Surviving the Shutdown as a New Young Public Servant

Monday, September 30th, we were told incase of a government shutdown contingency plans are in place to suspend our training program, that we had been in for eleven weeks, with only one more to go until graduation of our phase 1 part of training for a new job I had secured serving the government. After weeks of hard work, our momentum was propelling us to the end, and it couldn’t come soon enough. That day I remember everyone wondering what was going to happen. That night it seemed like New Years Eve, people staying up abnormally late to see if there were to be any votes to keep the government functioning, and even more if we would go on the next day to keep training. At midnight it was known, the government would be shutdown, and I was on a plane home later that morning to suspend years of waiting for this job, and weeks of training, oh and I wasn’t going to be paid.

As a group of young trainees, we have grown pretty close. On the way to the airport we bantered back and forth about what was happening, non of us in disbelief this actually happened. How could a bunch of suits, who basically go through their day moving from one air conditioned office to another, actually allow this to happened to people who seemingly do more work, and rely on their jobs a whole hell of a lot more than these jokers? Problem solving and governing 101 should be something mandatory before taking office…or just not being an A-Hole. Anyway, I digress. It was a nice feeling to come home and see my wife after months of not seeing her, although it would have been nice to come back all finished, but that was out of my control. Being home was nice, and a little weird, but not in a bad way. It kinda felt like when I returned home from my mission, only a little scaled down. I had spent weeks in a new environment, with different people who became friends, and more so brothers.

So I’m home until further notice, what do I do? My wife is gone to work everyday, so I have the whole day to basically hangout. Quickly this became old. This couldn’t have happened, I couldn’t really be home, they didn’t really just send us all home, were some of the thoughts that were shared amongst some of us in the group, through messages, we similarly were feeling the same things. In regards to battling the difficulty of having to worry about finances in this time, luckily I have a wonderful wife who thrives on being independent and ambitious who has a good job. So while it sucks not having any income for this hideous we are ok. Surviving the shutdown has been interesting, starting out a new career, and taking a two week break isn’t what I ever thought would happen, but I have gotten pretty far in to Grand Theft Auto 5. The shutdown has been interesting to contemplate for the thought of how this happened, and how a small minority of legislators could impact a government in the way it did. To them they will go back to their days as they always have, and for me, I will pack back up when I am told to head back down to the training center I was at to finish the last week of training. I survived, thanks to playstation, and postseason baseball. My group will go back to dealing with situations where we have to train to solve problems, make decisions, and mostly serve with trust and confidence, I wish our government would do the same.