Every once in a while, government makes the mistake of revealing how incredibly stupid it can be.

Such is the case in South Carolina right now. It seems that The Republican governor of “The Palmetto State,” Nikki Haley, wants employees at state agencies to answer the phones a certain way.

According to the USA Today, “The first thing [Haley] wants people to hear when they call any state agency is a cheery: ‘It’s a great day in South Carolina! How may I help you?’”

That sounds like a really good idea to me. I mean, it’s better than the universal greeting you get from government workers in Chicago when you call, which is: “What?” Usually followed by: “You got the wrong agency.” Usually followed by: “Click.”

But . . . no. It seems Haley’s mandated cheeriness has rubbed some Democratic lawmakers the wrong way. They claim that it’s ridiculous to have such an upbeat message when the state has problems. Namely, the unemployment rate is high; some of the citizens of the state don’t have healthcare; and there’s not enough money to fund public education.

The USA Today quotes a Democrat, state Rep, John Richard King, who is sponsoring a bill to outlaw the greeting: “It’s insulting when we have to call agencies in this state and hear them say, ‘It’s a great day’ when we are suffering here at home.”

So you have elected officials like John “Dick” King spending valuable time, effort, and taxpayer dollars waging war on a phone greeting, just because he doesn’t like the fact that Haley is a Republican. Do you think John Dick would be doing this if a Democrat was in power?

I mean, what are the Democratic lawmakers who are fighting the greeting trying to achieve, other than scoring political points? Honesty? Transparency? Would they rather have the agency phone reps say something like:

“Hi! Welcome to South Carolina. We may be a cesspool of unemployed, under-educated, sickly asshats . . . but at least we’re not West Virginia!!!!”

Or maybe . . .

“Hi! Welcome to South Carolina, where our politicians ain’t got shit else to do but get in pissing matches with each other over how we answer the phone while the whole goddamned state slides into the fucking toilet.”

I don’t know enough about South Carolina to suggest further phone messages, but this whole thing got me thinking about how Chicago and Illinois government agencies should answer the phone. Here’s a short list of possibilities:

“Hey! Welcome to Chicago. Mayor Emmanuel is personally monitoring this call, and if you say something bad about him, he’s going to chop off one of your child’s fingers and make you wear it around your neck, like a finger necklace.”

Or . . .

“Hi there! Welcome to Illinois, where our former governors outnumber the crack dealers in the local prisons!”

Or . . .

“Greetings from Chicago, home to President Barack Obama . . . well sort of, but not really, because he actually grew up in Hawaii, and spent his formative years at Harvard, and really only lived in Chicago for a short time, and he lived in Hyde Park, which is to Chicago what Cambridge is to Boston . . . but he does occasionally wear a White Sox hat, even though he always gets the name of the stadium where they play wrong, and he can’t name any of the players, but since he wears the hat for photo ops and was here for a while . . . welcome to the hometown of President Barack Obama!!!!

Or, of course, we could just go the transparent route:

“Welcome to Chicago, the most corrupt city in the country!”

“Hi there, welcome to Chicago, where entire SUVs have been known to disappear into potholes!”

“Hi there, welcome to Chicago, where it takes seven city workers 11 weeks to fill a pothole, and it still doesn’t get filled!”

“Hello, Weclome to Chicago, where if you actually need a city employee to help you, you’re better off calling South Carolina!!”

I guess it really doesn’t matter what slogan we come up with. Because whatever we come up with, some politician will be willing to spend hours and dollars fighting it.

Because that’s what they do.

So I’m scrolling through a list of headlines about the death of Kim Jong II, the North Korean midget dictator, to see which story I want to read, and I come across this one, from the New York Daily News:

Kim Jong II, North Korea’s enigmatic and controversial leader, dies at 69

Enigmatic? Controversial? These are the words that some professional newspaper person chose to describe one of the world’s most brutal dictators . . . a monster of a man who threatened his neighbors regularly with nuclear holocaust, and starved millions of his own people to death, while restricting all personal freedoms and liberties?

Why not just call him “zany” or “colorful?” I mean, the headline makes the guy sound like Lenny Bruce or Jim Morrison, for Christ’s sake.

And speaking of words, I’m compiling my list of words and phrases that I hope don’t make it to 2012. You know, the words that everybody uses to the point where they just get irritating.

First on the list is everybody’s favorite social media phrase: “Hat tip to . . .”

Everybody on FaceBook and blogs and Twitter uses this when they share a link to something cool.

Sample usage:

“Idiotic New York Newspaper article calls that little dickhead from North Korea who just croaked ‘Engimatic.’ www.nydaillynews.com. Hat tip to Ronnie Jack for the steer.”

The last time somebody tipped a hat was in England, in 1876. Yet here we are in 2011, and everybody is constantly tipping their hats at everyone else. And while we’re at it, you probably shouldn’t thank someone for the “steer” unless they gave you a cow.

Readers, any words or phrases you want to see on the list? I’ll be publishing it shortly before the New Year, so get your submission in now!

***UPDATE: Heard from several readers who have tried to comment and couldn’t because of technical issues. Sorry about that. IT is going to work on it after their nap. In the meantime, there’s a fun conversation about all this on my Facebook page if anyone wants to join in there.

This is bad. Very, very bad.

I can’t be 100 percent sure, because they don’t talk, but I think both of our cats have secretly joined the Occupy Wall Street movement.

To be more specific, I’m pretty sure Ella and Weezie are charter members of the little-known-but-very-powerful “Occupy Steve and Cindy’s Condo” faction of the movement.

Now, as regular readers of this blog know, Ella and Weezie have long served as our company’s IT department. They are perfect in this role, and we have come to expect classic IT behavior out of them. Namely:

• I call their names, and they look at me with disdain, if not outright hatred.

• I sit next to them and they immediately get up and go hide under the desk.

• The nicer I am to them, the more aloof they act . . . as if they are afraid that if they ARE nice to me for even ONE second, I may ask them to actually DO SOMETHING.

• At least once a week, I catch them licking their crotches.

You know, classic IT behavior.

And I’m cool with that. When you hire IT, you get what you get.

But lately, their behavior has been even stranger . . . and more, I don’t know . . . militant. Which leads me to believe that they have joined the Occupy Movement. Why? Because their behavior matches exactly what I’m reading about the various Occupy protests.

Here are just a few examples:

1. They bitch and moan with no apparent purpose.

From what I’ve read of the Occupy protestors, they stand around a lot and make cool signs and put up tents and disrupt entire cities and do cool shit like lock their arms and chant when the cops show up . . . but they’re not very clear about what they actually WANT.

From what I can tell, they have something against something they call “the 1 percent,” whatever that is. I think it might be Oprah Winfrey, but I’m not sure.

Based on the signs and the quotes in the paper, they feel that “the 1 percent” has too much money, and they would like “the 1 percent” to give THEM some of their money. Or they want “the 1 percent” to pay off their student loans. Or to pay the bills for their iPads and iPhones. Or something like that.

They seem to hate bankers a lot for some reason. And banks. And big companies. And politicians. And successful people. And anyone who works in the financial sector. And personal hygiene.

All that is very clear. But their actual goals seem to be a bit hazy and unformed.

And it’s the same with Ella and Weezie! Especially Weezie. Right about the time Occupy Wall Street started getting a lot of press, Weezie started mewling and howling for unclear reasons . . . just like the protestors! Don’t believe me? Here’s a video:

She would fit right in with the Occupy protestors, wouldn’t’ she?

2. They’ve become messier and more destructive.

By all accounts, the Occupy folks are kind of scuzzy. Their camps are rife with lice and scabies and leprosy and scurvy and smallpox and herpes and all sorts of other nasty shit. More than one city had to shut down the camps for health reasons alone, before the Bubonic Plague set in.

Now, my cats are usually pretty clean, but lately, since the Occupy movement started, they have started doing strange, unsanitary things, like dragging my socks into the dirty litter box and puking up hairballs on the couch.

The other day Ella was puking on the hardwood floor in the dining room, and she stopped, mid-puke, and moved over to the rug and finished puking there . . . as if she knew it would be harder for us to clean puke off the rug than the floor!

It can’t be a coincidence. They’re making some kind of statement . . . I just don’t know what it is.

3. They are disrupting the natural flow of the house.

The biggest problem with the Occupy crowd is not their lack of any concrete goals or objectives, or their scuzziness. It’s not even the fact that 75 percent of them are spoiled little pricks who can’t BELIEVE nobody will hire them when their parents have been telling them for 21 YEARS how WONDERFUL they are!!

No, the real problem with the group is the fact that they take up valuable city resources, and whatever city they are soiling with their presence can’t operate as normal.

Well, since the Movement started two months ago, Ella has taken an active role in disrupting the normal workings of this house. Here are just two quick examples:

Example #1: It used to be that we had assigned seats for movie nights. I had mine, Cindy had hers, and Ella and Weezie had theirs.

But lately, Ella has been sitting in MY spot. She’s Occupying my fucking couch! And I can’t get her to leave without getting physical . . . just like the Occupy protestors!

See this picture?

Well, the cat on the left, the one with the devil eyes, is Ella, and she’s sitting in MY FUCKING MOVIE SPOT!! That never used to happen!

And do you see those brown blankets they are laying on? Well, we don’t even know where they got those!! They’re bringing their own shit to MY couch, just like the Occupy people bring their tents and their hackysacks and their bongs and their bugs and their signs and and their diseases to their protests.

It’s bad enough that the little hairball thinks she thinks she can camp out in MY movie spot . . . but bringing her skuzzy little blanket with her is taking it too far.

Example #2: One of the nicer routines in this house is that on nights we don’t have Zach, Cindy and I like to drink wine and play Rummy 500. Well, check out this short video of Ella the Occupier disrupting that little activity:

I really don’t know what to do about this. I want to encourage their right of free speech. I don’t want any trouble. I certainly don’t want to break out the pepper spray or, God forbid, the Water Bottle.

The last thing I need is for the whackadiddies at PETA to picket my house for using force to break up a supposedly “peaceful” animal protest.

But I can’t let this go on. It has to stop.

If only they’d let me know what they want . . . but they don’t seem to know. And unlike the Occupy Crowd, which will probably go away when it gets cold out, our little protestors aren’t going anywhere for a long, long time.

Cindy and I went down to Atlanta about a month or so ago, to teach our Strategic Creative Communication seminar.

It was a great crowd, and afterwards about 12 of us gathered in the hotel bar for cocktails. The conversation turned to food, as it so often does if I’m in the room, and one woman started telling us about the greatest steak she had ever eaten.

“When the waiter served it to you, he only gave you a butter knife, and said that if you couldn’t cut it with that, it was free” she said. “They also brought you big fat chocolate strawberries with your bill.”

Always on the lookout for a good steak, I (and others) pressed her for details. But she couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant. At first, she couldn’t even remember what city it was in. Her and her sister stumbled into it on accident during a long road trip.

At first she said it was in Lexington. Then she said it was in Louisville. She knew it was in Kentucky. She remembered it being in a strip mall. She thought it was next to a Kinkos.

“How can you not remember the name of the place that served you the greatest steak you’ve ever eaten?” I asked.

At that point I was digging my hands into my thighs under the table in an effort to control myself and not leap across the table to strangle the name of the restaurant out of her.

“I mean, that’s the sort of thing you REMEMBER,” I told her.

Maybe it’s just me, but if I had a steak that good, I would tattoo the name of the place on my ass if I had to, in order to remember it. That’s why at my house we have conversations like this:

Steve: Let’s go eat steak.

Cindy: Where do you want to go?

Steve: That one place. I can’t remember the name. Here, look on my ass. I tattooed it there so I wouldn’t forget.

Cindy (looking at my ass): You have 37 restaurants tattooed on your ass. Can you give me a clue?

Steve: I think it’s on the right cheek.

Cindy: Okay, let’s see (reading off a list) Eggs Benedict, Roast Chicken, Pulled Pork, Oysters, Clam Chowder . . . oh, here it is. Chicago Cut steakhouse, bone in prime rib. I’ll call for a reservation.

The woman in Atlanta obviously didn’t have the nerve to tattoo food all over her body, and she couldn’t for the life of her remember the name of the place.

“You don’t understand, I’ve called steak houses all over Kentucky, asking them if they serve a butter knife with their steak, and whether they serve strawberries with the bill,” she said. “I’ve tried for YEARS to find this place. I think it must have closed. I’ve researched it for years with no luck.”

And then BAM: out came the Dingleberries. Within 1.7 seconds, six of us had smart phones in hand, typing in (or in my case talking in) phrases like “Kentucky steak house butter knife guarantee chocolate strawberries with check,” and “Louisville steak house where you can cut the steak with a butter knife or it’s free.”

One woman, who I swear had her Dingleberry in a Western-style fast-draw holster strapped to her leg, she had it out so fast, was the winner.

“Got it!!” she said, after about 37 seconds.

A call was placed. A call was answered. Questions were asked.

Are they in Lousiville? Yes.

Are they in a non-descript strip mall? Yes.

Did there used to be a Kinkos next door? Yes.

Do they serve their steaks with a butter knife, and guarantee that if you need something sharper to cut it, the steak if free? Yes, and yes.

Do they serve chocolate covered strawberries with the bill? Not always, but sometimes.

One poor woman spent years on the phone trying to find the restaurant. Another one found it in two minutes. The Age of The Dingleberry is officially here, bringing with it instant information on any topic in the world, no matter where you are.

I love it.

The only problem? By the time we found it, I was on my second martini, and can’t for the life of me remember the name of that Kentucky steak joint. If anyone else was there and remembers, can you let me know?

I need to go find out if it’s tattoo-worthy.

In advance of our upcoming Webinar on interviewing and writing, Write & Rewrite (also known as me and Jim Ylisela) are staging corporate interviews.

Two weeks ago, we tackled an accountant, and turned a bedwetter into a quote machine.

Last week we choked some good quotes and anecdotes out of a jargon-spewing IT guy.

This week, we go after a sales guy who just wants to blow hot air at you.

If you write, do interviews, or report stories for a living, watch the video below, and sign up for the Webinar to learn how to turn even the worst interviews into something you can use!