Unless I am reading this story wrong, here is a woman who is complaining because she gets paid $85 grand a year to do nothing.
NEW YORK POST ONLINE
WOMAN SUES OVER ‘NOTHING’
By FREDRIC U. DICKER
December 28, 2004 — ALBANY A State Liquor Authority employee is being paid $82,789 a year to sit in an office and do nothing all day, so she passes the time by reading books and daydreaming, it was revealed yesterday.
Patricia Freund, a career state worker who says she was once one of the highest-ranking women at the SLA, also said she spends more time speaking to the janitor at her Albany office complex then she does speaking to one of her bosses.
“I don’t think I’ve done more then two days work in three years,” Freund told The Post.
The incredible no-work job, which actually costs the state more than $100,000 a year with benefits, is not what Freund, 50, a widow and college graduate who has worked for the state for 25 years, said she ever wanted.
“I had a very meritorious career and an unblemished record until three years ago,” said Freund. “Now, I have no duties and nobody here even speaks to me.”
Instead of working during her seven-hour shift, Freund said she uses the time in the office to read books such as “A Distant Mirror,” about the 14th century, and “Bury Me Standing,” about gypsies.
No one comes to her office.
Freund, who is Jewish, says she’s being punished for raising questions about the emphasis put on Christianity at a nondenominational “prayer breakfast” sponsored by Gov. Pataki in 2000.
Freund said she was “pressured” by her bosses to attend the breakfast, which the governor has sponsored annually since he took office in 1995.
Freund said she was then “offended” when, after the breakfast ended, she was given a “memento” bearing Pataki’s name that included many quotations from Jesus.
“I guess I didn’t understand what this prayer breakfast was at all,” she said.
Freund, who is officially listed as the SLA’s “director of wholesale services,” has filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against SLA Chairman Edward Kelly and other state officials, claiming she was stripped of her job responsibilities for critical statements she made about the breakfast.
Depositions in the case, which was first reported by the Albany Times-Union, were taken last week and a trial is expected in about a year, said Freund’s lawyer, Susan Adler.
SLA spokeswoman Kimberly Morrella had “absolutely no com- ment” on Freund’s allegations.
Pataki’s prayer breakfasts came under intense scrutiny earlier this year after The Post revealed that he had hiked the cost of the event to as much as $1,000 a table after announcing First Lady Laura Bush would attend. Pataki was also forced to register the breakfast event as a charity with Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office after The Post disclosed the governor failed to so during his first nine years in office.
