Today was a very bad day at work. It was sufficiently bad that I was thinking about looking to go back to being a goatherd. Yes, I have worked as a rather literate goatherd.

I requested that somebody be put on a watchlist today. This is no small thing for me to do. Since employees have been shot at and killed who aren't in the Criminal Investigation Division, there are two watchlists. Both require risk assessments be undertaken on the individual and result in five year designations that can be renewed. One is "Potentially Dangerous Taxpayer" and the other is "Caution Upon Contact". I requested someone get put on the "Caution Upon Contact" list for intimidation and extreme histrionics towards an employee.

Yes, 20 minutes straight of listening someone behind the wheel of a car talking to you on their cell phone while the berate you and talk about how their life is ruined because of the failure of a prior employee to deliver results does legitimately scare the tar out of our staff. Frankly we get concerned when people drive as we're afraid of road rage and possible accidents/vehicular homicides. Acting out, lashing out, and behaving poorly while you're being recorded is frankly a quite stupid thing to do.

Things like that are cumulative where lashing out repeatedly can lead to possibly horrific consequences. The case of Andrew Joseph Stack proved that out after he commited suicide by crash an airplane into one of the buildings at the Austin Service Center in 2010 after a period of increasingly angry interactions with my employer. My usual rule of thumb is that if the caller contact last more than half an hour and it ends with me in tears after metaphorically being used as a verbal punching bag then it is time to start kicking things up the reporting chain for review.

The zeitgeist, the spirit of the moment, is rather deranged right now. I voluntarily am taking furlough as of August 31st and am voluntarily entering non-pay status early. It is expected that everybody else will be out at the end of Fiscal Year 2017 on September 29th. Apparently I started a trend as normally few jump early but when people heard I was jumping early but nobody knew why...the grapevine figured something must be up if Mr. Stay Until He's Forced Out was running away instead this year.