Social Security Administration to Employee: Who Farted?

Look at poor, downtrodden you, just browsing Reddit to get through the day in your cubicle at some "private" company, where you aren't offered the competitive salary, benefits, and rights to complain as those posh government workers in equivalent positions. Pissed, aren't you? It isn't fair - government workers have it almost as easy as Welfare Queen Michelle Obama. OR DO THEY?!?!?!?!?!?!

If you thought your boss monitoring your emails was bad, imagine him/her logging your every fantastical flatulent release, compiling charts to use as evidence against you like some nosy EPA regulator drone-spying on your methane emissions. Imagine a work environment where your boss scoffs at your medical problems, and demands you control your horrible, malodorous condition without assistance or the empathy and patience of your peers. If you still believe you have the short end of the employment stick, imagine, for just a second, that you work in a Social Security office in Baltimore. Cubicle feels a little bigger, doesn't it?

Beginning in May 2012, an employee of a Baltimore-area Social Security office has been closely monitored by Big Brother (no, seriously, counting farts is something a big brother would do) in order to shame him into joining the anti-flatulent hive-mind of our government. The employee was first approached with a verbal warning at a performance review, but continued exercising his right to deposit harmful gases into the air in the name of American industry (mostly the production of 7-11 grill items) through the Summer and Fall. On December 10, the employee was reprimanded in an official, 5-page Social Security Administration Memo, requesting that he JUST PLEASE ALREADY stop farting in the office. The memo includes detailed logs of his gaseous activity and a summary of previous requests from management for the employee to limit his freedom to act like his heroes in A&E's American Hoggers.

Though the subject is hilarious, because...you know, farts or whatever, the implications of the memo are troubling. Suddenly, you're creating a "hostile work environment" if you like to shoot a poot every once in a while? Remember when you had to go on a racist rant or fall into some titties to do that? And since when is it appropriate for a manager to force medicine down your throat or tell you to clench your cheeks tighter? A government job used to be a lush oasis of sensual hedonism, where buxom pensions frolicked in taxpayer-funded meadows, their modest investment returns exposed to the soft sunlight, but now it's a vaporized wasteland of destructive group-think that reflects the government itself.

So keep browsing your Reddit - or MSN if you're over 90 and still slaving away in the private-sector salt mines - and let out a little post-lunch squealer. Not to be rude, but simply because you can (for now).

 [Gawker / The Smoking Gun]