Do People Follow Instructions?

 Ever since I started with ASCS in its Directives Branch I've been interested in that question.  This election it is important because lots of voters will be voting by mail for the first time, and lots of county clerks will have to compose instructions and see their voters try and sometimes fail to follow them.

Anyone remember the "butterfly ballot" in Florida in 2000? I think the answer to the question is: "sometimes".  But it's often a problem to convey information from one mind to another, and often people doing something new try to figure it out themselves, only checking the manual when they screw up. 

Directives and Policing: the Baltimore Case

Peter Moskos does the Cop in the Hood blog (he was po-lice in Baltimore for a few years before becoming a sociologist).  In this post he writes about the "General Orders", the directives applicable to the Baltimore police.  I doubt there are many in the world who share my interest in directives, so I'll excerpt a part of his post, talking about the rules of ethical conduct included in the General Orders, which he checked of when he violated one.

I may have missed a few, but of the first 31 rules of conduct, I checked off all but 12 as violated. And I was a good cop, an honest cop. And yet in less than two years on the job I managed to violate the majority of good conduct rules. My favorite was "Section 7: Members of the department, while riding gratis on any type of public conveyance, are not permitted to be seated while other passengers are standing." This is off duty, mind you. And it doesn't say "give up your seat if the bus is full." Nope. If anybody is standing, you must stand.

 He has complaints similar to those I heard from ASCS employees back in the 60's and 70's: hard to find the relevant material.

Apparently according to the trial of Porter in Baltimore in the Freddie Gray, there was a change to the General Orders on seat belting prisoners issued 3 days before the Gray incident, included in an 80 page attachment to an email (and perhaps the Baltimore police department did not have good email).  You'd think with modern technology there'd be a better way, but no one is interested in directives.
 

The Dog Days of August, Not for FSA Offices

We're in the dog days, and I can see it in my RSS feeds. Where some days I've had 500 or so, these days it's mostly below 200. So while the US may not be quite France, which totally shuts down in August, people are taking vacations.

But not so for FSA workers. Those busy bees in the South Building put out 6 notices today and 12 yesterday. That's a heavy workload, both for the directives people in DC and especially for the county people, who have to sit down and digest the meaning and significance of the words.

(I remember a group studying ASCS directives back in 1973 or 4, I think it was. We heard lots from the county people, griping about the number of notices. They particularly griped about permanent instructions in notices. If you have 3 or 4 directives on a subject, the clerk (that was the approved terminology back then) would have to thread between them to come up with a consolidated understanding of the subject. Multiply one clerk by 2800 county offices (the count then) and you have lots of waste, not to mention potential errors. I wonder whether the situation has improved any.)

Acre Handbook

FSA has posted the handbook which includes instructions for the ACRE program on their website. I hope Chris Clayton at DTN is satisfied with it. (But a warning--a handbook covering a new program is just the same as version 1.0 of software used to be (remember back in the 1980's when we actually had versions 1.0?)--subject to bugs and needing improvement.)