How to Buy a Beer for an Idle Government Worker

The current government shutdown is the 17th since 1976 and, eclipsing the 30-day plateau, it has become the longest in U.S. history. But it's getting on our collective nerves. And that's why God made beer.

Sometimes being shut out of your job, furloughed, and removed from the payroll can be a humiliating and frustrating experience--kind of like feeling incarcerated. There's a famous scene in The Shawshank Redemption in which one character buys "suds" for his fellow inmates to enjoy, just to make them feel normal after a day of re-tarring the prison roof during a hot summer day. Now, there's a great website with that very idea in mind.

PayItFurloughed.com is a new twist on the "pay it forward" concept of doing a good deed for someone else. In this case, it's buying a beer for a government worker adversely affected by the shutdown in our nation's capital.

You can go to the website to either Fund a Beer (if you'd like to donate) or Score a Beer (if you're a government worker in need of a craft brew.)

The site also features a running scoreboard of Beers Available, Beers Donated, and Beers Enjoyed, and the numbers are in the thousands.

As the site says, you can help "stressed out" federal employees by providing them with some "free liquid therapy."