OrionWorks wrote:
...I offer the following precautionary tale, recently received from an
old friend, a (retired) government employee.
This does not sound like a joke from a government employee to me. The
butt of the joke does not resemble any federal or state employee or
official I have ever met, and I have met many, since I grew up in
Washington DC and my parents were federal employees. Plus I know
several at the NRL, the CDC and the FAA.
a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan
sunglasses, and YSL tie, . . .
I have never seen a government employees drive a fancy car or wear
fashionable clothing. No government agency in the U.S. uses
foreign-made automobiles, and employees seldom earn enough to buy
expensive cars themselves.
The yuppie parks his Beemer, whips out his Dell notebook computer,
connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA
page on the Internet . . .
Stop right there! Has anyone ever seen a "yuppie" work for Uncle Sam,
or even someone who owns all those gadgets? All of the federal
employees I know resemble cold fusion researchers, such as this crowd:
http://lenr-canr.org/Collections/ICCF11.htm
Several of those people are U.S. federal employees, and they blend
right in. It is hard to imagine a less-fashionable group of people.
Believe me, they wouldn't recognize the difference between "Brioni
suit" and Macy's. (No would I, needless to say.) Watch the movie
"Apollo 13" or do a Google search for "federal employee" images and
you will see that these people are geeks, not yuppies.
Federal employees seldom own things like Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone.
Feds such as Grace Hopper and my mother helped invent computers, and
in my generation, federal employees such as Kahn and Cerf invented
the internet, with help from Rep. Albert Gore, but such people seldom
carry around computerized toys. Who needs 'em? (Anyone who thinks
Gore did not make large contributions to the internet knows nothing
about the history of the internet. See:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/10/02/net_builders_kahn_cerf_recognise/)
"You're a Congressman for the US Government", says the cowboy.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"
Congressmen never wear fancy clothes or drive foreign cars. If they
did, they would not be re-elected. The ones I have encountered are
not particularly skilled at technology.
This joke describes a dot-com millionaire type, not government employee.
- Jed
