Fatal Attraction: Working for Uncle Sam!

History has shown, working in a federal office can sometimes be dangerous, says Senior Correspondent Mike Causey.

Comedian Ellen DeGeneres does a routine about how often people exaggerate. In one example, she cites someone who says “paper-cuts are the worst,” most painful thing one can endure. To which she says, “Really?”

By the same token, some jobs are a lot more dangerous than others.

When it comes to hazardous occupations almost any list will include loggers, commercial fishermen and firefighters at the top. Truck drivers and big city cabbies are also on the not-real-safe category too.

While most people don’t think of federal employment as heavy-lifting or particularly dangerous being a federal or postal worker, anyplace in any job, can be on the front-line these days. And it didn’t just start with 9-11. Employees in Social Security offices, and anyone with the Internal Revenue Service know all about irate, sometimes dangerous, customers and situations. A few years back, a “disgruntled” taxpayer crashed a small airplane into an IRS office, in a leased building, in Austin. One worker, whose job ironically was to help taxpayers, was killed.

Agriculture Department and OSHA employees face danger on the job. All other feds, regardless of the location or job title, daily face the possibility of danger at work. A new Bureau of Labor Statistics report indicated that last year feds were much more likely to die on the job than their nonfederal counterparts.

In 1993, two CIA employees were killed and three wounded by a terrorist who shot them as they sat in their cars, at a street light, outside of their Langley, Virginia headquarters. Government authorities tracked down the shooter, who was later executed.

The 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building speaks for itself. The truck bomb killed 168 and wounded 680 people. And ruined, forever, the lives of thousands of people. Most of the victims, men, women and kids in a day care, were feds.

More recently (September 2013) at the Washington Navy Yard a contractor killed 11 and wounded three others before he was shot dead by police. For the military, it was second only to the November 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, Texas.

There have been incidents in D.C. and around the country, and now the Department of Homeland Security has ordered increased protection for 1.4 million workers and visitors to 9,500 federal buildings. The shootings in the Canadian parliament in in Ottawa plus threats and actions from Islamic State militants and other terror groups are part of the reason for the new security crackdown.

DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said the Federal Protective Service will beef up security and teams will be rotated as needed.

Lots of feds must be asking how security will be improved. And with what. What’s next?

So, how are things where you work. Is there something they could be doing to make you, and your customers, safer. Are things as good as can be expected or are you sometimes, and increasingly, nervous in the (civil) service?

Let us know at: mcausey@federalnewsradio.com.


NEARLY USELESS FACTOID:

By Michael O’Connell

The world’s largest rabbit is Ralph, a 4-year-old Continental Giant from Great Britain who weighs just under 55 pounds.

Source: Huffington Post


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