02 March 2007
Social Security
I was reading about the markets this morning, listening to the rain beating hypnotically on the window. I turned to Paul Krugman's column in the Times. He explained how the stock market was going to fall apart. Funny, I thought, I never worried about it when I had nothing invested and a steady government job.
The pay was not awful, and the greatest benefit was the security. It gave you a place in society, that did, and was sort of like the blanket that Linus carried around in the comic Peanuts.
Funny, that was something I wouldn't have had to explain just a few years ago. It was ubiquitous, part of the fabric of life. Linus, Lucy. Good 'ole Charlie Brown.
Artist Charles Schultz never brought anyone onboard to replace him, intending to end the strip on the day he could not longer draw. It was too much a part of the society, though, so they just started to run the old panels. I imagine that with the number they have, they could march backwards in time and we roll forward, and we could wind up with Peanuts looking like the Katzenjammer Kids, hopelessly out of space-time context.
But I quit reading the comics, since the news was so bad, and couldn't tell you where Snoopy is today. People who work in the print media don't have much security these days, any more than Paul Krugman says the money invested in the stock market do.
He says there have been so many loans made to people with marginal qualifications that when the run on them starts, the whole system will come down like a house of cards.
It made me a little nervous, but that is to be expected. As a government contractor I have the double-whammy on that. I kept the clearance that the government gave me and parlayed it into a decent job, doing things for the government that it no longer can do for itself.
It was a great deal, at least for me and the thousands like me here in Washington, and provides the security of a steady trade that no one without a clearance can join. At least, it was until this year, when the shelf-life ran out on my background investigation.
Every five years an update to the original investigation has to be conducted, with gumshoes and everything. The requirement is still on the books from the Cold War. The government feels obligated to rush around twice a decade to re-investigate us to make sure that we have not converted to communism.
I suppose it is justified. People do change, over time. I quit reading the comics and now take sugar in my coffee, and that might be useful for the system to know.
I was getting polygraphed a couple years ago as a requirement to do some job, and saw my actual file on the desk of the examiner. It was ominously thick, four or five inches tall. It was what they always warned you about things not looking good on: Your Permanent Record.
It looked heavy enough to injure you, if it fell off the desk, and the examiner was a dead-ringer for my ex-wife's attorney. You can imagine how much fun the session was once I was all wired up and told not to breath.
I mentioned that the government can't so even routine functions for itself anymore. At least not since we re-invented it and hired contractors like me to do them. It is well known that the Security end of the business was never filled with the best and brightest in the business, and in fact the security "system" for controlling classified material and issuing security clearances is rampant with make-work and featherbedding. It provides life-time security for all sorts of bureaucrats.
I want to be charitable here, so let's say that there are the very best of intentions behind the system that slowly fell behind in its responsibilities. I am pretty good about remembering when I have to submit the paperwork to keep my clearance up to date, at least since the year that the government lost part of my file and expired me.
Thankfully I was still in the government, and of course it can do what it wants. It is not the same thing out in the private sector. I submitted my papers on time, just as the office that conducts the investigations announced that they were 350,000 investigations behind, and were going cease operations due to lack of funds.
That is more investigations than there are people in the Navy, for goodness sake. The catastrophic failure would have been surprising, if it had not happened before. With my investigation in the works, it naturally caused me some anxiety. I had to put it right up there with the threat from global warming and bird flu.
The month of expiration came and went, and money was found to hire some folks to go around and ask personal questions. I had no idea where the process was until I got a call yesterday.
It was an angry woman who claimed to be from the Office of Personnel Management, one of the agencies that is trying to work off the back log. She informed me that she had been assigned to conduct part of my investigation, which is good news. That means that the paperwork had not been lost, and the sixth of these five-year indignities was actually underway.
It is never a good thing to have angry investigators, though, and I was solicitous to her on the phone.
“We have to talk to the ex-spouses she said,” and your seems to have disappeared.” I was pretty sure that she hadn't, since I talked to her just the other day. “I have tried everything, even the computer 411. She is gone. Do you know where she might be?”
It seemed like the lady suspected I had done away with her, which is never a good thing in a security investigation. I told her that she had dropped the land-line and gone wireless, but the number was the same, and I recited it from memory.
The Special Agent was silent for a moment and then said that the problem was that she could not read the copies my file that had been given to her. I wondered idly how many sets of my file were out there, laying in the back of cheap sedans piloted by low-bid contractors headed for interviews with angry ex-spouses.
She thanked me for my time, and said she would be getting with my ex-wife shortly to discuss my suitability for continued access to government secrets.
I wished her a very pleasant day, having little in the way of a constructive alternative, and looked blankly at the phone.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com