A lazy German civil servant

A German civil servant has admitted doing nothing during the 14 years before he retired:

The man, aged 65, sent a farewell message to 500 colleagues on his retirement day after learning his job was axed due to cuts.

In the email round robin to other civil servants in Menden, in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia, he boasted that he had earned £613,000 (745,000 euros) for doing no work.

"Since 1998, I was present but not really there. So I'm going to be well prepared for retirement – Adieu," he wrote, in an email leaked to the Westfalen-Post newspaper.

The admission that a civil servant could be paid for 14 years without doing any work is embarrassing for Germany because it is leading calls for austerity cuts to the public sector in eurozone countries such as Greece and Spain.

The unnamed man, who has worked in a municipal state surveyor's office since 1974, accused the municipal authorities of creating inefficient, overlapping and parallel structures, even employing another surveying engineer to do the same job, leaving him with nothing to do. Of course, I well benefited from the freedom that came by to me," he wrote. 

The anonymous civil servant has been condemned by the Mayor of Menden and others in Germany. But looking at this case from a somewhat different point of view, the civil servant´s behaviour is maybe not so reproachable :

The do-nothing civil servant was in reality very inexpensive compared to the thousands of civil servants and "experts", who are wasting huge sums of taxpayers´ money on a plethora of completely useless "climate change" and "renewable energy" programs in Germany, as well as in all other EU countries.