Moneydick

A Freedom of Information act submitted by the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) Supervisory and Professional Union turned up some pretty wild spending on BART executive salaries and $27,000 of very unrelated/frivolous expenses like shoes, catering and outdoor gear from REI.  The full report can be found here: AFSCME – BARTReport (PDF) or check out the AFSCME site.

Among the items charged to, and paid for, by the District in 2008 are:

• Over $27,000 in food and catering including:
• $2,635.36 on Togo’s Sandwiches
• $1,160 on See’s Candies
• $953.05 on Roundtable Pizza
• $1,300 at Performance POS, a fine dining company in the North Bay
• $577.15 at Devan Thai Cuisine in Oakland
• $493.14 on The Glass Onion gourmet catering
• $23,487.77 spent at local Apple stores or Apple online stores (the District’s computer system is not compatible with Macs)
• Over $15,000 in office furniture purchases from:
• IKEA
• Kantor’s Furniture
• Interior Motions
• Almost $6,300 on companies that make promotional items with corporate logos, such as pens, hats, mugs, or key chains.
• $5,200 on Blackberry devices – or at least 50 new phones over the course of the year.
• $1,629 on an “Angel Island Tram Tour”
• Over $1,500 on shoes, shoe repairs, and bags or luggage, including:
• Timbuk2
• Tumi.com
• Zappos.com.
• Over $1,500 at the outdoor gear store REI.
• $554.48 on eyeQ speed reading software.

As predicted, the default fonts set in MSword are spreading across the governments of the world…

images from “Recovery through Retrofit” pdf by the Department of Energy. Indicated fonts are Calibri and Cambria, the defaults set in Microsoft Word 2007.  Both supplants of the time-honored Times New Roman.