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Across the country in Washington state, Matthew Hines, a civilian employee at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, was equally perturbed.

“How much more does the federal employee have to endure? We’ve already been jerked around,” Hines told KING-TV.

Some businesses near federal installations offered discounts and specials in an effort to cushion the blow for their loyal customers. They included several restaurants and a pilates studio in Washington and a restaurant near the federal building that houses the Houston office of Sen. Ted Cruz, a leader in the Republican effort to take a firm stance on demanding changes to President Barack Obama’s health care law in exchange for passage of a government funding bill.

Last-chance federal clinic forced to turn away patients

Patients hoping to enroll for treatment in cutting-edge research studies at the National Institutes of Health’s renowned hospital in Maryland will have to seek care elsewhere during the government shutdown. NIH Director Francis Collins said the only exception he can make is for a child with a life-threatening illness.

Many would-be patients may qualify for research studies at other hospitals around the country. Still, “this is the place where people have wanted to come when all else has failed,” Collins said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Closure catches some seeking services by surprise

At a federal building in downtown Los Angeles, a string of frustrated people showed up through the morning, only to find that they had wasted a trip. Sheila Caraway, 23, of Inglewood, Calif., who works at a casino, didn’t know the government had shut down until a security guard told her the Internal Revenue Service office was closed.

“That’s crazy,” she said. “I was trying to get my refund. I haven’t gotten my refund. And the IRS is gone.”

Caraway said her cable TV has been shut off, and she had hoped the refund would help pay that bill.

Tourists find they’ve come a long way for nothing

Tuesday morning at Liberty State Park in New Jersey, tourists from around the world trickled in with dashed hopes of catching the ferry to the Statue of Liberty across New York Harbor. Nobody could have been more disappointed than Haiyan Wang’s 9-year-old nephew, Tony. He and his father had traveled from Beijing, and Wang said the boy “has been wanting to go inside the Statue of Liberty for a long time.”

She said her visiting relatives did not really understand what had happened in Washington because “the Chinese government never closes down.” They instead opted for a harbor cruise, which Wang called a “compromise” of the sort that the members of Congress had refused to accept.

National Zoo’s popular panda cam shuts down

The National Zoo’s beloved panda cam and all other live animal cameras at the zoo went dark with the government shutdown. The panda cam has been popular since the birth of a new cub on Aug. 23. The zoo tweeted Monday that “the cams (incl. the panda cams) require federal resources, especially staff, to run. They have not been deemed essential …”

In nation’s capital, rush hour comes early

Rush hour in Washington came about four hours earlier than usual, as workers called in for one last time finished shutdown-related tasks and headed home around 1 p.m. The Washington Post reported that the At L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station, near the Department of Homeland Security, the General Services Administration and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, was busy at midday.

“It is a lot more people now than usual,” Cory Grant, a District of Columbia government employee waiting for the train, told the Post. “This is ridiculous. I don’t understand what they are trying to do. They need workers to keep things running.”

By contrast, the Smithsonian Station in the heart of the capital’s largely shuttered museum district was nearly empty.

Some see shutdown as a bit overblown

The government shutdown is far from total — hundreds of thousands of federal employees in jobs deemed essential are continuing to report to work. That led to some awkwardness for the news media. Most newspapers, websites and TV stations adopted the qualified phrase “partial shutdown” to describe what was happening, though they continued to use “shutdown” as shorthand.

Fox News, however, came up with its own one-word label: “slimdown.” On Tuesday afternoon, almost every budget-battle related headline on its website contained the word. Fox also advised that national parks, closed to visitors, were still accessible via a gallery of NASA photographs from space. But if you want to catch up on the travels of the agency’s Voyager 2 as it ventures beyond the Solar System, you’re out of luck. As CNN reported, the crew responsible for monitoring the probe tweeted, “Due to government shutdown, we will not be posting or responding from this account. Farewell, humans. Sort it out yourselves.”