It really seemed at work today like it was 1995 all over again even though I was doing something else during the last government shutdown.
We received a second e-mail in as many days from the cabinet secretary. I’ll leave you guessing which one. The e-mail was kind of an “Idiot’s Guide to the Government Shutdown.” If appropriations fail to exist for the government at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, it seems we will still have to go to work our next scheduled workday for a four-hour “orderly” shutdown. That means we have to make sure everything is where it should be and where it ain’t it is. Got that? What happens if we call in sick?
I guess I am fortunate to work only part-time for Unc Sugar. That way I get screwed only part of the time and not all of the time.
The looming shutdown, if it happens I might add, was so prevalent today that it was hard to get things done but somehow we always do. I am off tomorrow and have an hour’s teleconference on Monday, so I suppose, shutdown or not. So I can only imagine the angst of federal workers on the job tomorrow. I will be following the news and the Internet closely, although I would bet I would have to stay up until midnight tomorrow evening to find out whether or not there is a shutdown.
I am both somewhat depressed and more than just a little pissed off. Depressedoff or maybe Pisspression. It isn’t just the possibility of a shutdown — actually I would rather have a shutdown than another continuing resolution — it’s the fact that the stupidity of the possible shutdown plus the added fact that I ache and hurt and I was reminded today that I can’t go for the hour-long walks around my neighborhood I once made.
Driving home from work I spotted one of the local crazies whom I hadn’t seen in a long while. It reminded me I have this pain like someone stuck me down the right side of my lower back and on inside my hip when I stand or walk too long. I don’t write this for pity, rather it’s because of a longing for walking that I can’t do these days because of whatever is wrong with my lower back. It’s a longing like when I was in college and miss those first snippets of Spring when the girls started coming out of their dorms with their bikinis and their tan-free bodies. This was before tanning beds, kids. It’s longing for those days I could actually go jogging, when I took it up it was on the beaches of Southern California. That wasn’t bad at all. The present is a longing for the time I didn’t carry all this weight around and a knowledge that I’ve just got to get rid of those added pounds for no other reason than it makes me feel very, very uncomfortable.
My medical practitioners at the Department of Veterans Affairs, a brethren agency which hopefully won’t be hit badly if we get shutdown, need to do something, try something. What physical therapy I’ve tried isn’t working. What a surprise, it never does. Docs say surgery won’t help. What about the pain clinic, try shooting me with steroids or some miracle drug. Hey, the shots I got in my knee are still working.
I wish I could be more upbeat and write something inspiring or at least not in such a foul (fowl, cluck it) state of mind.
Congress and the Prez coming together on a budget would make me feel a little better. Having an absence of lower back pain would do even more.
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: