The Credit Crunch, a Gift for Some? - Mariana

The Credit Crunch, a Gift for Some?

Granted: when you’re government-employed you can’t even dream of ever getting a fighting chance to do the self-respecting thing and under-declare your income like everyone else - because, before you even bring the dough home, Big Brother’s already been in there and had his cut - but, let’s face it, otherwise, government employees have it pretty good.

The blissfulness of their situation particularly struck me when I started to realize that people are really taking the credit crunch seriously - small people, big people, very big people even. Everyone and his auntie seems troubled.  The talk is on how jobs could be lost: rich men could lose millions, poor Joe next door could lose the few Euros he got out of his miserable job of carrying crates of tonn taz-zejt at Lidl and many Toms, Dicks, Harrys and Henriettas could be having to do without that little extra from over-time. Poverty, in its various guises, is looming round the corner and everyone is concerned.

Everyone, that is, but government employees of course!  Now don’t get me wrong: most did look up from the crossword puzzle in The Times (the most demanding part out of most government employees’ workday), and most did stop in the doorway on their way to a qabża somewhere and pressed the pause button on one of their unofficial coffee breaks, manicure breaks, email breaks - or whatever break they happened to be "working" on when the topic came up in the office.  They all joined in discussing the situation.  But that was in no more alarmed a tone than they use to discuss most other topics. They’d gone into the same depth, and with the same passion and level of concern, as the time they’d discussed Lou Bondi’s dress sense (or lack thereof), or when they'd discussed who it had really been who’d sung Run Rabbit Run back in ’81. In fact most did not even close their Youtube window for this one.

For them this is really no biggie.  The credit crunch is not likely to hurt them.  They know they will hardly be getting the axe. Government employees work for the one employer who would never admit a serious loss - much less bankruptcy - and for most, the possibility of their redundancy is simply never on the books.  Basically it’s this simple in these cases: you get the job at 18, you get to keep it till you were 61, whatever happens in the big world out there, or whatever you do in the interim.  

After all, half the local government employees know for a fact that their employer has been pretty nigh starkers for some twenty years now, but somehow the employees have always managed to get their pay slip come end of the month, haven't they?  They know they will always be hanging on to their miserable chair, in their miserable little office,  till kingdom come, however much the credit situation is crunched.  OK, they may not exactly be getting a pay rise, but let’s face it when did they last get a decent one anyway?  I mean Mintoff’s been out of office for twenty years plus,  which must make it - heck I’m not that good at Math - but my point is this: life has taught them that promises of a pay rise should never get them wetting their pants in anticipation anyway.  

So, we've concluded that no pay rise is no big deal for government employees. But now everyone else - the big business people who imported expensive clothes in the big stores and the big business people who imported the great electronic gadgets - was experiencing the credit crunch, and most said this meant prices would be crashing, but that the pay of the government employee would remain what it had been.  Therefore, though most government employees have no great brains for all things money, they know that this means that their spending power is about to soar, and that the shittier things would grow for everyone else out there, the better off they would be.

Of course you may tell me I have it wrong because their investments would suffer like everybody else’s.  But the truth is that they won’t. I’ll make it clear. When I say ‘government employees’ here I do not mean those who run their private business on their sick days. I actually mean those passive asses who are truly and exclusively government-employed.  And really, what exactly are you expecting the latter version of government employee to have invested? The couple of Bic pens they'd nicked from the office?

So it’s fact: the credit crunch is a welcome break for your civil servant.  Which is why we should now expect to see many more of them on many more qabża s’hemms and qabża s’hawns from their place of (non) work, buying new mobile phones, installing satellite dishes and putting down deposits on new cars, even.   

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not entirely stupid and I do know and am only too ready to acknowledge, of course, that there will be some government employees who will be badly hit by the credit crunch. And here it is: unfortunately, for the sad, dying breed of frustrated wet blankets who stupidly insist on finding nothing better to do with their working hours than work, life is about to get worse.  The office is about to become an all-in-all emptier place, and these employees' in-trays will see the work that was due in the in-trays of those on their qabżiet magically landing in theirs at a more alarming rate than ever before. But then, deciding to be the office dumpster for all things work-oriented had been a career move they had made when they had interpreted the term ‘civil servant’ far too literally, hadn't it? So basically they'd asked for it.

It is a given, therefore, that the credit crunch is an unmitigated gift from God to all government employees who deserve it, on a scale which is inversely proportional to the amount of work which any given employee gets done. It’s possibly even His way for making up for their tax situation.... or their having no better way to screw the State than the occasional qabża or nicked Bic pen.