| 22 April 2006 Back Up I had out-of-town guests- Corporate ones- and I could have done a better job of hosting them if I had input to their schedules. But of course I did not. That was controlled by executive secretaries in some other state, and a company alliance with a major hotel chain. It could be worse. I read with horror in the Times the other day about a growing trend in business travel. Companies are insisting that executives room together on the road, to save expenses. It has not come to that for us, not yet. I think bankruptcy would be preferable; death before dishonor. It is coming full circle. When I was a young officer, the Navy standard for visiting quarters was two single beds in a room. A door lead to a bathroom, which was shared by the two occupants of the room beyond. It was great fun, since the door could be locked on the inside by whoever was using it, and it was common for a groggy user to forget to unlock the door and stumble back to bed, effectively leaving the other side shit out of luck. I think the Navy believed it was a luxury to not have a shower room and head at the end of the corridor, but my position was “any port in a storm.” Better a gang head than none at all. Sometimes the Goddess of the Fleet smiles, and you lucked out and had the room to yourself. But often enough, some new roommate would show up in the middle of the night, or be sprawled on the only chair when returning from work. Quality of life improved over the years, and by the time I retired even the troops were getting their own rooms and baths. But that might have been the zenith of the Democracy. In order to compete in the new global economy, our corporate world may be heading backwards in time. President Lincoln had to share a bed when he was a circuit attorney, and he didn't even get points on his frequent travel card. Undeveloped land being at a premium close in, this particular location had been constructed on land that had been a switching yard when railroads ruled travel. The parcel is cut off by the interstate and a shallow creek. Access is possible only through the distant ends, not sideways, and traffic in and out of the parcel funnels into a stop-sign that collides with a four-lane overpass that is jammed at rush hour, which forces the jam back up through the stop and into the hotel parking lot. That jam, in turn, leads to the heavy construction on the new Wilson Bridge across the Potomac, and the traffic that is snarled east to west, Baltimore to Richmond , respectively. “Never live on the wrong side of a bridge,” is what Mom says, but that is the way it works out in a city divided by the Potomac . The answer is to leave early, of course, and beat the rush. Which means that rush hour begins when the first eager-beavers roll out of bed in Fredericksburg or Quantico and head for the Imperial City . One of the corporate guys said the traffic was worse than New York , but at least they have an alternative. It got better. The corporate guys were in town to attend a conference on the Air Force Base next to the Anacostia. The freeway is under construction, but theoretically there are three gates to go through, all with different rules for admittance. The Navy has some adjoining property, and they have one set of rules for their civilian contract guards, while the Air Force has another on the two gates they control with fierce 19-year-old Airmen. They require government identification, or a phone call from the agency inside the base, which is often accomplished with the efficiency for which your government is known. Once on the base, if you make it, there is no place to park. It seems counter-intuitive that an inactive airbase should not have plenty of parking, what with the runways not being used for anything but new building construction, but that is the way it is. Arrive on the base after eight o'clock and you may wind up parked miles away in a distant lot, waiting in vain for a government shuttle bus that works with crisp government efficiency. Or you can just walk the two miles, freshly starched shirt slowly melting. That doesn't account for access to the actual building proper. There are two separate security systems in place, equal and non-communicative. I'm sure they will work something out, maybe share information someday. It is a new arrangement, after all, with the Director of National intelligence having just moved in a few weeks ago. I am convinced that the massive re-organization of the sixteen members of the Intelligence Community will someday establish fundamental change, like having a visitor's parking lot. But that is why they pay us contractors the big bucks, to put up with the stupidity of the system. We stumbled through the business end of the day, and eventually got the corporate guys on the road home to where they could sleep in a bed where they could chose their partners. I had other business in the afternoon, at Arlington Cemetery . An old colleague was being interred, with full honors. That meant caissons and horses and the ceremonial guard and a gun salute. It is impressive, and it never leaves me with a dry eye. The family has been waiting since last fall for a slot to open up, since Arlington is pretty busy these days. The pace of operations overseas is just highlighting another problem. The cemetery is running out of land. The Custis-Lee Plantation, which was seized by the Union to provide a permanent resting place for the dead of the Civil War, is just about full. We were in a long line of cars in the formal gardens of white stones, and saw the bulldozers at work, pushing dirt right to the edge of the highway to create flat new plots, and squeeze the maximum out of the available land. I think the four of us in the car had the same thought at about the same time. Shoot, that could be where they put us . Right next to the traffic that whizzes by, except at rush hour. Which is pretty much all the time now. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |