28 February 2004

The Process

If we can just get out of this month, things will be fine. Not long to go. But it was not a good day, yesterday, and this being alone sucks. That was part of it. There was more.

I got a call in the evening at home, telling me the meeting that had been moved up to eight o'clock. There were important issues to be resolved. We need to move the process along. Getting there meant hustling a little. The Murphy bed never did get folded up, fuck it, it thought as I crashed around the shower, small pictures piled beside the basin in the bathroom, trying to brush my teeth without splashing too much on them. Piles of crap everywhere, why had I thought them all so precious?

The rebels are advancing on Port au Prince, says the radio. Pro-Government forces are buring and looting. I thought it was the rebels who wanted to do that, I thought, walking past the portraits my Dad had done lining the floor of the entryway, boxes on the tiny kitchen table. Crap everywhere. Later. I'll get organized later, I thought.

It was cold outside, breezy but clear. If we can just get out of this month, the process of Spring work its magic. The flowers will be up in a few weeks.

I made the meeting on time, driving with deliberate pace to the tower in Crystal City and parking deep in its bowels, wondering at the lack of security. Free and easy access to all comers, the towers filled with government offices and the contractors whose parasitic presence make it all work. Then into the office where we occupy the conference room, a special facility where we can talk about the sensitive matters we must resolve by summer's end.

The organization that is unwillingly hosting us has reportedly spent several billions of dollars since they were established by Congress to address a specific shortfall in readiness and they have never issued their first product. They resent our presence, directed by their master in the Pentagon. Ah, the Government!

We sit around the large conference table at precisely eight, not quite a quorum. The moderator tells us we are going covered next week. Our little panel will get a new name, a euphemism for what we are doing, which is to provide a plan for change, should our grown-ups desire it. We will take our new collective identity to occupy an anonymous suite in an anonymous building that hosts groups such as ours. It is an innocuous name. If I told you, I would have to….never mind. The old joke rings hollow this morning. I don't want to kill anyone. I just don't to pay $2 for a cup of coffee and $17 a day for parking.

I am a pragmatist these days.

Both those issues will be resolved at the new facility, though the restaurants are not located at the foot of the towers as they are here.

Since we do not have enough representatives to do anything requiring a decision, we sit and the moderator tells us about the new building, and plans for the next few weeks. He will have to repeat all this when the others show up. I should not mind. After all, I am a contractor now, and get paid for sitting, whether anything productive is happening or not. Still, it grates.

I doodle in my notebook, mundane matters mingling with the great task. I make lists of things that still have to be done to clear the old place by midnight tomorrow. Kitchen first? I need to move the old clunky microwave oven to the Good Will. I wonder how much I have to clean up when the rugs and the last big chair are moved, and where I am going to put them when I get them downstairs. I think it will all pile up on the patio, awaiting a place.

And at the bottom of everything else is the big Oriental rug. I love that rug, all blue and gold swirls of hand-knots. It took a family the better part of a year to tie it from native wool.

It is the nature of life, I suppose, that the biggest things are at the bottom and all the rest must be moved away before one can reach them. Of course, having arrived at the fundament, I will have to roll it up and bring it down to a place where everything else, all the other baggage has already arrived. Perhaps I will just drape it over everything and live under it like a multi-colored Bedouin tent.

We sit and chat for an hour. Eventually the computer support people arrive and one of the Services that had not participated in the formative discussions. We have enough people to start our deliberations. We begin to review our basic assumptions, projected on a screen at the end of the room. A question was raised by someone who hadn't been present when these talks began three weeks ago. It is about percentage of budget versus number of people who do something. We start through the logic of what we decided, struggling to remember why we had done what we had done.

We need to report this back to our various Agencies. At the back of everyone's mind I was the absence of the man who had started the fight at the end of the previous day was not present. He arrived as I was beginning to think about lunch. He is a senior executive from one of the three-letter agencies around town. I offered him my seat at the table, since I am a supporting player in this body and not a principal. He smiled thinly and declined. He took a seat along the wall and sat passively, listening to an arcane discussion of the acquisition process. He had a flower on his lapel and a pink ribbon pin to signify his support to the effort to find a cure for breast cancer.

Someone had told me he had lost his wife. Perhaps that accounted for some of the simmering anger, a rage against fate focused on this Process. I could feel the intensity even at this distance.

It took a few minutes. We tabled a proposed solution to the matter at hand and opened up a discussion of its merits. It went around the table and then it began. The man with the flower cleared his voice and began. He informed us that he had been with his seniors until eight o'clock the previous night, and he questioned the very basis of what this group was doing, and what our recommendations would be. He questioned the process and told us we had not read the legislation that mandated our study.

He had revealed truth, I thought, and his voice had that strained quality to it that meant he was trying to control stress. But then his began to rise, quoting us from the weeks of discussions and I realized he had taken verbatim discussion back to his boss, slandering our professionalism and objectivity. I began to get that feeling in my gut that made me want to act. I listened to the rest as he finished his oration. Having delivered the message from his agency, he sat leaning forward, poised to attack the next bit of wrong-thinking.

Our moderator was nonplussed. He had been phlegmatic throughout this process, listening patiently to the Agencies and Services. There are equities at stake, but his feeling was that reason and collaboration would get us to answers we could present to the Grownups. That was what we had been ordered to do by Congress and the Secretary of Defense and as best I could tell, that is who we worked for. He came back at the man with the flower with rising fervor and then it went back and forth for a while.

I could see that nothing was going to come of this process, not this day, and perhaps the next week and month. Doing business in this town, in this Intelligence Community, is like pushing a rock up a hill. I looked over at my Customer and made the gesture that means "I'm pulling the ejection seat handle." I folded my notebook and got up, the rest of the people around the table looking stunned at the interplay going on at the other end of the room.

I have been down this road before, trying to get agreement between the management of fourteen classified activities, all of them thinking they have a veto. I was pretty good at it, even if my last effort had taken two years to complete. But this study has a time limit, and if the children cannot play well with others, then we are going to get something the nation cannot live with.

I am a Contractor, now, and I cannot say what I want. I picked up my briefcase and held my hand against my ear, simulating a cell phone. My customer nodded, indicating he would call me when he needed me again. He was the Government. He had to stay.

I left the secure facility and down the elevator and into the vast garage. It was cool outside, but pleasant. I put the top down on my convertible for the first time this year and tried to let the crisp air cool me down.

I have a lot of crap to move, after all. It is part of the process.