I am now retired but over the past 35 years of public service, I have been behind the closed doors of government.  I have been in the room.  I have been in the back-room.  I have seen and heard things that cannot be unseen and unheard. I know them, I was one of them.  It is time the truth is told about who they really are and who they are not.

They, public service workers, are individual people with individual differences.  They are not clones of each other. I think the individuals who make up any group of people are always different one from another.

Every single government employee I have ever worked with or even heard about, is a unique individual.  None of them are the same one to another.  They are not all alike. Some are male, and some are not.  Some are smarter than others.  Some are older than others. They have different personalities from each other. Some are outgoing, and some are not.  They do not all think alike.  Some are more compassionate than others.  Some are married, and others are not.  They act and are, pretty much, as normal as any group of people are, which is to say some are not normal at all.

Next time you hear someone talk about all government employees as if they are all alike, please know that person is misguided and or misinformed.  Government employees are as individual one to another as any group of individuals are.  Some government employees are not good at their jobs.  Some government employees really do not care about your personal well-being.  However, most government employees are good at their jobs.  Just like most people, most government employees do care about the well-being of others.

Compare any government employee with any other government employee and you will be amazed at the individual differences between them.  Some are very funny and some not so much.  Most just do their jobs the best they can just like most other people do.

Public service people are unique individuals and there is only one thing that is the same about every current or former public employee, the fact that they were or are a public employee.

It is human nature to want to categorize people into groups and then think of all members of that group as if they all share the same characteristics. It is much easier to assume that all moms are the same and that all dads are the same.  It is mentally easier to think of all salespeople as being the same.  Name the group and by our very nature, we humans most often will categorize that group as having the same characteristics.

The fact is, all humans are different, one to another.  None of us are the same as any other individual human.

It might be human nature to think that “they”, whoever they might be, are all the same one to another.  We all have stereotypes of people who belong to certain groups in our head.  But get to know some individuals in that group and you will come away thinking they must be the exception because they are not like the stereotype.  The problem is they alone are not the exception, everyone is the exception.

Not all moms are alike.  Certainly, all moms share the same characteristic that they are a mom.  There are, for example, many moms who have not given birth to the person they are mom to.  We have all known several individual people who are moms.  Are any of them, as individuals, even really even close to having the same characteristics as your mom.

My point here is simple really. Always remember, the stereotype of any group does not really represent the reality of the members of that group as individual people. Almost never do all members of any group act a certain way or even close to the way the other members act.

All public employees are not the same one to another.  They are individuals who happen to work in the public sector. Think about other groups of people that you think are all alike.  Then take a step back and remember that they also are individual people with many individual differences.

 

What we perceive often depends on how close we look.
Scaleandperception.com