And telecommuting’s purpose, presumably, is to minimize the need to commute daily to one’s office to work.  A noble idea.  Within certain guidelines, employees have the flexibility to work from home, the road, the coffee shop … pretty much anywhere outside of a central work environment.  Reduces traffic, cuts down on energy usage, lowers real estate costs, improves morale.  A little something for everyone, right?

Well, yes … unless of course you’re the Federal Government.  Who, true to form, found a way  to screw the pooch.  Because the introduction of telecommuting – at least in the DC area – included the opening of fourteen “Telework Centers” for employees to, uhhh, travel to.  Gazing at the photo below of one of these centers, you might think this looks somewhat familiar.  That could be because these Telework Centers came equipped with work stations, desks, chairs, computers, phones, copiers and bad coffee.  Hmmm, I think I may know another name for a Telework Center – AN OFFICE!!!

That’s right.  To reduce the need to travel to the office, someone at some point decided to open fourteen new offices – errr, Telework Centers – for employees to travel to.  Eventually, even our Government higher-ups came to realize the folly of all this and slashed the funding for these little Orwellian haunts earlier this year.  But not before having poured several million dollars annually into this bureaucratic exercise in defeating the purpose.

Yep, looks like yet another Government program that was managed about as well as Air America Radio.  Still, we should probably be grateful that ultimately, some public officials managed to look from office to telework center, and from telework center to office, and from office to telework center again; and found it was impossible to say which was which.