Green Side Up

There is an old joke that is completely appropriate to this day as we prepare to stagger back to work. The excess is about over, parties done, and return legs from vacation complete or in progress today. The Ohio State Buckeyes are Kings of College Football, first time since the year before I went to college, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. In the pro game, which thankfully has weeks yet to grind on, last night Michael Vick dethroned Brett Favre as the pro quarterback of legend, making history at Lambeau Field in frigid Green Bay.  The Packers had never been beaten there in the playoffs. They have now. The Jets look unstoppable in the Wild Card round of the NFL play-offs as they routed Payton Manning’s Colts. Thank goodness there is still more football. Something to keep us distracted.

Oh, the joke I’m thinking about features a work crew and it’s foreman. You can pencil in any social or ethnic group you want, that doesn’t matter. Where I came from, years ago, when brontosaurs still lumbered up Woodward Avenue, they happened to be of Polish national origin. The foreman of the group would let them clock-in and start to work, yelling “Green side up!”

So as we all collectively clock-in to the new year there are some things we need to be aware of. If you have not flown since the first of the year I need to pass along the happy news that things are all screwed up again. Congress has mandated 100% baggage screening. There is the predictable pandemonium as new processes and procedures are put in place. The conjunction of e-ticketing and increased security is bewildering. One is intended to speed us up and the other is intended to slow us down. They are working in tandem to make us rapidly confused. As my son discovered, you advance to the electronic monitor, swipe a credit card to establish identity, scroll through several touch-screen menus and the machine prints a boarding card. Should you wish to check a bag, a tag is printed- but only behind the counter where an airline employee pulls it out of the printer, checks to see if the airline has filed for bankruptcy, and calls your name. Nowhere, of course, does the system tell! you that is that is what is going to happen. My son finished his boarding ticket and then stood there looking baffled. Meanwhile, paper-ticket dinosaurs are swirling around the check-in counter to add to the general festive confusion.

At least that was my observation at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport this morning. Even with the glittering new terminal there is a limited footprint available on the postage-stamp airfield, and now the heroic concourse is occupied by the gigantic x-ray screening machines. Which is where you have to go after the ticket counter. The counter people no longer swing the bag onto the conveyor belt behind them where the bags would disappear into the maw of the airport. No there are two lines of people at either end of the huge screening machines which emanate many good bursts of x-ray energy. The signs don’t tell which is the one for people to feeding bags into the machine, and which is for paranoids who want to lock their bags up again after they have been searched. For my son, with a duffel bag, he didn’t care and once the confusion was mastered, actually wasn’t that bad. Of course, he was willing to walk away from the clean underwear and towels if necessary.

The bad news came when we got to security to actually access the boarding area. I couldn’t go with him, of course, since I have only been in Federal Service for 26 years with credentials that used to allow me to plan airstrikes on hostile nations. I stood there watching as the TSA security checkers were laughing at a Secret Service Agent who thought he didn’t have to have his bag checked. He seemed to think his badge meant something. My son’s problem is that he fits the profile of a young man wearing a backwards ball-cap and big shoes. Travel in the winter is bad enough, and he is going to the heart of the meat-locker in Michigan. Her has his big parka and two backpacks. He has to strip off the parka, empty his pockets, remove his shoes, lift his two bags onto the conveyor, step aside into a special holding pen and Assume the Position to get The Wand. All the while trying not to lose the flimsy e-boarding pass and his picture identification. It took him about ten minutes of ! fumbling around to get through, and I hope he had everything when it was all over. I am pleased he is not a smoker. That would make this all completely impossible.

There is frustration to be had aplenty for young men these days. I’m glad it was not like that when we were young and being crazy. It just isn’t fun anymore, and he is flying into the snow in Chicago to change planes. So his adventure may not be over. I don’t think his airline is under Chapter Eleven re-organization. That could change by the time he this O’Hare. Oh well.

Vacation is over. Everyone back in the salt mines. In the old joke, the crew takes their coffee break, and when they come back, the Foreman yells “Green side up!” for several minutes. So older son is launched back to his academic salt-mine, and I can turn my attention to the major work of literary analysis on Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy my younger son has deferred through the season of joy. Of course, it is due tomorrow when the County schools re-open. I predict there will be some significant oratory this afternoon, and several soliloquies, some of which may even be from the play. And in the larger world, the one in which the adults defer their homework until Monday, our little staff will be back from their break, sunburned and unfocused. I noticed in the Times this morning that Vietnam is experiencing a tourist boom since as a Communist Dictatorship it has excellent security and fabulous beaches. Castro ought to look into that.

Meanwhile there are several tasks which have dropped limply into the in-baskets since our employees left, bright-eyed and ready to make merry, and the great work of the Government will begin again in grand buildings and cubical farms all across this Imperial city. There is important policy to made, long meetings to schedule, phone calls to not return and memos to write. War looms in the Gulf, the Koreans have a box they need to get back into, there are the Seven Terrorist Dwarves to chase across the globe, and a host of underlying and significant problems to continue to ignore. You know, the ones that will actually destroy us. Now that the party season is over, we may as well get back to work.

Oh, and the punch-line to the joke? It is just like tomorrow is going to be in a lot of offices. The Foreman is dealing with the inability of the workers to remember what they are doing after any time off, even a coffee break. He is telling the landscapers to lay the sod “Green Side Up!”

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra