My favorite dis­cus­sion this year in my Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tion class cen­tered around whether civ­il ser­vice was a call­ing [or not]. This led me to think about why I get so much sat­is­fac­tion out of my gov­ern­ment web design gig. The answer I usu­al­ly shell out is because every day I get a chance to improve the way gov­ern­ment inter­acts with its cit­i­zens. Despite this being true and the most imme­di­ate reward of my job, I fig­ured there has to be more. It’s my fam­i­ly, and Catholic school.

My grand­pa fought in World War II and then was was a mail car­ri­er with a rur­al route for the Post Office for years. My moth­er taught spe­cial edu­ca­tion her whole life. The Holy Cross broth­ers at Notre Dame also empha­sized ser­vice. After awhile it gets ingrained. I enjoy work­ing for the gov­ern­ment because it is ser­vice-dri­ven, not prof­it-moti­vat­ed. When­ev­er I get a call for­ward­ed to me from the help desk, I always make sure I don’t send them around on anoth­er bout of trans­fer-tag. If I can’t answer their ques­tion or help them out, I make sure that if I do have to trans­fer them, they get sent to the exact­ly cor­rect per­son, not just the cor­rect office. The reward is their grat­i­tude.

So, I guess it is easy to see where I fall on the argu­ment. I feel called to civ­il ser­vice, so I think it is a call­ing.

It might seem like an excep­tion, but the Selec­tive Ser­vice (a fas­ci­nat­ing Wikipedia arti­cle), and the fact that I had to reg­is­ter for the [non-exis­tent] draft in order to receive fed­er­al stu­dent loans is a big rea­son why I nev­er signed up for the Armed Forces. I’m non-com­bat­ive by nature, but I’m also stub­born as hell when some­one tries to force me to do some­thing. It is fit­ting then, that I would resent sign­ing up for the draft; it is an enforced civ­il ser­vice (among oth­er things), and there­fore incon­sis­tent with my opin­ion that civ­il ser­vice is a call­ing.