THE BUDGET IMPASSE : Shutdown Notices Can Be So Casual : Workers: Getting the word out is often done in a haphazard manner. Many of the federal employees were not fully prepared for the closing.

National Park Service Ranger Wayne Elliot was working at his desk in the rustic Ocracoke Island visitors’ center Saturday morning when his supervisor called to tell him to shut down his portion of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

The first thing Elliot did was to close the restrooms. Then he went to face campers at one of Ocracoke Island’s 80 sites--to tell them they had to roll up their tents and leave by noon today.

The undramatic, almost haphazard way Elliot received his shutdown order is typical of the way government workers around the country are getting the word that they won’t be coming to work because of the current budget crisis.

And that’s just in the case of those who were scheduled to work over the Columbus Day weekend.

If the fiscal squeeze continues through Tuesday morning, the nation’s 2.3 million government employees (excluding postal workers, who are exempt) will face a notification procedure that more closely typifies the public’s image of the federal bureaucracy: They’ve been ordered to report to work so they can be told to go home.

As John N. Sturdivant, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, concedes: “I keep meaning to ask why a person would go to the trouble to go to work only to be sent home.”

Ironically, there’s been far less preparation for the current virtually government-wide shutdown than there was last Monday, when the government was expecting limited automatic across-the-board spending cuts, as specified by the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law, to take effect.

“Last Monday, they prepared us for it,” said Karen Visscher, a financial analyst for a division of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“They gave us so many memos describing what we should do if we are furloughed and told us how many hours we’d work,” Visscher said. “We even had to sign a couple of papers saying we knew we’d be furloughed.”

But when an inquirer called early Saturday to ask how Visscher felt about the impending shutdown, Visscher was surprised to hear there even was one. The talk at her office had been basically that the “scare” was over.

“All of a sudden on Friday, people said we might not have to work on Tuesday; when people said the furloughs and cuts weren’t going through, we thought they weren’t going through for good,” Visscher said. “We didn’t think they were just going to put it off a week.”

Unlike the Gramm-Rudman cuts, which would have prompted only occasional furloughs of federal workers, the current shutdown only applies to “non-essential” employees--a distinction that many here contend can be arbitrary.

“A nurse in a critical unit in a VA hospital will stay on because you can’t shut off a (life-support) machine, for example,” Sturdivant said. “The secretary to an agency head who does all his scheduling and planning might be much more critical and essential than an undersecretary in charge of planning programs.” An “essential” national park employee “is anyone in the field providing life, health and safety,” said Chuck Lundy, a Grand Canyon National Park management assistant.

So, besides emergency medical services or ranger patrols to protect the visitors and land, water pump operators in the Grand Canyon also are judged essential--because they maintain a water supply to the 2,000 year-round residents in the outer rim of the park.

Weekend workers--particularly in national parks and forest service reserves--were notified of the shutdown through an administrative grapevine.

Washington handed down the notice to regional offices, which, in turn, called individual park superintendents, who then called division chiefs and finally, in most cases, the word arrived in offices such as Elliot’s Saturday morning.

The shutdown is a haphazard affair regardless of any prearranged implementation plans, Lundy said. “There is a certain amount of confusion when this happens,” he said. “A great deal of preparation goes into a shutdown.”

Despite the seemingly simple instructions that employees should report to work on Tuesday and then leave if necessary, the day will “be pretty chaotic,” Sturdivant surmised. “Will the day be one continuous rush hour?” he asked.