(The following memo is intended for dedicated civil servants who, having paid attention to the breathless media and grim-looking Washington-based politicians, had planned to end it all today to avoid the financial ruin of a furlough followed by the end of civilization as we know it.)

• Relax. Return to your normal duties. Put the cyanide tablets you purchased last April in anticipation of a governmentwide shutdown back in storage. For now.
• Everything is going to be okay. For now.
• Continue to report for work (unless you are one of a select group of FAA employees or a member of Congress). If you are at home, go to work. If you are at work stay there. Continue to do whatever it is you do until told to stop.

As some cynics predicted, correctly as it turned out, a last minute agreement was reached Sunday evening by the president and the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate. Long-time politicians were not surprised. But brand-new members of the House and Senate, who thought they had launched a revolution, were stunned.

In various how-we-reached-a-compromise speeches (that some speculate may have been written months if not years ago), leaders of each party in the House and Senate said they had heroically made concessions for the good of the nation. That after a year filled with time-outs and vacations, they had worked around the clock and even over the weekend! Commentators who don’t have much to comment on unless Congress does something – or better yet nothing – noted that neither the extreme right or the extreme left wings of either party was satisfied. Like, what else is new?

The apparent good news is that government agencies won’t (for now) be shutting down major operations. That federal workers (for now) won’t be furloughed and contractors won’t be off the payroll because of a partial government shutdown. But don’t forget the exercise you have just been through. It will happen again, and again. Either because first, Congress fails to approve agency budgets or secondly, because it does approve budgets that require cutbacks.

Congress can now take the rest of the month off. Maybe before it goes, it could settle the issue of the 4,000 FAA employees who really were furloughed through no fault of their own.

The rest of us can return to what passes for normal and enjoy what many say is the best-time – Congress-free – in Washington. (Oh, and save yesterday’s column about furloughs and unemployment benefits. This is just the end of a chapter, not the full story.)

NEARLY USELESS FACTOID

The inventor of the graham cracker, Sylvester Graham, was a 19th-century American Presbyterian minister and an early vegetarian. He believed the originally whole-wheat snack named for him could curb lust.

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