Message-ID: <s0f555e8.023@crs.loc.gov> Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 17:13:19 -0500 From: Jonathan Sanford <mailto:JSANFORD@CRS.LOC.GOV> Subject: Budget war spilling over to this list -Reply To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Dear Eberhard,I don't think you should be so hard on US government employees who were off because of the recent furlough. (I'm not one of them--we have our annual appropriation, so we worked the whole time. But many agencies didn't.) People at AID were unable to go to work--in fact, they violated the law if they reported to work or took anything home with them to do. (Federal law. Financial penalties. Possible jail time for major violators, such as agency administrators who allowed non-emergency people to work.) It was a lockout. Nobody expected it to go on so long--not the President, not Congress, and certainly not the employees themselves. People at some agencies held demonstrations ("We Want to Work") or had "Work-ins" (where the building security staff had to drag them out). Now that temporary funding measure has been agreed to last weekend, Federal employees should be going back to work--at least until January 26, when this craziness could start again. Except on the East Coast, where Washington DC is located, since the weather bureau has given us a big snow job. We were out three days because the city was totally snowbound, and another big storm is due tomorrow.
As for the mailbox setting: a lot of people do not limit their mailbox, since they get messages from the public that way and most internal messages within their agencies are now electronic. Necessarily, most people have very very large mailbox allowances. I had 683 messages when I returned from a 10 day vacation once. The system works fine except when the whole system goes unattended for a month. I imagine some people at AID who communicate with the outside world via e-mail (the public, contractors, news services, NGOs, etc.) could easily have three or four thousand messages in their box. Try facing that when you come back to work after being locked out for a month!
I normally like your contributions, but I think you were unfair on this one.
Jon Sanford