Wednesday, July 21, 2004

I wear a few hats in my office out of necessity. For the most part I don’t mind it, except it sure would be nice to be paid for the increased duties. But alas, federal service ain’t like the private sector. I can’t just go into my boss’ office and demand a raise or else. He’ll just laugh and be within his legal rights to do so. Actually, my boss would cry and panic for a minute at the thought that maybe I was seriously considering leaving, but that’s not the point of this post.

(As an aside, he did come to me this morning to tell me of a promotion possibility at one of our DC offices. I quickly assured him that there was no way I was doing that commute, even for a promotion, and especially not that office. He was pleased and more than a little relieved.)

OK, so back to the point ... we had a short training thing this afternoon regarding emergency procedures. They have divided up some tasks to ensure a safe evacuation to specific people in each component of the building. At one point I leaned over to my boss to ask who our [position withheld to be mysterious] is. He didn’t know.

When the training was over, we went to the deputy who’s in charge of this thing to ask him who our [position withheld to be mysterious] is. He leafed through his manual and when he got to the appropriate page, he pointed to the person listed. You’ll never guess who is the [position withheld to be mysterious].

OK, you guessed it. It’s me. Is that irony?

I immediately requested some additional training since I’m still pretty unfamiliar with most of the layout of the building (and I need to know it now). And I now have in my possession a snazzy orange safety vest with [position withheld to be mysterious] in large black letters across the front.