Civil Service

(This page is for the organization named the "Civil Service".  If you are looking for information about the story by "Duke of Ramus", that can be found here.)

Confederacy Uniformed Service Civil Service

   The Civil Service (usually abbreviated to CS) is an all-officer corps of non-combatants.  It is the Confederacy's primary non-military organization and as such everything the Navy and Marine Corps don't want to deal with gets dumped on the nearest Civil Service Officer (usually abbreviated to CSO),  Its primary mission is the continuation of the human race away from the planet Earth.

Background

   The Civil Service was an after-thought, a quick fix to the problem of un-attached concubines.  The original agreement required that volunteers be allowed to collect personal slaves when they were extracted but these slaves were regarded as property, not people.  As such if the volunteer later died then the Confederacy's AIs wanted to recycled the excess property as it was no longer needed and was consuming resources.
   This, once it was understood, was unacceptable to the humans who had volunteered.  The concubines may have been property but they were also in many cases they were also loved ones.  The AIs considered them to be interchangeable animals, while the volunteers still considered these concubines to be human.  Besides, who was going to take care of the orphaned children?
   The Civil Service was established to:

• First, establish a new 'owner' for these spare concubines,
• Second, to get some use from these extra concubines to further the race, and
• Finally, if possible, find them and their children a new home.

   Unfortunately, many of the excess concubines had no job skills beyond those needed in bed.  Just about every colony with excess concubines was forced to set up a brothel to keep the excess concubines busy and pregnant until they could find a new sponsor.  Naturally, this led to a morale problem among the concubines once they realized that they had no future outside of the brothel.
   Once the Civil Service existed, the Navy, Marine Corps, and Fleet Auxiliary quickly realized that ALL non-military headaches could be dumped on the CSOs, and the Civil Service rapidly became the general-services organization it is today.  The Civil Service manages towns, factories, and colonies as well as the brothels they were originally told to set up.

Establishment

   Staffing was envisioned with a 'small team' of Civil Service Officers in each colony with at least one officer per township but to date the Civil Service would count themselves lucky if they managed to get one official CSO per colony. As a result, many CSO's obtain additional staff by utilizing their concubines in a strictly unofficial capacity.
   The CSOs have a rank system equivalent to the combat services, but with Roman terms.  They use the same insignia as the Marines.  Their uniform is patterned after the Marine uniform but is grey (the standard grey of a Concubine shift, in fact) unless in a combat zone in which case they wear the same white skinsuit as the other services.
   For many colonies, the main point of contact with the Civil Service is the brothel.  This is where unattached concubines are put to use if they have no other useful skills.

Training

   The Civil Service was created in place to deal with immediate issues, and the personnel selected to be "the CSO" at each of those early colonies was handed those problems with little to no background on what should be done.  Those original CSOs tried a lot of different things, and many of their ideas didn't work out.  Eventually, trial and error as well as communication between the different colony CSOs allowed them to all come up with common solutions as well as a long list of working variants and an even longer list of failed ideas.
   As with the other Confederacy uniformed services, the Civil Service is above all pragmatic.  Regardless of what others have said or done, what works at this colony is 'right'.  What doesn't work at this colony is 'wrong'.  One of the earliest service-wide instructions was for each CSO to write up his or her experiences, and these separate essays were shared with each other as ships moved between the colonies.  This institutional knowledge quickly became codified into two 'books' titled "What Works" and "What Didn't Work".  While the service attempts to give new CSOs a short apprenticeship under more experienced CSOs, and the CS has a very short set of formal instructions of what to do and how to do it, that policy manual ends with:
   "It is a formal tenet of CS philosophy that a situation may be similar to others, but each colony has its own unique quirks, needs, and resources.  Each CSO must be ready to recognize the similarities and differences between other colony's issues and the current one he or she is faced with, and apply common sense, initiative, and imagination to create a solution that works HERE for THIS colony and THESE people."
   Regardless of the outcome, what worked and what didn't will be added to the two 'books' so that other CSOs can compare your experience and results with others, and hopefully add to the list of 'What Works'.

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))