Dispatches from California Government

It's never nice to make light of people's deaths, but some stories just write themselves:

Apparently when you work for California governments, you can be dead for over 24 hours before anyone even notices:

"An L.A. County employee apparently died while working in her cubicle on Friday, but no one noticed for quite some time.

51-year-old Rebecca Wells was found by a security guard on Saturday afternoon.

...

The last time a co-worker saw her alive was Friday morning around 9:00 a.m., according to Downy police detectives."

It places a fairly high upper bound on the importance of the work you're doing when you can be dead for 24 hours in your workplace and nobody even notices.

The article mentions that she was a 'longtime compliance auditor', whatever that is. I'm sure if we happened to fire some of them from LA county, the unions would scream bloody murder about how crucial the compliance auditing was to the functioning of LA.

The comments to the article are gold:

Will she get overtime pay for being at her desk for 24 hrs straight without a break?

Ironically she had the highest productivity of any employee that day.

Will this be on her next performance review? Dying on the job will get you a 1 or 2 at most. This could affect her raise. Has Obama been informed? Where is the justice?

Government workers, I can hear it now, "We just thought she was taking a regular nap."

How much you want to bet she gets promoted?

Given that we can't seem to eliminate or even reduce these kind of positions in California, I guess macabre humour is the best we can hope for.