The Bic Effect

Having been gainfully employed in my current capacity by Uncle Sam for approximately two hundred thirty-six days, thirteen hours and fifty-four minutes I am considered a novice bureaucrat, but with my youthful enthusiasm and naive self-righteousness my frenetic pace allows me to outrun my colleagues like a paranoid squirrel jacked up on Pixie Sticks. I am often told rather condescendingly (what we call “talking down the chain”) that this will change. The Global War on Terror has no room for feelings of self accomplishment.

I am the kind of guy who likes jotting down thoughts and ideas (hence this blog), so I find myself in constant need of something to write with. However, one of the basic tenants of government life is that a humble servant such as me has no hope of keeping a pen from first stroke to its final death scribble. It just doesn’t happen. I frequently leave a small fortune in personal electronics on my desk with no incident, but if I dare leave a ballpoint unguarded it will be gone in seconds. I call this the Bic Effect.

The discovery and documentation of the Bic Effect is perhaps one of my proudest achievements to date. With a cubicle close to both the conference room and the fax machine, I can carefully observe this behavioral science at work. Kind of like a Jane Goodall of GS-13s. In fact, watching your coworkers like hawks is encouraged in government service. I believe the Chief of Naval Operations calls it “Focus on Execution.” (I added this hyperlink to add legitimacy to this post. However, I have not actually read this guidance in detail. If colleague espionage is not covered in the CNO's guidance, please pretend that it does.)

The key to a government worker’s inherent kleptomaniacal habits is the understanding that there is no privacy associated with cubicles. My cubicle is your cubicle is the taxpayer’s cubicle, and all government property inside said cubicle is in the public domain. An individual at the fax machine will have no problem walking into a cubicle of a lesser-ranking coworker (i.e., me) and retrieving a pen to sign a page or to make a note on the fax document. This individual might have every intention of returning the pen, but 64 percent of the time (I am required to tell you that my study has a margin of error of +/- 3 points) the pen is pocketed for later convenient use.

Therein lies the Bic Effect: The likelihood of retaining an unsupervised writing utensil is directly proportional to the relative seniority of the current owner and inversely proportional to the traffic passing within visual observation of the writing utensil. If you can't quite figure out the math in the previous sentence, find the nearest engineer. If you don't work anywhere close to an engineer, you are probably much happier for it.

You can expect a PowerPoint presentation of the Bic Effect shortly. But if you will excuse me, Rich just left his desk, and he has a sweet new UniBall…