Ow. Cause, meet effect

Friday was a very weird day, My alarm went off at 6:05 and my first response was Oh. I forgot to turn my alarm off. That's really sad because its Saturday. I don't have to be up for hours. And so I stayed in bed. I didn't go back to sleep because I did have to get out of bed to take Dogger to the vet for a 10am appointment.

At 7:30 I rolled over and looked at the clock and said OH MY GAWD ITS FRIDAY!!! Fortunately, my clock is set ahead and by the time I threw on some clothes and forced pills down every ones throats and flew out the door, I arrived at work exactly on time. Whew. That's what I get for cheating on E.R by taping it and watching Life on Mars instead. Lesson learned.

The rest of the day went along swimmingly until the three-pm-news dump. We got an email from The Secretary and we learned the following:

- All travel is frozen

- All vacant positions are frozen

- All salary adjustments are frozen

- All purchases are frozen

- All directive apply regardless of funding sources.

Man, I knew things out in the world were bad but I didn't think it was going to change that fast. Speaking of fast, Target has an ad out all ready trumpeting their budget friendly prices, now that all of a sudden we're all poor. It just seems so fast.I guess the entire management team from my division are lucky they let them come back from that three day conference in San Diego last week. These cuts do not sound related to a decree that went out about a month ago from the Governors office that state agencies were to cut two percent from their budgets. This sounds like a rerun of several years ago when we weren't allowed to order paper clips for a year. It sucked.

It could be worse though. The year I was hired the budget was so short they were furloughing state employees because they couldn't make payroll. They had to get special dispensation to hire me because they position had been vacant for six months and they were desperate and the job paid so little it was practically a volunteer position. I didn't get the same salary I was getting with my last position for four years and it was almost two years after that that I finally was earning more than I was when I was laid off in 2001. It's hard out there for a state employee, once hired we are harder to get rid of than cockroaches but they sure as hell try.

The good news for me Friday was that Friday evening I finalized my Christmas card plans by nailing down my photo-cards, yes plural and ordered prints from Snapfish where I got fifty free prints! Saving myself many dollars over going to Wallgreens! I only had to pay for 20 prints at .9 each, Whoo! I also got lucky with costs because I had some photo-cards stock piled from after Christmas sale shopping , so I ended up only having to go out and buy cards for one set of the prints instead of all three. I won't be able to order paperclips at work until the end of the fiscal year, but in real life I can send Christmas cards.