Thursday, April 30, 2009

They call it Flex Time.

Or flexi-place.  The program that used to be for semi-retirees and those with small children is getting foisted on everyone.

I’m getting cut back for hours.  For now, I’m on for 30 hours a week.  On top of that, I can only be in the office two days a week.  The rest of the hours have to logged from home.

It’s a mixture of things.  Congress made their emergency budget reallocations, sending more to DHS and DoD at the expense of Education, EPA, and a host of other domestic agencies.  But more pressingly, FPS and the mercs want us out of the One Congress Street building.  The Post Office Square building is still not fully repaired.  Most of the construction contractors are refusing to cross the infrequent picket lines (somehow the picket lines always seem to be there before the contractors show up and the contractors only show up when there is a picket line).

Net affect, not enough money to pay us all, but even more so, not enough space to house us.  Did I mention that those 30 hours a week are expected to include weekend hours?  Not all the servers in IT are running correctly, so when you try to work from home, it has to be at a time when only a few other people are working from home (unless you are senior enough at which point someone else gets bumped from the system to make room for you).

Essentially, EPA business (and federal business in general) is grinding to a halt.

The old swamp Yankee in me thinks “Good riddance!” to federal involvement at all around here.  The liberal in me sees threats to public safety going unfixed and tax-payers going without services.

My wallet just says ouch.