Does Pittsburgh City Paper even know what a Pittsburgh potty is?

The most incompetent roosting chicken ever elected

There is too much good stuff in here for me to waste a single line on my usual “my life is bonkers” bullshit.

Away we go!

1. Paid six figures to screw all your paperwork up

We have GOT to talk about Sherry Magretti Hamilton.

I hear you—who?

Sherry. Magretti. Hamilton.

Put the name in your brain, sir Google, so that every time someone searches for her they’re gonna come right here and go, “Well, oh my.”

Sherry is the Register of Wills of Westmoreland County.

I hear you—what even is a Register of Wills?

It’s an elected position sought by people who want to hold elected office for the sake of holding an elected office but who do not have the desire, talent or charisma to actually be a politician but still want an office and power and a budget and shit.

Do not email me, omg, if you are a Register of Wills; go argue with your full voicemail box.

RoW (not to be confused with R.O.U.S.es, Westley) are basically in charge of processing paperwork for things like estates, adoptions, marriage licenses etc. I’m not saying this isn’t important work! I’m saying it’s dumb it’s an elected office.

Moving on. Sherry Magretti Hamilton won the Register of Wills election in 2016 and has been managing the office ever since, even running unopposed last year even though this bullshit I’m about to tell you is old news. She’s been shit at her job since nearly day one and the chickens have now come home to roost. Listen, I don’t honestly know if that’s the idiom or if I even used it correctly, but let’s just go with it. The chickens, they are roosting at home as opposed to … elsewhere.

Most of her issues seem to be with filing adoption paperwork in a timely manner. Because she’s bad at her job, she was previously ordered by the court to file adoption paperwork within 5 days. Despite the order, she had to be hauled before two judges in March on a contempt charge because her office had been taking up to TWO HUNDRED DAYS to file such paperwork. The chickens are incompetently roosting it seems!

When questioned by the judges after it was argued in court that she had been out of compliance with their orders for all of last year and the first part of this year, Sherry Magretti Hamilton did what any good elected official does … blamed everyone but herself:

She blamed those filing delays on staff shortages, disloyalty and insubordination of employees and her absences related to health issues.

But her staffers testified otherwise:

Staffers testified she was seldom at work and sometimes was in the courthouse for as few as nine hours a week.

Sherry Magretti Hamilton testified that no, she actually worked up to 30 hours per week. Ell. Oh. Ell, Sherry. Questions about how much she actually worked are not new and date back to as early as 2020 when her opponent’s husband requested her timecard records under a Right to Know request, I’m guessing because it was an open secret that she just didn’t do her job, kind of like it was an open secret that Lukey wasn’t very keen to show up to his job as much as he should have.

Now, you’re all wondering just how long it takes to do the filing of this paperwork?

Those documents take between five to six minutes to produce

Why does this huge backlog matter outside of holy hell lady you were elected to file paperwork and you’re literally not doing your job so why are taxpayers paying you nearly $100,000 a year??

Filing delays can produce substantial hardships to new parents who require those records to secure birth certificates, legal proof for medical insurance, school enrollment and other issues.

So her incompetently roosting chickens are screwing with families.

When she was offered help earlier to clear the backlog through funds to hire additional staff, she inexplicably refused the help, which makes me wonder if she is working in service to some weird bullshit personal belief system that we don’t know about yet.

So that was back in March and now? Things are still terrible because she’s the actual worst chicken!

What happened? She was found in contempt and derelict in her duties in May and was stripped of her power. The office was taken over by an appointed conservator and Sherry Magretti Hamilton became nothing more than an employee in the office. That seems good right? If you can’t roost good, then you don’t get to lead the roost; you are just gonna shoot out eggs like everyone else.

Am I doing this right? Do I need to brush up on my animal husbandry? I don’t realy know what animal husbandry even means.

Moving on.

In June, she bargained a punishment to include an agreement to resign at year’s end and to pay a $10,000 fine to avoid jail. So in comes the overseer to see what the damage is and he was like, “Holy shit! She wasn’t just grossly incompetent, she was vomitously, criminally, bullshittingly, jagoffingly incompetent!”

Why? Well an inventory of files and documents undertaken in an attempt to understand the real scope of her ineptitude found that not only were documents being filed months late, upending family plans, they were also full of errors. Obviously people were fired including the office manager and the solicitor. So chicken heads are rolling.

But guess who still gets paid her nearly $100,000 salary that she was making while she worked anywhere from 9 to 30 hours per week depending on who you believe while being incompetent literally to the point of criminality?

Sherry Magretti Hamilton, who, despite these new revelations about how she forked everything up for a bunch of people, refuses to resign until the end of the year as she originally planned. So she sucked even after being court-ordered to stop it, upended lives, made more work for everyone, cost the county more money than needed, and is just going to collect her paycheck for six more months despite calls from both parties to do the right thing and resign now.

But that chicken not only said, “Hell no!” she said something even more bonkers:

“God has a plan, and I trust that,” she said.

As John Cusack once so eloquently said, and I quote …

You ridiculous chicken! What was the plan?! Some elaborate long game that wanted you to be the shittiest you could possibly be at your job to the point that families were paying out-of-pocket for health care for their adopted children because you were too incompetent to make sure paperwork got filed? And then the plan was for you to have your ass hauled before multiple judges multiple times as they tried to force you to do your job, for which you were elected, and you instead said, “Nah. I’ma just keep doing my bullshit.” And then the plan involved you continuing your bullshit until you got stripped of your power and fined $10,000, narrowly avoiding your chicken ass being incarcerated, while other people continue, to this day, to clean up the mess you willfully made like some 3 a.m. wall-zooming bed-puking house cat?

Maybe it’s not a plan. Maybe you, of your complete free will, did a horrible job to the point they nearly needed to put you behind bars for it.

Maybe, you, Sherri Magretti Hamilton, are just a criminal. Cluck off.

2. Does the City Paper actually know what a Pittsburgh Potty even is?

Recently Pittsburgh City Paper, who sacrilegiously have a pigeon mascot, held a photo contest to find the best Pittsburgh potties in the city in three categories. Scariest, most yinzer, and fanciest.

As you know, a Pittsburgh potty is a toilet in an unfinished basement, left out in the open, no sink near it save for maybe a filthy, spider-filled utility sink, and which is used only in cases of medical emergency like when your stupid brother is using the upstairs bathroom and you’re about to shit your pants. So there you sit, in the moldy open air, evacuating your body of waste, praying to every god of every religion you can think of including the Scientology cave-alien to please not allow anyone to come into the basement to do laundry or grab a soda from the noisy beige 40-year-old refrigerator down there.

I write like I know this keenly because I used to use the Pittsburgh potty in my gram’s basement in Bridgeville and boy … THE. STRESS.

My first married home was 127 years old at the time I lived in it and it had a Pittsburgh potty from hell. You could have filmed a Saw movie sequel with it as a visual centerpiece.

Anyway, let me show you the “winners” of the City Paper Pittsburgh Potty contest named the most yinzer, the scariest and the fanciest:

Do you see those walls? Those doors? That privacy? Not one of these winners is actually a Pittsburgh Potty. A Pittsburgh Potty is not just a basement toilet; it is a basement toilet without privacy. If sitting on your Pittsburgh Potty doesn’t feel like an enormous violation of privacy mixed with a hint of foreboding like you’re about to get messily murdered, it’s not a Pittsburgh Potty. That last one especially is literally just a basement bathroom. What’s wild is if you go to the contest page, you can see all the entries in each category and you can see that they had valid entries to choose from. Had they consulted with an expert, me, here would be the real winners in the scariest and most yinzer categories.

You’re 100 percent about to be murdered while using the first one, and you’ll 100 percent die a slow agonizing death by embarrassment using the second extremely classic one as your mom comes down, sees you sitting there and says, “Just grabbing the clothes aht the dryer, sweetie. Have a nice poop.” And no, there’s no winner in fanciest. By virtue of being fancy it cannot be a Pittsburgh potty! By their very definition, Pittsburgh potties are UNfancy.

Before you run this contest again, you better get your shit together, City Paper, and that is 100 percent pun intended.

Speaking of puns!

3. The City of Pittsburgh lays it thick on Heinz

You recall when the giant Heinz ketchup bottles were removed from Heinz Field, one was placed outside of the Senator John Heinz History Center, which due to its size, was technically against City of Pittsburgh rules for outdoor signs and whatnot.

Recently, the Department of City Planning issued their ruling on the violation, giving the ketchup bottle permission to stay. But they did it in the funniest way possible. Highlights of the ruling, which you can read for yourself:

• Without obtaining permission from the City, which would have been worth the wait, the Applicant installed a model of a Heinz Ketchup bottle

• The ketchup bottle installation has been squeezed between architectural elements

• The installation does not drip beyond the property lines into the public right-of-way

• The Applicant laid it on thick when apologizing for acting like a hotdog

• and was used as a condiment-ary signal of incursions into the “red zone.”

• The Applicant created its own fifty-seven varieties of a pickle when it installed the ketchup bottle without first determining whether the installation passed legal mustard

• To be frank, the Board does not relish considering legal bottlenecks where the Applicant’s anticipation of approval necessitates playing catch-up.

• Any seasoned applicant should understand that post hoc applications for approvals are a big dill and could be a recipe for landing in hot sauce.

I don’t know who wrote this, but this is true government of the people, by the people and for the people.

When I am eventually given the key to the city, my official proclamation better include lots of puns about pigeons while also incorporating every fake band name I’ve ever come up with.

Good luck to whoever has to work Sexual Jagoffery into a sentence that starts with WHEREAS.

Speaking of Heinz …

4. Pittsburgh x Everybody

How did we live before collabs?

Olds, “collabs” means collaborations and it is how the yutes these days say “brand partnerships.”

This week I have not one, not two, but THREE Burghy collabs that will make your wallet go, “Put me down and slowly back away, bitch. You need help.”

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Yutes, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” is how us olds say, “Bestie, that ate.” Let’s take a look!

• Heinz x Kate Spade: Here is where some of you want to email me and tell me how Heinz ketchup isn’t even made here in Pittsburgh and I cannot strongly enough encourage you to accept the fact that I do not care; to me, they will be a Pittsburgh company until their very last employee closes their very last office here. This collab is perfect if you’re the kind of person who can afford a keychain that costs ONE HUNDRED AND TEN DOLLARS to put on your $400 messenger bag to wear with your $228 ketchup shoes. Reminder: you don’t have to spend a fortune on Heinz merch. Just get thee to the Heinz History Center’s shop!

• Eat’n Park x Commonwealth Press: This year Eat’n Park is celebrating their 75th anniversary and to celebrate, Commonwealth Press has official Eat’n Park ball caps, shirts and even SKATEBOARDS! You could get two Eat’n Park skateboards for about the price of one Kate Spade x Heinz keychain. So that’s a steal.

• Eat’n Park x Steel City: Look at the new adorable nostalgic Smiley Cookie shirt!

• Eat’n Park x Pittsburgh Pirates: This collab gives us the newest Smiley Cookie available for order … Paul Skenes mustache cookies! Now he can never shave his mustache even if he wanted to.

As per my usual, none of these are ads. Happy shopping!

5. Random n’at

• Gus of the famed Gus and Yia Yia’s ice ball cart has died at age 92. What a life and legacy.

• A man untied an 82-foot yacht and floated it a mile down the Allegheny while he and possibly others trashed it, ate all the pistachios and Cheetos they could find, and tried to figure out how to turn it on, all in an effort, as the man drunkenly claimed when confronted by river police, “To meet some Pittsburgh Pirates.” My guy, you do know the Pittsburgh Pirates are not actual boat-going pirates one would randomly encounter on the open water, right? Related, I need to become friends with someone who has an 82-foot yacht full of Cheetos and pistachios.

• I’m going to go into some of the fun history behind this column in a future newsletter since I’m out of space here, but for now, you really need to go read my latest for Pittsburgh Magazine in which I rounded up some super cool, interesting, and unbelievable Pittsburgh history stories and oddities. For instance:

  • What role Fred McFeely, Mister Rogers’ beloved grandfather, played in getting Latrobe through the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic.

  • How Pittsburghers reacted the first time they saw a “horseless carriage” (automobile!) on our downtown streets (hint: screaming, crying, throwing up is just a slight exaggeration). And wait until you see who owned it!

  • The last execution by hanging at the jail downtown took place later than you probably think.

  • Who the hell was Pittsburgh’s “Jack the Chaser”? Dig in and we will chat more about it soon!

6. That’s all!

Have a great week or two! Be kind! Don’t litter! I don’t make you pay for my writing ever, so buy my book, you jags! Don’t shoot half your hand off with fireworks! Come see my band The Incompetent Roosting Chickens!

If you’ve never heard punkified square dance music, have we got a treat for you.

Bye!