I know nothing....

When I was a kid, I used to watch some serious amounts of Hogan's Heroes reruns on my babysitter's black and white TV.  The two things that stick out in my head are Sergeant Shultz's famous line, and the fact that Colonel Hogan was always trying to find a way to get Colonel Klink to give him a furlough. 

Those are both fresh on my mind, because I have said nothing about the Boston Marathon event due to the fact that much like Sergeant Shulz(and the Fed's) I Know Nothing, and...today I had the first day of my own sequester related furlough.

While not a direct federal employee, the contractor I work for had our contract funding cut by 10% when the sequester went into effect.  One of the ways we are absorbing that funding cut is by furloughing our exempt staff.  Our craft, as union employees, don't have anything about furloughs in their contract, so we simply laid a number of them off to realize the same percentage savings. 

The company went through a few different plans for the furlough, and did the math a few different times before arriving at the final plan they implemented, tying the amount of time you need to take off to the amount of vacation time you earn, because you see, you can take the time off with pay, because the money to pay vacation time comes out of a different pot than the money to that you get paid for actually working.

End result...I need to take 11 days off between now and the end of September, and today was the first of them.  Because of some work shops that my kids go to, Wednesday is a good day to take off, since it meant I had my wife all to myself for a few hours in the middle of the day, which we used to go to the gun range! 

 

 

After action report to follow!