Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Locksmith at Yosemite
Trump fired the locksmith at Yosemite. Yes, THE locksmith. The one who has ALL the keys and the institutional knowledge of how to use them. He hasn’t taken a vacation, sick day, or weekend in thirty years because then no one could have opened the doors at Yosemite. When his kids graduated from kindergarten, high school, and college, he wasn’t there. He told them, “Sorry, child, I’m THE locksmith at Yosemite.” He was really busy every single day, scurrying over that 1187-square-mile park because he was THE locksmith, opening all the offices and restrooms in the mornings and closing them up at night. Sort of like St. Nick visiting all the children all over the world.
Apparently he also took the keys with him when he left, because they’re gone. In the normal world that would be considered theft of government property and a felony. In the normal world, security would have taken that massive ring of keys off his belt as he left the meeting where he got his termination notice, even if it took a forklift. In the normal world, the supervisor of THE locksmith would also get fired for allowing a mere employee to build up such an empire. But this is government world, not normal world.
Even worse, the took the institutional knowledge with him. He knew every key and every lock by sight. He could lift that massive ring of keys and instantly pull out the right one. A mere mortal like me has to try all three keys on my key ring before I find the right one. But not THE locksmith. Sadly, the rest of the employees at Yosemite are too dumb to figure out how to call a locksmith service to replace all the locks. So they should be fired too.
And now Yosemite will be locked up forever. Tourists will only be able to gaze at the natural beauty of Yosemite from outside the locked gates. Thousands of years from now, archeologists will gaze in wonder at this perfectly preserved example of a United States National Park office, papers carefully laid out on desks, cups of petrified Starbucks coffee next to keyboards. They will even find skeletons of tourists locked in bathrooms, fingernails torn to the quick as they scratched at the locked doors, desperately seeking to escape their doom. Can you imagine the horror of dying with the smell of a chemical toilet in your nostrils? Archeologists will wonder what disaster befell Yosemite to cause it to be abandoned in such haste. But they will never figure out that it all happened because THE locksmith was so callously and carelessly fired by Donald J. Trump.
Published in General
Alrighty then.That’s one way to have a guv’mint work stoppage.
Yarob, you’ve changed!
Is any of this true?
Yosemite’s only locksmith Nate Vince was fired because he was a probationary employee. The rest is just mockery of the legacy media’s overreaction.
And I’m pretty sure you don’t need an actual locksmith just to open and close things. That’s more like a custodian.
Funny stuff!
The only thing you left out is that he was hired as a “locksmith” because there was no job opening for a custodian and some one’s wife’s nephew’s cousin needed a job. I don’t know any other way someone gets a job in Yosemite.
Can we have DOGE fire other locksmiths, like at HHS?
Well done.
Who really had the firing decision on this one? Was it the HR Department where DEI might still lurk? This sounds like a case of malicious compliance.
I’m looking forward to this ignominious inflection point in our nation’s history being immortalized in a Kevin Costner narrated documentary.
Perfectly satirized, even though I read some articles that sounded just like this but were supposed to be serious. Reminds me of the time when Obama put fences around the national monuments during a government shutdown. It was stupid then and this is stupid now.
Exactly. Where I worked, keys to classified material were checked out to the individuals storing them. Upon leaving service, be it retirement or moving to a different department, security would come and get your keys, then check it off as having been done. They’d ask for the classified material too . . .
The most secure facility I ever worked at made us empty our pockets at the property desk on the way in, watches and such as well, and check out whatever work materials we might need or have previously checked in when leaving. Legal pads and pencils, mostly. Ringed notebooks. Calculators. On the way out, we did the reverse procedure. This was before PDAs. We had transistor radios and The computers were refrigerator sized with clothes-washer sized disk peripherals and refrigerator sized nine track tape drives for archive storage and retrieval. No desktop computers allowed. No laptop computers were commercially available just yet.
Good quality mockery. Thank you.
Not for Vice-President Joe Biden. They better do better with J.D.
Yeah, my reaction to the actual story and the media reaction (I spent many years managing a law department for a large corporation) was, “If the entire enterprise depends on one person who’s been on staff less than a year (a probationary employee), you have some serious management deficiencies.”
As would be the case if the entire enterprise depended on one person who had been there for thirty years.
I was thinking about that, too, as I read Steve’s post. I used to take active measures to avoid getting our department into vulnerabilities like that. There were some academic administrators who were careless about such things and who needed convincing, but my last boss understood the importance, too, so that made it easier.
A some-time colleague who was still retained by Pfizer for several years after the company was bought out says that whenever he developed some new utility software for the lab, his boss would ask him, “And what happens if you get run over by a garbage truck?” But one time he came up with something extra good, and that time his boss asked him, “And what happens if you get run over by a Mack truck?” He had gotten upgraded from a garbage truck to a Mack truck.
I love this post. It’s a wonderful bit of satire. There wasn’t a single moment, as I was reading it, that I found myself conflicted. As it turns out though, and as I read the comments here, it seems a few folks may have been confused.
This calls for a locksmith.
Here’s how a normal person should react to this:
One locksmith for a National Park? AYFKM?
No backup? No cross training?
And the drive-by media keeps writing the same narrative. Person gets fired, citizens inconvenienced, “people will die!” Our community can’t handle this!
I just saw a version of this play out on my mountain town’s Facebook group page. Just for context, my town is – as the crow flies – 50 miles south of Lake Tahoe and 50 miles north of Yosemite. We have a notable state park nearby and are within a National Forest. An SFGate article was shared about the DOGE impact to mountain communities. Commenters on Facebook started catastrophizing about access to our mountain lakes, who will pick up the trash, etc. It wasn’t surprising that the natives were not as concerned as the Bay Area transplants. Many mentioned that the current level of service is inadequate (dirty toilets, trash).
Why are our mountain communities so dependent on a handful of USFS jobs? Why can’t the park service demand a level of service and contract it out to someone who can do it reliably and we don’t have to rely on the Matrix’s keymaker or Peter Lupus’ Nordberg in Police Squad.
I’ve seen this before. There’s always someone with hoarded institutional or technical knowledge. They need to be kept around and wear the mantle of brave firefighter who extinguishes the fires they set. Intentionally or via long term incompetence.
DOGE brings chaos, yes. But boy, does it bring clarity.
On the parallel situation of USAID, after the expected round of “people in Africa will suffer and DIE” I began to see some second- and third-hand reports (so I do not have reliable sources to cite) that at least some entrepreneurial Africans are happy that maybe some home-grown African solutions to African problems can grow without the market distortions of foreign government subsidized outside do-gooders constantly parachuting in.
Or without the perversions and depravity that cling to the West like swamp leeches.