The high-five you don’t want to get, or Naked at the office

Do you have a recurring dream/nightmare? A bed-sweater you can’t shake. Many do.

I asked eight colleagues here at the office if they had long-time, unpleasant dreams. Seven of said yes. Several of us had very similar similar dreams, although our ages, and backgrounds are very different.

A couple of us, in dreamland, show up to work either naked or embarrassingly clad.

Several of us regularly dream we are in danger but either can’t move or are forced to try to “swim” very slowly through the air. One woman is surrounded by snakes. She doesn’t like snakes.

Two coworkers said that in dreamland, they are in trouble, or danger, but can’t make any sound when they try to call for help or warn someone. One is on a Delaware beach, in a deck chair, and she and her family get swept away by a massive tidal wave.

All of the people in my dream-nightmare survey are experienced news types with extensive newspaper, magazine and online publishing, and, of course, radio and TV backgrounds.

So how about your office? What gives you, and your colleagues, night terrors?

In addition to the usual (or unusual) dreams, odds are many of the work-related nightmares feds suffer from involve bogeymen (and women) in the form of members of Congress. What causes revenue agents, customs inspectors, astronauts and biologists and other feds to have nightmares are the recurrent threats to federal pay, benefits and lately job security. They seldom if ever happen. But the threat is there and it is wearing on the nerves.

Over the past several decades, Congress has shut down federal operations and the White House and Congress imposed furloughs without pay. New federal hires will pay more for their retirement benefits than current employees. But workers hired before the changes continue to contribute the same amount. So while nothing has changed, the nightmares continue. For good reason.

One of the long-time nightmares that plagues some feds is that Congress will mess with their retirement plan. Currently, benefits for workers are based on length of service and their highest three-year average salary. Example: A 55-year-old CSRS employee earning $80,000 per year could retire at 30 years on about 56 percent of that salary. That annuity would be indexed to inflation, for life. The employee gets back all of the money he or she contributed to the retirement fund with in 18 months to three years. That’s a good plan.

But Congress is back again with a proposed “tweak” in the federal retirement system. It would base future annuities for employees on their highest five-year average salary. That doesn’t seem like much, and the high-five formula is commonplace in the private sector. But it would make a difference. The change (which would be effective in 2017) is estimated to save the government $3.1 billion (with a B) over the next 10 years. Put another way, it would reduce all future retirees benefits by $3.1 billion between 2017 and 2027.

So is the high three to high five proposal just another rerun of the same old nightmare? Maybe. Maybe not.

The high-five plan has been around since the 1970s, scaring feds but never going anywhere. But this time things could be different.

Richard G. Thissen, president of NARFE, said the old/new high-five plan may have a shot this year. Because? Thissen said that in the past the high-five-to-high-five transformation proposal has been part of a larger package of “reforms” that went nowhere. This time, he said, it’s a standalone bill. And it would affect the retirement plan of members of Congress and congressional staffers too.

Congress likes to make gestures. And sometimes sacrifices. Members took themselves out of the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (considered the best in the nation) as part of the debate/compromise on the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Many predicted that would never happen. But it did.

So, maybe the message is try to get some rest. Just don’t go to sleep!

NEARLY USELESS FACTOID

By Michael O’Connell

The bogeyman is a mythological creature that is common to many cultures. In Inuit mythology, for example, the qalupalik is a human-like creature with long hair, green skin and long fingernails. He snatches disobedient children away from their parents. The story was invented to keep children from wandering away or else the qalupalik would grab them and take them to his underwater lair.

Source: Wikipedia

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