Banks Collapse, Kleenex and Jergens See Record Profits

Most people wouldn't say they "enjoy" their jobs. That is to say, most people wouldn't continue filing TPS reports, fielding customer-complaint calls, inseminating mares, or whatever if there were no compensation involved. Add to that reality the fact that most people plug away at their jobs for at least forty hours every week, and it's no wonder folks occasionally find themselves seeking out cubicle-based diversions. A quick mission sweeping mines, pithy social-networking updates, riveting and hilarious cultural observations -- you get the picture.

But what kind of job must one have that enables him to -- ahem -- jerk around for eight hours a day? Why, a government job, of course!

A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. [emphasis added]

Eight hours a day?! I know pornographers who don't see eight hours of porn in a day. Fortunately for the hoarding horndog, there were plenty of other locked office doors in the building:

The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by the Associated Press.

The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.

One amorous accountant attempted (and failed) to access restricted sites more than 16,000 times in a single month, then -- displaying that never-say-die government moxie that won the War on Drugs in the '80s -- the accountant settled for changing his Google Images search settings and "managed to amass a collection of 'very graphic' material on his hard drive" that way instead.

The report surfaced on Thursday, but the story seemed to suffocate quickly, practically dismissed as novelty News of the Weird. But before the sordid tale of the Bishop-Bopping Beltway Boys dies off completely, keep a figure in mind:

$222,418

That is the salary of "senior level" SEC employees, seventeen of whom were implicated in the probe. That's $9.45 million you and I spent since mid-2007.

Talk about fiddling while Rome burned...