Hick in the District

Today I had to drop off a lot of letters from the Secretary to representatives who sit on a subcommittee that’s going to be marking up the administration’s FY ’07 energy budget request. This involved the vainglorious task of walking into each member’s office and dropping off said letter with their staff. Here are some of my observations:

1. The entire federal budget would shrink by .03% if Rayburn were reorganized. Or better yet, demolished and replaced with a building that doesn’t look like it was designed by the faculty panel that heard the dissertation for the guy who designed Dwinelle.

4. The fifth floor of Cannon is a joke. When you get off the elevator you step into a storage space that looks like its housing wreckage from Katrina. Walking through it you can’t help but be concerned the capitol police are going to arrest you for being somewhere you shouldn’t to do something you oughtn’t.

5. Every staffer except Vanessa Colburn (who couldn’t have been more pleasant, go bears)—like fifteen of them, republican and democrat—took the letter and let it fall on their desk as though I had simply dropped off the office water bill a week early. Little punks! I just delivered something signed by the United States Secretary of Energy’s autopen! Rah-speckt mah authoritah!

7. Junior high kids should not be allowed in the district unless they can pass a test identifying the function of the buildings whose security walls they’ll be jumping from.