Office Siberia
There are many subtle ways to find out how you're going over with your boss.
Say, for instance, you work for the White House, you're a weapons inspector, and you conclude that there aren't any Weapons of Mass Destruction in some country where other folks in the building say there are Weapons of Mass Destruction.
How will your boss's displeasure be communicated? Will you be excluded from the monthly birthday party for everyone born that month? Not receive memos? Forced to park in Bethesda?
All possibilities. But tonight, I saw PBS's excellent "Frontline" show, a rerun of one I'd missed, called "The Dark Side," about Vice President Cheney's power struggle with CIA Director George Tenet, over control of intelligence, and specifically over information or disinformation surrounding the war in Iraq.
The "employee" we're talking about, in the picture, is weapons inspector David Kay. He testified that they couldn't find any weapons of mass destruction, and told the world that he couldn't prove there'd ever been any.
Kay said he got the hint that he wasn't welcome back at the White House when he came back to work and discovered he'd been assigned to an office in the basement, without a phone, surrounded by storage crates.
That's right, just because he gave the most accurate information he could, the folks running the White House decided to change him into Milton from "Office Space" .
posted by twamsiam at 10:47 PM
2 Comments:
I hadn't heard about this, but there's no big surprise in it, is there? From the time Bush first took office, there's been a stiff penalty for disagreeing with him, or for telling him anything he doesn't want to hear.
Cranky Daze, you're right about the penalizing being consistent. I do think this is a new low in terms of the pettiness involved.
It's one thing to libel someone, fire them, or call them an "enemy of freedom"; this is more along the lines of short-sheeting a bed or toilet papering a house.
Most politicians find some way to exact revenge, though this group does it to Nixonian excess.
We're at war in Iraq, they put us there, and yet they have time to go shave the neighbor's cat. That's what this sounds like to me.
Post a Comment
<< Home