Tag Archives: government

What I Did on My Furlough Friday (Part 6 of 6)…

Posted on by

I feel like we’ve reached the end of an era together. Now that I’m sitting here writing at the tail end of Furlough 2013, I’d love to say I’m sorry to see it go… but in the perpetual war between free time and spending money, money has won out yet again. It’s just as well that next week will bring back the standard 5-day work week. Another five of six weeks of being a part time worker would have probably ruined me completely for ever having a full time job again. If you haven’t had the experience in your adult life, a 4-on, 3-off schedule is pretty damned easy to get use to.

Being philosophical doesn’t really tell you much about how I used my final scheduled off-Friday for the immediate future. The answer to that one is simple: I did all the stuff I would have otherwise done on Saturday – grocery shopping, banking, stopping by the post office, and enjoying a late lunch at Chiplote just to top off the day. Now I’m back home writing, editing, and trying to remember that English is my first language and I should really know how to use it. All things considered, it’s been a successful Furlough Friday… I just hope it’ the last time I have to use those two words together in a sentence. Somehow I can’t shake the feeling that it’s just an operational pause before we reach a whole new level of stupid when the new year kicks off on October 1st.

Be sure to tune in here tomorrow for “My Trip to Walmart…”, a Post By Request coming to you whenever I get around to turning it in to actual sentences based on the notes I took while shopping for groceries this afternoon. With a plug like that, how can you not want to come back and check it out?

Kick in the junk…

Posted on by

Today is the last installment of Furlough Monday for the time being. One of the things I learned from the furlough experience is that regular three day weekends sound a hell of a lot better in theory than they are in practice. For the duration of the furlough, Mondays have been all about pain – trying to keep up with all the demands with less than half the people is not a recipe for good times. I can only expect the experience was similar for those who showed up on Fridays. From my admittedly limited observations, what you end up with is a few people doing a lot of things and not doing any of them particularly well. I’m fairly sure the technical description is penny wise and pound foolish… but that’s a point for another rant.

Tonight’s point is that the end is in sight… and I’ve never been more excited about the prospect of a five day work week (or a full week’s pay). Thank God the Labor Day holiday is coming up so we can ease back into the routine with a short week. These short weeks have been like a kick in the junk… but I wonder if the long weeks will be any better.

The storm before the bigger storm…

Posted on by

So the intrepid leadership of the Dysfunction of Defense has magically discovered a way to reduce the total number of required furlough days for civilian personnel from eleven to six. On the surface, that sounds like a fine thing and if you’re not picky about the details and surrounding circumstances, I suppose it would be. Being the slightly jaded and cynical jerk that I am, of course, I have a slightly different take on how things are going inside that five sided funny farm on the banks of the Potomac.

As close as I can figure, reducing the number of furlough days probably has as much if not more to do with the legal requirements for the Department to close the books on the fiscal year before the clock strikes midnight on September 30th. Someone, somewhere deep in the bowels of The Building has probably realized that along with the rest of us schleps, the finance and logistics people they need to close out the fiscal year are also working 20% fewer days and not authorized overtime. In my experience, that makes completing the year end financial festivities a statistical impossibility. Woops.

Another perk of getting everyone back to the office in the next week or two is that it gets everyone into a nice routine for the inevitable shitstorm that’s going to take place at the start of FY14. My best guess is that the fiscal year about to start on October 1st will include such highly sought after features as Debt Ceiling Induced Government-wide Shutdown, Furlough: Part II, Reductions in Force, and Pay Freeze: Part 4. Hopefully I’m wrong about some or all of those predictions, but I don’t think I am.

I have the sinking feeling that this six day furlough was a dry run – the storm before the even bigger storm ahead.

What I Did on My Furlough Day (Part 4 of 11)…

Posted on by

Well, we’re four weeks in to DoD’s brilliant cost-saving furlough and routines are starting to develop. Saturday Part 1 (a.k.a Furlough Friday, a.k.a. Old Friday) has become the default day for running errands, going to Walmart for groceries, and beating the lawn back into submission. Basically I’m still putting in a full day’s work, it’s just work that I’m not getting paid for and use to be considered part of the weekend routine. Aside from the making of a new routine, there’s nothing significant to report. Hanging out at home, minimizing expenses where I can, and generally trying not to have an aneurism every time someone mentions a five-week Congressional recess or a multi-million dollar presidential vacation.

Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give him a bank and he can rob the government… but if you elect him to office he can steal it all.

What I did on my Furlough Friday…

Posted on by

I really should just be staying home, conserving resources, and bitching online about the monumental contempt in which I hold the elected “leaders” of this country, but instead I cooked an actual breakfast this morning and knocked around with the dogs. Washed some clothes, did some dishes, and made myself presentable. I trolled around a few of the local pawn shops looking for deals on a couple of specific items and found out that grocery shopping at 1PM on a Friday is every bit as good as 8AM on Sunday. I’ll be keeping that little secret in mind for the next nine weeks. I cut the grass and decided even I’m not obsessive enough to do an hour’s worth of trimming in 100 degree heat. No worries, this weekend still has two more days and I’m sure obsession will trump heat at some point.

So now that everyone else has started their weekend too, here I sit, nursing a Red Stripe, trying hard to coax a few hundred words onto the page. If I’m bluntly honest with everyone, the beer is disappearing far faster than the words are showing up, so there probably won’t be much to salvage by the time it wraps up this evening. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after that. Fortunately, the words always seem to show up eventually, even when I don’t know exactly where they’re coming from. However it happens, I’ll take them all.

So yeah, Furlough Friday #2 (or Saturday Part 1 if you prefer) was as much of a success as one can reasonably expect under the circumstances. It’s still new and different. Ask me a month from now and you’ll likely hear a different opinion.

Furlough Friday: Take 1…

Posted on by

And so, the first Furlough Friday of FY13 draws slowly to a close. Some of you might be wondering how it went. Although I didn’t have a to do list for the day, here are some of the highlights:

– Wake up, roll over, and tell the alarm clock to go fuck itself

– Brew and drink at least a pot of coffee

– Send hostile and antagonistic message to local members of Congress

– Write at least 500 words before leaving the house

– Pick up groceries

– Watch four episodes of The Sopranos

– Attempt to write a creative and snarky blog post (mostly unsuccessfully)

– Eat dinner

– Find something on TV that doesn’t make me want to pummel myself into unconsciousness

– Go to bed, wake up, and repeat weekly as required.

As much as I would like to say that Furlough Friday was a endless field of excitement, alas it was not. The good news is that despite the furlough the electricity remains on, the fridge is still cold, and inside it is enough tasty hops flavored beverage to see me through to another Furlough Friday.

A week with no Wednesday…

Posted on by

Since this is the first of 10 more furlough weeks to come, it should be noted that for purposes of record keeping I’ll be dividing the week as follows:

– Monday and Tuesday will be held as scheduled.

– Thursday replaces Wednesday and is immediately followed, as usual, by Friday, which will take over Thursday’s old time slot.

– Saturday Part I is allocated the space formerly occupied by Friday.

– Saturday Part II is takes the place of the traditional observance of Saturday.

– Sunday remains in its historic place as the day that keeps Saturday (Part II) and Monday from crashing together.

Please note that until further notice, Wednesday will no longer being observed by jeffreytharp.com. While posts will continue to appear as normal, official business will only be transacted on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday as outlined above. Saturday (Part I and II) and Sunday are considered non-working days and will be subject to lying about on the couch watching trashy daytime television, surfing the internet, perfecting a diabetic-friendly rum punch recipe, arguing with the evening news, and otherwise being an unproductive member of society.

We regret that Uncle Sam has made this drastic step necessary and hope that Wednesdays will be restored to service as soon as funding levels allow.

A whole lot worse…

Posted on by

For eighteen months, “furlough” and “hiring freeze” are words that continually show up atop the list of search terms that drag people kicking and screaming to my little slice of the internet. Having spent an outlandish amount of time bitching and complaining about both over the last two years, I guess that shouldn’t be much of a surprise. I’d love to tell you all that there’s light at the end of the tunnel and that Uncle Sam’s financial woes are behind him, well, there’s really nothing out there that indicates that’s true at all. From all outward appearances, Uncle has managed to paper over the worst of the problems for the time being. While that seems like a good thing, it probably just means that he’s managed to kick the can further down the road and that when it comes time to settle the tab, it will be even worse than we thought.

By my most recent calculation, I’ve worked under a hiring freeze of one sort or another for about a third of my career. I’m not feeling the pinch at the moment because I’m not actively looking for an eject button, but if I was options would be pretty limited. Having personally experienced the fresh hell of sending out multiple hundreds of resumes to get a handful of interviews, I don’t envy anyone looking for fresh horizons under the latest incarnation of the freeze. Even more unfortunate, I don’t see the market thawing any time soon, either.

Uncle has been warning about employee furloughs for months now. The general public reacted badly to the notion of laying off food inspectors and air traffic controllers, two very visible activities carried out by random, faceless bureaucrats. I have my doubts if there’s going to be the same outcry for defense workers. Working behind the wire, most of the public will never see or know what we do on a daily basis. As a result, us staying home for a week or a month isn’t something they see or experience firsthand. That makes us easy to ignore and therefore an excellent target of opportunity for cost reduction or avoidance.

So far, the department’s official position, at least the one that it’s opted to communicate to the workforce, seems to be ignoring the issue and hoping it goes away… at least that’s what it looks like from the inside. Predictions range from “nothing’s going to happen” to having to take the full 22-day furlough within the last 3 months of the fiscal year. Someone at echelons higher than reality probably has the smattering of a plan, but for the time being the drones are being kept well insulated from anything that resembles official information.

As we grind towards the end of fiscal year 2013, I think we’ll come through with minimal disruptions. What no one is talking about yet, and what I’m convinced is going to bight us all in the ass is that sequestration is a ten year event. Even if we ride out year one with cost savings through attrition and quietly cooking the books, we’ve still got nine years of draconian cost savings to generate…and in my mind that means things are going to get a whole lot worse in the out years before they ever start getting better.

But not the others…

Posted on by

One of the worst arguments I’ve seen repeatedly in the gun control debate over the last six months almost always goes along the lines of: Well, you have to have a license to drive a car, so why not a license to own a gun? The thing is, the Constitution does not specifically address your right to transportation – by car, horse and buggy, train, air, slow boat, or on foot. Ownership of a car does not require licensure or permission from the state or federal government. If a 15 year old has the coin in his pocket (and his parent’s permission as a minor), he can buy and possess any car on the lot. Licensing drivers conveys the privilege to operate the car on the roads, not the “right” to own it in the first place.

Since gun ownership is a right defined by the Constitution, the more analogous argument would be in requiring a state and or federal license to speak publically. Since words are so often used to bully people and that bullying directly results in emotional and physical harm up to and including suicide, before someone is allowed to exercise their “right to free speech,” they should be required to take a four hour word safety course and obtain a license from their state indicating that they understand how harmful words can be. Perhaps we should also extend the licensing requirement to the right to vote, since elections, too, have real world consequences. In order to exercise your vote as a citizen, you should be required to show identification and pass an exam showing a minimum proficiency and understanding of the issues of the day. Since we’re free to abridge one constitutionally protected right, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be equally free to abridge the others in order to make the world a safer, more harmonious place.

As much as I hate to say it, for me it’s not a pro-gun/anti-gun position that’s the real issue here. I would be every bit as apoplectic if the state and federal government were trying to restrict the other right that I enjoy as a free citizen of the United States of America. The right to keep and bear arms is just the one that the powers that be have decided to come after first. I’m a good enough student of history to know that once one right falls, the others are all the more endangered. I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with how people can love some freedoms, but not the others.

Just the parts you like…

Posted on by

I’m about to break ranks with Fox News, and you know that gives me a slightly queazy feeling on the inside. Still, I’ve made a habit of calling a spade a spade with everything else that ends up on my mind, so it’s only fair to call out your friends when they’re being asshats too. For the last six months or so, Fox News commentators have been screaming for the administration to cut government spending… except for Defense. And the FAA. And Homeland Security. And Border Patrol. Look, I’m a registered republican and draw a salary from one of the departments that you’re supporting, so I have a vested interested in being a defense sector booster but I know well and good there’s plenty of room to cut if it’s done smartly (i.e. not through an across the board cut as currently provided for by law and certainly not just by lopping off a work day every week for the next six months).

For the last two days, though, where Fox has decided to make a stand is on the subject of White House tours. Seriously? Guided tours of the White House are apparently so vital to the long term health and welfare of the republic that they should be included on the list of items to be fully funded… It’s so important that it ranks right up along with funding the troops still fighting in Afganistan. You have got to be shitting me, Fox.

Oh, you say, it only saves $75,000 a week. It’s a drop in the spending bucket. And you’re right. It’s one drop. A drop that over the six months of this years round of sequestration would save $1.65M of the $24M you say the White House must cut from their budget. That one drop is a pretty good start.

Sorry folks, but the need to cut spending isn’t about what programs you like, or I like, or the sixth grade class from East Pignuckle, Louisiana likes. It’s about reducing spending in accordance with the laws that Congress passes and the president signed into law. If it’s a bad law, it’s only bad because that’s the way some jackwagon staffer on the Hill wrote it.

I’ll be the first to tell you that the way sequestration was written, it’s just about the dumbest piece of legislation I’ve ever personally seen become law of the land. But the national consensus was that we want to reduce spending. Guess what? That means some of the things that people like just aren’t going to get done anymore. You wanted smaller government? Just remember that smaller government looks like fewer tours, fewer soldiers, slower refund processing, and generally less of everything we’ve become accustomed to over the last 60 years. If you don’t like what it looks like now that smaller government is here, push to change the law, don’t just sit around bitching about what you’ve lost. The future is about priorities and if you’re not speaking up for yours, someone else will be happy to let their voice be heard.