How is the government shut down affecting you?

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How is the government shutdown affecting me? I am paying taxes and getting no services. Federal employees will probably get paid again for not working like they did the last time the government shut down.
 
Not much different than usual lol.

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heatherbeast said:
I'm pretty ticked off, but I made sure that the following just relates to my WORK.

There will be quite a few folks that will notice if there is a shutdown. Just these past two weeks, my outbreak response lab coworkers and I have assisted the following:

Families of infants in a neonatal ICU in New Jersey trying to figure out why their children are still getting sick from waterborne Pseudomonas infections.

Patients in Nebraska that can't have endoscope procedures in their lungs because the facility is trying to trace a source of wax-coated bacteria that don't respond to antibiotics.

ICU patients in Puerto Rico actually DYING at the rate of 1 a week from a multi-drug resistant superbug that also doesn't MIND being dried out for months on end and floating around the hospital.

A hospital in Washington trying to figure out if a GI tract scope is making their patients sick.

North Carolina has a dialysis clinic dealing with blood infections in their already very sick patients.

Kentucky has a hospital trying to find out WHY patients are getting surgical site infections in joint surgery patients!

Guess what ALL of those have in common?

ME, and MY WORK. We SPECIALIZE in tracking down these hard-to-find bacteria because getting them out of water, medical devices, is a HELL of lot HARDER than just taking a blood sample or swabbing someone's mouth. States COME to us to help them do DNA fingerprinting on these things to FIND the source of these infections. A lot of them can't even afford a FRICKIN GUIDEBOOK to do proper antibiotic resistance testing!

Guess WHO isn't going to be working? ME and my co-workers!!! We LOVE our work. We're darned good at it, and yes, it IS important.

For those of you tittering about how no one's going to notice a difference, you are DEAD WRONG. Literally. By the time the outbreak investigation gets to us, it means that 1.) The hospitals can't figure it out. 2.) the local and state health departments can't figure it out. Those patients are SCREWED without us. I don't give a damned flying brick about the paycheck, I will be fine for 2 months or so. But there are a LOT of people whose WELL BEING depends on me being ALLOWED to work. I will not even be allowed to LOOK AT MY FRICKIN EMAIL or VOLUNTEER to continue doing my work!
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I too am assuming you're with the CDC, especially given your location. I was very concerned when I saw that it was considered "non essential" as if somehow diseases were just going to stop because the government said so...:irked:

Personally, I find it rather frustrating not being able to access my NSF Fellowship application. Fortunately it's not due for a month, but anyone needing immediate access to Federal agency funds or data (NSF, EPA, NASA, USGS, etc.) are pretty much SOL right now.
 
Charney are you a farmer?
 
To inglorious and jpappy, yeah. And the wording this time in all the notifications we received was 'excepted' versus 'non-excepted'. It has everything to do with whether the employee is military or Commissioned Corps. Someone very clever many centuries ago pointed out that the legions need to be (eventually) paid in order to avoid a coup. Many Congresscritters are selfish, not idiots, despite what we might like to call them. :/
 
heatherbeast said:
To inglorious and jpappy, yeah. And the wording this time in all the notifications we received was 'excepted' versus 'non-excepted'. It has everything to do with whether the employee is military or Commissioned Corps. Someone very clever many centuries ago pointed out that the legions need to be (eventually) paid in order to avoid a coup. Many Congresscritters are selfish, not idiots, despite what we might like to call them. :/
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I can imagine that a crowd of angry, highly trained soldiers is at least a bit more intimidating than an angry crowd of scientists/technicians. Not that it's any less tragic when still forced to stop helping in a potentially disastrous situation.

I have a friend who's a civilian nuclear engineer at a Naval shipyard out on the East coast who's been furloughed. I assume there's someone being still monitoring those subs......
 
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