES). Researchers said their aim was to challenge leadership styles and suggest ideas for best practice.

“Employees use swearing on a continuous basis, but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner. Swearing was as a social phenomenon to reflect solidarity and enhance group cohesiveness, or as a psychological phenomenon to release stress, ” the study stated. “Most of the cases were reported by employees at the lower levels of the organizational hierarchies and it was clear that executives use swearing language less frequently. "

(Hat tip: Slashdot)

Some Social Security Administration employees apparently can't take a hint. Even after an agency manager at the agency's Baltimore headquarters posted several signs on a restroom urging workers to be considerate and make sure that the handicapped stall was available to an employee who was actually disabled, on three different occasions the employee was denied access to the stall and ended up urinating in his pants.

Now, the Baltimore Sun reports, an administrative judge has ordered the agency to pay the employee $6,500 in damages.

The problem, the judge said, was that managers had not directly ordered employees to "refrain from using the wheelchair-accessible stalls if they were not disabled, or did not have a compelling reason to do so."

Update: I changed the sentence above because, as the alert commenter below notes, it should have said that managers had not issued direct orders to employees.

The General Services Administration not only wants agencies to "achieve great federal public spaces," but to make them secure as well. The agency has issued a Site Security Design Guide for security
professionals, designers, and project managers that lays out various "methods used to produce safe and productive workplaces." The guide follows security standards developed by the Interagency Security Committee.

The General Services Administration apparently thinks federal buildings could present a better face to the public. The agency has issued a guide for federal property managers on "achieving great federal public spaces." It provides, the agency says, "a step-by-step process on how to enhance public spaces such as plazas, lobbies, atria and grounds."

"It's important that these spaces are accessible to the public and that they convey a positive image of the federal government," says David Winstead, head of GSA's Public Buildings Service.

The interest in just who's editing Wikipedia entries -- and especially, who at federal agencies might be doing so on government time -- is still running high. When Virgil Griffith, a California Institute of Technology graduate student, launched WikiScanner a couple of weeks ago, it suddenly became easy to track the names of organizations connected to the IP addresses of those who were making changes on the Wikipedia site. But the search function enabling users to find out exactly what they were adding or deleting was disabled due to high traffic on the site.

Well, apparently that problem has been solved, because FedSmith's Ralph Smith has been poking around and found some pretty interesting edits apparently originating from federal agencies. I won't give them away, except to say that I found it interesting that somebody at the Office of Personnel Management appears to be very interested in boosting the image of actor Sean Penn.

Wonkette goes for the local angle on crumbling infrastructure, with a report on the collapse Wednesday of a decorative ceiling at a parking area in Columbia Plaza next to State Department headquarters on Wednesday. A bunch of cars were damaged, but no people were hurt. While the ceiling is being fixed, department employees can't use the ground level entrance into State's SA-1 building.

Suppose you work with somebody who's looking to move over to the private sector. Can you call up a company and make a pitch on behalf of your pal? As in all other federal ethics situations, the answer's complicated, but the Office of Government Ethics has offered some guidance on what feds can and cannot do in this situation.

(Hat tip: IEC Journal)

Last month, I wrote a column about how bonuses for federal executives were attracting increased scrutiny. In just the past few months, top officials from the Veterans Affairs and Education departments to the Government Accountability Office have been called upon to explain awards they've handed out.

Well, the beat goes on with the Washington Post front-page story today about bonuses at the Food and Drug Administration - which quadrupled in four years, to a total of $13.6 million in 2005.

As I wrote in my column, some agencies' bonuses are more defensible than others. At first glance, the FDA situation looks pretty bad, due to several factors:

• The bonuses were supposed to be retention-based, but were awarded to some officials on the basis of merely signing declarations that they were "likely to leave the federal government for a higher paying position in the private sector."
• Large bonuses seem to have gone disproportionately to managers in FDA's Office of the Commissioner, rather than the scientists, inspectors and doctors who would seem to be more likely to command higher salaries in the private sector.
• The bonuses were awarded at time when FDA was enduring some high-profile problems with everything from flu vaccine shortages to a plan to the plan to close field laboratories that was suspended yesterday.

Just when the Office of Personnel Management would like to bask in the glow of a record-setting year in 2006 for the Combined Federal Campaign, along comes a little snag for this year's effort. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that a federal court has ruled that OPM must reconsider the application of the Stuttering Foundation of America of to join the charity drive. The agency had said the organization did not qualify for the CFC under a new rule adopted last year requiring that groups in the program must be “public charities” as defined in the tax code. The judge ruled that OPM's regulation violates federal law.

It was another record-setting year for the Combined Federal Campaign in 2006, the Office of Personnel Management reports, with more than $271 million in pledges. That's up from $268 million the year before. The largest local campaign, in the national capital area, saw pledges of more than $60 million, up $2.4 million over 2005.

Susanne Franza Valdez, executive director of the Greater St. Louis Federal Executive Board until she retired in March 2007, won OPM's CFC Leadership Award. Despite a drop of nearly 10 percent in federal employment in the St. Louis area in recent years, pledges there rose to $3.2 million in 2006, up 14 percent from their 2002 level.

The Office of Government Ethics has a new training tool: crossword puzzles. Seriously. The agency is developing a set of puzzles on ethics issues. The idea is that agencies can use the puzzles to help with training efforts. OGE already has posted the first one, on misuse of employee position. It's available for download, or if, you're using a Java-enabled browser, you can fill it out online. It's a pretty rudimentary puzzle, and not that hard, even for someone who's never held a government job.

(Hat tip: Interagency Ethics Council Journal)

If you're going to make a Web site talking about how much you don't like your federal job and your co-workers, it would be best not to do it with a government computer, on official time, and including unauthorized documents. Because if you do, you're likely to be fired, and the Merit Systems Protection Board and the courts are unlikely to show you much sympathy, FedSmith's Susan Smith reports.

Breathe easy, California federal employees. People who call your agency can't secretly tape their phone conversations with you, even if they want to share such a tape with your supervisor because they think you're being rude and not doing your job. Or so says Ron Sokol, who writes the "Ask the Lawyer" column for DailyBreeze.com in Los Angeles. "I do not find support for the proposition that it is legal to tape a conversation with a federal employee without his or her permission," Sokol says.

My colleague Matt Yglesias at The Atlantic has a post today on a subject near and dear to my heart: neckties. The jumping-off point is a Mark Kleiman blog post on a move by the European Commission to ban tie-wearing by its bureaucrats in the summer. Apparently, the idea is that without ties, men will be able to tolerate warmer offices, cutting down on air conditioning use. I'm not sure I buy that logic, but anything that contributes to cutting back on the regular use of silk strangulation devices is OK by me.

Yglesias remarks that Washington remains "one of the most formal of American cities at this point." But one of his commenters says that's only true "if you are stuck in politics or law down here. You don't see people walking around NIH, NSF, and Goddard wearing suits and ties."

That's actually been my sense of federal workplaces in general for awhile. But obviously you, Fedblog readers, would know better than me. Is the tie going the way of the dinosaur, at least in the summer?