Back in Action October 18, 2013 Jill The U.S. government is back in business, and the shut-down achieved, well, nothing. Except leaving a lot of people out of work and financially strapped. How did you spend your shutdown?
I work in the private sector and was not affected by the government shutdown. My son in law works for a federal prison and did not lose any hours.
Being a state employee, the impact of the shutdown on me personally was quite minimal. My recently deceased uncle, a vet, could not be buried promptly due to the VA not processing certain documents, but that should be sorted out shortly. I found talking to my Republican cousins yesterday quite interesting, however. They do not see the shutdown as having accomplished nothing. In their eyes, the GOP lost, but at least they fought this time. They believe the shutdown demostrated to the American people that Obama is a terrible leader who cannot be trusted at the head of the nation. They look forward to the opportunity to purge the party of traitors like McConnel and Boehner so that the good fight may continue, and they are confident that they will be able to do so in 2014. It promises to be interesting. (and yes, in case you haven’t guessed, I live in Texas)
DC is, of course, a government town, but I found furloughs were less frequent than I’d been expecting. Most people I knew were working all the way through to the end.
I did what I always do: sat on my couch all day reading comments on blogs, read a couple of books, did some volunteer stuff, gym morning and night. And had to go to some dinners.
I spent it fretting about how we will make up the 88 hours of work we lost. Other than that, not much.
It did not affect me personally, but I spent most of the shutdown working and trying to magic up enough money to keep my relatives that are dependent on Social Security and food stamps afloat. Fortunately it didn’t come to that. Now we just have to go through this again in 4 months.