A short blog post I wrote recently on the Web site GovLoop, a kind of Facebook for government types, hit a nerve. Titled "I work for the government and I am NOT the enemy," the post elicited scores of sympathetic comments. My motivation was concern that the usual complaints and dumping on people who work for the federal government is morphing into violence.

The 24-hour news cycle continually churns up issues real and imagined, and a popular, bipartisan target is public employees. I've been a fed for 25 years and I'm used to the lack of respect, and the "you guys can't do anything right" attitudes. But the new hyperpartisan rhetoric leads directly to violence. Words matter.

Other federal employees commenting on my blog post acknowledged the public's perception that, as a whole, government employees are lazy, wasteful and incompetent, counting the days until a plush retirement.

These perceptions belie the truth. In reality, the federal workforce has a much higher percentage of highly educated employees than the nation overall. And since the 1984 phase-out of the Civil Service Retirement System, the growing majority of feds receive retirement benefits quite comparable to the private sector.

That said, a federal job is a good gig, but most feds certainly earn their salaries.

Many years ago, I was a systems administrator — you know, the person who keeps your computer running. These employees are what I like to call invaluable and unpromotable. They are invaluable because you can't live without someone who can fix your computer system, and they are unpromotable because they know all the magic incantations to keep your systems running so you can't let them change jobs. In many ways I see feds as the systems administrators of a civilized society.

Feds provide infrastructure and keep it running. Your mail shows up, Social Security checks get delivered, roads get fixed, clocks agree — all of these are due to government services and employees.

But they're easy targets when something goes wrong.

We are used to the concept of infrastructure: roads, water, electricity, the Internet. These often run and are maintained via public-private entities. But there is another type of service that I call "deep infrastructure" — the kinds of things best done by government.

The Global Positioning System, for example, which allows us to determine the position of our cars relative to satellites in space, works because of the precise measurements of a time standard.

When an FBI agent searches for a fingerprint, he uses a machine that was validated by a government agency to actually work. When you get an X-ray with a specific dosage, that dosage is calibrated to a government reference standard.

Even Google's search is made possible by the collective knowledge of a research community built up over years using data produced by the government. No one argues that these are valuable services, but they are invisible. If you don't see a service, or it just works, you don't get credit.

What do we do about this? I think the general public has no clue what most feds actually do for a living. This is not easily solved, and a big public relations campaign will likely instigate more howls of government waste then anything else.

The recent move toward "open government" is, I believe, a great first step. If I can see what is happening inside the government, what it is producing, how it can help me, then it's much less of a mystery and I can see how my tax dollars are being spent.

I'd also like to see a greater distinction made between public employees and politicians. One comment on my blog post said: "People on the street do not believe politicians. People on the street do not believe public servants. They are linked as night follows day."

I certainly don't believe the average politician. However, the average public servant is often the best, most factual source of information on a wide variety of topics.

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Sandy Ressler is a program manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The views expressed are his own.