So this whole stupid thing started because I hate people. Yes, I do mean people in general, not any specific type of person, though dumbasses are generally higher on my list-o-hatred than your average Joe.

This does not bode well when you work a retail job as somebody who is required to not only deal with people coming in off the street, but also to do it with the smile of a retard who just found his dick.

When I say I hate people, I mean I hate people.

Anyway, I just couldn't deal anymore. Making small talk with rejects from The Hills Have Eyes became such a chore that I knew if I stayed, I would start killing people with whatever sharp thing was nearby. So.... Exit, stage left.

I was jobless for a while, just kind of enjoying not having to be somewhere at sometime, but then I remembered irritants like "rent" and "food" and so ventured forth to the "internets" to find a new career. After a couple weeks of useless job spam from monster.com, A friend of my wife's pointed me to Careerconnector.jobs.irs.gov where there was a vacancy for a "Data Transcriber" job, which is government-speak for "data entry." The pay was good, and the hours were fantastic, so I figure, what the hell. I apply, and I receive... nothing. No word for, as far as im concerned, way too long. As im waiting to hear ANYTHING, (I knew I was qualified.. hell, OVER-qualified, really) another listing pops up in my neighborhood, for a clerk position. The best part is, instead of having to drive into [the city], it's in the same suburb I live in. Of course, there are some differences. The first job was "career conditional" which is government speak for "seasonal." The 2nd job, the clerk job, is "Temp, NTE1Y" which is "Temporary, not to exceed 1 year."

From asking around, I find out that the seasonal job will likely be done long before the year is over, so I decided I would apply for the clerk job.

Of course, now I know that things like bonuses, benifits, and job security go with "career conditional" jobs, not "temp" jobs. But at the time, I sort of equated the two things, so when I found out I had gotten both jobs, I took the clerk job.

Boy was that a goddamn mistake. I know that now, please don't send me email telling me what a fucktard I am, I am completely aware. Horribly horribly aware.

But the pay is the same, and I do get some benifits, just not anything worth while, So whatever. At the very worst, its still better than my LAST job.

That's what I tell myself to be able to sleep at night. The fact that it happens to be true doesn't make it any less sad.

I discovered, upon going to [the city] to get paperwork and have my picture taken for my new spiffy security badge, a deep insight into our government:

No one talks to each other... ever.

different branches of our government will go to great lengths to avoid communicating with each other. Paperwork is sent from place to place, maddeningly useless, in order to keep all members of each service completely seperate. I think that if you managed to somehow get two people from two different governmental branches into the same room, they would sit in opposite corners and stare at each other, like cats meeting for the first time. They would scratch memos on articles of clothing with their own blood and fling them at each other in order to avoid any sort of communication.

Within each branch are departments. They act the exact same way. No department wants anything to do with any other department. They flee at the sight of each other. I have, in the limited time i've been with the IRS, seen somebody actually MAIL A FORM to a person in a different department who SITS TWENTY FEET AWAY. The form actually had to go through the mail, and arrive back at our same building, and have somebody from the mail room bring it to the other person, PASSING THE SENDER'S DESK ON THE WAY TO THE RECEIVER.

It's completely insane. The whole thing is completely insane.

Here's another blazingly stupid insight into the inner workings of our government:

Because of some idiotic bill passed by Gdub, the IRS must BID ON ITS OWN WORK versus a private company.

I am not making this up.

The IRS has to bid in order to keep it's own work. And even better: they almost lost the bid! On their own work! The IRS!

Because they must now bid on their own workload, they have had to cut costs. Hurray! which means that thousands of permenant IRS employees who had been doing the job for years are laid off, and thousands of Temp employees are brought in. Hurray for our economy! All those new jobs created! In one fell swoop!

The irony here of course is that a lot of the perm employees are now temp employees, with less benifits and a pay cut. This insures that the IRS is able to under-bid the private company that is competing with them for their own work. The private company would of course out-source all of this overseas if they won the bid. Way to go Gdub! Way to keep our economy strong!

/begin rant
God our president is such a dumbfuck I don't know how he manages to put his shoes on correctly in the morning. Probably has his Secret Service guy lace em up with some kind of inane "rabbit goes in the hole" rhyme.
/end rant.

Either way, even though the IRS managed to win the bid for its own work this time around, the private firm is "appealing" it right now, which means nothing to me, since im still confused over the whole bid process.

Hence the "temporary" status. The fact is, the IRS has no idea how long anyone will HAVE a job, though apparently the transition from IRS to private firm will take about six months anyway if the IRS loses the bid (FOR IT'S OWN WORK) in the "appeal" process, so they say we'll all have our jobs at least that long.