Publisher’s Platform: Anyone there? The government shutdown – Month 2

By Bill Marler on January 25, 2019

Day 34

I take a ferry to work guarded at times by now unpaid members of the Coast Guard. Next week with increasing trepidation, I will go through TSA Security with more unpaid professionals on the job monitoring security to then board a plane to be routed to NYC by unpaid Air Traffic Controllers. I am not sure I could focus on my job while wondering how bills were to be paid.

The shutdown hit close to home this morning when I opened my laptop at 5:30 a.m. to see a flood of hundreds of “Out of Office” notifications responding to emails generated from last night’s blog posts on Salmonella in flour and spinach.

Here are just a few:

“Thank you for your message. I am not in the office at this time. I am on furlough without access to email, due to the lapse in federal government funding. I will return your message as soon as possible once funding has been restored. For information about available government services, visit USA.gov.”

“Due to the absence of either an FY 2019 appropriation or Continuing Resolution for FDA, I am out of the office on furlough status and I am not able to read or respond to your message.”

“I am currently out of the office.”

Odd way to run a government.

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