Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Just because...

Today the Northwest Herald carries a front-page article about "Too many bosses?"

We used to call this "Too many chiefs; too few Indians", but that's probably not politically correct today. Too bad.

At the McHenry County Sheriff's Department, there is one elected top dog, the Sheriff. He hires a #2, the Undersheriff.

And then there are six (6) in "upper management", and then 16 sergeants and 84 worker bees (deputies and detectives). (Who drives MARV?) So that's 22 (6 + 16) supervisors (actually 24), for 84 workers. A little top-heavy? A lot top-heavy?

"Upper management" must mean captains and lieutenants.

You can read the article for yourself at www.nwherald.com/articles/2010/01/19/r_u3z3ficq7q_waawyvcsyw/index.xml

Rather than slanting the article toward to extraordinary high ratio of supervisors to underlings, it phrases the explanation as "...3.5 deputies for each supervisor". Talk about playing softball.

How many times have you driven by an accident scene and seen numerous police vehicles with emergency lights flashing, and all the deputies standing around instead of directing traffic? Where was the supervisor then? Why didn't he send the unneeded deputies "back to work"?

Maybe it's like "Alice's Restaurant", where everybody wants to get in the newspaper story about the accident...

2 comments:

Philip said...

Speaking of restaurants, it appears Shuriff Nygren ate some bad cheese or something. That was not a pleasing photo of His Shuriffness.

Richard W Gorski, M.D. said...

Big government,big money,more personell, more power, centrally located in one individual....is't this the trend of the future. Apparently not in the state of Mass. and city of Boston which has a new Republican US Senator today after having beaten the Democratic Machine big time. Maybe this points to a change in direction...a new political revolution may be taking place in America.