Error! Your Function Is Circular

Spreadsheets. I once overheard three guys bragging about their Excel prowess. I wondered then if maybe I had made a mistake. I’ve been thinking now for twenty-four months that I made the worst decision of my life, but now I wonder if thinking that way was the actual mistake. If I despise my role as Machiavelli’s agent in the Sun Tzu war of not making war on behalf of the United S of A, imagine—just imagine!—trying to compete in a workforce against guys who can plausibly brag about the stylings of their formatted cells.

The meeting yesterday with the Cost Analysis Division was a horror show of boredom, un-leadership, and applied apathy. Let me back up just a bit. My new assignment is to work with a tiny agency under the umbrella of the Department of the Interior. I’m not exactly sure what the agency’s mission is. Something about methane, forest fires, oil dispersants, and assisting low-income beet growers.

Anyway, The good part about this job was that I sat at a desk all day while the testing algorithm ran in the background. Meanwhile, I surf the e-waves all day.

The bad part about this job is the same for all my jobs. I come in, unannounced. Everyone hears that I’m joining their agency on a special assignment from someone higher up. Instantly, everyone hates me. They probe my qualifications. No, I did not go to MIT, Harvard, LSE, or Stanford. No, I’m not a son or nephew of Orrin Hatch or John Kerry. I leave it at that.

But, when there’s a special problem no one wants to solve, they dump it on me. So, I’m evaluating our miscellaneous receipts report for the past fourteen months. Someone somewhere in the abyss of management believes a check was deposited into the agency account, but was somehow attributed to the wrong accounting code. Good stuff. This dark lord of underachieving wants a final report, showing totals, monthly breakdowns, and percent change from month to month. The agency receives checks in basically a random fashion. So this is totally pointless. But he wants it by close of business.

When I got to the meeting, I was having a hard time letting go of the encounter with Mister Nondescript. My nerves don’t normally creep up on me like this, but I just kept expecting to see either of his two cohorts bursting through the door of the conference room and gunning me down with an uzi.

When I finally realized someone asked me a question in the meeting, there had been at least a two second pause where all eight people in the meeting were staring at me. I had no idea what the question was.

“I’m a big picture thinker. I’m sorry for the needless digression, but can you explain the broader importance?”

My b.s. made the dark lord of underachieving’s eyes glitter. I opened up a chance for him to expound on the importance of the agency to the government as a whole. Taxpayers everywhere should be grateful. I understood almost nothing of what he said. By the time he was done, the vice dark lord of underachieving was ready to move on to some other matter.

I decided right then that my mission was complete. There are no foreign agents infiltrating this agency. My boss at the Lake (the quaint name for the unnamed domestic spying agency that managed to clutch my soul to its malevolent waxed breast) thought I might learn who was behind the Gulf oil spill. No such luck.

So today I’m working on the spreadsheet. I was going to go get falafel again for lunch, but I’m so completely despondent over having to produce this report. I think I’ll just get a bag of chips from the vending machine.

Mister Nondescript, RIP

I never arrive. I just keep traveling. But not traveling—I’ll never feel the comfortable lull of spacing out in the back seat of my mom’s VW, eyes eating hours of landscape on a road trip. I just keep, what? Commuting. Tip toeing? Pioneering.

Like Lewis and Clark, but dressed business casual.

Today, like a tiger being stalked through the brush, actually. They’ve gotten better at putting tails on you. One is dressed like a spy. Easy to spot because he’s the only guy on the street who looks perfectly nondescript. Northwest DC is full of nondescript white people, so this is a subtle distinction. The other guy is dressed like a real threat. I’m supposed to write him off because he looks too obviously dangerous. In DC this means he’s a black guy in a white tee shirt. It’s August, so he has a small towel draped on his shaved head. I don’t understand the fashion statement, but I do see the slight bulge of the pistol handle sticking from the waistband of his Nike shorts. And of course there’s a third guy, I mean gal. She’s easy to spot because she’s the only white, professional woman in DC whose nose isn’t scraping the bottoms of jets landing at Dulles.

So I go into an office building that houses a slightly disreputable conservative think tank. I pass by Newt Gingrich in the lobby. I nod knowingly to the security guard. Nigerian. We all look the same to him, so he buys my dupe.

I do a quick scan of the building directory. Seventh floor has a number of small offices, so that’s where I’m going. I won’t stand out as a stranger amid the real estate agents, lawyers, dental hygienists, and investment analysts – and their customers and clients and patients.

Ding.

I don’t know how they will know which floor I went to. That’s the tradeoff. I want to take them out, but I don’t want the cops showing up. My badge will shut them up, but maybe not before some tourist snaps me on her Iphone and sends my face around the world. Then I’m out of a job.

If I’m out of a job, I’m probably dead meat. Shockingly, some people think I know too much. Others think I am too valuable an asset to let walk the streets and breathe the air of freedom and independence. I do chuckle to myself to think that I, an operative for the deranged cult of killers and prescription drug addicts known as an unknown domestic intelligence agency, can claim that I have fought for the continued maintenance of our facsimile democracy and faux independence.

I guess my outlook proves I do know a little too much. More on that later.

So maybe I have a tracking bug on my person. Because the elevator is opening. I am perched around the corner, listening. I hope to hear the blather of three lawyers bragging about golf scores. I don’t. I hear the measured steps of an assassin.

The Red Baron killed all those French and British airmen through simple tactics. He did not do barrel rolls or any of that aerial ballet crap that makes us go Woo! There’s a lesson there. So I’m just waiting around the corner. I’ll hear him approach. If my hands are fast, he won’t have time to react.

Fist to throat. Something in his neck makes a crunching sound. He’s down. I see his eyes bulge because he can’t find air. I pin his hand against the carpet. I angle my thumb, find the pressure point. Twist with my wrist. I think I hear a tendon snap. It’s hard to tell because he’s making rasping sounds while I choke him with my other hand. He’s trying to use his legs to toss me, but he’s losing strength fast.

He’s out. Well, shit. I held on too long. Or maybe I shattered his wind pipe and it swelled shut. Either way, he’s dead. Mister Nondescript, RIP.

It’s weird. While I’m being hunted, or when I’m fortunate enough to be the cat instead of the mouse, I love it. Like hide and seek, seriously. When I’m gripped in combat, I feel a joy and terror of immeasurable intensity. Then it’s over. I’ve been lucky and skillful enough (notice which adjective I mention first) to survive. And I feel sick. I feel less remorse for my actions and more pure horror at human nature.

Then I dispose of the body by sending him on the elevator to the twelfth floor while I take the stairs back down. The twelfth floor is where the executives and big brains of the slightly disreputable conservative think tank sit. They will be honored to have a foreign agent turn up dead on their front stoop. It will give them street cred and an air of danger. They’ll falsely assume their “research reports” are catching the eyeballs of the world’s baddest. Maybe if I’m ever allowed to retire I’ll go into PR.

I go all the way down to the parking garage and exit by foot. No sign of the guy with the towel on his head or his lady accomplice.

I hate that. It requires a remarkable resolve to walk calmly down the street knowing that two people who want you dead are out there, unchecked, unseen. Yeah, I ditched them. Yeah, they will probably come at me again. I know I would. My bosses have zero tolerance for failure at this sort of thing. Kind of funny, in a way, when you consider how haphazard, error-prone, and delusional our intellectual work is. More on that later. In fact, I need to get back to the office. Lunch break is over and I have a one o’clock meeting with the Cost Analysis Division.