Another thing to brighten my day was an email informing me the wage data I forwarded to a former employee was in the wrong format. He is trying to collect disability. It is therefore his former employer’s responsibility to allocate time and resources to play games until the paperwork is correct. Back in the day, before governments like the City of Asheville kindly started availing resources online, anybody making a Freedom of Information Act request would, for one thing, wait until after any deadlines to receive information had passed; and then, when the info arrived, it would be packaged with an invoice for per-page Xerox costs plus labor. I would feel much better about these fool’s errands if the government would reimburse me.

So, we wonder what’s wrong with the economy? Government recruits people to go on welfare. Those on welfare inflate the prices for everybody else. Those left working, then can’t work because they have to spend what, 10 to 20 percent of their time filling out forms? That’s labor costs that have to be recovered by upcharges to consumers. Less time is available for innovation and quality assurance, so customers pay more for less. Why don’t we all just sit around and re-fill out forms and figure out how to reconfigure our computers to make the government happy. I’m sure the food will fall in our mouths and our great government will provide us all the housing we need.