Cerise and I went out dancing Saturday, which was definitely a much-needed recreation for me, particularly after having been dragged to Glen Echo National Park for the Arts to watch an “adult puppet show” first. Technically speaking, it was a “puppet slam,” sponsored by The Puppet Company, The Center for Exploration of the Puppet Arts, and the Eugene O’Neill School of Puppetry. It was most certainly not anything you would take a child to see, that’s for sure. Cerise loved it, especially the more risqué performances, including “Jack and the Bean Stalk – the Sequel,” which fee-fied Cerise’s fo-fum pretty darn well, as it turned out later in the evening.
So Cerise was all tra-la-la as she left to go out shopping this afternoon, leaving me to the Sunday Washington Post. I was perusing the Outlook section while Twinkle perched on the window sill like a miniature sphinx, reposing in a bright patch of sun, flicking her tail in lazy circles, gazing out on to the snow-covered lawn.
“Melting,” Twinkle observed.
“Sure is,” I replied as I began reading an essay by Jeffery Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, which suggests, in all seriousness, that President Obama nominate himself for a seat on the Supreme Court. But I hadn’t even gotten a chance to turn to Page B5 before Twinkle, still peering through the window at the front walk, said “Katje,” and, after that, I scarcely had time to put the paper down before the doorbell rang.
Katje was in a tizzy, to say the least. “Tom,” she gasped, “just what the hell is the matter with your brother?”
“Beats me,” I admitted as I helped remove her coat. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for decades. How about some cappuccino? And I made some chocolate almond cantuccini fresh yesterday, if you’d like.”
A few minutes later, ensconced at the dining room table with hot coffee and a nice sweet snack, Katje unburdened herself. “It’s these company lap tops that Rob Roy and I were issued. ‘For telecommuting, teleconferencing, authorized work at home and use during transportation emergencies’ is what the e-mail from the corporate vice-president for operations said. We’ve been using them for… damn it, Tom, for [expletive] years!”
“Guess Whizzonator-YoyoDyne saw some significant value added there,” I surmised. “What with all the software development and systems support their workforce performs, the cost of a bunch of lap tops to keep their contract employees billable to client projects at home, no matter what, must have been negligible compared to the additional revenue.”
“No doubt,” Katje sulked. “But Friday morning, Rob found out about the sinister side of Whizzonator-YoyoDyne’s take-home lap top program. His supervisor called him into his office, and there were these bozos from the Human Resources Department and the Security Department with him, and they gave Rob a huge reaming – big lecture, letter of reprimand, the [expletive] works!”
“How come?” I inquired after discreetly swallowing a mouthful of cantuccini.
“They said they had evidence that Rob was gambling. Then they went on about how Rob has a federal security clearance and how gambling is illegal in Virginia and doing it gets federal security clearances canceled, and all that kind of [expletive]. They said if he got into debt from gambling, then that would make him vulnerable to influence from foreign powers or make him take money from Osama bin Laden or the Taliban to pay off his bookie in return for secrets and passwords and such [expletive]. And so – you know Rob – instead of being all contrite and sorry and apologetic and stuff, he loses his temper, starts shouting and demands to know ‘what [expletive] evidence you [expletive] [expletive] think you have, anyway,’ and so they play a video of Rob in our living room in Fairfax, in front of the HDTV, with NBC on, drinking Jack Daniels and betting his buddy Jimbo the Unix administrator from the NOC a hundred bucks on the winner of the mens’ figure skating event at the Winter Olympics.”
“Who,” I asked, barely avoiding spitting out my coffee, “did Rob bet on?”
“Evgeni Plushenko,” Katje sighed in a disconsolate tone. “So you can imagine what kind of mileage those HR and security guys got out of the fact that Rob lost his bet. They hammered his [expletive] to the wall. Then Rob came home and he was absolutely livid.”
“Well,” I philosophized, “a lot of people were. “Evan Lysacek only won by one and thirty-one one-hundreths of a point out of a total score of two hundred fifty-seven point six seven. That’s like, one half of one percent difference between them, which is ridiculously close.”
“Rob said it was out-and-out theft,” Katje muttered. “Plushenko did a quadruple Lutz and Lysacek didn’t.”
“Yeah,” I conceded, “but Lysacek scored more points through flawless execution of figure skating fundamentals.”
“Rob,” Katje flatly stated, “says billions of people don’t tune in to the Olympics on television so they can watch some fudge-packer like Lysacek skate backwards figure-eights like a girl; Rob says they tune in to the Olympics so they can see a real man like Plushenko do a [expletive] quadruple Lutz!”
“Okay,” I relented, “I think Rob defined the ongoing debate about that contest in particular and the nature of mens’ figure skating in general very well, indeed. But I don’t think it’s fair to single out Lysacek and call him fudge-packer – as near as I can tell, all of the male Olympic figure skaters are fudge packers. I mean, really, Jesus Christ, just look at the way they dress.”
“Yeah,” Katje acknowledged, “they all do dress sort of… metrosexual.”
“Sort of metrosexual?” I exclaimed. “Are you kidding me? They all dress like New Orleans drag queens during Mardi Gras!”
Katje took another bite of her cantuccino, sipped her coffee and, after due reflection, replied. “Yeah, now that you mention it, they do. So anyway,” she continued morosely, “Rob found out – the hard way – that those built-in cameras we were using for video conferences with the company lap tops have a program that allows people at the Whizzonator-YoyoDyne corporate offices to activate the cameras at any time and record whatever’s in the field of view – with full audio, too, of course.”
“There seems to be a lot of that going around,” I remarked. “People get a wireless lap top from their school or from their employer, and they take it home, and leave the damn thing on all the time when they aren’t using it. It never occurs to them that it’s got a camera and a microphone in it and that it’s constantly connected to the Internet. There was some kid up in Pennsylvania, just the other day, who got called down to the principal’s office or something like that after school officials used the kid’s MacBook to observe him misbehaving at home in his bedroom.”
“Rob heard about that, too,” Katje interjected. “And he says that kid’s parents are ready to sue the pants off the school district!”
“I’m not a lawyer,” I reminded her, “but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if that kid’s parents win.”
“Okay,” Katje nodded, “in that case, Rob ought to sue Whizzonator-YoyoDyne, huh?”
“No,” I cautioned, “he shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” Katje protested indignantly. “His employer issued Rob a lap top, just like the school district issued that kid one, and they both used their lap tops to spy on people – the school district was playing Big Brother with that kid, watching him in his bedroom, and Whizzonator-YoyoDyne was doing the same thing to Rob, spying on him in our living room while he and Jimbo were watching the Olympics!”
“Yes,” I allowed, “there are some striking similarities between the two situations, but there are also some very important differences.”
“Such as what? Tell me,” Katje defiantly requested.
“Such as,” I explained, “that kid lives in Pennsylvania.”
“So?” Katje flashed me an uncomprehending look. “What difference does that make?”
“Plenty,” I elaborated. “You see, Katje, Rob lives in, works in, and is employed by corporation headquartered in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
“Big deal,” Katje shrugged. “Whizzonator-YoyoDyne Information Systems is headquartered in Virginia. Rob’s work site is in Virginia. We live in Virginia. So [expletive] what?”
“Virginia,” I pointed out, “is a right-to-work state.”
Katje leaned forward slightly across the dining room table. “Meaning?”
“Meaning, in accordance with the usual conventions of American conservative nomenclature, that workers in Virginia have no rights whatsoever,” I told her. “In Virginia, you’re ‘employees at will,’ which means your employer can fire you, for any reason at all, at any time, without any notice and without any legal recourse.”
“You’re telling me,” Katje said, rolling up her sleeve and pointing at her tattoos, “that if I get a new tat, and my employer decides they don’t like it, they can fire me on the spot?”
“In the Commonwealth of Virginia,” I assured her, “they can develop a retroactive distaste for the body art you already have, and do so at any time, and dismiss you for it without notice or warning. And there’s nothing you or any other worker in the Commonwealth of Virginia can do about it, either, because the Commonwealth of Virginia is a hard, selfish and backward place where, in many significant respects, it’s still the eighteenth century.”
“So those [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] at Whizzonator-YoyoDyne Information Systems can hand out lap tops with cameras in them and spy on Rob and me and everybody else who works for the company with impunity just because the company is incorporated in Virginia?”
“Not just because of that,” I clarified. “For instance, if you and Rob lived in, say, Frederick County, Maryland, or if your work site was in the District of Columbia, then you could do something about this situation. Maryland and DC both have pretty tough restrictions on the kind of behavior your employer is engaging in. But in your case, everything is happening inside the Commonwealth of Virginia, and, because of that, Rob is pretty much S.O.L.”
“Damn it!” Katje spat, slamming down her coffee cup in anger. “It’s like, workers in Virginia are nothing but slaves on a [expletive] tobacco plantation or something!”
“An antebellum tobacco plantation,” I said, “is the exactly the prototypical business model for pretty much every corporation in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
“That totally sucks!” Katje complained. “Those [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] can spy on Rob in his own home, just because it’s [expletive] Virginia, and use whatever they find against him! Rob told me he might lose his security clearance over this [expletive]! Can they do that, too? I mean, this is a federal contract we’re working on, and it’s a federal security clearance. You don’t think the state of Virginia has any say in the matter, do you?”
“A security clearance,” I sadly related, “is a privilege, not a right. If his employer turns the video over to OPM and they don’t like what they see, Rob’s security clearance has about as much chance as a single-payer health care bill in a room full of K Street lobbyists.”
“But it was just a friendly bet…” Katje began.
“For a hundred dollars,” I quickly interjected. “Which, according to the laws in the Commonwealth of Virginia, laws that, more or less intentionally, don’t get updated very often, is a lot of money to be caught wagering. Look, Katje, it wasn’t that long ago that there weren’t even any bars in Virginia – ‘liquor by the drink,’ as they called it, was debated like the death penalty, and when, at long last, it finally passed, you could hear the Bible-thumping Tidewater Troglodytes howls, predicting the imminent collapse of Western Civilization echoing from Richmond to Norfolk and back. Seriously, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Apartheid South Africa had nothing on the Commonwealth of Virginia…”
“You keep saying that,” Katje interrupted, “’Commonwealth of Virginia.’ Why? What makes Virginia different from the State of New York, for example?”
“You could write a book,” I assured her, “about what makes New York different from Virginia. Several states, including Pennsylvania, where that poor kid we talking about is from, actually, call themselves ‘commonwealths,’ but Virginia does it because ‘commonwealth’ is really, really archaic – the term dates from the fifteenth century – and therefore, it’s redolent of the past, and the past is what all true Virginians worship. You know how many Virginians it takes to change a light bulb?”
“No,” Katje shook her head. “I sure as hell don’t. How many?”
“It takes between twenty and thirty, depending on who’s available – one Virginian to do the deed, and the rest of them to stand around, clucking their tongues, talking about how much better the old one was.”
“That kind of attitude,” Katje volunteered, “isn’t as obvious around Washington.”
“Drive fifty miles south from US 495,” I vouched, “and you will travel two hundred and fifty years into the past. The clever thing high-tech corporations do, you see, is to headquarter their businesses in Virginia, where it’s 1760, and get contracts from the United States government in Washington, DC, right across the Potomac river, where it’s 2010. That way, for example, they can sponsor H-1B visas for technical workers to come to Virginia from places like Bangladesh, luring them here to work in conditions – and with wages – not unlike those on a good, old-fashioned Virginia plantation, and, also making sure, once they get here, just like the slaves that worked on those antebellum plantations, they can never, ever leave.”
“And they say ‘Virginia is for lovers,’” Katje snorted derisively. “Sounds like ‘Virginia is for corporate [expletive] holes’ might be better.”
“It is,” I duly noted, “considered very friendly to business.”
“But what the [expletive]!” Katje shouted, suddenly realizing. “You live in Virginia!”
“Yeah,” I granted, “I do. But that’s different. I own a business.”