You know I’m talking about DOGE. “Slash and burn.” “Throw the baby out with the bath water.” “Blow things up.” Pick one or make up your own.

I can’t write coherently about any of this stuff at the moment. I am sorta flabbergasted at the flood of firings spewing out of president Trump’s Musk’s big ugly mug (sorry, I’m pretty pissed off).

To pick one issue. I am a systems analyst and when I heard about the “zombie army” of 150-year-olds collecting social security payments, I thought, “there is 000000.01% truth to that statement.” Later on when some diligent journalists started to dig into this, it became clear that Musk was not looking at all the available data. Well, maybe it wasn’t available to Musk, not that I think it should be. I can’t ‘splain what I read but later on I found an article that explained a bit more about how the social security association (SSA) handles dead people’s records. And yes, there are people who defraud the system, like trying to hide their grandma’s death so as to collect a couple more of her checks. It’s 1% or less that do this (I believe that) and most of the would-be defrauders get caught quickly. The issue with the 150-year old folks has to do with ancient records and an old database (not on the internet) and the fact that not too many folks can sort that stuff out. I’m one of those who can but they aren’t asking me and I’m not looking for a job. Although maybe I should be…

I guess Musk has expertise at something but I’m not sure what it is. Maybe inheriting a lot of money?

And BTW, if a relative dies and you are dealing with a *reputable* funeral home, it almost *always* contacts the SSA for you. I’m not sure it’s a requirement but there’s a form they can fill out along with all of whatever paperwork they do when people die. I did *not* have to contact SSA when mom died. The funeral home my family had used for several generations did it for me. When I was 17, my parents were driving home from downtown and saw one of their cars (crashed) in the funeral home parking lot but that would be a whole ‘nother story and I was not injured. And I am NOT collecting my mom’s social security money but I am goddamn collecting my own😵‍💫.

The photo is from a Tahquamenon Falls lantern hike a few weeks ago. National Forest Service employees plan these events plus many other important duties. These events are very popular. I hope they don’t get Musked out of their jobs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 19th, 2025 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.