The Department Of Goofing Off

By Tom ‘government cheese’ Waters
April 1, 2009

The Department Of Labor couldn’t find their ass with both hands, a global positioning device, Google Earth, a dowsing rod, a police psychic on the payroll, a leprechaun, a genie, and least of all, Amelia Earheart. That’s right. As a matter of fact, Amelia Earheart happens to be the new commissioner (she’s the one with the Burger King crown on her head in the company picnic photos) of the Department Of Labor. In a scant nine years, this commission of a clusterfuck has turned into a blight that makes the Department Of Motor Vehicles look like a while-you-wait photo shop. I’ve been getting ass-raped by the DOL for the last eleven weeks and now it’s their turn. Grab your ankles and look for the soap, you dumb bastards. Squeal like the unreachable beaurocratic fatcats you are soaking up the governmental funds you sun yourselves with on hammocks minted in gold when you should be working for those of us who have our entire lives, you worthless sacks of human waste. This one’s for you.

After getting the royal screw-job from my previous employer for boosting sales too much and the shortcoming of being a white male with a penis, I made the gross assumption of expecting that the government would cushion my fall from financial grace by giving back some of the sweaty money I’ve paid into the same system for nigh upon twenty years. I was so wrong that I made R. Kelly look like an altar boy. How foolish I was to draw the conclusion that an agency designed to help those out of work would do just that. I must have been betarded to infer, deduce and conclude that the two people in this great country of ours who are tasked with ignoring people out of work would dole funds out to those who have actually worked for a living in the past!

For six years, I’ve catered to (literally) generations of welfare recipients, SSI slugs and the walking biological waste who would rather stand in line or fill a seat and fill out paperwork for free funds, grants and tax dollars in an effort to sit around, rot their brains and neglect their children instead of getting off their gelatinous asses and press a hamburger button for eight hours four times a week for an honest paycheck. In a dying economy full of companies who are sniping hard working people left and right, I fell into the same category. Unfortunately, with my background in backbreaking labor as opposed to growing up in a system that caters to perpetually jobless dregs who know how to work pity to the maximum advantage while spawning children who will accomplish the same, I am at a disadvantage.

I’ve gone eleven weeks without a penny from the state or the government I’ve made every attempt to support. I’ve filled out their paperwork in record time and faxed it out well within their acceptable deadlines. I am a writer after all. Perhaps the fact that my handwriting was legible was a dead giveaway that I had an above-GED education or that I wasn’t a bottom-feeding piece of scum in a tank full of those fish who suck the spooge off of the side of a fishbowl. If I was smarter (or swifter), I would have filled the forms out with a Picture Page Marker and sent the letters out folded up into some manner of origami airplane instead of a tele-fax, which was a dead giveaway that I had more than a rudimentary education. Sadly, I didn’t spend the majority of my life finishing early into soon-to-be teen moms. I’ve never cooked crystal methamphetimes in multiple bathtubs. I also haven’t traded foodstamps for handguns from local corner stores so that I could rob banks for tax-free non-dye pack dollar dollar bills (y’all) in order to buy the latest hip sneakers while I continued to collect a steady fare for supposedly doing nothing. This was among the long list of what would become many of my first mistakes.

When I got wrongfully terminated in October of this year, I was honest. Another huge mistake. Instead of lying through my teeth like everyone else, I tried to explain that I founded my own publishing company and that it cost me more money from the outset (in review copies, radio show comps and bookstore swag) than I was making. How foolish I was to tell the truth. I should have taken a note from the hundreds of thousands of career loafers and omitted the truth. That way, my claim would have been processed in a manner more timely than say, eleven weeks and counting. Unlike my pathetic peers, I don’t deal in outside ’pharmaceutical’ representative work. I’m not in the business of ’hands-on’ sperm donation through the Frostee Clerk at the local Dairy Queen after we’ve shared a Philly Blunt. Woe is goddamned me.

The beauty and the form and function of the Department Of Labor has much ado with their chain of command as well as their response time, which is negligible at best. The entire system is set up to ignore actual recipients. I’ve made no less than a dozen phone calls and gotten zero callbacks in return. At this point, I’d prefer a post-film critique with a hundred monkeys with a hundred typewriters over the half of a simpleton who seems to be ignoring genuine requests for guidance and assistance that a slightly more corrupt simpleton appears to be in charge of. What is it that you people do? With a score of locations spanning this entire country, I’m astonished at the incompetence and complete inattention to detail that your organization displays. If you were service or gratuity based, you’d be doling out hand jobs under an expressway overpass for macaroni and cheese money by now.

Thanks in large part to my honesty (which, again, was a massive mistake and I should have known better), my claim is ’pending’. ’Pending’ means that the money owed to me will be on hold from now until nuclear fallout sometime in 2071 when my case-worker, trained Tandy Robot Arm Who Passes For A Pathetic Employee Of The Government or Lazy Bastard Who Chucks Pencils At The Ceiling While Ignoring His Ringing Phone gets off of his fat pock-marked ass and actually earns a living, which I did for practically twenty years until this economy decided to bring the hammer down on me.

What do you people do and how do you live with yourselves? The entire daisy-chain of neglect is built around ignoring the people who pay you, isn’t it? I’ve gone onto every web site, automated response system and paper trail invented for the scam that our government has put into place and they all lead to dead ends. I’ll just draw the assumption that (much like my former employer’s home office), a handful of oily men and women in short-sleeved shirts hold one-person limbo parties ala Bruce Willis in Moonlighting across the country while their phone lines are set to Forward-Only.

Not unlike the Batcave, finding a Department Of Labor (oxymoron) that will open it’s doors is paramount to knowing which hologram of a mountain cliff is fake so that I can pass through to the real place where their might be a breathing person who actually works for the good of some people who are down on their luck willing to work at a job who can’t find one. I’d still prefer to sacrifice my financial gains as opposed to my dignity, and those of you in this industry have neither. You make me wretch, and if there was any justice in this life, you’d boil your own body parts down and sell them on the black market to renumerate those of us who have actually worked for a living instead of coasting up and down a vacant office aisle in a bad chair with a bad tie. Damn you to hell, Department Of Labor. To be more specific, rot in hell, Brian. Do your job for once in what passes for the pathetic vacuum of an existence that you call a life.