Vic Socotra

09 December 2008

Leap Second

(Marshal Zukov's Statue in Red Square)

The earth is slowing down- you have felt it, too, I suspect. The astronomers are going to have to add a “leap” second to the next year, 2009, I think, to accommodate the dramatic decline in the rotational speed of the planet.

I started feeling it last year, in December, of all things. Maybe you did, too. Something sluggish about the way the banks were working. I had an itch to spend all my money, something I tamped down pretty well. Which was good, as it turned out. I had to have something to lose in the market.

That was not the only effect. The continental landmasses are lurching to the left with the deceleration. That is the only thing I can find that accounts for the strange stuff going on. Pavel, the Czech lifeguard at Big Pink the last two years, hit my Facebook page from the Czech Republic. It seems like Prague has slipped more than a second to the west. Pavel is interested in staying connected, either because he may want to come back, or perhaps if I need to seek asylum east of Germany.

But if the Czechs are slipping, that is nothing compared to what has happened to the former Soviet Union.

I was considering that when I got an e-mail note from Anastasia, one of the Russian women in my life. As it turns out, both are not actually Russian, but Ukrainian. Anastasia is the apparatchik. She rules her subcontracts with an iron fist. She hits me up, not with a request to Facebook, but with arcane questions about risk and insurance, overseas deployment premiums, and non-disclosure agreements.

Imagine for a moment that you are a happy-go-lucky program manager for a major suburban consortium of government contractors. It is hard to generalize about them, though I do all the time. They are all people, most of them coming from the same sort of background I do. Most on second careers, having served their nation in uniform and now free-booting to carve up the public bounty.

Most of us are doing pretty well, since the government is still spending the money appropriated last year, before we realized the earth was slowing down. Hopefully, by the time they wake up and realize what is wrong they will be pouring money down some other rat-hole and we will be agile enough to transform ourselves into some other line of work to take advantage of it.

Of the many qualities of the government, bless it, agility is not one of them. It is more like the falling of a mighty Sequoia, and hard to steer on the way down. President-elect Obama is about to find that out.

Anyway, Anastasia is always with me, since there is apparently no action I can take that does not cause an equal and opposite reaction in the world of subcontracts. Sometimes it is simple stuff, issues with translation between the language of her birth and that of my business. It can be hard. I was trying to get a non-disclosure agreement in place with a prospective small business to gain an advantage on the proposal score-card, which rated our bid not just on whether we could do the work, but how well we did on important social goals that have nothing whatsoever to do with the national defense.

She wrote me an urgent e-mail to ask what the subject of the non-disclosure agreement should be. I looked at the title of the e-mail, which said: “Non-Disclosure Agreement required for Discussions on Government Contract HMM-02-345-003.”

I resisted the inclination to send back a zinger. It would be counterproductive at best. I could have hurt her feelings and she might have found a dozen complex sub-paragraphs to bedevil me with over the course of the afternoon. She does that sometimes, and after a 45-minute discussion, gives an electronic Russian shrug you can feel over the phone and tells me it doesn't matter.

More likely it would have had no effect at all on a woman whose skin had been thickened by growing up in the Soviet Union. A smart-ass e-mail saying “Read the title” would have had no more effect than firing a pop-gun at Marshal Zukov’s legions at Kursk, you know?

I have considered using one of the translation services on-line to translate my e-mails into Cyrillic characters in the hope that we could communicate better, but it takes too much time going back and forth from English to Russian to ensure that I am not saying something like Jimmy Carter said to the Polish people, when he meant to say that he had a great intellectual fondness for their long struggle, and the translator informed the throng that the President loved them- in a deep, intimate and carnal way.

It was not as widely remarked as the famous remark of John Kennedy to the Germans, when he stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate and informed the astonished crowd that he was an jelly donut (“Ich bin ein Berliner!”) but that is the hazard of trying to do important things in a tongue not your own.

I actually met Anastasia at a meeting a couple weeks ago. I didn’t know what to expect; her husky contralto voice conjured up all sorts of images, and Russian women are a very attractive side of the species.

In the flesh, she is manifested as a tall, willowy woman of a certain age, with dark hair and dark mysterious eyes. You can see why the Tatars invaded her homeland, that exotic cast to the eyes, like Stalin himself, or particularly Leonid Breschnev. We were talking about allowable risk on insurance policies, a subject that I find endlessly fascinating, and wondering exactly how she had managed to uproot herself from Moscow and take a chance on a marriage in America, and the fast-paced life of government subcontracts management in an alien language.

’t know where I might want to go, and that is a problem. Plus, in the larger sense, there is no insurance. I wonder at the magnitude of the problems that Anastasia was getting away from, and the price she was willing to pay to do it.

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