April 18, 2012
Dear [Me],
I have sent the enclosed correspondence about your situation to [Governmental Agency Acronym].The enclosed copy is for your files.
If you have any new, relevant information, please send it to:
Name and address of possibly underpaid staff member
Office of Desperate to be Re-elected Official
Mailing Address to "Local" Office
Or
Fax number that no one uses anymore because of e-mail and the Internet
Please be assured that we are continuing to work on this matter and will contact you as soon as we receive a response. If you have received this message by email, it is not possible to reply by email. Please contact my office by phone, fax, mail or online via webform on our website at webaddress.PLEASE-vote-for-me.gov.
Again, thank you for contacting me. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance to you on this or any other issue.
Sincerely
Quite odd that if they can send me an email that I can't send another in return. I thought that was how email worked. All these years using the Internet and somehow I missed that.
Anyway, I opened the "enclosed correspondence" to see what it had. Here's what I found:
Dear Sir or Madam,
The purpose of this correspondence is to inquire about non-reappointment of [Me, but with my name in all capital letters].
[Me] contacted [Desperate to be Re-Elected Official] out of concern for this case. Her current mailing address is [none of your business].
Her email address is [also none of your business].
Her date of birth is [REALLY none of your business]. I have attached a signed Privacy Act Release Form for this case. (NOTE: The Privacy Act Release Form had all that info on it, so why waste time in a "letter" repeating it?)
According to [Me], she was recently not reappointed to her [old job title] position after almost 8 years of work without personnel or performance issues. As she has not received an answer from [Governmental Agency Acronym] regarding the specific reason, she believes that it is due to the fact that she has obtained a certified service dog to assist her. I have attached the email she forwarded to our office where she quotes the letter she received from [Governmental Agency Acronym], as well as her signed Privacy Release form. (NOTE: Didn't they already say they'd attached this? Who writes these things??)
I respectfully request that your office give each and every due consideration under the law to the request of the constituent. Please update me by email about the status of this application or the reason for this denial so that I can inform the constituent.
Best regards,
Name of possibly underpaid staff member
So, the letter was off and now all I had to do was sit-back and wait for an answer. My attempts at getting a straight answer from supervisors (and, I thought, friends) didn't work. My attempts at going through the Equal Rights and Equal Employment Offices had met with little fanfare and, as of this date, still no response. Now I was going to get somewhere!
Today, an email arrived from the political official's address. Inside I found:
April 20, 2012
Dear [Me],
I have received the enclosed correspondence from [Governmental Agency Acronym]. The enclosed copy is for your files.
Please feel free to contact me in the future if I can assist you with any other matters of federal concern. If you are receiving this message by email, please note that it is not possible to reply by email. Instead, please contact my office by phone, fax, mail or online via webform at www.I'm-getting-very-desperate-to-be-reelected.Give-me-some-money.gov.
Again, thank you for contacting me. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance to you on this or any other issue.
Sincerely
Okay, a stock response with a quick flip of the ol' web address where donations are happily received. But, it had only been 2 days! I knew something was fishy. The government never works that fast. Not for regular taxpayers like us, anyway.
So I opened the attached "response" and here's what I saw:
Good Morning [Possibly Underpaid Staff Member],
Thank you for your recent inquiry about [Me]. She is concerned about not being reappointed as a [old job title and acronym for it]. On behalf of the [Actual Name of Governmental Agency and Acronym], the following is what I can share at this time.
March 24, 2012, marked the end of the current appointment period for all [old job acronym]. We were asked to evaluate our current work force needs based on [Governmental Agency Acronym]’s mission. This required making some difficult decisions. Clearly we had people who had contributed to our mission for a long time and were good employees. However, our current and projected staffing needs meant we needed to create a more nimble organization, which required making some very hard choices. At this time, it was determined per the Stafford Act and your Conditions of Employment, to allow [Me]’s appointment to expire. {Me] is free to apply for an appointment within another Cadre.
Once the new [New Job Title] program (what the [old job acronym] program used to be called) is accepting applications, the non-appointed [old job acronym] (your constituent in this case) could apply. The details of this are still being worked out, and we will keep you posted. I hope this helps and let me know if you have any additional questions.
Best regards,
External Affairs Specialist, [Area for which I used to be employed]
Hmmm....something seems familiar. Why, yes! That whole second paragraph was nearly identical to what they'd sent me previously (and you can check my prior posts to verify it)!! They didn't even change the word "your" before "Conditions of Employment" in order to make it read correctly! They completely avoided the reason why I was asking for clarification and simply whipped together the same old spiel they'd been given to placate those who weren't rehired and sent it. And the Desperate to be Re-Elected Official's staff didn't even bother to check that it wasn't an actual response to my actual question before slapping the Official's name on the email and sending it to me.
Oh, sure, it looks "better" with them saying that I can apply when the new program opens. However, those who were reappointed also have to apply and if they're hired, they don't lose their accrued sick days and their pay could go up but cannot go down. Those of us who were not reappointed have to start from scratch, regardless of how much experience we have, and lose all of the sick days we'd saved working over the years. So, technically, someone who had just been hired prior to the "reappointment" period who was retained could be making twice what I made and have no experience but if I get rehired to my "old job" I'd have to start at the bottom of the salary tree again. Yeah...that sounds really fair.
I immediately went to the website of Desperate to be Re-Elected Official and left them a nice message that what I got was a whole lot of nothing that I hadn't already sent copies of to them. And, no, this person will not be receiving my vote in the election -- even though this fiasco had nothing to do with my previous intentions to not vote for them.
Oh well.... I'm still on the hunt for answers. Yeah, I may be just banging my head against the wall, but it's better than sitting and wallowing in self-pity or wondering what I did wrong (which was nothing).
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