Ask (or blog) and you shall receive

Or so they say. Before I explain what that means, I have to share an email that just got sent around my office. I had just snagged the last English breakfast teabag in the kitchen (a Tupperware full of teabags magically appears each Monday, and is empty by Friday), and was feeling rather smug about it. Of course, I then promptly spilled that tea all over myself, in a fit of tea-hubris-induced karma. Ah, well.

Back at my computer, there was an email that had gone around on the news listserv from Pambazuka, a Pan-African news website, titled The Dead Horse Theory. I thought I would preserve it here, because it's hysterical.

The unfailing productivity study for governments.

The tribal wisdom of the Plains Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that: "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

However, in government more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

2. Changing riders.

3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.  

4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.

5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.

6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.

7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.

9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.

10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.

11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.

12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And, of course...

13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

South Africa's government operates unfailingly on the theory of the dead horse.

Anyway, I think maybe someone from the NGO is secretly reading my blog. Not really, but as soon as I posted my last entry that I was disappointed about not having work from the HIV program, I got work from the HIV program. I got called in yesterday by the lead program lawyer, who basically said that the draft of their second litigation manual on HIV testing (researched and written by a consultant) is a complete mess, and she gave me carte blanche to do everything in my power to fix it. Rearranging sections, doing extra research, rewriting chapters -- anything. I had read through the report draft once (I think I mentioned it before -- about trying hard to be polite in my suggestions for changes), and she had said she would ask me to help in the future. But that was weeks ago, and I hadn't heard anything, so I thought she had forgotten or changed her mind. I was pleased as punch to get the assignment, and to be given free reign over the manual.

I don't know why NGOs insist on hiring consultants. Every time I encounter anything done by a consultant, the NGO is desperately unhappy with the end result. I guess it could be selection bias, since they wouldn't need an intern's help on high-quality work produced by a consultant, but it seems to be a pattern.

Note to self on possible career avenues: NGO report-writing consultant, as there seems to be a dearth of talent in the field.