I'm Hot. Very, Very Hot. And Tired. Very, Very Tired.

It is 9,000 degrees C today here at the VA. My office has some air conditioning, but everytime I go out into the hallways, I quickly begin to sweat. Then I was invited out to lunch by Whirling Dervish, with the hope of meeting an old friend who was in town (he didn't show), and got absolutely drenched. So now I've decided to skip a meeting and cool off before I have to trudge on over to the other side of campus (and outside again, as that office building is not attached to this one) for the afternoon fun and games. I don't regret skipping that meeting. In fact, if I had my way, I'd just go home now.

And it's not just because I'm hot and tired that I'm over it and want to go home.

At Whirling Dervish's urging, I called the VA chaplain headquarters to confirm that they have received my application packet and were processing it. The clerk who answered asked, "Are you a veteran?"

"No," I answered, thinking, and if you had opened my application to page one, you would have seen that!

"Well," she replied with an oh, so snooty voice. "You can't apply, because we're not accepting applications now, and won't be for some time."

Okay, just to catch you up to speed (in case I haven't told you this story about a million times by now), several chaplains, including me and Whirling Dervish, were supposedly banned from applying for the upcoming VA positions because we had missed an arbitrary and virtually nonexpressed deadline. After much fighting and name calling by my boss, we were given permission to apply. And now they're telling me that I can't? And the woman I spoke to, the same woman who was involved in the scraps with my boss, claims to have no knowledge of the outcome of that battle!

And to think, I used to wonder why the system is so incompetent. I now have the reason. They are cloning bureaucrats and keeping them as clerks! For one, it doesn't matter if there are any side effects from cloning. Brain didn't develop? No organizational skills? No problem! And two, if nothing ever gets done, nothing ever has to get done!