A letter sent to Last Days by a hot tipper/furloughed federal employee Laura:

Thank you for once again getting it right. Last Days is piss-your-pants hilarious and a therapy session of comedy for the injustice and stupidity that we humans churn out endlessly. But you also inevitably focus in on the real core of the story, as in the case of October 1st story. You got it right in one paragraph. I have seen no other media outlet get it so right.

I came home from my federal job on Friday evening, having worked for three days for free. (I was furloughed for the first week, then called back to work without pay and told I would be subject to discipline, if I refused to come in.) I had an extensive vent session with my husband, furious over why the main media story of this ostensible "partial" government shutdown is not the fact that federal employees, regular working people, are either being forced not to work or being forced to work without pay (making them ineligible for unemployment). I ranted that this should be the main headline for every story and every politician's statement, "Federal employees have no paycheck through no fault of their own. Regular people who live paycheck-to-paycheck cannot pay their bills. Some will be evicted. Some will go hungry. Some will have ruined credit. Some will be forced to work without pay." End of story.

I turned to Last Days for the cathartic horror into humor it provides, hoping to distract from my fury. And what do I see? A story about the shutdown, with the real bottom line of the shutdown highlighted-"800,000 federal employees on indefinite unpaid furlough and requiring another 1.3 million federal employees to work without pay until our elected officials figure this shit out." End of October 1st entry. As it should be.

Thank you. I think if this were the bottom line being emphasized to the public, this nonsense would never be allowed to go on and even teaparty-anarchists might grasp that such tactics are not in their political best interests.

Dear Laura: Thank you for reading and writing and I sincerely hope you start getting paid to your job again very, very soon.