Today's Mood Is...

So I have a friend who filed for bankruptcy, which is not an easy thing to do when you take pride in the fact that you are not prone to take help when you are in trouble. It is part of that ephemeral, rapidly disappearing American spirit of lifting yourself up by your bootstraps and digging in. But this person realized that this was not a battle they had brought on themselves, that this was not a thoughtless schmuck running up credit cards and then running away from their responsibility, but that they were hit by a confluence of events that would give any person more than a couple moments of pause, and for the sake of their sanity and in order to allow themselves a fresh start this was the right thing for them to do. Last week they went to court to finalize everything. And as far as they knew, they were done with the whole thing and could now work towards moving on with their life.

That is when their lawyer called.

It turns out they have to take a 2 hour or so online exit class (for lack of a better term) in order to truly finalize this whole situation. Now why has this elicited shocked monkeys / cats / pandas from me?

Because they have to pay $50 for the course.

So what the federal government is telling them is "Hey, I know you had something tragic happen to you that put you in a position where you have to eat a good bit of crow and swallow some serious pride in order to get your life back in order. And we agree to allow you to tell all of these people that you are no longer going to pay them and that there isn't Jack Squat they can do about it. But give us $50 in addition to all of your lawyer's fees. KTHXBAI!"

WTF, government? W...T...F?