Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

‘Twas time for haircuts, which we’d (the husband and I) scheduled for first thing when they opened at 9. Up and at ’em, then to the local diner for breakfast. Eventually made it back home where I napped with my female cat for a couple of hours.

We decided to get the heck out of the house and went to see Monkey. It had good bones, and we ended up laughing a lot at the film, but it was definitely a stretch of the short story. We enjoyed it, but mostly because we needed the laugh of something silly. And in the middle of that the new came down that 47’s handler decided to send out emails telling all of us feds to justify our jobs by midnight Friday. Cue the rolling of the eyes. “Spitting nails” was the most polite way I could describe my reaction to that wanker’s horseshit. I know I can produce something (after we get guidance from our agency, which they already emailed to let us know would be forthcoming), but what happens to someone who’s on leave Monday, or who otherwise doesn’t have access to their work email to send something? Heaven forfend someone should go on vacation. What a shithead.

Monday is my agency’s return-to-office full time day, for those of us not in the union (which none of the attorneys are here, because we’re too small a shop to differentiate practice areas). That made today was the last full telework day for a while, so of course I stayed home. I do have some random leave scheduled for the end of the week after next, so I’ll get a partial break from eight and a half hours/five days a week, but this is the first time we’ve all been back in since March of 2020. And even then this agency had a fairly robust telework policy so it was normal for people to work from home a couple days a week.

The folks with kids or elder care stuff are the most stressed. I’m just concerned about how crowded Metro is going to get; I haven’t had to Metro this distance to work regularly in decades (I lived in walking distance of my last job). Fully plan to keep masking on Metro, too, because I don’t trust people not to head to work while sick. And the work computer stays in the office unless I arrange for the very limited situational telework that’s available, so I’ll get to go to a smaller commuting bag after Monday.

Otherwise there were no new directives from on high, so we actually got to catch up on odds and ends today.

So much chaos at work. Three attorneys, maybe four, of twenty, took the early out, including our deputy. That I know of so far. The deputy isn’t widely known in the office yet, but she told me this afternoon before we left work, and next week will be her last. Two support staff took it, of eight. So not quite a quarter of the office will be gone soon at this point.

Cancelled the travel authorization for the training, and the agency should get a partial refund of the costs.

And then last night 47 killed off a forty-five-ish year old program that is designed to attract people who are getting graduate degrees into federal service, with an eye toward training them for management. It’s the latest version of the program I came into the gubm’nt under back in the late nineties, and its dissolution is another ‘salt the earth’ tactic to poison the well of civil service so it’ll be that much harder for future administrations to put things back together.

As maybe sort of expected the (truncated) training I was to go to next week has now been canceled completely, with partial refunds going back to the agency. Wasn’t entirely surprised about it, but it’s still sad and annoying as fuck.

Spent yesterday and today working on that ‘justify your job’ exercise, which was extra fun because instead of having us individually work on portions and submit them for adding to one document, they had us all putting the things into one big shared document. Hilarity ensued. Not. If you’ve never had the pleasure, 20-odd people trying to edit one document in real time is a nightmare of font changes, jumping pages, and formatting whiplash. So when we got it this morning 2/3 of the things I put in yesterday were missing. Added them back in, only for them to give us a new version with all of the missing items mysteriously back in. Ah, bureaucracy.

A bit better today, for having named the feeling bummed out yesterday. Doing extended periods of couch stretch before bed seems to be helping the knee, and we got one big project completely done today, and another partially done, which also helped.

Then came the expected firing of probationary employees today, which was apparently an emotional mess in the building (understandably!). Folks gathered to applaud the folks who were fired as they left. I’m glad I was teleworking; I would’ve broken down. As I reminded a friend, the chaos and the cruelty are part of the point, to keep the public off balance so they can’t effectively push back. It will be interesting to see what reaction gets wrung out of Congress when they go after Defense, which they are reportedly doing soon.

Well, snow telework day. It finally started mid afternoon and we’re up to a couple of inches outside now. Lots of leftovers for lunch (ordered pizza last night), and various and sundry work messes to clean up as we attempt to normalize what 47 is doing.

It’s unclear if I’ll be attending the second half of the training course at the end of this month because he issued an order dissolving the training institute that’s putting on the training. Rumor is that as part of an orderly shutdown they’ll finish out the class that’s there now, and then have my class come down for our last two weeks (because we already paid them for the training last fall), at which point we’ll be the last ever class there. The whole point of the institute is to train federal employees in leadership skills, and as we know this team hates the idea of a profession, non-partisan civil service (because he just wants yes-men), so it makes some sick sense that they’d close one of the ways that we maintain that professional civil service. Depressing, really.

Overslept this morning, which was odd because 1. I set an alarm; and 2. I got more than my normal seven hours of sleep. Was okay, was only a little late. And hey, I got stuck there until 7pm trying to fix some other thing that 47 and president fElon broke anyway, so it didn’t really matter.

Also, I really hope the folks who stayed home, or who didn’t vote for the other party because they ‘weren’t doing enough’ for whatever cause was near and dear to them are happy with everything that’s going on, especially today’s news about the middle east. And I really hope they don’t have the temerity to complain about anything he’s doing within earshot of me, because I’ve had it. These people are bound and determined to destroy 249 years of self governance, without a monarchy, and without (official) aristocracy.

The administration’s continued parade of ‘let’s keep everyone off balance’ continued apace today. Full employment for moi, so far. Though I did determine that after some of their actions at higher profile agencies we are not going to paint a target on my office by trying to ‘out lawyer’ their stuff (so long as it’s actually legal, and so far it has been, even if it’s been … odd).

The level of angst in the office is a mess. Every other conversation seems to start with, at minimum, a ‘wtf’ look, if not an outright blurting out of the actual phrase. And it’s nigh impossible to keep up with it all, which is, of course, their intent. Baffle ’em with bullshit, as the saying goes. Nothing like some chaos to keep everyone busy.

Well, 47 is definitely keeping the news companies busy. Haven’t heard whether my small agency’s IG was one of the ones fired last night. I doubt it, we’re too small for that, but one never knows how far his attention will stray to.

Lots of texting with colleagues today. Consensus with the lawyers is that he’s doing this as a way to generate a lawsuit that will eventually get SCOTUS to say that laws which purport to limit his authority to fire people in the executive branch are unconstitutional. Such a decision wouldn’t come for years, but it’s definitely within the sights of the folks he surrounds himself with.

What a time to be alive.

We feds got a message today from the outgoing president about how much he appreciated our work. Well, 46, if you appreciated it so much why did you limit our pay raise this year to 2% instead of matching the military’s at 4.5%, as is customary? For someone who claimed he was a champion for labor he sure didn’t show it. Of course, neither did 44, who agreed to ridiculous pay freezes because he was afraid the opposition party in Congress would say ugly things about him. Fools. Meanwhile, insurance and living costs continue to outpace raises so we’re not even breaking even (a big reason you lost, 46). Again, fools. So thanks, you senile old fool. Enjoy your early retirement, and do us all a favor and take more of the other 70+ year olds with you into the sunset.