At the nightmarish place that is the DMV, a clerk sleeps 3 hours a day

You've probably fallen asleep at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and been thankful for the escape from the interminable wait. Those plastic chairs are sure uncomfortable, though. It would be so much better to rest your head on a nice comfy desk, like at least one DMV worker does.

SFGate.com reports that a state audit found one California DMV worker (or should we merely say "employee") took a nap at work every day for nearly four years. Every day. For four years. It amounted to an estimated 2,200 hours of sleepy time, and the audit placed the cost to taxpayers at north of $40,000. (The audit has other tales of bad behavior by public servants as well.)

Doing the math on that, it appears they're only counting hourly wages paid the data operator. If you count the lost productivity on the part of taxpayers who waited in line a bit longer and were processed a bit slower because of this, the cost of these naps might add up to a far bigger number. And yes, the audit said her naps slowed down processing time. She handled an average 200 documents per day, vs. her coworkers who handled an average 560. So in other words she was less productive in the hours she was awake as well. Plus the audit faults her work as inaccurate and says she added to the workload of her colleagues.

DMV wait times in California can range from 2 hours, 42 minutes on average in Los Angeles to 4 hours, 10 minutes in Sacramento.

The napper's name wasn't disclosed. And it might be easy to fault this person, because as accounts point out, many medical reasons can cause people to fall asleep midday. The bigger fault, it seems, would lie with her supervisors, in that she was not disciplined, reassigned, given part-time status, sent to her doctor, or whatever one might do to help this person, in spite of complaints from her coworkers. The supervisor says she woke the employee many times per nap and estimated she only lost 20-30 minutes of productivity. The audit concluded that was "not credible."

The supervisors did make note in her performance reviews that she slept on the job, so ... there's that. Except, the audit says she won't be disciplined at this point because the lapses weren't properly documented.

The employee continues to work for the state, the audit says.


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