Friday, September 09, 2005

Gervaisian Evasion

FEMA chief relieved of Katrina duties

I know there's nothing funny about a hurricane, but...am I the only one who recognizes this conversation from TV?
Brown's biography on the FEMA Web site says he had once served as an "assistant city manager with emergency services oversight," and a White House news release in 2001 said Brown had worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., in the 1970s "overseeing the emergency-services division."

However, a city spokeswoman told the magazine Brown had actually worked as "an assistant to the city manager."

"The assistant is more like an intern," Claudia Deakins told the magazine. "Department heads did not report to him." Time posted the article on its Web site late on Thursday.
Cue David Brent and Gareth on The Office, bickering about whether Gareth is "assistant " or "assistant to the" regional manager over and over.

By the way, it's encouraging to me that an internship for a small Oklahoma city with a tiny bit of emergency management somewhere in the job description (or even the trumped-up job Brown claimed to have done) qualifies one to be the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I'm sure I can find one or two bullets in my resume that qualify me to be something really cool, like commissioner of baseball (I operated the music and the scoreboard for a single-A minor league team one summer), or president of Harvard (I was a member of a college curriculum committee for three years), or curator of the Louvre (I wrote museum exhibits, worked in museum PR, and even speak un petit morceau de francais). If none of those work out, I suppose I could be the director of FEMA--my basement did flood once in college.

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