A sense of humor is the most missed thing in Washington.
Get it, folks? This is funny!
Hell, if you’re so worked up about the cost have them bill me! Can’t be more than a couple of grand and I bet I can get a bulk discount from MicroCenter, too!
Listen, when I first heard about this I laughed. I thought it was a somewhat clever and harmless prank- No big deal.
That all changed when I read later reports that instead of removing the W’s and leaving them somewhere obvious, where they can be put back in place by the new people, the old administration either took off with the keys or hide them where noone will ever find them.
It leaves the old computer system useless and forces the new people to either buy new keyboards or whole new computer systems. And it’s not just one computer, it’s the whole White House computer system. Were talking some bucks here.
Jesus, can’t the outgoing people just leave it at funny? They have to move onward and upward to assholishness no matter what the situation?
You tell me to get a sense of humor? Why don’t you get a clue.
There is nothing funny about government waste of taxpayer money. No matter what that waste might be, or who may be doing it. Period.
It’s a tradition to pull something of a prank on the new guy! Besides that, the report on ABC this morning pointed out that almost all of the missing Ws were found hidden on ledges and not that difficult to find.
Sheesh! No harm, no foul.
later, Tom.
What the hell, Cnote? Lighten up. This is, at most, $1,000 dollars worth of vandalism if all the keyboards have to be replaced. I’ll send that check to GWB myself if it will shut up the whining pansies in this country.
… and how is this any more of a waste of tax payer’s money than, say, the White Water investigation? Christ! If people in Washington spent more time pulling childish pranks we might not be faced with all the time and money wasting catastrophes precipitated by the mad struggle for power among old, humorless jerks.
Had a big disagreement with Mr2U about this this morning. I was then accused of being “so republican, I’m surprised you don’t have tusks”. I countered with his being so “juvenile, I’m surprised you aren’t wearing Huggies”.
He thought this was an absolute hoot. I, on the other hand, who have had to spend time at MY job doing useless, idiotic tasks (that define mundane and pointless, oh, and STUPID) due to the actions of other nonthinking moronic dolts with no thought for anyone other than themselves that took me away from something very important that needed to be done found it nothing more than indicative of the level of maturity of the outgoing staff.
Too bad they can’t hold the people who did this accountable.
Meanwhile, our new administration is busy playing “let’s find the W key - who’s got the W key” when they should be doing something a bit, oh, say, more imfuckingportant.
Morons.
Sense of humor? Show me something funny - not STUPID and a waste of my money.
As usual there’s more to the story. The missing “W’s” are merely one symptom of the lack of respect the outgoing officeholders displayed. Here’s some excerpts from a New York Times story. I’d provide a link, but you need to register a user account to access the article.
There have also been allegations (which I read on an admittedly partisan website) of “unflattering graffiti scrawled on the walls” of Whitehouse offices. And several of the permanent staffers have said that their desk drawers have been dumped out.
Buncha partisan pussies!
And I suppose the White House was a spotless, fully stocked office space when GHW Bush left in 92…
The end of my sophomore year in college, a bunch of fraternity members who weren’t going to be living in the house the next year took it upon themselves to “remodel” the house one night. They smashed every light in the hallways, dumped broken shelves outside, and ran up and down with a fire extinguisher until the walls, floors and ceilings were all covered in a nice white coat and the halls filled in a haze that seeped through doorways and into rooms.
I’m going to weigh that against the missing “W” and laugh at the joke Clinton’s staff pulled.
Even assuming they have to replace all those keyboards (and c’mon, that’s not going to be the case even if they never found the missing keys), that’s a grand total of $.000003 I’d have to shell out. Who’s got a pen? I’m getting my checkbook.
Omniscient says:
If I recall correctly from George Stephanopolous’ book, the departing Bush Administration had removed EVERY hard drive in EVERY computer in the building.
Which meant that the first days were spent installing Windows on a hundred machines. That’s just EVIL!
I agree that removing and hiding would be funny (and temporary), but breaking off crosses a certain line and becomes vandalism.
But…I note that both here and in the press, the assumption is that multiple people had a hand in this prank. The prank could have been perpetrated by anyone with the proper clearance and could have been just one single person with access to those computers.
Do we have to be so “all or nothing” about it? All the democrats look bad because one or a few took a prank too far. All republicans can’t take a joke. There’s NOTHING funny about this, etc.
Just curious…
Personally, I think the media’s reaction and use of phrases like “salvage any of the keyboards,” is funnier than the prank. They make it sound like the keyboards were blown up or something.
I think it would have been far more fun to swap a couple of letters around, like the ‘m’ for the ‘n’.
Would have driven them crazy.
hehehe…
that was a brilliant move >=)
Do you have a web link for this cite? …
beyond that, if their IT department spends time install Windows on every machine, they should be fired. There are many much faster ways to deploy a standardized operating system.
Sorry, no web link.
I got the book out of the library a few months ago.
My memory is that when they got to the White House, all of the machines lacked hard drives.
I don’t remember what the Bush folks claimed the reason was, probably “security”. George S. suspected that it may have been done with intent to annoy.
They spent the first day scrambling around, trying to put out a press release because one of Clinton’s cabinet appointments was in trouble. (This, of course, in the days before ubiquitous laptops and Plug-N-Play).
The comment about installing Windows was my own editorial, to emphasize that getting 100 or so machines up and running with new hard drives (especially in '92) seems much more difficult than replacing a few hundred keyboards.
Have never heard the hard drive story before but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true.
But, considering how lax the Clinton White House was in getting proper security clearances for everybody, it may have been a good thing.
Just walked over to the campus bookstore to verify. It is pretty close to what I remembered above.
“The hard drives had been removed from every terminal in the building. Officially, it was part of an investigation into whether White House officials had illegally pried into Clinton’s passport records. We suspected sabotage.”
This is on the same day that Zoe Baird is crashing and burning in Nannygate.
How much money/time is really wasted replacing a few hundred keyboards?
How much money/time was wasted on the inaugration celebration crap?
I personally find the amusement of the missing Ws FAR more useful than the inaugration celebrations (though in all fairness, I don’t live in the States and I didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention to them).
Just my two cents (which are only worth one US cent).
From this week’s CityPaper: (http://www.citypaper.com/current/feature.html)
So I’m satisfied that the expense of the parade, which included “16 entry-points, 10 ‘public’ and six for ticket-holders,” did not come directly from tax-payers. However, the fact that “some 7,000 police officers from the District and surrounding jurisdictions,” who were deputized that morning, were present, not to mention the mobilized DC National Guard, makes me think that a few missing "w"s are not a huge deal when compared to the money taken from my paycheck to pay for all that unneccessary militia.
But that’s just me. I’m a partisan for life.
(If you get a chance, look around that site for the cover photo. Nerdy-looking white guy holding a sign that says, “We’re All Dead,” and the caption below says “Hail to the Thief.” I’m so glad there’s a newspaper that I can agree with.)
I can’t imagine even Clinton sanctioning all (it goes beyond keyboards, non-clickers). If I were a Democrat, I’d be embarrassed, too.