Early yesterday evening, as I relaxed in the study at my home in Great Falls, Virginia reading the Outlook section of the Washington Post, the doorbell rang. Whereas the living room was full of people attending one of Veronica’s holiday parties, I didn’t bother getting up – after all, the damn door bell had been ringing since about four. So it was a little bit surprising when a knock on my study door followed some two or three minutes later.
“Tom,” Veronica’s voice burbled through the door – not even six yet, I reflected, and she was clearly displaying the effects of excessive alcohol consumption, “you have a visitor!”
Upon opening my study door, I beheld Veronica, all champagne smiles and cocktail giggles, arm in arm with Hundsfot, who stood there, mute and obviously embarrassed, as she spoke. “Mr. Collins, may I introduce Mr. Hundsfot, Acting Deputy Assistant Chief Operations Officer of the Department of Housing and Urban Development Information Technology Directorate.”
Not being entirely pleased at the unexpected visit, I played along with Veronica, extending my hand with exaggerated and ironic ostentation. “Ah, yes, Mr. Hundsfot, of the Southwest Washington Hundsfots, I presume?”
“Tom,” Hundsfot twitched, disengaging his arm from Veronica’s “this is serious. You know that, or I wouldn’t be here at your house on a Sunday.”
“If that’s how you’re rolling,” I sighed, “then all right. Come in.”
“When you boys are done working,” Veronica called out as I closed the door, “be sure to join us and have some fun!”
“Who is that woman?” Hundsfot winced as Veronica’s voice faded down the corridor.
“An old friend,” I explained, “from college. Her house burned down. Since then, I’ve been letting her live here – as a paying room mate.”
“And where,” Hundsfot asked, now slightly curious, “was her house that burned down?”
“Malibu.” The name hung in the air, filling up the room completely for several seconds. Hundsfot was stunned. “She used to live in Malibu?”
“Yeah.” I sank back into my favorite plush leather reading chair.
Hundsfot took a seat on the couch. “Malibu, California?”
“Affirmative. That Malibu.”
“Well,” Hundsfot observed, “she certainly does look like she’d, ah, fit in there.”
“She’s one of the few people in my experience,” I concurred, “who bother to maintain a tan in DC during the winter.” I pored over Hundsfot’s haggard countenance – the man was clearly worried to death. “So,” I surmised, “it looks to me like your supervisor is about to write a letter to your file.”
Hundsfot’s face fell. “Who told you?”
“Nobody,” I sighed, “I just happen to know from experience that’s the only thing which could make a federal bureaucrat as upset as you are at the moment. What’s that letter going to say?”
Hundsfot’s gaze sank to the floor. “Nothing good,” he replied morosely, “you can bank on that.”
“Civil Service supervisors,” I remarked, “never write nice letters to their subordinates’ files. That’s the thirteenth corollary of Murphy’s Law ‘Do something right, nobody remembers…”
“’… Do something wrong,” Hundsfot whimpered, “nobody forgets.’”
“So what in heaven’s name,” I demanded, “did you do that was so bad, your supervisor’s going to write a nasty letter to your file about it?”
Hundsfot raised his hand, pointing at the business holiday cards displayed on the bookshelf above the desk. “There. The one you got from us at HUD IT.”
“Oh, yeah,” I mused as I rose and plucked the HUD holiday card from the group. I keep all my business holiday cards in the den, reserving the living room for display of personal greetings. It just doesn’t make sense, in my humble opinion, to give equal prominence to heartfelt Christmas cards from my family and bland holiday missives from other consultants, contracting firms, my real estate agent or my plumber. No, all those latter types of cards, including the one I’d received from HUD IT, go on the shelf in the den.
The card Hundsfot had indicated immediately got considerably more scrutiny than when I had first looked it over while plowing through a stack of my mail, which, being December holiday season mail, was about twice the usual size. So at the time, the HUD IT card hadn’t received more than a few seconds of my attention. But now, of course, I was being paid to look at it. It was clearly custom designed and probably produced in a lot of a few hundred at some place like Kinko’s. The cover featured various holiday decorations, proclaiming “Season’s Greetings from the Housing and Urban Development IT Directorate.” Inside, however, was a rather strange, and, I might add, decidedly tasteless cartoon. Several ladies and gentlemen, depicted in caricature as elves and wearing elf hats emblazoned with the acronyms of various federal contracting firms, are lined up on their knees in front of Santa Claus, who is labeled “HUD IT.” Santa’s sack brims with scrolls labeled “ERP Contract,” “FEA Contract,” “SANS Contract,” “Telecomm Contract,” “O&M Contract” and so forth, and Santa’s outstretched arm holds a scroll labeled “FY 2010 Recompetes.” The lady elf on her knees directly in front of Santa’s crotch is unfastening Santa’s pants. The scene bears the caption “We Know If You’ve Been Bad or Good, So Be Good for Goodness Sake!” After a moment’s reflection on this, I resumed my seat, greeting card in hand. “Okay,” I opened, “it’s a good bet your supervisor is probably pretty upset about the… let’s say, somewhat racy nature of the card.”
“For starters,” Hundsfot nodded slowly.
“So,” I continued, “as they say at the delicatessen, ‘and what else?’”
“The, ah, implication,” he stuttered uncertainly, “um, that Civil Service employees want sexual bribes in exchange for federal contracts, something about which, uh, she says I should know better…”
“Which is?” I leaned forward expectantly.
“That Civil Service employees want money in exchange for federal contracts,” he lamented, “not sexual favors. She says sexual favors are part of the personal services every federal employee above a GS-12 has a right to expect from federal contractors as part of the performance of their contract tasks. Also, she said that if we send holiday cards of any kind to our incumbent federal IT contractors, we have to send the exact same holiday cards to all our potential IT contractors, too, because if we don’t, the ones who aren’t incumbents and don’t receive a card will file administrative protests.”
“Okay, then,” I advised, “I hope both of us realize that there are twelve days of Christmas, eight days of Hanukkah and seven days of Kwanzaa, and anything postmarked tomorrow qualifies for all three of them…”
“She’s got me on that already,” Hundsfot wailed. “She says that the doctrine of equal treatment for non-incumbent contractors dictates that their cards be postmarked the same day as the incumbents’!”
“So,” I concluded, “unless you happen to have a time machine handy, there’s nothing you can do to rectify the situation.”
“Nothing,” he sadly muttered, “nothing at all.”
“Well, first,” I began, presenting my preliminary analysis, “since you sent me this thing, I want you to know that I resent the implication that I’m some kind of prostitute.”
“Oh, no, Tom,” Hundsfot protested, “not you! Look, look,” he admonished, pointing at the card, “you don’t see your business mentioned in the labels on the elves’ hats, do you?”
“No,” I allowed, scrutinizing the card closely a second time, “now that you mention it, I don’t. Do you mean that only the companies depicted as elves in this cartoon are providing personal services, up to and including rusty trombones, for federal bureaucrats at HUD?”
“Well, Jesus, Tom,” Hundsfot griped, “if the artist put in an elf for every federal contractor that puts out for Uncle Sam, the card would be the size of a wall mural and you’d still need a magnifying glass to read the company acronyms.”
“Given that,” I pressed him, “how did you decide on this particular group of federal contractors which appears in the cartoon?”
“I didn’t, Tom,” Hundsfot shot back self-righteously. “They were in the e-mail attachment.”
Hearing that, I moved to my desk and booted the PC. “Which e-mail?”
“The e-mail,” Hundsfot ruefully sneered, “that my supervisor sent me, ordering me to prepare a batch of customized holiday cards from HUD IT using our graphics equipment, get them printed up charged to our administrative budget and send them to various recipients listed in a spreadsheet using HUD franking accounts and…”
“Wait minute,” I forcefully interjected. “This isn’t, by any chance, the same supervisor who’s about to write a nasty letter to your file, is it?”
“Why… why, yes,” Hundsfot stammered. “It is.”
“Now let me get this straight,” I requested. “She sent you an e-mail, telling you to make up and send these holiday cards, and now, she’s going to reprimand you for having done so?”
“That’s about it,” Hundsfot sadly confirmed.
“In that case,” I suggested as I rose from my seat, “you drive. Go to your e-mail server and forward a copy of that e-mail to me.”
“Sure,” Hundsfot replied as he took a seat at my desk. “Hey, wait a minute,” he exclaimed, “where’s Outlook?”
“As the Magic Eight Ball has been telling us since before Microsoft even started stealing other company’s applications and inextricably insinuating lousy imitations of them into the code of the Windows operating system, ‘outlook bad.’”
Hundsfot’s face screwed up in a mask of confused disconsolation. “What are you talking about? How can I do e-mail without Microsoft Outlook?”
“Funny you should ask,” I opined, “since you are, as a matter of public record, the Acting Deputy Assistant Chief Operations Officer of the Department of Housing and Urban Development Information Technology Directorate.”
Hundsfot stared at the PC desktop display, utterly bewildered, then recoiled in panic. “What is this thing?”
“Linux.”
“Linux?” Hundsfot glared at me in disbelief. “What, do you think I’m stupid or something? Everybody knows that Linux is only good for back office applications and network management. There’s no such thing as a Linux PC that’s like Windows!”
“Don’t take it out on yourself too much,” I consoled. “Your level of understanding is entirely consistent with ninety one percent of United States government Civil Service IT professionals. The fact that you’ve never heard of a Linux desktop system isn’t your fault.”
Hundsfot’s face brightened a bit as he stared at the PC monitor screen. “It’s not?”
“How could it be,” I inquired, rhetorically, of course, as I accessed the HUD e-mail server root, “when, as we both are well aware, no particular expertise in anything is required in order to become a member of the United States Civil Service? You get out of college, you get out of the armed forces, whatever – and you know what, really? Nothing. Then, because you fulfilled this or that demographic criterion; or, you were a veteran of a volunteer national defense force with an honorable discharge, and therefore qualify as a verifiable social conformist with documented respect for authority, no matter how asinine – and utterly devoid of imagination, not to mention intelligence, since you volunteered to join the armed forces of a superpower which passed from barbarism to decadence with no period of civilization in between in the first place; or, you know somebody who lets you in, because you’re related to them, or you, ah, shall we say, did something which ingratiated you, and so, as a consequent of one or more of those factors, you obtain a position in the United States Civil…
“Stop!”
“You drove all the way out here, to my house, uninvited, without notice,” I railed, intransitively, by the way, being by now reasonably riled up, “barged into my home while my room mate is hosting a holiday party, and demand an unscheduled consultation…”
“Stop!”
“The results of which,” I pounded home, you now refuse…”
Hundsfot reflexively pulled his hands up, covering his ears. “Na, na, na, na, na, na, na! I can’t hear you,” he shouted.
“Listen,” I shouted back, “I know the United States Civil Service Handbook instructs you to do that, but it’s high time you ignored the rules and started looking out for Number One! Don’t you realize,” I screamed, “that your federal retirement is at stake?”
“My… my federal retirement? At stake?” The very words checkmated him.
I knew that would work – extensive experience has taught me that the parasitic mentality of the US federal employee is uniquely susceptible to such a particular angle of deconstruction. “Yes, Hundsfot, your federal retirement. If you persist in denying the cost benefits of open, non-proprietary software solutions, eventually, the hubris of your own, ignorant solipsism will destroy you.”
“Okay,” Hundsfot shuddered, “you have my undivided attention.”
“Good,” I encouraged, “now we’re getting somewhere. While we were… talking… just now, I accessed your e-mail account – well, almost, anyway. Just type in your password.”
“But, but…” Hundsfot shivered as he broke out in a cold sweat. “Microsoft security is impregnable!”
“And where, might I ask,” I, well… asked, “did you get such an absurd idea?”
“That’s what they tell us,” Hundsfot insisted. “According to Microsoft’s account reps, what you just did is completely impossible!”
“That,” I coldly told him, “is what Microsoft wants you to believe.”
“But what if, instead of you, a trusted consultant with multiple security clearances – what if somebody else, a terrorist, for instance, what if they could just break into US government systems based on Microsoft technology whenever they feel like …”
“Duh, yeah, sure,” I broke in, “and your point is?”
Hundsfot’s face went bright red. Very slowly, one character at a time, he entered his e-mail account password as the veins stood out on his forehead like a topographic map of lava pipes in the Ngorongoro Crater. “There could be an IT security breach…”
“For which…” I extrapolated as I watched him complete the password entry sequence, “as Acting Deputy Assistant Chief Operations Officer of the Department of Housing and Urban Development Information Technology Directorate,” you could, potentially, be held responsible… “
“No! No! No!” Hundsfot insisted as he pushed himself away from the desk, hot tears spilling from his face as he buried it like a frightened child between his knees, “Not me! Not me! Blame it on the contractor! The contractor! The contractor did it, not me, I swear! Who are you going to believe – a loyal member of the United States Civil Service or some hired expert who works for private industry?”
“Please,” I implored, “try to control your gut reflexes so we can determine an effective solution to your problem! Now that you’re signed in to your HUD account, forward me a copy the e-mail you were talking about earlier.”
Yes, I have a stash of Dior handkerchiefs in my den, too – for just such occasions – and I quickly provided one for Hundsfot to honk upon, which he did, loudly. “Thanks, Tom,” he murmured, slinking back up to my PC keyboard, “it doesn’t look the same, but I’m sure I can… yeah, there it is. Forward it to you, is that what I should do?”
“Exactly,” I affirmed. “Forward that e-mail to me. No,” I corrected, “not that one. Click on the control that’s marked ‘Forward.’ Good. Now type in my e-mail address. No, that’s ‘dot-net,’ not ‘dot-com;’ okay, good. Now click on the Send control.”
“What… what is this thing?” Hundsfot was transfixed, mesmerized, staring at the PC monitor screen.
“It’s an open-source Web-based SOA e-mail user interface, written using AJAX, running on a Linux PC in the Firefox browser.”
“Good Lord,” Hundsfot breathed softly, obviously amazed, “what are all these controls? What do they do? How do you work this thing over here?”
“No time for that now,” I informed him with just a touch of regret in my tone of voice. “There – the Forward process is starting. Let me sign on as myself and read what that e-mail says.”
Withdrawing slowly to the couch again, Hundsfot reluctantly allowed me to take over. Two minutes examining the headers was enough. “So, here’s what she wrote: ‘It’s that time of year again, and this year, you’re the lucky HUD IT team member who gets to create our annual season’s greeting to HUD IT contractors. Attachment 1 contains the instructions. Attachments 2 through 6 contain the image files. Attachment 7 contains the list of recipients. Charge production to your Government credit card and deliver the completed envelopes to the HUD HQ mail room for franked delivery charged to HUD IT. Happy Holidays!’ That’s it, right?”
“Yes,” Hundsfot affirmed as he peered over my shoulder at the monitor, “that’s the e-mail she sent me on the fourth of December.”
“Well,” I revealed, “maybe you received this message and its attachments on Thursday, December 4th, 2008, but your supervisor wasn’t the person who sent it.”
“But… but that can’t be,” Hundsfot insisted.
“Sure it can,” I pointed out, “if somebody spoofs your supervisor’s e-mail address through a proxy server in Minsk, a DNS server in the Cayman Islands and a mail server at the federal courthouse in San Francisco.”
Hundsfot fainted. It took me about five minutes to revive him. “There, there, old boy,” I encouraged, “it’s not as bad as all that. I’m sure when your supervisor finds out somebody tricked you, she’ll view things in a different light. And besides,” I pointed out as I propped him up on the couch, “it’s not like the card has a picture of Uncle Sam dressed up like Santa, defecating down a chimney all over the American Taxpayers, is it?”
Hundsfot rolled his eyes at me. “As a matter of fact,” he slurred, “it does – on the back.”