exvigilare

Sure it would drive me nuts, but not any more so than any other job I’ve ever had. Think I could get a job with the State? Oh wait, there’s a hiring freeze.

Oh wait, maybe not.

Gov. Bill Ritter promised a hiring freeze last year to help bridge the budget gap, but a CALL7 investigation found that as many as 2,300 employees were hired during the “freeze.”

“We have taken a number of steps to shore up our fiscal house: imposing a hiring freeze, stopping several new construction projects and halting non-essential spending requests,” Ritter said in his January 2009 State of the State speech. But a CALL7 investigation found that the number of state employees increased during Ritter’s hiring freeze, and Ritter’s top staff, who were tasked with managing the freeze, did not know how many people were hired.

“So, during the hiring freeze, the number of employees actually went up?” asked CALL7 Investigator John Ferrugia.“Yes,” said Jim Carpenter, Ritter’s chief of staff.

That must be some kind of new-fangled math that they’re teaching kids these days. In my day, X minus Y equaled a number less than X. Certainly not higher. X plus zero still only equals X, not X+2300. If there’s hiring freeze, then no one gets hired. See how that works? Sure there are exceptions, as there no doubt must have been during the Oct. 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009 timeframe.

…during the hiring freeze, Carpenter required any departments that needed to hire staff receive a waiver from him and budget officials.

CALL7 investigators reviewed all the waivers for the freeze period, finding Carpenter approved fewer than 500 waivers. (emphasis mine)

Looks like I’ve just been looking for jobs in all the wrong places. With this kind of oversight, maybe I can get fat raise from this guy without ever taking a job in the first place.