When you hear the grand announcement, that your wings are made of tin, then you know, Junior Bird Patrol, to send your box tops in!
Up in the air, Junior Bird Patrol – up in the air, upside down;
Up in the air, Junior Bird Patrol – with your noses to the ground!
Boeing needs the revenue and the contract’s downright wired, everybody knows the whistle blower was quite promptly fired!
Up in the air, Junior Bird Patrol – for federal boondoggle scum-baggery,
Up in the air, Junior Bird Patrol – Project Vulture is the RFP for me!
Late this afternoon, just about when I was ready to leave for what I hoped would be a blissful weekend during which I would have to solve no particular problems for anyone, my private secretary ushered Morton into my office. Those of you who have been with me since the beginning will remember Morton as one of two people I mentioned in nothing less than the second post made on this Web log, back in December of 2006. For those of you who don’t remember or didn’t know about Tom Collins World Wide Web Log then, I’ll save you the trouble of using this blog’s Search feature to find the post and simply tell you who Morton is – an old friend who was about to lose his job with the most evil corporation in the world, allegedly on account of me starting up this Web log, whom I helped out by arranging a replacement position with one of the other most evil corporations in the world; not a corporation in the top ten most evil ones, but definitely in the top forty.
“Tom,” Morton lamented as he took a seat on the couch by the window, “I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. Since Boeing sent me here to DC for meetings with those bastards at DARPA, I figured this would be the best time for me to see you, face to face, and ask for your help. I hope,” he sobbed, “I’m not ruining your weekend, barging in here last thing on a Friday afternoon, but… but… the house payments, the kids, their constant demands for things, the riding lessons, the dancing lessons, the tennis lessons, the music lessons, the acting lessons, the orthodontist, the utility bills, the pool bills, the country club dues; the landscapers, sending those [expletive] [expletive] out with their [expletive] leaf blowers at seven in the morning on Saturdays; and the cell phone bills – astronomical, incredible cell phone bills for IM, text messaging, GPS map navigation services, video downloads, music downloads, ring tone downloads, for Christ’s sake – payments, insurance and upkeep on an SUV, a hemi pickup, and a Lexus, Tom, and with the price of gasoline these days, and the price of clothes, my digital cable bill is what I paid for rent on my apartment after I got out of college, for God’s sake, Tom; even food – a trip to the Safeway is like four hundred [expletive] dollars, and my wife, Tom, she drops five hundred at the salon twice a month, another three at the health spa, over a two grand a month at Nordstrom’s and whatever [expletive] chi-chi boutiques in every [expletive] mall she can find, and on top of that, she’s out buying these [expletive] overgrown gold fish, you know – koi, for like three, maybe five thousand a pop and telling me they’re an investment! I’m… I’m not like you, Tom… I’m not… not…”
“’Single’ is the word you’re looking for, Morton,” I assured him.
“Yeah,” Morton sighed, “I guess that’s it, basically. Tom, I’ve been whoring my [expletive] out to Boeing, just like I whored my [expletive] out to Microsoft. My nose is raw from scrubbing all the [expletive] off it I get kissing my bosses’ stinking [expletive] seventy hours a [expletive] week. But what good does it do? Not only is my family less than two paychecks away from living at the Salvation Army, those [expletive] suckers at Boeing put me on the [expletive] DARPA Vulture Project.”
“Oh, no,” I sympathized, “I’m so very sorry to hear that.”
“No kidding,” Morton agreed. “But you can’t be any more sorry about it than I am, though. I really thought Boeing was going to win that Air Force tanker plane contract.”
“The KC-767, you mean?”
“Yeah, that one,” Morton affirmed. “They had me slated to go to work on that, and when Northrup won the contract instead, back in February, well, around Boeing, beggars couldn’t exactly be choosers, you know? Still,” Morton muttered, shaking his head, “getting assigned to the DARPA Vulture project…”
“It’s sort of a backhanded insult,” I observed.
“Exactly,” Morton concurred. “Vulture is a totally ridiculous idea – an airplane that stays aloft five years in the stratosphere.”
“It’s supposed to replace military surveillance satellites, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Morton sighed, “that’s the general concept. DARPA is thinking solar would be the most feasible power source.”
“So something like that,” I surmised, “it would have to be very light, very slow and very large.”
“You are very correct,” Morton responded.
“So consequently, Uncle Sam would have this huge, flimsy, low velocity and not particularly agile unmanned vehicle built to hang out indefinitely over hostile territory at altitudes of sixty to ninety thousand feet. Sounds to me like the Ayatollah Khomeini High School Science Club could shoot the sucker down with nothing more than a home made solid fuel rocket, a ground based laser guidance system and a decent telescope to aim the laser beam with.”
At that, Morton bent forward, placed his head in his hands and let out an exquisite groan. “No [expletive]. And guess what they put me in charge of?”
“Hostile attack countermeasures?”
“Yeah.”
“Morton,” I told him, “you are one truly unlucky guy.”
“Why me?” Morton mournfully beseeched of the ceiling as he sat up, spreading his arms in a gesture of helpless futility. “And the Project Officer – sweet Jesus Christ, what an [expletive]!”
“Oh, yeah,” I agreed, “those guys at DARPA are legendary. I’ve never met one that isn’t a total piece of work.”
“Mine sure is,” Morton complained bitterly. “You should have seen him at the executive preliminary meeting – two and a half hours of yammering about himself and his fellow geniuses at DARPA. I mean, it was ridiculous. You couldn’t get a word in edgewise. The guy simply would not shut the [expletive] up!”
“You know how a DARPA project officer screws in a light bulb?”
“How?”
“He stands there with the damn thing in his hand while the universe revolves around him. Why do DARPA project officers smile when lightning strikes during thunderstorms?”
“I donno, why?”
“They think they’re having their picture taken. Why won’t Blue Cross cover DARPA project officers’ radiology bills?”
“Because they’re denser than lead?”
“No, because they’re so vain, they insist on having their X-rays retouched.”
Morton chuckled morosely. “Much funnier,” he opined, “after you’ve met a couple of them. This guy, he’s astounding, there’s just no other word for it. Suppose you ask a perfectly reasonable technical question, such as ‘How do we plan to keep a solar powered aircraft aloft at night?’ What does he say?”
“You mean,” I inquired, “after two and a half hours, he finally let other people at the meeting talk?”
“Yeah,” Morton nodded, “I think it was pure muscular exhaustion – it looked like his jaw just finally gave out. So, what does this guy say when one of our engineers finally gets to ask a question and wants to know how he intends to deal with flying a solar powered aircraft in the dark? ‘What are you asking me for? That’s your problem! You won the contract, didn’t you?’ And what’s worse, it looks like [expletive] NASA wants to put their [expletive] finger in the pie, too. They sent this woman who just sat there, fuming, while the DARPA guy did his motor-mouth marathon. After that, we got to raise maybe three technical issues, ask a couple of scheduling questions and maybe get in five minutes on staffing before she went off on this totally incomprehensible ninety minute tirade about aircraft wing and control surface design, stratospheric meteorology, the ozone layer, solar flares, ion storms, the boreal and austral auroras, ultra density energy storage devices, high-performance optics, digital surveillance technology, the manned Mars program and something she called ‘quantum tectonic geodetics,’ which I haven’t been able to find anything about, anywhere.”
“What did the DARPA guy do during all that?”
“He took copious notes. Then, when she finally shut the [expletive] up, he picked an argument with her about everything she had said. That lasted one hundred and seventy-five minutes.”
“Sounds pretty bad, Morton. What’s the budget?”
“It’s a piddling three point eight million bucks, Tom,” Morton softly wailed. “With those two clowns involved, we’ll be lucky to deliver a project plan for that kind of money. I can just see them now,” he continued angrily, “arguing over the scope, arguing over the task definitions, arguing over the activity durations, arguing over the technical approach, arguing over the assumptions, the constraints and the risks; then demanding continual re-writes, revisions, additions, deletions, ah, [expletive], anything they can think of to get back at each other, all while the clock is ticking, the meter is running, the sands of time blowing away into oblivion.”
“From what you’ve told me,” I assessed, “your prognosis is perfectly plausible. If all you’ve got is three point eight million, an artist’s conceptual drawing and two typical federal Civil Service imbeciles from DARPA and NASA, I’d say you’d be well advised to jump ship before the scow sinks.”
“That’s why I’m here, Tom,” Morton revealed. “As it happens, last week I was approached by my previous employer.”
“You mean, Microsoft wants you back?”
“Yeah,” Morton said, “they always have.”
“Really?”
“Sure.” Morton smiled, just slightly. “Thanks to the job lead you gave me, I was able to quit, you see. Since Microsoft is actually a cult, not a business, they always fret about it when somebody displays enough free will to leave. On the other hand, if I had waited around for them to fire me, then forget about it – they would have performed the Microsoft Excommunication Ritual and I’d never have a shot at working there again.”
“So you could,” I surmised, “skate back to Redmond instead of putting up with this Project Vulture nonsense at Boeing.”
“Well, yes – and no. Or maybe no. Or maybe yes. The problem, Tom, is that they want me to work on Microsoft Mesh.”
“Oh, great,” I exclaimed ironically, “now I see why you’re here. Mesh is to Microsoft…”
“As Vulture is to Boeing,” Morton interjected, confidently completing the analogy.
“So, on one hand,” I observed, “Boeing has a pretty picture of Vulture, and on the other, Microsoft has a PowerPoint presentation about Mesh. Of course, Microsoft has a hell of a lot more than three point eight million dollars to invest in Mesh.”
“And Boeing intends to talk the Pentagon out of a hell of a lot more than three point eight million for Vulture,” Morton asserted confidently, “you can take that to the bank, for sure. If they only get three point eight billion flayed off the taxpayers’ backs for it, I’d say Boeing wouldn’t nearly be performing up to their usual level of avarice.”
“Well,” I replied, “I bet that, as of today, the Pentagon’s probably spent more money on Vulture than Microsoft has on Mesh. After all, there’s a limit to the amount of money even Ballmer and Gates can waste on development if the product is nothing but arm-waving presentations and vapor-ware.”
“Microsoft may have gotten farther than that,” Morton offered.
“Could be. How do they describe the product?”
“The officially blessed spiel goes: ‘Mesh is a software-plus-service platform that enables your PC and other devices to come alive and be aware of each other through the Internet.’”
“Morton,” I protested, “you’ve gone and bent the damn needle on my bull [expletive] detector.”
“Sorry. But it’s in some kind of beta, or so they say at Microsoft. They call it a ‘technology preview.’”
“And just how,” I demanded, “is Mesh different from Google Apps?”
“Well,” Morton confessed, “as far as I can tell, it’s not as robust, it’s not as functional, and you have give Microsoft money in order to use it.”
“In other words, Mesh is another example of the standard Microsoft business model – if you can’t buy the company that has the real, innovative and powerful technology, steal the concept and produce an inferior imitation. Then bundle the purchased and/or stolen products with your operating system, force hardware vendors to bundle your operating system with their devices, and charge all the suckers out there in cyberspace up the wazoo for your rotten imitation software.”
“You got that right,” Morton admitted. “So what do you think, Tom? Do I stand a better chance of survival working on Mesh at Microsoft or the Vulture at Boeing?”
“You sure know how to pick them,” I mused. “It’s like deciding between sliding down a three-story spiral bannister covered with razor blades or sucking on Dick Cheney’s nose until his head caves in.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Morton murmured softly. “What should I do?”
“Apply to Dyncorp.”
“Dyncorp?”
“Yeah, Dyncorp. It’s quintessentially evil, just like Microsoft and Boeing, but they don’t do surreal projects like Vulture or asinine projects like Mesh.”
“Well, then,” Morton implored, “what kind of projects does Dyncorp do?”
“Dyncorp does demented projects, like Plan Colombia.”
“And that,” Morton asked, incredulous, “is better?”
“I don’t know about better,” I averred, “but I know for sure, Dyncorp will hire anybody with a pulse, a security clearance and a willingness to perform disgusting, morally questionable acts and keep their mouth shut afterward.”
“Well, I sure as hell qualify for that!” Morton chirped, now considerably more cheery and confident. “Thanks, Tom,” he said as he got up from the couch, strode over to me and shook my hand, “you’re the best friend a guy could ever have!”