More from the Tabletop Diary

This morning's tabletop diary entry:
June 7th, 2009 Sun
Yesterday I received a manila envelope-sized notification from the Washington State Department of Certification Services, serving me with a notice of polite businesslike intent to revoke my water worker's certificate if I do not complete my obligation to them to acquire 3.0 continuing education units (CTUs) by December of this year. My certificate #4199 will be invalidated and cast into the outer darkness by February of next year and my position as an unpaid government minion will be terminated and purged from the holy memory banks of the Washington State Department of Health data base. Amen. Forever and ever.
This governmental entity/appendage, an artifact from the draconian Nixon administration, was Federally Mandated in the early 70s as a reaction to the irritating re-occurrence of the Ohio River's tendency to catch fire and burn for days at a time. More importantly, Mr. Nixon was being caught up in an increasingly irritating incident known as Watergate and needed a diversion for the public more effective than simply announcing that he was not a crook. He therefore created the Safe Drinking Water Act and dumped the responsibility for its implementation into the lap of one John Ehrlichman, a son of the Northwest whom he did not trust, to keep him (Ehrlichman) out of his (Nixon's) hair.
Ehrlichmann took these federal riches back to his home state of Washington as a potentially huge feather in his political cap. He ended up going down as a Watergate conspirator anyway, a victim of political necessity, and 37 years later I'm soon to be out of compliance with the Feds if I don't get on the stick. Politics eventually victimizes everyone. A recent cartoon of mine bemoans this sad fact of life.
(P.S. I fed the dog.)