19 February 2004

Plenty of Free Parking

I am starting off slow this morning. The New York Times e-version did not show up in my inbox , and although I have been up for more than an hour already, I have accomplished precisely nothing. I had a glitch copying files from my archive to the hard drive on the new computer.

Between trying to retrieve old files and move the dauntingly tall stack of loose crap from the old apartment to the new one, I am confronted by the meaning of life. The State Department is telling American citizens to get out of Haiti again. The Pentagon is squirming. DoD has its hands full in the Middle East right at the moment and does not need a sideshow in the Caribbean. But it could come to that. There are 20,000 American citizens on the Haitian side of Hispaneola, and they could be the cause of intervention. And there is the possibility that the unrest in the hinterlands could spark another boatlift toward Miami.

That is where I came in the last time, standing there on the pier at Port au Prince when the Coast Guard Cutter brought 400 refugees home for repatriation. No asylum for them, just a return to the slums.

I need to get moving toward my latest contract. I checked the Corporate e-mail when I got home last night and discovered the last contract I was working has some problems, and I may have to work nights to cover the Watch down at Homeland Security. I hope not.

This is all not a dress rehearsal. Life is happening, the sands running through the glass and there is no getting them back to the bulb on top. Each day is precious, as I note sometimes as I have been sitting in these endless meetings. We sit and talk from 0900 to 1700 each day. Sometimes we get an hour for lunch, sometimes our moderator forgets to give us an afternoon break.

We have been debating endlessly the various aspects of military intelligence, the element of the cycle of Tasking, Collection, Processing, Analysis and Dissemination. The deal, of course, is about money. We spend a few dozen billions of dollars on intelligence and he subject is controversial at the moment, newsworthy, since the Presidential election may hinge on who knew what and how they spun it at the time.

If we re-organize for some myth of efficiency- this is the Government after all- we will create opportunities for the agile and smart, and others will get swept along in the eddies and currents of change. People hate change, and none more so than bureaucrats.

The CIA is under assault from the Panel the President convened, and military intelligence is under assault from our peripatetic Secretary Rumsfeld. We could get caught in a cross-fire, too, so the giddy uncertainty of this lends a certain excitement to the dull and lifeless ExCel Spreadsheet we project on one wall of a little airless conference room

So that is the context of the place in which we sit each day.

The lunches are not bad. There is a little steam-table deli downstairs where the food is expensive but hot. The major problem is getting there, which is the universal problem here. The development of Crystal City is a strange one. It was created due to the synergy of the Pentagon and Industry. Government activities spilled over into the gleaming towers built over the Metro tunnel. So you would think that the proximity to mass transportation would make this easy. But of course it is not. The Metro is chronically underfunded and does not work the way subways do in real cities. The trains have a fairly good frequency at rush hour, but during the day they have gaps of ten minutes or more.

In Moscow, a grim place by most standards, there is a train arriving on any platform every two minutes, day or night. London is criss-crossed by train lines and they run with a certain eccentric grace. New York functions with an American urgency. Washington, combining the charm of the North and the efficiency of the South, just pokes along.

I live near the Orange Line which crosses the Virginia suburbs and plunges into the District, West to East. To get to Crystal City, one must transfer to the Blue Line at Rossyln, last stop in the Old Dominion. With the train change, you may get the opportunity to wait as much as twenty minutes on the platform waiting for a train.

But the supreme problem is the parking. There is none. If I pick up the train at the closest station to my apartment, I could walk twenty minutes and get there, if it wasn't raining or snowing. In the summer I would arrive with my suit soaked in perspiration. In the winter I would freeze. I am an American, after all, so I sometimes drive to my corporate office and park there for free in the underground garage. Then I walk the two blocks to the Metro stop at Ballston and go underground from there.

Sometimes it takes ten minutes with a fortuitous train to Rosslyn, and another eight on the Blue Line down to Crystal City. With the eight minute walk to the office building, it is theoretically only a half hour. But the whole thing is absurd, since I can drive to Crystal City in eight minutes. There just is no place to park when I get there. The few metered spaces are occupied by 0600; the alternative is the underground garage.

That is remarkably convenient, though harrowing, since the Washingtonians drive in the concrete darkness with the same wild abandon they do on the Beltway. And then it is $17 a day to park.

There are discount rates for a monthly pass, but they have been promising our move to another more permanent Government facility daily for nearly a month. I think I could get reimbursed for the parking on the contract, but I haven't figured out how to do the paperwork for that. The Company is comprised of stingy paper-pushers on overhead, who spent their days not making any money scrutinizing the timecards of those of us who do.

Don't get me wrong, I am thrilled there is a train at all. But arriving at Crystal City, it is a brisk eight minute walk to the building where we work, and eleven floors up to the Government office where the surly employees grudgingly let us into "their" spaces and eye us to ensure we do not read "their" magazines. They don't trust us and have not given us the combination to the cipher lock on the door. There is a Colonel in charge who looks perpetually dyspeptic.

He was assured we would only darken his door for a few days and we have been camped in his conference room for nearly three weeks. They say we will move on Monday to a suite over near Virginia Square. They claim there will be free parking, and I know the neighborhood. It is on the vibrant Wilson Boulevard Corridor, where the new building are sprouting atop deep underground foundations, and there are plenty of places to go for lunch.

So that is where the Spring will come to us, over near the Orange Line.

Life may be finite, but there is something special about the new facility something that approaches the meaning of life here. They say there is plenty of free parking.