Vexed Bermoothes

Still no Christmas card from my best friends Ewart and Wanda.  Maybe I’ll get a fruitcake instead?  Still hoping.

The Premier’s press secretary insisted that the cards only cost $20,000 to print, and tried to fit the words “Bermuda Press” as many times in one sentence as he could.  (Is that “the devil made me do it” defense?)

But, the distribution of the cards was not free.  Yes, they were sent at no charge to the Premier by “OHMS mail” – but the cost of distributing those 42,000 letters through the postal system was presumably 35 cents each or an additional $15,000.  Moreover, the cost of envelopes and government resources to create and assemble the mailing is probably several multiples of that.

Finally, OHMS mail is intended to only be used for “official mail relating exclusively to the business of the Government.”   Holiday gladhanding doesn’t count as official business.

You can write this off as petty criticism – after all it’s a drop in the bucket of Bermuda’s budget, which has doubled to a billion dollars annually in recent years.  And that huge increase was built drop by drop.