What’s that you say? Two weeks is now? My neighbor the lawyer’s free advice is to sharpen those woodworking skills, tout de suite.
News item: “The agency that oversees the government’s civilian workforce is facing scrutiny after suggesting federal employees affected by the partial government shutdown barter with their landlords if they can’t make rent payments, advice that it later said was posted ‘inadvertently,’” the Washington Post reported.
“On Thursday, the U. S. Office of Personnel Management tweeted sample letters to help the roughly 800,000 affected workers negotiate with creditors and mortgage companies. One letter, meant for employees to send to their landlords, discussed a temporary reduction in rent payments and suggests ‘the possibility of trading my services to perform maintenance (e.g. painting, carpentry work) in exchange for partial rent payments.’”
Of course this absurd situation is ripe for parody — and I’m not just talking about the fact that, in the student days when I had landlords, I assure you they did not want to take my personal brand of carpentry as any substitute for legal tender.
The worst of it is the wonderfully passive way in which the suggested Memo to Mr. Jones lays blame for the fact that Joe Bureaucrat no longer has an income. In the tweet — which by the way addresses furloughed employees by the salutation “Feds,” which is a new one to me, though we do live 3,000 miles away from Big Guv’mint — the government whose own dysfunction put these folks out of work suggests addressing creditors: “I am a Federal employee who has recently been furloughed due to a lack of funding of my agency.
