Shutdown Theater Presents: NIST

Imaginary Obama NIST spokesman: "We have no money to pay for NIST staffers to manually upload each web page on our website in realtime during the government shutdown, so we will have to suspend our website and services. Pay no attention to the server behind that curtain! The server which is displaying this 'site shutdown' message is a figment of your imagination, and does not exist. Blame it on Congress that we can't pay staffers to manually load pages to our website in realtime, and therefore have to close the whole website down...

"Also, since we do not yet have a guarantee of future money with which to have already paid for the various conferences which we have scheduled, we will have to cancel these future conferences. It's a shame that budget uncertainty for the next fiscal year prevents us from holding any conferences this week, but that's how it goes. Be sure to blame Congress for this.

"Please urge Congress to vote so that we can resume manually uploading each page to our website, and so that we can cancel those conferences which we previously scheduled and payed for."