19 March 2004

Ramblers

I was out rambling around the town yesterday after a day in the vault.

It is a most secure vault in an anonymous building. They don't want us bothered on the project we are working, which is an examination of military intelligence with an eye toward reorganization and realignment. It is very sensitive, since it is about jobs, and hence we have gone covered. We have an anonymous project name and our own heavy copper door that swings on industrial-grade casters and has powered cams that lock it up, air-tight, and keep our secrets safe.

I don't know who the last bunch was that occupied the place, or what they did there. The building is dedicated to projects like ours, short term and most confidential. When they are done, the product goes someplace else, the paper goes in the shredder and everyone disperses, the vault clean as a whistle..

I went to bed last night with the high bid on a 1962 Rambler American convertible. The teen-aged son of a friend turned me onto the internet car market, showing me ancient Lincoln Continentals with suicide doors like the one Jayne Mansfield died in. It got me energized on the E-Bay and Autotrader websites and when I am bored I surf there.

Last Saturday I wound up on the E-Bay page for American Motors, which has been out of business for a decade. There was the dusty red Rambler with a ripped white top and the trademark bug-eyed headlights and painted crimson dashboard with the signature "R" that my Dad had contributed to the design as the assistant head of styling. Boy, did that bring back memories. My sister fell out of a Rambler American very much like it when she was little. While it was moving. Mom was disconcerted. When she retrieved her and admonished her not to play with the door-handle, she told not to tell Dad when he got home.

My sister has always been an independent kid.

I checked the status bar on the auction and saw there were six days to go before it closed. I bookmarked the page and checked every day to see what sort of activity was happening.

The car is in Phoenix and has been in storage for eight years. We had one a lot like it and I e-mailed my brother who lives in Flagstaff. He also thought it might be important to own it and offered his services as an intermediary if I decided to bid on it. But he said he was going on vacation and couldn't help this week.

My Dad had worked on that model year in the styling shop at American Motors and I was interested. My younger boy will need a car this summer, and this was no muscle car that he would wreck in a high-speed chase on the Parkway. But the car was ancient and funky enough to be interesting. So I was interested but cagey. I just watched. The initial bid was $500, and it hung at under a thousand bucks for most of the week. I'd click on the link a couple times a day to see what was happening.

My big social opportunity this week was last night. I took a pass on the annual St. Patrick's Day riot, although the Steelworkers International Lobbyists who live next door brought a little of it back to Big Pink after it started to wind down.

I was meeting an attorney pal at the Capital City Brewery after work. There was a lot to talk about. He is a retired military judge, out of uniform and trying to make a difference in one of the organizations engaged in the great fight against Terror. We yacked about that, and swapped sea-stories about the places we used to go. Port Layuete in Morocco and the Philippines, all the crazy people and the stiff crisp Service we both served for most of a lifetime.

I mentioned the issue that has been on my mind this week. I have an attractive offer from a big high-tech corporation. The company had got out of the Government market in the telecom boom of the '90s, thinking the rigid system was just too much trouble to deal with. When the commercial bubble burst they were left with no steady opportunities. In order to build the government side of the business back they are offering me an extraordinary package to walk away from my current job. I ran the numbers by my pal and he looked at me with a poker face and asked when I intended to start.

I blinked. I told him that I promised them an answer on Monday and had not yet talked to my management at the company where I work. He said to find my boss, tell him what Bell had offered and give them a chance to match the offer by Monday. If they don't, he said, give notice and walk that walk.

"But suppose it isn't a good fit?" I said.

"Hell, you don't like what you are doing now, do you?"

"Well, I like some of the people I am working with on the contract. And if I don't make it a year, I have to pay back the signing bonus."

"You did fourteen months in Korea standing on your head" he said. "And the people you are working with are not the people you are actually working for. "

He had several good points, all in a row. We had three-and-a-half beers and then walked out into the gathering gloom. It is trying to turn Spring here and not quite succeeding. Cold droplets of rain were falling on the bright-colored pansies the merchants have put out, hoping to draw customers with the prospect of warmer weather and renewal. I have not yet seen my first bare-midriff-and-sandals combination, but maybe this weekend the skin will start coming out. Hope springs eternial.

I drove home sedately, alert for the cops, ignoring the "check engine" light on the dashboard. This was the second time this month it had come on. The last time it was an Engine Gas Recycle valve that stuck, and I spent a day rambling between Big Pink and the Dealer in Old Town and taking the Metro to the office. I assume it is the same thing again but I hate warning lights. The new cars are so high tech nowadays that only the Dealer can tell what is wrong with them. They are just a pain in the ass.

I drove into the lot at Big Pink and found a parking place near the walkway up to my unit and sighed in relief to be home. I got the mail, turned on the TV and put on some rice over which I could ladle some leftovers. It was too hard and too late to cook.

I turned on the computer and scheduled a couple transactions on the Web Bill Pay for later in the month. I checked the recurring payments that keep the wolf from the door. When I was done I clicked on the bookmark that called up the Rambler auction. The high bid had gone up to $1,500. The auction was scheduled to close at midnight, Pacific Standard Time, and I was not going to stay up to do my bidding in real time. The time had come. I clicked on the little box and typed in a number. I clicked "submit" and the system blinked and told me I had been outbid.

I frowned and entered another number, slightly higher. There is software that provides an automatic counter-bid up to a predetermined amount of money the bidder is willing to pay. The system kept blinking back at me until we got to $2,600. It was more than I wanted to pay for forty-year-old car fifteen states away. But I had enough beer in my system to be one with my computer, and I stabbed in my last number, a generous offer above my only serious competitor. It was four hours until the auction closed out there in the west. I turned out the lights and slept like the dead.

The alarm went off at the usual time, harsh and grating. I was pleased to discover that the amount of beer the night before was just right. The white noise of the day began to envelop me. I noted that the incumbent President of Taiwan had been shot while visiting Tainan City, his hometown on the southern tip of the island. He was OK, but there was some dark talk about who was responsible. Maybe the Mainland tried to put him down for his inflammatory rhetoric about independence. The BBC informed me that the number two Al Qaida guy might be surrounded in Northern Pakistan.

I realized at that moment- thinking about terrorists- that I had dropped the better part of three grand on a car I had never seen. I sat bolt upright and got out of bed and started the coffee. I would have to send a thousand on PayPal to secure my end of the deal. Shoot, I thought. I wish I had just let the auction go by when it got over $3,000. What was I thinking?

I turned on the computer and opened the e-mail. Co-mingled with the reports about the Presidential shooting was a story about wine made on the Mainland. Chinese Chardonnay.

I scrolled frantically down the e-mail queue. There was a note from E-Bay telling me I had been outbid by $50 on the Rambler, at precisely 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time. I sighed in relief. No decisions and no intra-continental logistics to worry about today. Dodged a, e-bullet on that one. I relaxed in the glow of the screen.

Then I clicked on the other listings for Ramblers, wondering. Halfway down the column of thumbnail pictures was t a Nash Metropolitan, 1959, and white-over-red paint scheme and in cherry condition. They were amiable little bathtubs, cute as buttons.

"Shoot," I said, speaking to no one in the darkness. "We had one of those, too!" That auction closes in five days. And it looks like the price might be right.

I bookmarked it and wandered off to the kitchen to cook some eggs.