Somehow I am not surprised.
by Bruno Waterfield
A German civil servant has admitted that he “did nothing for 14 years” in a retirement email sent to colleagues.
The 65-year-old sent the farewell message on his retirement a day after learning that his job was disappearing due to cuts.
In the email to 500 other civil servants in Menden, North Rhine-Westphalia, he boasted that he had earned $975,000 for doing no work. “Since 1998, I was present, but not really there. So I’m going to be well-prepared for retirement – Adieu,” he wrote in the email which was leaked to the Westfalen-Post newspaper.
The admission is embarrassing for Germany because it is leading calls for austerity cuts to the public sector in eurozone countries such as Greece and Spain.
The unnamed man, who has worked in a municipal state surveyor’s office since 1974, accused the authorities of creating inefficient, overlapping and parallel structures, even employing another surveying engineer to do the same job, leaving him with nothing to do. “Of course, I well benefited from the freedom that came by to me,” he wrote.
He also accused the Menden city authorities of buying unusable computers and software, but has since refused to publicly detail his allegations.
Volker Fleige, the mayor of Menden, said that he had felt a “good dose of rage” when he saw the email, as the employee had not once complained about not having enough to do during his 38 years of employment.
Fleige said that there would be no sanctions against the former civil servant and that his job would not be filled.
He probably admires Obama.
Oh so it’s HIS fault. Gotcha.
Did the guy not have a boss that was responsible for keeping everyone busy? Or underlings that got tired of doing the work this guy wasn’t doing?
How many in our public sector are taking advantage of the same deal? hmmm
@ m:
You don’t understand
The employee was probably in the wrong party or union. This is NOT a unique case. To protest this doesn’t make it better but worse.
Here’s a story that goes well with this thread:
Democrat-controlled Senate laziest in 20 years
The primary duty of the Congress (both houses) is to produce a budget. The last time Congress passed a budge was April 29, 2009. A pox on both houses.
“The Department of Redundancy Department”
—Firesign Theatre
@ huckfunn:
The House passed a budget last year and has passed on ethis year I believe. The Senate hasn’t bothered to even take those budgets up for debate. There’s nothing that the House Republicans (or Senate Republicans for that matter) can do about that except use it as a campaign issue to run against the Senate Democrats that are up for re-election this year.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
I’m can’t say I’m surprised you’re a Firesign Theater aficionado; you had excellent taste!
Iron Fist wrote:
I’m well aware of that. The larger point that I was trying to make is that the Congress (collectively; both houses) have not passed a budget in 3 years. In other words, our government has operated without a budge for 3 years.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
You’ll never work here again, Tirebiter.
@ MacDuff:
Funny thing about Firesign Theatre is that despite they and their politics being solidly lefty, their stuff sounds more conservative than not nowadays. “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus” was a poke at world’s fairs and Richard Nixon, but for the most part the Future Fair, and the hologram president, describe very well (if allusively) what America and its politics have become.
I have to draw the line at the “revolutionary” ending where “Clem” shuts down the President (“This is Worker speaking”), just as I reject the implied Weatherman support at the end of “Don’t Crush That Dwarf” where the cast starts singing “We’re Bringing the War Back Home” (a Weatherman slogan)—but while I reject the Firesign Theatre’s implied solutions, I applaud their absurdly accurate vision of what reality was to become.
huckfunn wrote:
I think you forgot to put the final “t” in “budget,” but it’s accurate either way.
@ huckfunn:
The only way we’ll ever get another budget is to hold the House, and take both the Senate and the Presidency. Otherwise, Obama will simply veto any budget the Legislature passes, and we’ll likely never have the votes to override that veto. The Democrats have found that they can continue to spend in the abscense of a budget. Indeed, they can take money and move it around, the way Obama took $500 million and mover d it to the IRS to pay for implementing ObamaCare, and nothing will happen. Unless the voters make it happen. The Ryan budget isn’t really auster enough, but it will have to do. But it will only get passed if the voters put the Republicans back in charge, and then hold their feet to the fire. As we saw in 2002-2006, just having the Republicans there is not enough. Our government is broken, and rapidly going broke. I don’t think the sane are numerous enough to be able to save the Republic this time.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
It works bofe ways
Iron Fist wrote:
Basically, that means that “the power of the purse”—and thus, Congress—is dead. The Congress exists solely to authorize, as a rubber stamp, Obama’s increases in the spending ceiling, which is what has served in place of a budget for years.
This makes the entire legislative branch a puppet government, and Obama dictator in all but name.
@ Iron Fist:
I think BO-hole came to the WH with the idea that it would best to operate without a budget so no one could see what he and the commies would be doing with our money. Hello GSA.
@ buzzsawmonkey:
Exactly. The Republic has already fallen. The question isn’t “Will we Fall”, but how far will we fall. This election may very well be our last chance to even slow the crash down.
@ huckfunn:
The Democrats are afraid to go on the record about what they want to do with our money. Thus, no budget for three years. The question is, will the voters do anything about that? Only serious defeat at the ballot box can possibly change things now. We have to soundly defeat the Democrats at every level. A replay of 2012, plus the addition of defeating ZObama. Anything less, and we are just re-arrainging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Iron Fist wrote:
Hopefully, instead of re-arranging the deck chairs, we can arraign and deck the chairman.
@ buzzsawmonkey:
I don’t imagine we’ll be able to imprison Obama, but I’ll settle for retiring him soundly. I don’t think that is going to happen, though. I am expecting a razor-thin margin. Romney may win, though that looks doubtful right now. Certainly it is still possible for him to win. It is still a long time to November. The suspense is like to kill me. I wish i t were done, one way or the other.
Iron Fist wrote:
Oh, come on—surely you wouldn’t want to miss the ever-increasing verbal acrimony; the Administration fomenting race riots and Occupy tantrums with a wink to its base, a sneer to the rest of the country, and the connivance of the media; the shrill and increasing accusations of “wars” on blacks, gays, Hispanics, women, “the undocumented,” and Muslims; the undermining of Israel; the increasing maladroitness in Afghanistan; the $5.50/gallon gas; the demands for the “Buffet rule”; the increasingly tight net of business-killing regulations; the appeals to “green energy” and “climate change”; and the sneering at Christianity in all forms and Mormonism in particular?
Think of how much will be packed into the next nearly-seven months! You’ll have so much to occupy your time you won’t even have time to remember if you don’t have a job, or can’t afford to take a vacation!
@ buzzsawmonkey:
Yeah, I am so thrilled I could just shit in anticipation! Seriously, I expect that you are right. It is going to be one wild ride. I just hope that it gets wilder when Obama is voted out of office. There will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth when that happens. That’ll be worth all of the stress of the next seven months.
Iron Fist wrote:
Maybe Disney, or possibly Six Flags, could make a real “wild ride” out of it: “Pirates of the Potomac.”