Yesterday, my sister-in-law Katje called and dropped some serious hints that I should invite her little family over for dinner at my place in Great Falls, Virginia. It made sense – she and my brother Rob Roy both work for Whizzonator-YoYoDyne Information Systems, one of the huge gaggle of federal contractors and subcontractors that created HealthCare.gov, the Obamacare Web site, which rolled out October 1. So by now they are both worn to such a complete frazzle from trying to get it to work properly, neither of them can manage going to the Safeway, buying food, bringing it home and preparing it for themselves and their son Jason. But likewise, all three of them are utterly tired of sending out for Papa John’s pizza, City Wok Chinese or Moby Dick falafel and kabobs, and also totally burned out with driving to the local malls and eating at places like Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesday’s or the Cheesecake Factory. Such circumstances are what relatives are for, of course, and so I immediately responded to her not-so-subliminal suggestions with an invitation.
It being fall, root vegetables are in season, and Katje is a vegan, so I put together a nice casserole of parsnips, rutabagas, arrow root, lotus, shallots, burdock and salsify seasoned with gray Celtic sea salt from Brittany and fresh herbs from my greenhouse. I made sure it was large enough so she could take some home for later, too, because I knew that would allow Rob and Jason to enjoy burgers and cold cuts once or twice without worrying about what Katje was going to eat. After all, vegans can outperform Jewish mothers and Catholic clergy when it comes to laying on a good, solid guilt trip, as I’ve seen Katje do many times. I have found, however, that giving them a nice root vegetable casserole can work wonders. And since I didn’t feel like making separate appetizers for Katje and the guys, we started off with a Thai style coconut, lemongrass and cilantro soup with wild mushrooms – no controversy there.
For Rob and Jason, on the other hand, there was no question they craved some honest meat, and that’s what they got, joining me in the thoroughly satisfying consumption of two-inch porterhouse bison steaks and venison sausage made with wild boar and dried black cherries. Those were accompanied with a salad of mesclun, radicchio, mache, scallions, roasted chestnuts and heirloom tomatoes, tossed with genuine ten-year-old balsamic vinegar of Modena and organic Tuscan olive oil, plus purple fingerling potatoes, prepared au gratin with water-buffalo cream and cultured goat’s milk butter, and baked with a thick golden crust of authentic French Gruyère.
With those, I served a 2005 La Sirene de Giscours Margaux and a chilled 2002 Chassagne-Montrachet white Burgundy. And although a vegan, Katje has never had a problem with the exploitation of those poor tiny yeastie beasties – I knew that and served the white Burgundy specifically to enhance the enjoyment of her special dish. For dessert, I made a 95 percent wild Peruvian dark chocolate and Spanish Mandarin orange mousse garnished with Moët champagne ice. At the end, only Katje’s leftover vegan casserole survived, and less than half of that, actually. No doubt about it, those folks were starving for some serious home cooking. Afterward, we retired to the living room for drinks and conversation.
“Outstanding!” Rob Roy proclaimed as he settled into the couch and knocked back a cold bottle of Dogfish Head Porter. “After a meal like yours, Tom, I could almost forget about that [expletive] [expletive] Boris!”
“Meaning,” Jason smirked, “Dad needs to vent about Boris again.”
“Normally,” Katje confided to me, “I’d chalk Rob ranting and raving about somebody at work up to his consumption of excess meat toxins, but not this time. That [expletive] Boris has even got me so upset, I feel like wringing his [expletive] scrawny Russian neck!”
“He’s a Russian?” I inquired.
“Well,” Rob huffed, “technically, he’s a US citizen, but yeah, he’s from Russia – some place called Vesyegonsk, north of Moscow, or so he says.”
“What’s um… got your goat about his fellow?” I wondered.
“All that [expletive] knows is Java, XML, Russian and English!” Rob bitterly complained. “And not such good English, either!”
“And certainly,” Katje chimed in, “not very good Java or XML, either.”
“And he works for Whizzonator-YoYoDyne Information Systems?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Rob confirmed, “he did – up until about a year ago. Our senior division vice president put him on the HealthCare.com development contract as soon as the ink was dry. The Veep was absolutely… queer for…”
“Rob!” Katje admonished. “Please don’t insult the LGBT community by using that word to describe the senior vice president’s social juxtaposition with respect to Boris!”
“Oh, all right,” Rob sighed, “sorry – the VP was absolutely… um… infatuated with Boris. He was talking about Boris all the time, you know…”
“He’s this… ah… diminutive fellow,” Katje interjected. “Boris, I mean – and he’s kind of… I don’t know… ah, I guess you’d say ‘cute,’ and being Russian and all, he’s got this exotic quality about him, I suppose.”
“What he’s got,” Rob protested, “is a gold silk brocade tuxedo, which he wore to the organizational Christmas party at the Washington Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill two years ago.”
“And,” I sought to confirm, “is this senior division vice president of yours by any chance from a Puerto Rican, Columbian, Dominican, northern border Mexican, Filipino, Greek, Armenian or Romanian family based in New Jersey within forty miles of New York City?”
“Why… ah… now that you mention it,” Katje stammered, “yeah. He’s Greek – from Hackensack. How did you…”
“Simple,” I revealed. “Only somebody like that would be impressed by a gold silk brocade tuxedo. Anybody else would think this Boris character is at best a pathetic fashion disaster and at worst, mentally ill.”
“I vote for both!” Rob shouted as he finished his beer and made for the refrigerator.
“The problem being,” Katje continued, “this senior VP who was so… uh… enamored with Boris, put him in charge of constructing the HealthCare.gov controller layer.”
“So,” I sought to confirm, “Healthcare.gov uses the Model-View-Controller design pattern?”
“Yes,” she affirmed, “and Boris was put in charge of the team that was supposed to implement the business rules for health care application processing.”
“Which meant,” I concluded, “that Boris would have to interact with… and comprehend… the various subject matter experts in the various subject areas of citizen health care insurance application processing?”
“Exactly,” she nodded as she took another sip of 2002 Chassagne-Montrachet white Burgundy, the unfinished bottle of which she had brought from the dining room. “The problem being that Boris didn’t really understand what the SMEs were talking about – he just typed what they said into his laptop and went back to his team and told them to program that – whatever the hell it was – as Java methods.”
“And his team?” I pursued.
“Oh, them, well,” Katje cleared her throat and took deep swig of wine. “Yes, them. In the beginning, it was a bunch of your typical clueless H1B visa bozos from India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Middle East and Taiwan. I remember Boris brought one of them into the Humphrey Building and the guy said, ‘What nice headquarters YoYoDyne have.’ Unbelievable, I guess, until you see it with your own eyes. I mean, all right – Rob and I aren’t PhDs in computer science, but at least we know that the Humphrey Building on the National Mall, a stone’s throw from the US Capitol, belongs to the Department of Health and Human Services. And, yeah, also, by the way, we’re not going to just blindly code any stupid requirements or algorithm somebody like Boris gives us, because even if we expect to get paid what we’re worth for our professional services, we’re intelligent, educated Americans who don’t walk around Washington DC with our heads up our [expletive] like some H1B visa geek that just got off the plane at National Airport.”
“One could sense a number of problematic aspects,” I opined, “to the situation you describe.”
“Right – that’s what you get the big bucks for, isn’t it, Tom?” Rob shouted as he returned to the living room, bearing another beer. “Describing a great big, sweating, stinking pig [expletive] in such terms, a person might even look forward to attending it!”
“Guilty as charged,” I sighed. “It beats working, though.”
“Tell me about it,” Rob groused as he resumed his place on the couch. “Listen, Tom, she hasn’t even gotten to the really [expletive] up part yet. What happens next, see, is Boris gets this brilliant idea to employ ‘code re-use,’ which he read about in a book somewhere and he vaguely knows has something to do with object-oriented software development, which, in turn, he thinks he understands because his Eclipse IDE compiles his Java programs. So he goes out on the Internet and downloads a [expletive]-load of Java Beans from sites all over the Web, and proceeds to put them together in this Tinker-Toy monstrosity…”
“’I make mashup,’” Katje quoted in a deep voice, mocking a Russian accent, “’to save big money and give Boris famous reputation – and also YoYoDyne – you thank me big time!’”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rob pressed on excitedly, “a software Frankenstein which has the most obscene interface problems imaginable…”
“Which eventually lead to both the most absurd performance problems and the most ridiculous, illogical and crazy functional executions of health insurance business rules…” Katje interrupted.
“Which Boris transcribed as total bull [expletive] in the first place.” Rob noted. “But it gets better. Or maybe I should say worse, because next, Boris resigns from Whizzonator-YoYoDyne Information Systems and starts his own company – named ‘Govnosos, Inc.,’ after his son – which, in turn, thanks again to that VP from New Jersey, becomes a subcontractor to Whizzonator-YoYoDyne Information Systems! Then, Boris stuffs the personnel roster with crowds of people who work for him – all at a 17 percent G-and-A rate!”
“And all obtained from Russia, Eastern Europe or the male bath house Boris likes to visit after work!” Katje yelled as she poured the dregs of the Chassagne-Montrachet into her glass. “That’s the kind of stuff that’s going on with HealthCare.gov! That’s the kind of stuff that’s been going on in Washington DC every [expletive] day since Rob and I moved here and it makes me [expletive] sick! We pay taxes too, you know, and it doesn’t matter if we happen to work here, we can get just as mad about this [expletive] as anybody in Peoria or Omaha! We’re Americans, too, and we think all this corruption and [expletive] sucks, just like everybody else does! But what the [expletive] can we do about [expletive] holes like [expletive] Boris, huh? They come here and they attach themselves like [expletive] ticks in a dog’s ear, and then they start sucking our blood, ripping everybody off left, right and [expletive] center!”
“And you see where people like Boris get us,” Rob added. “Thanks to YoYoDyne, HealthCare.gov and his gold silk tuxedo, Boris got obscenely rich! While millions of poor people across this nation are trying – and failing – to apply for health insurance, Boris is moving into a mansion on Royal Oak Drive!”
“As Jimmy Carter once observed,” I remarked, “life is unfair.”
“Unfair?” Katje objected. “Okay – unfair I can live with, but [expletive] rigged?”
“Yeah,” Rob snorted, “Rigged? Is rigged okay, too?”
“How about it Tom,” Jason asked with sly smile. “Is America supposed to be rigged for guys like Boris and screw the rest of us?”
“How about seconds on dessert?” I suggested.