Goings on at the National Polygon (Episode 1)

Just when I had started to get things down to a routine and believe that I might actually earn my paycheck again, this happens.

There are many moments in my day that remind me of a Steven Wright joke. When he was a kid, his grandfather would lock Steven and himself in a closet and they would just stand there, staring at the wall. Eventually Steven the little boy would get impatient and ask his grandfather what they were doing. He grandfather would drily answer, “elevator practice.” In a later joke, Steven spoke about one day he took the elevator in his hotel and after the doors closed and the elevator started moving, he looked over at the person to his left and said, “Your grandfather made you do this too?”

So my friend Michele also works at the Pentagon, down in the J1 (Manpower Administration). Everyone in her office comes to work at 0700, sits down in front of their computers, stares straight ahead, and types or does something all day; at 1800, they all get up and go home. It is not as bad where I “work,” but I still have yet to figure out what I am supposed to do everyday, let alone what anybody else around me does.

Up until this morning, I would catch the 0620 bus near my house; there I would sit quietly and patiently, making eye contact with no one, keeping to myself as I futzed on my Blackberry or read a book about the Crisis of Islam. The trip took about 40 minutes and when we arrived at Pentagon station, we would all dutifully file off, like we learned how to do in grade school. Come to think of it, a school bus is really an ingenious way to force kids to stay in line. No matter how small you are, there is really no way to walk two abreast; I suppose if you were small enough to achieve that, then the seats on either side would look too high and scary and you may as well just sit down and start crying for help.

Anyway, after getting off the bus, I would go through security to get me into the building, then I would peel off to the left to get a VISITORS badge – as to why I am still a VISITOR, I will get to that in a minute; I'd then show my two forms of ID, thank the kind gentleman, go through a set of turnstiles, up an escalator, then wend my way through the corridors, like a trained rat in a maze. Keeping to the right, I would make my way to floor 2 to corridors 6,7,8,9. This would spit me out in the Anzus corridor (please don’t ask for further amplification on the name), past static displays from wars past, and eventually come to an open area with up and down escalators where I would keep to the right again and head towards the Food Court. My office is located directly across from the Food Court – like pubs in a small English town, this Food Court is a handy landmark for giving people directions. Maybe someday I will be so gregarious and important that I will have to give someone directions to my office. I can’t actually get in to my office just yet, though, so I dutifully wait outside and call for someone to open the door and sign me in.

There are 23,000 people who come to "work" in the Pentagon, so this system of corridors, wedges, boxes and cubicles are really the best way to keep us all straight and organized. It is bureaucratic genius really. All of the people are properly pigeonholed until it is time to address their project or idea.

To make the dull grey cubicles, stiff carpet, and drab faces seem more exciting, when I entered that office, I would imagine that I was entering a forest. I would follow the beaten path back deep into the woods, occasionally glancing at the furry woodland creatures (the Army & Marine Corps LtCols) on either side, smiling slightly to seem pleasant, unassuming and unthreatening; I would make my way back to the far right hand corner of the room to a little hovel known as my desk – or the desk adjacent to Jeff’s (the guy I am to relieve). My hovel is just forward of a meeting table and a group of other desks inhabited by Col. Winters and a large man known as Tony Galasso (I think there are more letters in his name, but you get the picture; his name is pronounced as you would slowly pronounce a drinking receptacle in made up Italian: GA-LASS-OH). Tony is a civilian who works on metrics with Col. Winters (whom, by the way I have only seen once in my eight days reporting to work). Tony is daunted by the fact that to go anywhere in the Pentagon, he would have to decipher a long address and probably take a few wrong turns before arriving at his chosen destination. So, this particular rat just doesn’t go anywhere. I am sure he is very nice, though. He umps Little League Baseball, and his daughter who lives in England is expecting. The other day he was telling a story about his daughter. She and her husband, who is in the Air Force, have recently moved to England. Tony asked her for her address and she said that she didn’t know it, that the base was in some town (I can’t remember the name), but she isn’t sure that that was the name of the town that one might put on an envelope as a proper address. Tony was aghast, so to speak, that she hadn’t bothered to go out and get the proper information. The way I see it, she is not too much different from her father who can’t be bothered to leave his desk to explore the world outside of his cubicle. I am sure that Tony knows his own address, though, so perhaps a couple of skills have been lost in a generation.

At this desk, I would sit and read all kinds of electronic and printed word about countering extremist ideologies, how to win the favor of the mainstream Muslims, with the ultimate goal of winning the War on Terror. So this is what I would do until it was time to run some errands, listen to people talk about a meeting, or gather small tidbits of what Jeff does on a daily basis. I can’t really get anywhere important or do anything real because there are issues with my security clearance. When I checked in, the security folks made it sound like the clearance that I needed had lapsed and that it would take a week or so before they would be able to grant me the requisite level of access so I could start “working.” Well, yesterday had been a week and I found out that I don’t have any clearance at all; that I shouldn’t have had one since 2005. They told me to go home and come back on Tuesday. Maybe then they will have figured out where to put me. I have to find a new, unclassified pigeonhole. I feel like a pariah, a turd. I have essentially been excommunicated from the National Polygon.