The shutdown

I went to work today like usual. This was a surprise because of the warnings about a shutdown or furlough or, as my bosses insisted on calling it, "appropriations lapse". I wasn't looking forward to it; besides the totally normal "get up on Monday" problem, I had seven hours of meetings scheduled for today. I wouldn't have minded an excuse to skip that. I didn't get that excuse, but it's over now, thankfully. (That is, I'm still at work, but not in a meeting.)

But last week was a mess because of the risk of appropriations lapse. Friday I had 10 department-wide or administrative e-mails by 3:45 p.m. but no one could even say for sure what to do if the government shut down. And that's not counting e-mails relating to winding down specific projects, or e-mails on previous days about the shutdown. For comparison, the Friday before that had eight department-wide or administrative e-mails, (seven of which were about a one-time cadet training event including several "reply all"s), the Friday before that had two and the Friday before that had five.

Part of that uncertainty is because no one knew exactly what Congress would do, of course. But also, part was because of our status as contractors. There's a requirement that we have to be supervised by government personnel; for example, flextime and telecommuting are much harder for us than for most people in this building, if not impossible. But on the other hand, as contractors we're bought and paid for in advance. So if the government employees aren't here but we are and are willing to work, do we go home but still get paid? Who knows? It's unrealistic to hope for such an obvious loophole, but still, the fact that we never got definite guidance made me wonder.