Career federal employees are taught to write situation reports in very
boring language with just the facts known. Nevertheless, after
reading lots of situation reports, you start to notice when the
bubureaucratic language changes. Perhaps the most famous was the
commander of Apollo 13's report "Houston, We have a problem."
Puerto Rico has announced a new web site with current status:
http://status.pr/
However, in the last 24 hours I've noticed some agency situation reports
used different statistics to report "happy, happy, joy, joy" stuff. In the
bureaucratic world, this is very concerning, such as when the Veterans
Administration was misreporting appointment waiting times to look better.
You can't fix problems, if the real situation isn't being reported
accurately to senior leadership even if its bad news.
