I was sitting in the little office they gave me on the E-Ring of the Pentagon talking to one of the people who were attempting- partially successfully- to keep me sane in the face of a new job. Like most of the career, it was accidental in nature with no discernable scheme or plan to it. At that particular moment, we were discussing the unlikely topic of $500 million dollars, or more precisely, how to find a pile of currency sufficient to construct a new government building for emerging requirements of the Global War on Terror.

Jerry sat across from me at the small desk. Like me, he had been one of the intel geeks entrusted with operating and managing a classified program of some fairly significant dimensions. He had been doing it for several years and many of the mysteries of government money had been revealed to him in discussions about all sorts of things. The Air Force was interested in replacing the engines on the aircraft used to re-fuel sensitive reconnaissance missions on the periphery of potentially hostile nations. It was not an insignificant amount of money, something a bit like discussing replacement of the engine on the family car at the dinner table. Or these days, a new battery powered vehicle like the Secretary of Energy recommends.

It was an interesting conversation to someone like me, since the amounts of dollars under discussion started with ordinary numbers- one through nine, normally, before one had to associate the “m” or “b” prefix with them. You may have experienced the same sort of disorientation lately when they started using the “t” word to describe things like “a thousand billion dollars.” It used to be a number so large it sounded a little like science fiction. Not so much anymore, you know?

Apparently they want us to get used to it. Jerry explained to me how it was possible to conjure up five hundred million dollars for a project the headquarters thought was important in a budget just beyond the edge of our world. For planning purposes, that was bounded by what we called the “Future Years Defense Plan,” or the “Fy-Dip” for short. It was an ungainly thing produced by central planning and approved in manageable chunks each year by Congress.

I had assumed that things ended with the five-year period covered by the Plan. My pal laughed and said that was not exactly the case with Government cash. Instead, the numbers have their own lives and continue beyond the planning cycle and into an infinite sort of indeterminate future. We went to coffee later at the little cart that parked in the corridor near the office. Finding that much cash, along with the idea that all those gigantic mounds of it stretching out across the years into the future, made us a little giddy under the fluorescent lights.

Naturally, it was just a planning factor and I got used to the idea of those mounds of money as factors to be dealt with in other calculations involving buildings and pensions and stuff like that. But the need for those sorts of numbers faded with retirement from government service. Everyday life required calculating things in what we planners were told to keep our hands well clear of- what the green-eyeshade crowd called “The Year of Execution.” That was the year the elves actually printed the checks, turning imaginary money into actual cash.

The memory of that conversation is now decades old, but useful in terms of dealing with orders of magnitude. It flashed back yesterday afternoon with a rush under sunny skies. Rocket collected the mail. There was a fairly large number of envelopes in the haul he brought in from the mailbox out on the County Road. We don’t collect it every day, since the distance to the black metal box out there amounts to a distance long enough to (almost) justify driving out to check.

There was a thick envelope from the insurance people who manage the plan that covers some of the excitement in the recent medical adventure. It accounts for charges incurred in a single month, late July through late August of this exciting year.

We let Splash open the envelope since he has a penchant for drama. And the power of imaginary money swept over us at the Fire Ring. The bill was a total of thirty odd daily events with the total printed neatly at the bottom on the second page of figures. The total was $198,016.06, which is a bit more than we usually spend on groceries and gas. The insurance company said they would cover about $40,000 of it, with no requirement for additional funds to be provided by the Refuge Farm exchequer. We don’t know where the difference comes from, but once we knew it was “imaginary” like the Student Loan debt, everyone relaxed.

That came with general relief that the admonition “This is Not a Bill” was prominently printed at the list of charges. With that we realized that the bill incurred under those bright lights and populated with the team in the pale blue gowns was just as real as a government building we swore we would pay for in only six years.

“At least the down-payment,” commented Splash. “We have to buy electric cars by then anyway.”

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