Stupid Pink Slip Day
We love pink slips, people – particularly when they go to useless government employees who 99.9% of the time richly deserve them.
Hell, if pink slips were issued to all the bureaucrats whose lack of performance warranted them, there’d hardly be anybody left in government.
Anyway, that’s why we were surprised to find two examples of pink slippage today that defied our conventional wisdom.
One took place out in Los Angeles, where the spokeswoman for the area’s public metro railway was fired for actually doing her job.
Denise Tyrrell acknowledged shortly after a deadly crash killed 25 people in a Los Angeles neighborhood that her agency was responsible for the accident.
From the Wall Street Journal …
Metrolink Board Chair Ron Roberts said Sunday that the agency’s board hadn’t authorized, or known beforehand, that Ms. Tyrrell would tell the media so soon after the crash that the Metrolink engineer had failed to heed a red-warning signal, which led to the fiery head-on collision between the commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train in Los Angeles’s Chatsworth neighborhood. The swift admission of responsibility and apparent cause also angered NTSB officials who had arrived at the crash scene barely an hour before and had just begun their own investigation.
To her credit, Tyrrell stuck by her decision, saying that “it was the right thing to do regardless of how ticked off it made the NTSB.”
Not only was Tyrrell’s statement accurate, but she actually did her bosses a “solid” (i.e. a favor) by not revealing the damning fact that warning signal wasn’t heeded because “the engineer was exchanging text messages with a few teenage railroad enthusiasts nearby.”
“Teenage railroad enthusiasts?” Yeah … okay.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, the head of that state’s Department of Social Services resigned today after poor people had to wait for showers and food stamps during the Hurricane Gustav evacuation.
Secretary Ann Williamson was blasted by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal for her mismanagement of the evacuation, although it sounds to us like poor people were – in typical poor people fashion – being a bit unreasonable …
One evacuee complained to The News-Star, The Times’ sister publication in Monroe, that (their) bed was too low.
Seriously, people. Having a “low bed” doesn’t kill you, nor does not showering for a couple days (just ask Sic Willie).
Louisiana did a much better job handling this hurricane, and being a little stinky in a “low bed” is a small price to pay for being alive.
