How Many Porn-Watching Govt. Workers Constitutes A “Widespread Problem”?

by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn For Women

Let’s be perfectly clear: When people are at work, ideally they should spend their time working, in lieu doing anything else. But let’s also not kid ourselves; no person spends literally every single minute of her work day chipping away at her to-do list.

I can already almost feel the staunch objections coming back at me through my laptop screen.

Read on…

I work every minute of the work day, someone is thinking, unless of course you count going to the bathroom, getting a drink of water, stopping for just a second to say good morning to a coworker and OK, maybe checking out the occasional news articles online while sitting at my desk….

You get my point.

Can anyone honestly say they’ve never done any of the things listed above while on the clock? (Before you answer, please note the presence of the word “honestly” in the question.)

Granted, there’s a big difference between occasionally updating your Facebook status to complain about the lack of decent restaurants near your office and, say, spending six hours a day watching porn on the American public’s dime.

But is the real reason we’re focused on the latter the waste of taxpayer dollars? Or could it be media outlets focus on federal workers watching porn because doing so makes for a click-friendly headline?

Which Has Taken Up More Time: Porn Watching, Or Investigations Into It?

While I’m never going to argue watching porn is a good use of a government worker’s time, I think it’s worth asking how widespread this problem is, given how much disapproving ink has been spilled on the subject.

Take the news report linked above, for example, which is written with a tone which suggests a massive employee time-suck for the government agencies involved. Do the numbers in the article justify this issue being a greater concern than other means by which functionaries might dawdle on the clock?

“Almost 100 federal government employees have admitted to or been caught viewing copious amounts of pornography while on the job in the past five years,” the article states.

Almost 100 people might sound like a lot at first glance, but consider the size of the agencies involved and the five-year period over which these admissions/discoveries took place and the number starts to sound a lot less significant.

NASA, one of the agencies examined in the FOIA request which informs the NBC report, employs over 18,000 people. The Environmental Protection Agency employs another 15,000 or so, while the Pentagon has over 23,000 workers. Another agency covered by the FOIA request, the U.S. Postal Service, has over 620,000 employees all by itself.

Combined, we’re already up to 676,000 government employees – and the FOIA request relied upon in the report covers eight other agencies I haven’t even mentioned here.

Are you starting to feel less concerned about the number of federal employees watching porn on the clock?

Come now; let’s not be too hasty! Surely, it will all seem far worse once we take the next mathematical step, because there’s no way so many people have written articles about this major problem without noticing it’s not really a major problem, right?

No, It Does Not Seem Worse Once We Take The Next Mathematical Step

For the sake of argument (or, more accurately, because I’m too lazy to do eight more searches to determine the size of the other agencies involved), let’s say the “almost 100” workers covered in the NBC report all came from the EPA, NASA and Pentagon. This means over a period of five years, somewhat less than 100 out of 676,000 people watched enough porn to land on the radar of their employer.

To be charitable to those inclined to see this as a major problem in modern American government, let’s set the “almost 100” number to 99.

If 99 out of 676,000 people watched porn on the clock, this amounts to a percentage so low, your calculator will express it by way of a negative exponent, rather than list all the right-of-the-decimal zeroes necessary to display the sum in the more familiar way.

So, knowing considerably less than 1.46e-4 government employees are watching a problematic amount of porn at work, are you unbelievably outraged and frightfully concerned, or has all this just made you remember how much you hate math?

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