Vic Socotra

23 August 2008

Dump Charlie

Summer is going fast now, almost like the “dump program” option on the Mac. Drag-and-click to the recycle bin. The season is almost toe-tagged.

Or maybe better, it is like taking perfectly good jet fuel and dumping it in mid-air to get down to landing weight. Landing with full tanks can overstress the airframe and leave you with a broken jet.

It is one of those secrets you don’t think about on the ground. All those airplanes up there, and many of them hitting the valves to pour out extra fuel. Once gone, the liquid mostly vaporizes on the way to the earth, and you would almost not know that it had ever been there.

The military slang for getting rid of the extra fuel is “Dump Charlie.” It has populated other idioms, too, like taking a leak.

But I digress.

Fuel is a precious thing, in the air, and once gone it cannot be retrieved without heroic means. That involves other airplanes, flying gas-stations, and intricate coordination and rendezvous in the sky. It is part of a system-of-systems so complex as to boggle the ordinary land-bound mind.

To alight again safely, merging with the spinning earth, requires you to throw it all away. I felt that way at the end of the theoretical working week, lined up on the active runway and dumping the fuel I might need later if I had to take the whole thing around again on a missed approach.

Friday started bad and does not show any indication of getting better. I caught the Invisible Girlfriend at a bad time yesterday, which is how things cascaded into the rest of the day. She was in the middle of the wild roaring rampage that leads to glimpses of the Great Void; I had a bunch of nice people in my office working as a task force to capture some business.

They were looking over my shoulder at the IM box on my screen. I scowled. This is no one’s business except maybe the company that owns my computer, selected law enforcement personnel an d the NSA.

I don’t like people in my office, hovering at my back, and am a little disconcerted that my room at the end of the hall has become a bull-pen for a business operation.

There are worse things, I suppose. But timing has been a challenge this week, just as it is in aerial refueling. All the gas you need right there in front of you, and if you cannot plug the probe just right, it does not matter.

Thank god it is not a dark night. Now it is Saturday morning, there should be time to poke over a couple rocks and see what is underneath. Then there should be time for the chores, a haircut, perhaps, and a couple hours in the bright sunshine.

I need to start the big bike before the battery dies, and it turns into a six-hundred pound piece of modestly-chromed static sculpture. Maybe I can learn to ride it in the Fall. It is close enough, the days dumping fast.

Leaping to the top of the things-to-do list is the Dog, whose liquid brown eyes display his need.

None of those things are going to happen. There are two projects due later today. I vaguely recall weekends; they were things that existed at Big Blue and the Phone Company, but not here.

Particularly not with the torpid Government suddenly energized with manic activity, shaking its pockets and showering opportunities on the eager vendor community.

Apparently the Chief Financial Executive at the Agency put in place a "shut down" memo in the financial stream as effective as a closing a check-valve, preventing the orderly flow of cash to the dump nozzles. It stayed in place weeks after the Supplemental funding for the war was passed.

I don't know the motivation; you can never go far wrong in attributing it to simple incompetence. Of course, it might have been a stubborn protest against OSD Comptroller, or the Director of National Intelligence. Both of those offices have minions who must wave the magic passes of authority to unloosen of the Congressional purse strings on the little purse of heavy golden coins.

The practical consequence, and these things all have real effect regardless of how philosophic they start, was manifold and rippled through the Agency. One was to scare the Interns half to death (no actual jobs at the end of the trial period for the graduated Seniors).

Another was a disruption in the march of contract business. So now there are five Task Orders due next Friday, and two Red Team reviews today, due at four and five pm, respectively, and one tomorrow. There are another five or six Tasks that will be issued in the next week, or two weeks, possibly, and the mad scramble is on to get it together.

The tasks being offered are from the Unfunded Requirements List, the ones where the vetting is a little spotty. So the customer doesn't know precisely what they want, and we don't know precisely what to offer.

Fair enough, and nothing new. As a taxpayer I am not impressed. That is not a requirement for doing business, alas.

I have to manage to carve out time for swimming, and the exercise has been a marvelous tonic. It is tinged with sadness, though, since the pool will only be open in the evenings for a little more than a week. Two weekends in September, then dump the chlorinated water down to the winter level and the tarp goes on.

I'll have to find something else to elevate the heart rate besides sheer dread at the passage of the minutes through the dump valve on Sunday evenings and the realization that Monday morning is nigh.

The dog is stirring, and that is far more important than anything either I, or your vigilant government, have20on the menu. He needs to Dump Charlie, and it is not going to vaporize on the way down.

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