If you've ever had the chance to visit your local DMV or post office, you've probably wondered if all government employees are insane, or if you just showed up on the wrong day. Having spent time working at city-, county-, and state-level government offices, I can emphatically tell you that all government employees are not sadistic, delusional, or outright sociopathic. Only most of them. But the conundrum exists when you try to figure out why this is. Is our government so poorly run that it actually makes its employees go insane? Or are government jobs so bad that only crazy people would apply for them?

My feelings lean towards the latter. This seems especially true when you consider that the majority of people I met needed dual income, either from a spouse or from working two full-time jobs. I am a rare exception in that my measly government salary is all I need to maintain my standard of living. Then again, I'm young enough that my standard of living is quite low, to the point where I argue having a family of cockroaches living in your house is a good thing. (In addition to always giving you a rapt audience, having over a hundred dependents earns you a nice refund during tax time.)

The balance to these meager salaries is job security. As Benjamin Franklin so famously said, nothing is certain but death and taxes. Consider also Laurence J. Peter's quote, "Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status." Case in point, I can recall one department which still used typewriters for all their word processing, since their department head believed computers were, and I quote, "tools of sin." (As a side note, this is also the same person who believed I was a Satanist for fixing these demonic instruments. So strongly that they apparently devoted their life to leaving pro-Christian pamphlets on my desk, in my car, and even in my lunch once. Very few things are more surprising than biting into a turkey sandwich and getting a mouthful of paper.)

So when you combine a constant source of income with change coming at a glacial pace, you get very, very good job security. I would go so far as to say getting fired from a government job is an achievement. Naturally, this leads to the colorful characters you can find working at your local city offices.

One example that comes to mind is the man who took me aside one day, and told me in the strictest confidence that he had an identical twin nobody else knew about. He and his twin would take turns working four-hour shifts, switching off at lunch time. I never thought to ask what the twin was doing the other four hours of the day. My guess is hiding in the car, since he drove the same one to and from the office, and I never saw more than one person enter or leave it. But even I was smart enough to know you don't question the logic of a man who believes his multiple personalities are identical twins.

Staying on the topic of disorders, there was one man who had the strongest case of narcolepsy I've ever seen in a non-narcoleptic. Remember the story of Sleeping Beauty? Imagine she was actually a middle-aged man who worked in a government office. Now imagine that it wasn't pricking her finger on a spindle that put her out, it was the act of walking into a cubicle. And rather than sleeping for a hundred years, she woke up at 5:00 every day like clockwork. Also imagine that she wasn't too picky about her sleeping place, and could often be found hunched over her desk, laying on a meeting room table, or even spreading out in the middle of the hallway for her beauty sleep. Finally, suppose that she insisted her problem was a psychological disorder, but never produced any reliable evidence of this.

There was also the woman who insisted her husband worked for the CIA, and threatened to give him my name whenever I told her she would have to wait to get her computer fixed. Ignoring the obvious problem of the FBI having jurisdiction over American citizens, I still couldn't quite figure out why the CIA would care about whether or not her e-mail signature was showing up properly. Although it was fun to imagine a crack team of informants bugging my apartment, tracking my every movement, and having undercover agents pose as newly employed co-workers to try and figure out the nefarious conspiracy that was stopping me from letting this poor woman send out her full name, phone number, address, and job title with every e-mail.

Of course, in the interest of fairness, it's only fitting I bring up my own shortcomings in these jobs. Hanging up on the mayor was among my more humiliating failures, but the highest honor goes to the time I was responsible for an elected official accidentally calling a phone sex line.

To be fair, this was caused more by unfortunate circumstances than malevolent intent. I was trying to fix a phone that had been having problems making outgoing calls. Since I was working after hours, and have a very juvenile sense of humor, I configured it to automatically dial a certain sex line when the receiver was picked up. My phone line was set to block 1-900 numbers, so if I heard nothing, the phone was still broken. If I heard a message saying this call could not be completed as dialed, it was dialing correctly and the phone was fixed.

At this point, you've probably figured out the rest of the story. After I got the phone working to my satisfaction, I returned it to the elected official's office, but had neglected to remove the automatic dialing feature. Even worse, since this was such a high-ranking government official, the office phone line was not under any restrictions. Thus, when this noble civil servant walked in the next day and lifted the phone receiver expecting to listen to their messages, they were greeted by a voice explaining that hot, horny sluts desperately needed some big, thick cock.

Fortunately for me, I was not directly blamed for this outcome. The elected official simply let us know that the phone was still not working properly, and I was able to discreetly fix my mistake.

There are plenty of other incidents I could recount, but I think this is long enough already. My point is, smile the next time you talk to a government employee, or who knows what you'll find in your lunch one day. My guess is it won't be paper.

So I have a question to ask, and I can't think of a better way to do it than to pose it to millions of strangers, most of whom will never even notice it. What's the deal with the ads around here?

I want to be clear about this - I'm not denouncing the act of placing ads on a site. I can completely understand the need to generate some kind of money to keep things running. All I'm saying is advertisers might want to consider their demographics a little bit better.

For example, as I write this, I'm currently staring at an ad that promises to help me find Mr. Right. I guess it's possible OkCupid knows something about me that I don't, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that my sexual orientation isn't going to change any time soon. Although according to the hundreds of ads that show up in my inbox every day, my race, gender, and religion all seem to change throughout the week, so they might have a point there.

I also get served up with offers to help me find a sugar daddy, which surprised me just a little bit. I admit my bank account is not particularly healthy right now, and there are advantages to having someone take care of your every need, but I still have a ways to go before the thought of a relationship with a doughy middle-aged man is appealing. And I really don't think I'm what most guys have in mind when they decide to start an affair. Just saying.

Here's a few more snippets that someone decided I was in the prime market for:

"Find lonely bored housewives tonight!" - This was a clever change from the company's previous slogan, "Get the shit beat out of you by angry husbands tonight!"

"How to approach women" - Walking towards them seems to work pretty well. I won't even charge you for that advice.

"Free online dating!" - I think more companies need to take this approach, advertising your service with someone that does the exact same thing. Just imagine walking into a grocery store and seeing a huge hanging sign that says "Buy ALL your food in ONE location! Go across the street for more info!"

"Get her phone number within 3 minutes..." - It's called a phone book.

I joke about all these, but someone is paying good money to have me look at those messages. That means someone thinks I want to go online to meet a lonely, bored housewife, then approach her and get her number within three minutes. And then I'm going to have an affair with a married man who will act as my sugar daddy, eventually turning into Mr. Right. Which, now that I think about it, sounds like the plot for a romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant, and Keanu Reeves. Call me and we'll discuss the royalties.