Irony Bored

I've been angry for the last couple days. If you're an American taxpayer, you'll be angry after you finish reading this. Almost one year ago, I started receiving hits on my website from within the confines of my former employer. I complained to the organization whose job it is to stop "fraud, waste, and abuse" of government funds. I assumed, quite incorrectly, that they'd do something about it. The hits started again. I complained again, and I asked that this follow-up be associated with my previous ticket open with them.

The response I received, in its entirety: “What type of ticket do you have open? Who is it open with? What is a ticket?”

Expletives abounded after reading that response, but my vocabulary kicked in and I responded. In that response, I asked to be contacted in writing. I specifically requested not to be called.

I was called the next day.

I did not speak to the person on the phone. There is no record of what is said in a phone conversation unless it is recorded. I want written words, and I don't think that's an outlandish request. Send me a letter, apologize, and say it'll never happen again. I'll be happy with that.

After two more months of silence, I wrote a letter. It was seven pages long, went to a few senators and a couple governmental bigwigs. It seems that the letter has filtered its way down, because for the last two days I've had a governmental visitor for great swaths of time. Visiting every single link on my blog, and every line of comments.

This makes me laugh, because my complaint was that government employees aren't supposed to be surfing websites while they're at work. They're supposed to be *gasp* working! (That's how utterly radical I am.) The only sites they're supposed to view are those with a legitimate business purpose. This blog certainly does not fit that bill. There are far better ways for my tax dollars to be spent than to have people looking at blogs, don't you think? Look at it this way... at a conservative estimate, the person who was looking at my site for the past two days makes $18 an hour. (They probably make much more.) Yesterday they visited for a little over five hours, which equates to $90. That's ninety dollars to look at pictures I made, fractals, and a picture of me at four years old in a bathrobe.

I guess that makes sense. I mean, it's not like the deficit is at record high levels or anything. We've got money to burn! Rack up those blogexplosion and blogmad credits, folks! A tax hike is more than justified to pay for your surfing habit!

It's just high irony that the department charged with stopping governmental waste is now more guilty of wasting funds than the place that sparked my original complaint. Good job!

For those of you saying "so what?", think about this. This is $90 that I know about. So, if just one person wastes 5 hours a day, every day, that adds up to $32,850 wasted per year. If you think there's just one person doing this, I'd like to sell you some oceanview property in Colorado. Cheap.

My message to my new fans? Keep right on visiting! My logs will keep recording it, and it's more proof of how much money you're costing the government. Thank you for providing more fodder for my next letter. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the pics and the stories! Oh, and if you'd bother to fix the firewall like I said, this post wouldn't even be here! Fun!

*Update* - Hi again! Keep wasting those tax dollars! Oh, and nice job trying to hide. "Anonymouse.org"? I appreciate the entertainment. And what the hell do you keep looking at my profile for? It's changed maybe twice in two years. You expect it to change on a daily basis? Sheesh.