This may or may not be just limited to San Diego, and maybe someone has put a stop to this by now, as it’s been over 10 years. Nevertheless, there should be oversight to make sure it’s still not happening here and in other places.
When I worked a two-year temp assignment for a government office, the office on the floor above us was Department of Homeland Security. Our elevator wouldn’t allow us to go to the third floor by ourselves, as only DHS employees could activate the third floor feature with their cards.
Many times we worked after 5 p.m., when the questionable activity started. Young women, dressed like they were going out to a night club, would be waiting for the elevator on the ground floor as I’d be returning from my break. When the elevator opened, a guy from DHS was there to escort the women to the third floor. We all got in the elevator, I’d get off on the second floor, with the women and DHS worker going on to the third floor.
Besides this, we could hear the night parties going on upstairs. In the women’s bathroom, I could smell what was probably someone smoking drugs upstairs coming through the vents. There was loud music all night, probably even after we left our office. In the morning, the cleaning crew came to service our floor office. Their large trash containers were already filled from cleaning the third floor. There were pizza boxes, beer bottles, other liquor bottles, among other things in the third floor trash. The cleaning people said it was always that way, where they had to clean up after these parties.
After finishing my assignment, I did a short internship at an organization situated in another part of San Diego. My supervisor commented to another worker about the DHS partying upstairs. At first, I thought the third floor DHS office had relocated to the internship’s building. But my supervisor said their organization had been at their location for five years, and DHS was already there at that time, partying all the time. So this means there were TWO DHS locations doing this…fraud on our tax dollars!!