“Now that you’ve been working for the state for almost a year,” one of my coworkers asked me, “which bureaucracy do you think is more mixed-up, the military or the state?”

“The state, no question,” I said, without having to think about it at all. When he laughed and asked me why, I explained, “The military’s got bombs. When a bomb goes off, that leaves results you can point to and say, ‘I did that!’ The state doesn’t have bombs. Results are a lot harder to produce here.”