Around 11:00 a.m. yesterday, the news reached me that Slava had gone to that great Provo d’orchestra in the sky. So, instead of taking lunch at one of the local restaurants, I sent out for sushi and listened to some of his recordings in my office. Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was director of the National Symphony for a number of years until the mid 1990’s, and one of the last living students of Casals. During Schnittke’s Second Concerto, my private secretary’s line began flashing. So I put down my chopsticks, took off my Sennheisers and picked up the phone.
“Mr. Collins, there’s a woman out here who only speaks Spanish. I think she wants something, but I can’t tell what it is.”
“Okay,” I replied, “Repeat after me: ‘Camine por favor…’”
“Camine por favor…”
“… a través de la puerta…”
“… a través de la puerta…”
“… al lado del escritorio.”
“… al lado del escritorio.”
“That did it; there she goes. Thanks, Mr. Collins.”
Into my office walked a tall, buxom Latina, with, I must say, an extremely impressive set of legs. Had it not been for a face which resembled Ricardo Montalbán and a moustache worthy of Zorro, I would have said she was a knockout.
“Carmela Oveja,” she said, extending her hand, “Comisión Igual De Posibilidad De Employ De Estados Unidos.”
Naturally, I stood and shook the lady’s hand as I gestured to one of my comfy leather office chairs, “please, be seated.”
“¿Qué?”
“Ah,” I persisted, “please, be seated, make yourself comfortable, madame,” I replied, smiling and gesturing toward a chair.
“¿Qué?” She remained standing, staring at me stubbornly.
“Am I to believe, madame,” I asked, “that you work for the EEOC and you don’t speak English?”
“¿Qué?”
“¿Soy a creer, señora, que usted trabaja para el EEOC, pero no hablo inglés?”
“Si!”
Sigh. Sure, why not? This is the federal government I was dealing with here, and I’d certainly seen things more absurd. “Siéntese por favor abajo,” I repeated, in Spanish, adding “y dígame cómo puedo ayudarle.”
“Gracias, Señor Collins.” She seated herself primly, looked me over briefly as if I were a sack of masa harina on sale at the local bodega, and started up again, this time like Desi Arnaz on a pipe of free-base methedrine.
“Lentamente, Señorita o Señora, de acuerdo con las circunstancias.” I pleaded, “Hable por favor más lentamente. No puedo entenderle cuando usted habla tan rápidamente.”
She stopped, snorted softly in pique, gave me a look of utter contempt, and continued slowly enough that I could make out most of what she was saying, which amounted to this:
Earlier this week, the EEOC managed to force the Salvation Army to hire workers who do not speak English and keep them on the job even when they cannot or will not learn English over what the Salvation Army thought was a reasonable period of time – i.e., two years. Señora (or perhaps Señorita) Oveja and some of her cronies in the Civil Service are now hot to trot; they want to force every business in the United States to hire and retain “qualified” individuals, regardless of whether those people can speak English, even as well as Desi Arnaz did.
“Excusez-moi pour demander, Madame,” I interrupted, “Beaucoup de gens en Amérique parlent français. Il y a les Arcadiens, qui habitent en Louisiane. Ceux qui vivent dans les régions de Diaspora du Québec de la Nouvelle Angleterre. Ceux qui parlent français de phase dans beaucoup d’autres régions des Etats-Unis aussi. Ces nouveaux règlements d’EEOC s’appliqueraient-ils à eux ?”
“¿Qué?”
“An zweiter Stelle nur mit Franzosen, Deutscher wurde sehr weit in den Vereinigten Staaten gesprochen,” I continued, “Ein Entdeckung Deutscher als die erste Sprache unter vielen der Einwohner von Wisconsin, von Pennsylvania und von Minnesota, zum Beispiel.”
“¿Qué?”
“In risposta ad ordine esecutivo tredici mille cento sessanta e sei,” I elaborated, ”ho preparato uno studio per l’ufficio dell’amministrazione e del preventivo. Quello era durante l’anno due mila e due. A quel tempo, l’italiano era il quarto la maggior parte della lingua straniera comune parlata in America. Sono coloro che parla francese, tedesco ed italiano, ma non inglesi, anche essere incluso nelle nuove regolazioni?”
“¿Qué?”
“Creo que he hecho mi punto,” I concluded, “¿Usted lo piensa es práctico incluir a los que hablen solamente francés, alemán e italiano en las nuevas regulaciones? Hay un número considerable de la gente en América que habla solamente chino, tagalogo, vietnamitas y coreano. ¿Podría usted manejar al personal en un Taco Bell si hablaron ocho diversas idiomas? ¿En cuántas idiomas usted imprimiría el menú del alimento? ¿Cuáles de esas ocho idiomas debo saber cuando conduzco hasta orden un burrito grande de la haba y una Coca-Cola pequeña?”
So, I had pointed out that, besides English and Spanish, there are six other major languages – whose speakers, BTW, number nearly half the number of those who only speak Spanish, some 24% of exclusive non-English speakers in the US in 2002, as opposed to 54% Spanish speakers in the exclusive non-English demographic – which might deserve the same consideration Señora (or perhaps Señorita) Oveja had in mind for what was apparently the only language she was willing to speak or understand. So I just had to ask:
“¿Cuál es malo sobre cada discurso de la persona inglés?”
“Es imperialista” she sniffed, indignantly, “y oprime nuestra cultura.”
“¿Es eso también verdad si solicito el empleo en México y se requiere el español?”
“Por supuesto no,” she answered. “Usted es un gringo. Además, su pregunta no tiene ningún significado. No hay empleo disponible en México.”
So, because gringos are imperialists who oppress Latino culture, she thinks it makes perfect sense to force US businesses to hire people who refuse to learn English, but no way should there be a law like that in Mexico guaranteeing work for people who refuse to learn Spanish.
“¿Qué usted hará referente,” I inquired, “a esa otra gente que hable francés, alemán, tagalogo, chino, coreano y vietnamita?”
“Su situación no es igual que las nuestras.”
Oh, really? Now just how might their situation be so different from that in which she finds her fellow Hispanics? What, I wondered, did she think is so special about people who speak Spanish? “¿Cuál es diferente sobre hispanos? ¿Por qué es Latino especial?”
“Los que hablan solamente esas otras idiomas, usted no tomó su patria.” She retorted, acidly. “Usted los gringos tomó nuestra tierra de nosotros.”
“¿Estas nuevas regulaciones son parte tan del reconquista?”
“No puedo decir eso,” she replied, matter-of-factly.
Yeah, of course there’s no way she could say that – she works for the federal government. Well, enough of this merry banter, then – it was time to cut the cake.
“Explique por favor porqué usted vino visitarme.”
“Wilma LeBoeuf-Vankarkrishnan-Gunderson-Jones me envió para visitarle. Ella dijo que usted puede escribir regulaciones y avisos Federales del Registro.”
That certainly explained a lot. Writing federal regulations and the required Federal Register Notices that go with them is hard work. Nobody in the Civil Service would willingly touch hard work with a ten-foot fishing pole and none of them with IQs over ninety ever do. Like everything else, they find contractors to write the regs and notices. Trouble is, it’s not quite kosher for contractors to write federal regulations or even the Federal Register Notices that support them, so it has to be handled carefully.
If your firm already has a contract with a federal agency, as I did with the EPA when I performed such work for Wilma, then your time gets charged to preparation of some legitimate deliverable on that contract. But in this case, there really wasn’t anything else the client wanted. So in this case, it would be necessary for Oveja to invent a seemingly legitimate deliverable, put a “wired” contract solicitation out for it, go through a sham round of allegedly competitive proposal submission and bidding among responding firms on the GSA Schedule, and then award the contract to my firm. I’d say about half of the solicitations that the federal government advertises are wired – in other words, they are published as a formality, because the federal employee(s) who want the work done have already decided who they will hire to do it. But, according to the Federal Acquisition Regulations, they can’t just say “Hire Pretty Rotten Consulting to do this.” No, they have to make it appear that Pretty Rotten’s competitors had a chance, too.
Doing this is a bit of an art form, because it involves fooling at least a few other Beltway Bandits besides Pretty Rotten into responding. If a solicitation is so obviously wired that only one firm (or even, in many situations, three firms) respond, the federal employees who wrote the solicitation are often required to withdraw it completely and, at best, start over. I usually let the feds try to write the wired solicitation by themselves the first time – that way, if it flies, I have saved myself some work, and if it gets shot down, I get no arguments when I suggest they use a solicitation prepared by me for the second try (to which I submit my original proposal with a few minor modifications).
It’s interesting to note that the feds also wire their job postings – the ones for direct hires to the Government, either for the Civil Service, Senior Executive Service, or other types of positions. Usually, Joe has kissed the Division Director’s or Assistant Administrator’s nether parts sufficiently as to merit being rewarded for it. So the Big Boss creates a position for Joe and gives it a name, or, if Joe is lucky, the Big Boss just happens to have an opening coming up in an existing position that would constitute a promotion for Joe; an opening which occurred either because of retirement or the occasional resignation due to insanity or accumulated, intolerable disgust at working for the federal government. But wherever that slot comes from, Big Boss must compete it. And so Big Boss does, by running ads in the Washington Post, inviting any qualified professional to apply. And they do, in droves; and their applications are duly ignored. In order to keep the numbers down, the feds have a remarkably complicated and lengthy set of forms to fill out; in order to provide excuses for rejection of everybody but Joe, the feds also creatively decorate each federal job solicitation with a bunch of additional information requirements and then make it as difficult as possible for anybody but an insider to understand what information to submit to whom. In short, all those advertisements you see for federal jobs are a joke – unless you know (or are related to) somebody in the Civil Service or SES, forget about it, you are wasting your time – we’re talking total nepotism here.
Now I know, dear reader, that you may very well be shocked, yes – shocked to find such things going on inside the Beltway, and further chagrined to find Yours Truly engaged in some of them. In my defense, I will point out that you, the public, are much better off having someone like me write the federal regulations which govern every aspect of your existence than you would be if morons like Wilma wrote them. As a matter of fact, if you read in the paper or on the Internet about some situation of surpassing, surreal idiocy arising from application of federal regulations, take it from Tom Collins Martini, dear reader, that the federal regulations causing such situations prove invariably to have been written by actual federal government employees. When a regulation is composed in a manner so haphazard and ambiguous, that it can be applied more or less at random depending on which federal enforcement fool is reading it, that reg was written by a genuine federal Civil Servant. When the verbiage in a regulation can be read over and over again, yet still remain inscrutable, there, dear reader, goes the work of a GS-14. When a regulation appears to be the product of a mind disordered by extreme paranoia, petty megalomania and obsessive compulsive disorder, that regulation has undoubtedly been produced in the most honest manner possible, and serves as a perfect example of what full-time direct federal government employees provide in return for the taxes the IRS demands of the American people.
So it’s for the best, believe me, dear reader. This petty, power-mad Washington bureaucrat and her zealot cronies will have their way, and there is no practical method to stop them. At least, when I write these ridiculous regulations for Carmela Oveja and Company, they will be well ordered, sanely composed and written in comprehensible English. Compare and contrast, if you will, such attributes with the randomly selected example of a federal regulation you might obtain by opening a volume of the CFR and placing your finger on the page with your eyes closed. Try that, and you will readily see why, in my view at least, doing a decent job of codifying Uncle Sam’s cretinous tyranny over you folks out there in the provinces is a significant public service, and one that I provide without the least moral qualm.
Before going any further, I decided to find out how she knew Wilma. “¿Dónde usted resolvió Wilma?”
So she told me that she teaches salsa dancing and that Wilma is one of her students. I later found out that this is not quite true – she is a salsa (and rueda) dancer, to be sure, and attends some of the Saoco Distrito Casinero classes, which is where she met Wilma. I suppose that, being such a rabid Latin chauvinist, she was embarrassed to tell the truth and admit she was taking lessons in Latin dance. As far as where I know Wilma from, let’s just say that if you have ever manufactured, transported, sold or disposed of any wastes containing hazardous chemicals, chances are you had to follow regulations I wrote and that she passed off to her superiors at EPA as her own work.
“Tal tarea debe ser parte de una asignación más grande,” I explained, “hacer de otra manera no es bueno. ¿Qué trabajo importante usted me desea para realizar?”
“Creo que la ayuda de regla del desarrollo sería la designación principal de la tarea del approprate,” she replied.
Claiming that I am supporting regulation development would not be much a fig leaf for her, so I suggested something else – demographic policy research.
“He hecho previamente la investigación en el orden público referente a idiomas extranjeros…”
“En los Estados Unidos occidentales, el español no es un idioma extranjero!” She shouted as she rose about six inches out of her seat.
“Me disculpo,” I continued, “Deseaba sugerir solamente que pudo la investigación de la política una asignación más apropiada.”
“No cuido,” she shrugged, “’La investigación de la política’ es tan buena un nombre como cualquier otra; y Pare por favor el hablar en ese acento terrible de Castilian.”
“Madame,” I objected, “I learned to speak Spanish as it is spoken in Spain. There is nothing wrong with my Castilian accent.”
“En ese caso,” she huffed, “no incomode el hablar de español en todos.”
“So, you can indeed understand English if you want to?”
“Si. Sin embargo, me hace enojado para oír el inglés hablado en mi presencia.”
“No deseo hacerle enojado,” I demurred, “¿Es usted seguro él es satisfactorio que continúo en inglés?”
“Si, si – Oír un sonido del gringo como una persona de Madrid es una experiencia incluso peor que escuchando usted hable inglés.”
Clearly, this was a woman with issues. “Okay, we’ll need a Request for Proposal or a Request for Quotation, posted at FedBizOps. Either you should be listed as the contact or you should tell me whose name to look for.”
“Mi nombre será enumerado como la persona para entrar en contacto con.”
“Right – your name as the contact. RFP or RFQ?”
“Pedido la oferta.”
“RFP it is, then. When should I start looking for it?”
“Someteré la petición primer de mayo.”
“Goes up on May Day; roger that, comrade. I’ll prepare a boilerplate proposal and submit it one week before the closing date. Make sure to keep bidding open for at least thirty days. In case they send you numbered copies where the submitter’s names are redacted, look for the following phrase in the Analysis Approach Section – “statistical decomposition of correlation error through multivariant nonlinear stochastic parametric Bernoulli system models in Lobachevskian space.”
“Usted debe escribir eso para tragar.”
“I don’t think I should write it down, actually, but I will print it for you. Here,” I said, plucking a sheet from my desk printer and handing it to her, “take that with you, but don’t let anybody else see it. Once I get the contract, we can get started.”
“Si.”
“So,” I asked, “what sort of regulations did you have in mind?”
“Regulaciones que logran lo que acabamos de hacer al Ejército de Salvamento.”
“Okay, same thing you did to the Salvation Army – every business in America, above a certain size…”
“No! Todos!”
“There’s usually an exemption for small businesses, you know. It will be much harder to get your hidden agenda implemented if you go against the grain to that extent.”
“¿Cuánto más difícil será?”
“It will be much more difficult. I’d say you’d never get the regs implemented if you tried to force them on businesses with fewer than 500 employees. That’s the usual cut-off for the definition of ‘small business.’”
“Necesito discutir esa edición con mis colegas en EEOC.”
“Sure, I understand that you have to get a consensus from your co-conspira… I mean, your co-workers on this effort.”
“Si. Preferiríamos que las regulaciones se aplican a todos los negocios en América.”
“It’s up to you, of course, but I doubt you can get the Commissioner to sign off on regs that tell Mom and Pop’s Dry Cleaners that they have to hire someone who is unwilling to speak English to them or their customers.”
“¡Deben aprender hablar español!”
“But without a Castilian accent, I assume.”
“¡Eso no se está divirtiendo!”
“Not to you, anyway. Okay, I get the picture. Make sure you get plenty of funding for this. In addition to writing what will probably be five to ten new regulations, I’m going to have to write about twenty Federal Register Notices to promulgate them and deal with public comments. On top of that, of course, I will also have to prepare the deliverable described in your RFP, and that has to be a convincing piece of work or certain people will get suspicious.”
“Tengo un amante muy de gran alcance en la organización que hará lo que pregunto.”
“Oh, really? Congratulations; you seem to have embarked upon your crusade very well prepared, then. Is he, by any chance, a Ricardo Montalbán fan?”
“¡Mi amante es una mujer!” She looked down at the carpet, somewhat shyly and added, “Pero ella es un fanático grande de Ricardo Montalbán.”
“So, very well, I will be watching for your RFP, starting on May Day. But before you leave, could I ask you one more question?”
“Si.”
“What will the dog do when it catches the car?”
“¿Qué perro usted está hablando?”
“Well, we Anglos, we notice that dogs chase cars. It seems to me that, last time I was in Mexico, I saw dogs chasing cars there, too. But what, the old Anglo saying goes, would a dog do with a car if he caught it? So, you want to take back California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and what else – Texas west of the Brazos River, maybe? Say you get that; let’s assume, for the sake of argument, all of that was under control of the Hispanic population. What then?”
“Entonces el Anglos sabría debe vivir debajo del talón del opression sin piedad y de la avaricia despiadada.”
“Nothing better than that?”
“Los gringos no merecen cualquier cosa mejor que eso.”
“I suspect that, if such a fate were the case, all the Gringos would move to places like the Pacific Northwest. Then your new country would be pretty much like Mexico, wouldn’t it? Mexico has no aerospace industry, no biotechnology industry, no Silicon Valley, no Hollywood. And the Gringos would take all those things with them, so neither would your new country. What does it get you, tripling the size of Mexico, if all you end up with is three times as much space to grow beans and tequila piñas, three times as many places to pitch shanty towns and three times as many starving people? What would be the basis of your commerce – blowing leaves off each other’s lawns, washing each other’s cars, cleaning each other’s houses? Show me one Hispanic country with a stable economic and political system – show me just one with an average standard of living that’s better than even the poorest people in Mississippi. You know what I think will happen if your dog ever catches up to that car?”
“¿Qué usted piensa entonces sucederá, Señor Collins?”
“What always happens when a dog finally catches a car. He gets his front teeth caught in the rear bumper and dragged down the road until they break off.”
“¿Esa experiencia enseña el perro a no perseguir los coches?”
“Nope. Dog figures, now he’s got no front teeth, so it can’t happen again.”
“Ni unos ni otros voluntad que paro el perseguir de los coches,” she proclaimed proudly, rising from her seat.
“Yup. Might as well expect eagles to quit hunting snakes. Buonas tardes.”
“Adiós.”