As President Obama was leading a much-ballyhooed bus tour to promote the creation of American jobs, a glitch back at home raised questions about the government’s job-filling capabilities.
“We need to put people back to work right now!” Obama told a cheering crowd in North Carolina.
Well, maybe not exactly now. Depends on what the meaning of now is.
Leaving aside the question of whether Obama’s plan would actually create new jobs in the private sector, the government couldn’t even manage to offer desperate, unemployed voters the chance to apply for public-sector jobs. That’s because USAJobs, a Web site overseen by the Office of Personnel Management that acts as a clearinghouse for federal job postings, repeatedly crashed and malfunctioned while Obama’s bus merrily rolled along.
The site’s bugs started when the OPM relaunched it Oct. 11 after ending a long-running contract with Monster.com, which had actually operated much of the site, our colleague Emily Heil reports.
The resulting technological breakdown threw job seekers into a frenzy, and many took to Facebook to vent their frustrations. A sample:
“How come i can neve get in??? always says it too busy”
“This is a lesson in ‘if it aint broke’ . . . ”
“Maybe the Feds have stopped hiring people and the new website is a ruse.”
The OPM countered with a couple of awkward YouTube videos this week explaining that they’re adding more servers to handle increased traffic and asking users to keep trying.
In a gesture of patriotic magnanimity (or just savvy marketing), Monster offered to let government agencies list jobs on its own site free of charge — for a month.
“As a public service, we’re offering these free postings to ease the burden during the transition and to help connect federal agency employers to qualified talent,” the company’s president said in a news release.
Timing is everything
Patton Boggs, the law and lobbying firm, had long planned to throw a little fete Thursday night in honor of Ali Suleiman Aujali , Libya’s ambassador to the United States.
But the event at the firm’s offices took on new meaning Thursday when Aujali’s old boss, longtime Loop favorite Moammar Gaddafi, was killed as revolutionaries stormed his last stronghold.
The deposed dictator’s death just hours before the canapes were to be passed around makes Aujali one of the biggest “gets” in town — and gives the revelers an even bigger reason to celebrate.
Though the new government in Tripoli is only a few months old, Aujali is no stranger to Washington — he was, for years, Gaddafi’s envoy to the United States. Aujali switched over to the opposition early on, as soon as Gaddafi started killing peaceful demonstrators.
The reception invite promised “hors d’oeuvres and refreshments” while power brokers toast regime change and possible financial opportunities.
Party on . . .
News from Libya’s neighbor
Speaking of Libya, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who gets much credit as the key administration advocate for U.S. action in Libya, was in Malta on Tuesday to chat with government officials, inaugurate the new U.S. Embassy and announce the nomination of a new ambassador, Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, a career diplomat whose posts have included high-level jobs in the Middle East.
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