Inappropriate Content: 50 in 05©

Number Ten:
Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut's novel begins:

This is a tale of of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.

One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the tim—

11:16 a.m., March 21st. This post has been interupted by my first genuine bomb threat. I mean of course the first time I've been in a building where there's been a bomb threat, not the first time that I have called in a bomb threat. In any case, there is a flashing window on my screen marked “EMERGENCY” and informing us to stay out of the basement of another USDA office building on the other side of the Potomac.

Did I mention I work for the USDA now?

I began an internship here last tuesday. Sometimes I stand by the window and look out at the view from this office at the very edge of Virginia. I am on the tenth floor and can see the Potomac, the Watergate, the monument, and the Capitol Dome. It is now nearly noon, and I have just broken and fixed the electric typewriter; also, the computer has just given us the all-clear. No more bomb threat.

My duties so far have consisted mainly of filing documents, for example a memoranda of understanding between the Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Department of Labor, Educational Training Administration, signed before I was born and expired before my younger sister was born. It is not exactly deeply inspirational work, but the people here seem to like me.

There was a monday morning staff meeting today. The director the office and and a couple of staffers had been out last week, at various meetings in various states in hotel rooms that varied by pay grade. Mostly I listened to a discussion about where our office, which handles several senior, youth, and volunteer programs, will go. It's currently in the Forest Service, but may soon be re-delegated to some other division of the USDA. From the files I've been going through, I know that this particular Job Corps office, which operates some centers for the main Job Corps office in the Labor Department, has been in at least four or five divisions of two different cabinet departments in the last twenty years. It's all perfectly boring.

A little discussion of the president's budget. The phrase “the president's budget” is always said in a slightly lower tone than the rest of the sentence, not exactly a curse word, but not a phrase anyone enjoys saying. In Job Corps case, the operating budget for our existing centers is staying the same, but the current five-year plan to add centers and expand the program has been, depending on who you ask, either frozen, slowed, left alone, or, as my boss put it, “cut by forty thousand dollars—I'm sorry, I mean forty million dollars.” What's actually going on will remain a mystery until we finally get congress to pass a budget and get out of town this fall.

This is all very aggrivating to everyone on the office. We are after all Job Corps partisans, in the “as Federal employees, we can't lobby for our program, but...” sort of a manner. For example, one of the staffers helped Senator Coleman of Minnesota move forward with his efforts to get one of our old centers designated as a historic site last week.

(The Forest Service has a half-dozen offices in my building. While the doors require a pass card, most have signs, are near the elevator, and have someone at the desk to let people in. There is one office, though, that is hidden in a back corner, behind another office, where you can't see it, and has no one on call to let you in. It is, of course, the Forest Service's Freedom of Information Act Office.)

I like our office manager. She's a black woman in her mid-twenties, and she's attending graduate school part-time, geting certified as a Financial Manager; she works here 30 hours a week; she is raising a daughter. Last week she went to her daughters school with Smokey the Bear.

It is now my lunch break. Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.