Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrlll wonders why ONLY FIVE THINGS!? She writes:

To me the most astonishing thing about the Sturm und Drang over being forced to email the DOGE Detectives 5 things you did IN A WEEK, is the minuscule nature of the demand.

Let me get this straight. No, really, because it is impossible for me to believe. I started working full-time – summers — when I was 14. Not even counting babysitting, which I began doing in 7th grade. Here’s how responsible I was at age 12: a family down the block with FIVE children under 7 left me alone with their children for 3 days while they went to a funeral in Iowa! (I got $15, more money than I had ever seen at one time in my life.)

So I am gobsmacked when tens of thousands of government “employees” – really just 6-figure welfare recipients – are howling and gnashing their teeth and threatening everything from strikes (who would notice?) to lawsuits to violence at being asked to name WHAT IS IT THAT YOU DO HERE?

Office Space has always been one of my Top Ten favorite movies, but it was talking about the CORPORATE world, where at least you had to come into the office and pretend to be working or putting a new cover sheet on your TPS reports. How much BELOW that standard can the government drones fall? We’re about to find out.

I have NEVER had a job in my entire life where my productivity was not measured daily, starting with clerking at the tobacco counter in my father’s drugstore. I came in at 8:00 sharp and could not be late because I was riding to work with my father. I was wearing a clean uniform. I waited on customers until 6:00 p.m. If any customer made it all the way from the front door to the back of the store where Daddy stood at the pharmacy counter filling prescriptions WITHOUT being asked, “May I help you?,” there was heck to pay.

If it were raining and there were no customers, then we had to dust the shelves, take inventory, restock missing items in the candy area, or straighten up the magazines. God forbid we just stood around chatting when we were bringin’ down a cool seventy-five cents for each and every hour. (I do not make this wage up for comedic purposes.) We worked six days a week and every fourth Sunday.

My first job after marriage at 20 was as a typist for IBM in Evanston, IL. The 30 or so salesmen brought me sales proposals and I had to type up the letters to their potential customers. All day. Every day. The one teeny tiny little amount of goofing off that I got to engage in was surreptitiously typing my husband’s college term papers or themes on those rare occasions when he chose to participate in an assigned college task.

I left that job and went to work for the Fundraising Department at Northwestern University. My job there was to type the letters of gratitude to donors, large and small. My boss was a wonderful woman who was a fanatic about spelling, grammar, and neatness. We were not allowed to use white-out or correction tape. If you made a mistake, you started over. If there was some kind of smudge on the margin, you started over. If you typed “Dear Mr. Moneybags” instead of “Dear Bob” (because the Dean of Fundraising KNEW him personally and would not have called him “Mr.”), you started over.

When we moved to San Francisco and I started typesetting, we not only set type all day every day, but every job was logged in on our timecards in military time. The client was billed by the amount of time things took. When we moved BACK to Minnesota and I worked briefly for the printshop at the University of Minnesota, a union shop, my foreman DEMANDED that I slow down, saying aloud, “If you finish all this work on nightshift, then the guys will not be able to come in on Saturday and get overtime. And my thought was “I have to get OUT of here.”

And so I did and went into standup comedy, working for myself. With self-employment and any form of artistic endeavor, you either work or you don’t eat. Your life is a constant hustle, from creating new material to soliciting jobs to getting new headshots and new bios (later videotapes). When actually performing, you either show up ON TIME, make people laugh, or you not only don’t get paid but word gets around and you don’t get future work either. Simple. There is no “work from home” in standup. Although I understand that some people tried to do so during COVID with limited success on ZOOM.

Well, now I’m a retiree. And I’m still willing to bet that between cranking out a weekly column, trying to keep fit, shopping for food, putting food away, making two meals a day and then cleaning up the kitchen; emailing and texting a wide variety of friends needing a kind word, a check-in, a little cheer; nagging people to attend an upcoming Commenter-Con gathering, and keeping up with as much political news as I can stomach — my To Do List would have FAR more accomplishments checked off than would “workers” in, say, the Department of Education.

I do stipulate that in fairness to those drones I COUNT as checkmark-worthy such items as “washing my hair,” “making coffee” and “reloading my pill caddies” so that I know what day of the week it is.

If you work for “the government,” that means you work for the taxpayer, ultimately. How anyone can pretend DOGE is asking for the most private personal information by wanting to know “what did you accomplish last week?” is preposterous. Mainly because “the most personal private information” is what they email and text to one another all day every day! And the nature of that information is not to be believed. One male-to-female transitioner exulted about the wonders of being able to urinate sitting down! Woohoo! As someone accustomed to that privilege life-long, let me just say, “Wait till you go camping…bring extra socks.”

Fire all employees of the useless Department of Education and reconfigure all Department of Education buildings as apartments and rehab places for veterans. The $103.9 Billion with a “B” earmarked to be squandered on a department which is an obvious epic failure shall be immediately moved to pay down the national debt and to give a yuge raise to the families of service members.

During the Gulf war after 9/11 I entertained at Thousand Palms for the wives of the deployed Marines. I was flabbergasted at how young they were, most with children, and how meager were their circumstances. It broke my heart. I worked for free, it goes without saying, and I was only sorry that I wasn’t more famous so that they could feel more special.

If that insignificant little $.9B, say, is left over, I wish to announce the launching of my new clean energy Think Tank. I have already saved up the initial $100 like the gap-toothed grifter “real Georgia guv,” Think Tank Abrams, did for her loot.

I promise that with the funding of my NGO, polar bears will frolic once more – maybe in Arizona, maybe not, what difference does it make at this point? — and if you like your gas stove, you can keep your gas stove. We will all be unburdened by what the Global Cooling, Warming, Climate Change, ZPG, Acid Rain Racket has been and stride forward, all middle class families, mowing our lawns together and being warm in the summer and cold in the winter, as it has been and always shall be, forever and ever, Amen.

But only if that check clears. Commenters here might well pray for that windfall as I will take you all to Tahiti for a month to research Tahiti’s climate and work on our Mission Statement. Here’s what I have so far after a full bottle of champagne: “Don’ be mission out. Get all you can grab while the getting’s good!”

Apparently, the Gravy Train done hit a stump on the tracks and the gravy spilt all over. Sad. There’s not only a new sheriff in town, but his “sidekick” – every Western hero had one – has more kids than Pancho, Gabby Hayes AND Jingles Jones put together – a beyond genius IQ and ,oh yeah, could be the first guy to have a trillion personal dollars. What a time to be alive!