When Gretchen booked Nathaniel Gordon of the National H1B Visa Coalition for a consultation, I suspected he would present some tough problems, and I dare say he did not disappoint me. Arriving promptly at eight a.m., wearing a ten thousand dollar suit, a six thousand dollar pair of shoes, a thousand dollar French cut shirt with five thousand dollars worth of cuff links, a twenty-two hundred dollar tie, a twelve hundred dollar pair of socks, his wrist adorned with a platinum Rolex, and carrying a twenty thousand dollar brief case, Gordon was a resplendent advertisement for the merits of dressing like you’re so rich, you just don’t know what to do with your money. It’s all an act, of course. He’s not really that rich, and he does know what to do with his money – it’s tucked away in various off-shore banks located in countries with tight privacy laws and nice resorts. Of course, many of his organization’s members are lead by top executives who actually have become that rich from pimping third-world geeks to the American economy – so rich that they have, in fact, no idea what to do with all their money; which is why Gordon dresses like that, so he will fit in while he hobnobs with them.
“You look great,” I informed him as he sank comfortably into the couch by the window.
“Thanks, Tom,” he graciously replied, pointedly looking at my wrist. I don’t wear a watch, precisely because people in Washington are so quick to judge a person by what sort of watch they wear, and I like to make them wonder about it for a while before they jump to their usual and inevitable wrong conclusions. “You’re looking pretty good yourself.”
After the obligatory smile and nod, I got started. “How can I help the National H1B Visa Coalition today?”
“Well, Tom,” he began, “as you know, the NHVC provides support for the importation of technical foreign workers to fill critical positions in the United States economy. These are positions that can’t be filled by Americans – positions that require specialized attributes American technical workers simply don’t possess.”
“Yes,” I mused, contemplating the ceiling briefly, “so I’ve heard, and I’ve always wondered exactly what those attributes are.”
“Very valuable attributes,” he assured me, “such as a total inability to understand US labor law; the obsequious personalities of those raised in rigidly hierarchical cultures; utter incomprehension of United States Constitutional rights; unquestioning obedience to anyone placed in charge of them, no matter how ignorant, stupid or even insane that person may be; a completely oblivious and unconcerned attitude toward accepted American business ethics; haunting and continuous fear of deportation back to the squalid, disease-ridden hell-holes they have escaped; and, of course, a compliant willingness to work eighty to ninety hours a week for less money than the average Beltway bandit pays an American with a high school education to put in thirty-eight and a half as an administrative assistant.”
“An impressive list,” I observed. “But haven’t you left out their comprehensive lack of understanding with respect to federal acquisition or wage-and-hour regulations, such as those that require total-time reporting, thus allowing an employer to deliver ninety hours of labor in a week and charge for only seventy, making employment of H1B visa technical workers appear superhumanly competitive when compared to Americans who, unfortunately, know about those regulations and realize that they can go to jail for failing to comply with them?”
“Oh, yeah,” Gordon chuckled, “that, too. Why, I bet most of those data-wallahs, system-coolies and reg-edit ragheads would rather go to jail here in America for the rest of their miserable chinky-winky, gollie-woggie, sand-monkey little lives than have us pack them up like rejected trashy, imported Wal-Mart junk and ship them back to the rotten, maggot-infested dung heaps they sold their own sisters and mothers to claw their way out of; no, not even for ten stinking minutes!”
“Indeed,” I murmured, wondering if he was done. He wasn’t.
“I tell you Collins,” he continued, “with the kind of leverage their sponsors have over them, there just isn’t one, single, solitary illegal, immoral, unethical, debasing, dishonorable or unprincipled act an H1B visa slave won’t do if their supervisor tells them to do it!”
“And so,” I inquired, “what’s the problem?”
“The problem,” Gordon fumed, “is that one of our redskins went off the damn reservation!”
My eyebrows arched slightly as I asked, “In what way?”
Gordon’s face screwed up as if he were sucking a lemon. “One of them decided to break the law on his own!”
“Oh,” I agreed, “that certainly is dire.”
“No kidding,” Gordon nodded furiously. “For many years, the National H1B Visa Coalition and its business partners have been successfully exploiting helpless third-world bingy-bangies, charging up huge profits from clueless federal clients, and royally ripping off the taxpayers in the bargain – it’s been a total win-win situation all around! Now, some bow-legged, buck-toothed, cross-eyed, curry-stuffing Gunga Din comes along and tries to screw the client on his own initiative! What’s more, he gets caught, thereby threatening to upset our entire applecart full of golden goose eggs!”
“For purposes of thorough analysis, could I ask,” I requested, as tactfully as possible, “just what did this obviously less than handsome and unfortunately benighted westernized oriental gentleman do?”
“Well,” Gordon sneered, “the first thing he did was to make a bunch of changes to some gizmos called ‘server scripts,’ and those hosed up… ah, what did they call it… uh, the client’s ‘service-oriented architecture’ for an entire day while the other geeks located the problem and fixed it.”
“Why,” I asked, a bit puzzled, “didn’t they just roll back to the previous configuration?”
Gordon shot me a mystified glance. “Do what?”
“The changes to the server scripts you mentioned – surely they were part of a larger, phased software version release, weren’t they?”
Gordon squinted at me, quizzically. “A what?”
“Ah, well,” I explained, “IT industry best practices dictate that all changes to software must be mapped to specific requirements that have been assigned to a defined version of the product. So, I was wondering why the system administrators didn’t just roll back to the previous version of the network management suite as soon as they noticed problems with the new deployment?”
Gordon shrugged. “You, know, Tom, this federal client was like most federal clients – people just walk over to the IT section, find a programmer and tell them ‘make the system do this,’ ‘make it do that,’ or something.”
“All right,” I sighed, “I get it. Information technology maturity at the federal enterprise in question was essentially at CMMI Level One – Chaos.”
“Hell,” Gordon snorted, “you’re the expert on that kind of subject Tom. What you just said is completely Greek to me.”
“Sure,” I agreed, “why not? ‘Chaos’ is a Greek word, after all. So, what we have here is some H1B visa slave with network server system management software programmer access who does anything anybody tells him, because he’s deathly afraid if he doesn’t, your coalition business partner who put him on that federal contract will ship him back to his mud hut village in Wickywackystan faster than he can say ‘Me go America, get big pukka IT job and fat white woman to make green card and plenty babies.’ And one day, somebody walks up and tells him to modify the server scripts. At that point, one of five things happens. Either (a), the H1B visa slave’s English sucks so bad, he misunderstands what the government bozo wants, and, because he’s so weird and foreign, his comprehension of what the client organization actually does is totally deficient, and therefore he blithely programs the software to do something completely absurd; or, (b) the H1B visa slave understands what the government bozo is saying, but because his comprehension of what the client organization actually does is totally deficient, he therefore blithely programs the software to do something completely absurd anyway; or, (c) the H1B visa slave understands what the government bozo said, and comprehends what the client organization actually does, but is not proficient enough at IT to realize the implications of what he is about to do, and therefore blithely programs the software to do something absurd; or, (d) the H1B visa slave knows what the government bozo just told him to do is going to cause a lot of trouble, but he’s scared to object, so he trembles with terror and programs the software to do something absurd; or, (e) the H1B visa slave knows what the government bozo just told him to do is going to cause a lot of trouble, but, since he’s so weird and foreign, he erroneously figures that, once he explains he was just following orders, nobody will hold him responsible, so he indifferently programs the software to do something absurd. And, of course, in all cases, for the same reasons, he immediately deploys the changes into the production environment without testing them, because the government bozo, just like every other government bozo, says he’s in a great big hurry and doesn’t want to bother with all that expensive, time-consuming, unnecessary software quality stuff.”
Gordon laced his fingers together and pondered for a minute, then unlaced them. “It’s hard to say which one it was, Tom. It could have been any of them. But you sure covered the waterfront there, partner, I’ll give you that.”
“Okay, then,” I conceded, “it appears we don’t have enough information at the moment to narrow down the possible scenarios more than that. So, all right, then, this H1B visa guy’s network server script changes hosed up the enterprise SOA and the whole organization lost an entire day of productivity because of it. I assume there was an inquiry of some sort or another?”
Gordon frowned slightly. “I guess you could put it that way. The CIO stormed into the IT office with a bunch of huge, armed black security guards. Then he started screaming and throwing things.”
“A typical career federal executive’s reaction to any unsatisfactory situation,” I opined.
“Absolutely,” Gordon agreed. “Nothing unusual there. The way I heard it, all the H1B visa slaves were running around, chattering like a bunch of chickens in their various jibber-jabbers – all of them were much too horrified to manage any English, of course. But they all started hopping up and down, pointing at this guy I’m telling you about.”
I leaned forward with increasing interest. “And what did the alleged culprit do?”
“They tell me he went along peaceably,” Gordon sighed. “They took his ID and escorted him off federal government property. The NHVC partner company he worked for fired him immediately of course. I heard that meanwhile, the Security Office scanned his laptop, and afterward, they told the FBI they didn’t find anything unusual.”
Now things were getting interesting. “After what, exactly,” I asked curiously, “did the SO tell the FBI that?”
“Ah, uh,” Gordon stuttered, “after, apparently… “
“… allegedly?” I interjected.
“… yeah,” Gordon allowed, “that’s right, afterward, this guy allegedly went home, signed on to his own PC, got on the Internet, broke into their system and planted… oh, what did they call it… a ‘logic bomb,’ yeah, that’s it, he planted something called a logic bomb in their computers. It was supposed to go off on some kind of timer thing – yesterday, as a matter of fact, and ruin their entire network for at least a week. But they say somebody found it before that happened.”
“How did they find it,” I queried, “through a regular security audit or just by plain, dumb luck?”
“The details on that are a bit hazy,” Gordon demurred.
“No doubt,” I replied flatly. “And then the feds arrested this guy, I presume?”
“Oh, yeah,” Gordon confirmed, “and he’s been arraigned and released on bail. Right now, he’s awaiting trial.”
“Thanks for the background,” I said. “Now tell me, please, what aspects of this situation do you consider most problematic for the NHVC?”
“We don’t,” Gordon responded, “of course, give a damn about what happens to this particular little barefoot native boy. I mean, why should we? The third world is overflowing with replacements. But we are extremely concerned about what his conduct might do to the image of the H1B technical worker as a market factor product brand.”
“An image,” I presumed, “of a completely pliable, more or less qualified replacement for genuinely skilled Americans, requiring only minimal remuneration and, in addition, willing to act as the stooge whenever a federal government worker or American industrial manager needs a fall guy for their stupid mistakes?”
“Exactly,” Gordon trumpeted. “And it’s that last part there, about not being good at the scapegoat thing! That’s what we’re worried about, see? Because this guy, he didn’t just fail to play his part as expected, he went out and thumbed his nose at the whole system, like he was… I don’t know…”
“As if he actually had a will of his own,” I suggested, “as if he really thought someone like him deserved dignity, like he was some kind of real human being or something, instead of a bowing, scraping H1B visa slave, slithering through the workplace gutters of America, slopping up the scummy excretions of places like Microsoft and Freddie Mac, hoping to build them into a sorry existence in the suburbs, leading a life of quiet desperation ending with slow death in a cut-rate Florida nursing home, wondering why none of his ungrateful children ever even send him an e-mail.”
“Right!” Gordon sat upright, incensed. “And that’s what we’ve got to address! We need to dispel any notion whatsoever that the next H1B visa slave one of our coalition members’ clients hires will be anything other than a spineless, trembling, terrified, lickspittle, cowering drudge who is willing to do whatever they are told without question and, what’s more important, accept complete responsibility for everything that happens as a result, no matter what it is! And certainly,” Gordon spat, “not turn around and try to take revenge for being treated like a doormat, a garbage pail, a chamber pot, a…”
“…latrine pit …” I offered.
“…a cesspool …” he echoed.
“…a garbage bag …”
“…an offal pile …” I elaborated.
“… yeah, or something similar,” Gordon concluded, “because, if there’s one thing everybody knows, it’s that’s exactly what H1B visa workers are! Jesus Christ, if this or that H1B visa slave doesn’t want to take the risks, we can always replace him!” Gordon snapped his fingers in an exaggeratedly dismissive manner. “Poof! Another towel head chinky wink camel jockey H1B visa slave nonentity, gone – without a trace! Who cares? Nobody! But if one of them affects our bottom line, well, then, by God, that’s an entirely different kettle of fish, isn’t it? Something’s got to be done!”
“Sure,” I concurred, “I can certainly understand that. Has the NHVC considered any, ah… mitigation strategies?”
“We have, Tom,” Gordon told me proudly, “and one of my objectives here today is to run them by you and see what you think.”
“I’m flattered,” I lied, “to hear that an organization as august and renowned as NHVC would seek my opinion.”
“Oh, come on, Tom,” Gordon joshed, “everybody knows you’re the smartest person inside the Beltway!”
“Which is,” I cautioned, “very much like being the tallest building in Baltimore.”
Gordon let loose a tight and cynical but nevertheless honest laugh. “And everybody knows you say that, too, Tom. Do you have something against Baltimore?”
“No, not at all. So,” I pressed him gently, “out with it then. What have you NHVC fellows been thinking about this case?”
Gordon leaned close, his expression redolent of cloak-and-dagger conspiracy. “Well, Tom,” he related in a stage whisper, “our first inclination was to hire a major private detective firm to procure some heroin and plant it on the guy, then tip off the DEA.”
“Okay, I can see that,” I vouched, “but if it was heroin, all it would prove is that the guy is, by nature, a criminal. Then you’d have potential NHVC coalition member customers worrying that their H1B visa slaves are dealing smack on the side to make ends meet. That doesn’t sound too good. Now, on the other hand, if it was PCP, you see, that would be different, because PCP makes people crazy…”
“Which brings us to the other idea we had,” Gordon burbled excitedly, his whisper becoming incrementally louder. “We hire some operatives who can get close to him, and then we ‘gaslight’ the guy.”
“You mean,” I presumed, “drive him insane without the aid of drugs?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Gordon exclaimed. “By the time he goes to trial, see, he’s a total nut case, raving about aliens from outer space trying to kill him, refusing to recognize the authority of the court, demanding to act as his own lawyer, that sort of thing.”
“Not bad,” I complimented, “but I think it could be considerably better. Tell me, how were you planning to plant the drugs on this guy, or, for that matter, how were you going to insinuate somebody close enough to him, and gain enough of his trust, to drive him loony?”
“Aw, come on, Tom,” Gordon teased, “you and I both know the answer to that.”
“Ah yes,” I admitted, “I do – a slim, tall natural blonde Anglo female with a 34-D cup, right?”
Gordon reared back and roared out a laugh – hearty and honest this time. “Those H1B visa geeks are all so damn predictable, aren’t they? They only sex they’ve ever had has been with Rosie Palm and her five daughters!”
“Yes,” I joined in, “they certainly are pretty damn pathetic.” After the mirth subsided, I resumed in earnest, however. “With respect to the girl, there’s absolutely no doubt NHVC should go with the tried and true formula. But I have what I believe is a superior objective for her mission.”
Gordon’s expression lit up like a Roman candle. “All right! Superior objectives are what I’m paying for! Shoot!”
“I think,” I explained, “while this guy is out on bail, waiting for trial, under tremendous stress, and plagued by massive uncertainty, he’s going to be ripe for a pitch that will get NHVC off the hook completely.”
“Yes?” Gordon was beside himself with expectation.
“Demonic possession,” I slowly intoned.
“You mean, like ‘The Exorcist’ or something?”
“Pretty close,” I responded,
“But how” he asked, quite vexed, “do we get his head to spin around? And what about the green vomit?”
“It doesn’t have to be that graphic,” I informed him. “If she can get him to scratch a few messages from Satan on his chest, that should suffice.”
“And you think,” he contemplated with a doubtful scowl, “our operative can get him to do it?”
“Oh that,” I attested, “and plenty more. You see, all your typical H1B slaves come from primitive, highly superstitious societies. They already believe in demons. So when the most beautiful woman they ever saw – much less made love to a few times – tells them she’s psychic and can see the ifrits, djinn, dragon spirits, soul eaters or whatever hovering around him, that poor little fool is going to be all yours. And once it comes out in court that the whole affair is a case demonic possession, the NHVC is home free.”
Gordon gazed at me skeptically. “You really think so, Tom?”
“Think so? I know so!” The LED screen on the wall lit up, displaying several very convincing pie charts. “From a public relations standpoint, of course, what matters is not what the people in the countries where the H1B visa slaves come from believe, but what Americans themselves believe. And as you can see, 87 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, 72 percent believe in angels, 74 percent believe in astrology, and, most relevant to our present discussion, 84 percent believe in demonic possession. Ergo, once his lawyer tells the court that’s what’s going on, the vast majority of the public, including, I might add at least that percentage of your client base will accept the explanation without objection, and, by doing so, also completely exonerate the NHVC and its, er… products from any perception of defect or culpability.”
Gordon sat back, sinking into the couch, savoring the end of a truly worthwhile consultation. “So that’s the answer – the Devil made him do it!”
“Yowsa, brother,” I offered with solemn cadence, “and amen to that.”