I didn't make the short list. Because I'm neither a current federal employee nor a veteran. ::head-desk::
I would say unbelievable, but remember how I was talking about an internal position and scared a colleague with Suela's tales of federal woe? All this position was supposed to be was a change in title. For people in my position at my office who are attorneys, we wanted to (a) have attorney in our title and (b) be promoted without taking accounting classes. Management assured us this was no problem; they wanted to keep the many lawyers on staff happy. But still this involved months of tense meetings, whispered conversations at every event, long emails, the union got involved, we had a meeting with management to "clear the air" where we weren't allowed to bring up the possibility that to get this title change we'd have to be demoted with reduced pay, one job announcement that had to be withdrawn because it didn't specify that one had to be a lawyer, then a second announcement was issued with an additional sentence about being a lawyer that had no fewer than six typos in the new sentence, and still no resolution of the demotion issue. The 15 or so of us that were in my position at my office applied; we were assured by regional management that we would all get it. Two people made it on the certificate. None of us were on it.