Finding the fun in funding

My buddy Mike (Navy vet) alerted me to a government job opening the other day, and man, I couldn’t have been a better fit for the job if I had written the postion description myself.

The Department of the Treasury was looking for a cartoonist who, “…shall conduct two, 3-hour, Humor in the Workplace programs that will discuss the power of humor in the workplace, the close relationship between humor and stress, and why humor is one of the most important ways that we communicate in business and office alike.”

All I had to do was draw cartoons about the Bureau of Public Debt to cheer up its employees. (Apparently their work environment is a bummer.)

Cartoons about government jobs? That’s what I do! I mean, seriously, is there a more government job than the military?

But then some do-gooder Senator got involved and killed the whole thing (see “Senator quashes Treasury’s bid for humorist“). According to Senator Dorgan, “…there is very little that is funny about today’s economic conditions.”

Then the Treasury Department pulled the solicitation and apologized.

Come on, guys! Aren’t we trying to stimulate the economy? I can’t think of a better place to start than right here, beginning with my own personal stimulus package. I could have talked in funny acronyms. I could have drawn wacky flow charts. I could have put the “fun” back in “funding”.

And since it was a government contractor job, I could have inserted hidden fees, cost overruns, and unexpected inefficiencies that would have made me a ton of money. I could fall behind my joke-writing timeline and have to delay the first session for six months – that alone would have netted me enough to buy a boat.

But it wasn’t to be, and that’s okay. I dealt with my disappointment and moved on.

Besides, when when you think about it, any organization called Bureau of Public Debt probably wouldn’t have been good for the money anyhow.