Tales of government silliness

This week I started a new, temporary job with the U.S. Government, the second such stint I've had this year. I can't say much about the job itself, but I did want to relate one funny tale from my first days at work.

In every job, you have to fill out pages and pages of paperwork on Day 1. But with the government, the paperwork is utterly overwhelming. Thousands of pages, no joke, have passed across my desk in the first three days, much of it repetitive and pointless.

The silliness was summed up in one particular document, the nature of which is not important. The document is three pages long. My supervisor told me the 2008 version of the document was only two pages.

What, you ask, was added to make the document run over onto a third page? One single paragraph, which outlines the federal government's Paperwork Reduction Act.

I shit you not.

-- Matt Kelsey