Whoa I made the rec list? Gee thanks~
I wasn't going to write a diary on this, but I was listening to the Stephanie Miller Show and during a AP News break, they 'reported' on an internal government email about some random federal employees being 'concerned about cleaning out their office refrigerators'....
That burned me up.
More over the thing.
I know that Republicans and maybe many other Americans who don't work for the Federal Government think of us as shiftless, lazy, overpaid folk who do nothing remarkable for a living.
I chose the public sector over the private one from the moment I graduated from college. While my classmates in my chosen profession and other professions were making double or triple my starting salary right out of the box, I felt that I could learn more working in the public sector than the private one.
Boy was I ever right. As a consultant, knowing what I know and how my area of government works, I could make a nice living. But I happening to freaking love what I do, even though my skill sets would command a much higher wage in the public sector.
The federal government knows that too and that is why there have been other non financial benefits to try to make up for the obvious benefit that most people work for -- the money. I have always felt blessed to have my 'good government job' and I never take it for granted because there are many now who have no job at all.
Well, as of today, I'm one of them and excuse me if I'm a little sensitive about being disrespected, for cleaning out the office refrigerator was never on the list of things to do yesterday.
It never came up. We received a number of emails on what to expect during a government shutdown, what we needed to do to put forth an orderly shutdown, how we needed to deal with our contractors, what messages to put on our emails and voicemails and what we absolutely could and could not do during the shutdown.
That includes still being held to the litany of ethics regulations regarding outside employment. We are still held to the Hatch Act.
And we, under any circumstances, are NOT allowed to do government work. It's against the law for us and it was made explicitly clear to us yesterday.
So, up until about 9:30 pm last night, on my own time, after hours, I worked to finish communicating with my contractors on work that is essential to our agency's mission.
And now I will sit, along with 800,000+ other federal workers who have not had a pay increase for years, many of the same have already been furloughed under the effects of sequestration for the past 4 months and all of us having to work harder under skeleton budgets to do more with less resources -- all of the while fretting in the back of our minds if someone else will try to shoot up or blow up a federal building with us in it -- we all will sit and wait out a bunch of ------- in Congress to restore our jobs.
Our agency's Administrator said it right: this is not a way to run things and in the end, Congress will only serve to return a thoroughly demoralized federal workforce to work once it's all over.