Posted on 03/17/2025 4:40:25 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
WASHINGTON - At NASA headquarters in Washington, just a mile from the U.S. Capitol, employees returned to an infestation of cockroaches and some are working in chairs with no desks, according to two people familiar with conditions there.
In a private chat, staffers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services likened the hunt for desks in some regional offices to "The Hunger Games," the popular series of novels and films where young people must fight to the death in a government-sanctioned contest.
And at an Internal Revenue Service office in Memphis, Tennessee, tax assessors sharing a training room are unable to discuss sensitive tax matters over the phone out of fear of breaching privacy laws, according to one IRS manager who spoke to Reuters.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. federal government employees, many of whom have been working from home since the COVID-19 pandemic, were ordered back to their offices full-time by President Donald Trump on January 20.
But many have arrived at workplaces unprepared for their return, according to 10 federal workers who spoke to Reuters.
Some critics of the move - including governance experts, federal union representatives and civil servants - have said the lack of preparation is no accident.
They see it as a deliberate effort to make offices so unpleasant to work in that it will force more government employees to resign. Trump wants to slash and reshape the 2.3-million strong federal civilian workforce.
Federal employees described fights for desks and chairs, internet outages, a lack of parking spaces, with some sitting on floors and others told to use their personal smartphone hotspots to gain computer access to government data.
Some labor unions say the chaotic execution of the return-to-work order is a deliberate ploy to force more federal workers to leave government by making workplaces stressful.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
What a bunch of crybabies!
This just exposes gross levels of mismanagement and incompetence. And this is used to justify sympathy for the bureaucrats who cause the problems.
Not buying these tall tales.
We can always count on Al Reuters to blame Trump for the crimes of others.
“The Downfall of the Whiner Republic”
- by Reuters
no chairs ... such crybabies ... when i worked for a GOCO before the turn of the century, chairs were a problem even then ... whenever someone quit or died, there was always a stampeded to raid the vacated office of everything that could be carried away, including bookshelves ...
“And at an Internal Revenue Service office in Memphis, Tennessee, tax assessors sharing a training room are unable to discuss sensitive tax matters over the phone out of fear of breaching privacy laws, according to one IRS manager who spoke to Reuters.”
but no problemo when discussing such sensitive tax matters over the phone when “working” at home with family members running around, right reuters?
GOCO
********
What’s that?
Oh boo hoo!
“ workplaces unprepared for their return”
My God, they had FOUR YEARS under Biden to get the office spaces shipshape. What the hell were they doing all those years?
Government contractor
Shoveling ALL OUR MONEY OUT TO OUR ENEMIES!!
“My God, they had FOUR YEARS under Biden to get the office spaces shipshape. What the hell were they doing all those years?”
Selling Hunter Biden masterpieces.
I’m sure that the administration has been getting people to remove desks and chairs these last 2 months. Top priority.
So quit! Stop whining, you pampered princes and princesses. That you are still being paid for essentially doing nothing of value to society in itself is disgusting. Quit...and enter the WORK world. You are parasitic.
first thought by the headlines...the cockroaches were going back to working in the closets like they used to.
Gee. Military people are government employees, and have had to put up with cockroaches forever. When I went to Navy Jet School in Memphis, when my buddy and I were assigned a room, opening the door and turning on the light showed insects scurrying in every direction.
When I opened the locker, the inside had a drawn image of a cockroach and many, many rows of score marks.
Then, when I was assigned to Cecil Field in Florida, for the first time, I saw a cockroach fly. I was sleeping in my room in the BEQ (I was lucky enough to get a room of my own, it was a small oddly shaped room that could only fit one man!) I woke in the night to hear some odd scratching noise...it was going on in the room, and I thought “What the **** is that?”
When I turned on the light, it was the sound of the biggest cockroach I have ever seen scurrying around on the floor...I could actually HEAR it! I instinctively leaped out of bed, and wearing only boxer shorts, grabbed one of my boondockers and began chasing the thing around the small room...WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! but the blasted thing was too agile for me in my newly woken state, and I just couldn’t hit it. As it made a break to the gap under the door to escape, I nailed it.
When I hit it, the boondocker created a sickening CRACK-CRUNCH sound, and I thought “Well, that’s the end of THAT”, but as I lifted the shoe expecting to see a gooey mess, I saw a large, intact roach. For a second, it didn’t move...and then suddenly, it took to the air! It made this horrible whirring sound with its wings as it flew, and the blurring pattern of the wings seemed to create a gray sphere the size of a softball!
I can tell you, in the cramped confines of that room, it was quite unnerving!
It suddenly dropped to the floor, and ran under the door into the hallway, and I opened the door in hot pursuit with the boondocker repeatedly striking the floor with a WHACK-WHACK-WHACK sound, but it was too fast for me and ran under the next doorway it came to!
So...I don’t have a lot of sympathy for government workers who encounter cockroaches. Suck it up.
I guess he just has to fire people until there is plenty of room.
They were sitting at home eating Twinkies and playing on the internet. What? You expected them to “work”. How teeribly demanding you are! How insensitive!
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