An Offer You Must Refuse

Weird thing about working in government #746: Your negotiation skills will be put to the test in ways you never could have imagined - unless, of course, you were batshit crazy to begin with, which given your choice of vocation is perhaps not completely out of the question.

Situation: I have a fam tour coming up next week for a group of our employees. All of the events, meals, and accommodations on the tour are sponsored, donated by the participating chambers of commerce, museums, restaurants, hotels, etc. All I have to do (aside from prepare the extensive and complicated legal paperwork allowing us to accept the donations, coordinate the myriad travel arrangements of all our attendees, research and prepare educational materials on all the attractions we'll be visiting, make binders, enforce guidelines, answer questions, and forcefully wrest from the tour coordinator as many of the details as I can get him to share with me in case, oh I don't know, some emergency arises, and he has to leave early on in the tour, and I end up in the middle of nowhere with a tour bus full of information center staff, armed with nothing more potent than a few of his notes scribbled on scrap paper, JUST LIKE WHAT HAPPENED LAST YEAR, thankyouverymuch) is show up and enjoy the ride.

And I can't wait! I'll be bringing my laptop. I will blog. It's super fun!

But the travel arrangements get a little complicated. One of our attendees hails from a city with no nearby airport, so she has to drive; but it's too far to travel in one day, so she'll arrive the day before the tour begins on Sunday. Well and good. I asked the tour coordinator if he could get us a room for her at "state rate"* Saturday night.

He responded to me a couple of days later. "No problem!" he said. "The Sunday night host hotel will be happy to provide her a comp room for Saturday night as well."

Ah, but you see, the donation approval we received was only for the dates of the tour, beginning Sunday. If they give us a freebie on Saturday, it's a gift, and that's unethical. So I have to decline. "I expect they'll think I'm completely off my rocker," I wrote back to him, "but can they just give her the room at $85?"

"No problem!" he said; but another week later, when he sent me the confirmation number for my attendee, he once more mentioned that the hotel had comped the room.

I hesitate to call them to straighten it out, because I think our conversation will go something like this:

***

HOTEL CLERK: Hello and thank you for calling the Hotel Espada! How may I help you?

ME: Hi, I'm calling on behalf of Mary Ingalls, regarding confirmation number 8675309.

HOTEL CLERK (checking his computer): Yes ma'am, I have a reservation here for Ms. Ingalls checking in on Saturday and checking out on Monday, two nights, and it's our pleasure to offer the room complimentary as part of your tour group!

ME: Thank you so much! Actually, the thing is, I'm calling because actually she'll need to pay for Saturday.

HOTEL CLERK (confused): No, ma'am, I have your group down for complimentary rooms.

ME: Yes, thank you, that's right, except only that one.

HOTEL CLERK (still more confused): So, only Ms. Ingalls is paying? Isn't she part of the tour? And you are...?

ME: I'm the planner. See, the tour doesn't begin till Sunday, and we have special permission from our governing board to accept the donation of the room-nights, so...

HOTEL CLERK: She needs to pay for both nights?

ME: No, you see, she only pays for the first night. The second night, she's part of the whole comped-room tour group deal.

HOTEL CLERK (a little snippy): It's actually more work for us to do it this way. Why don't we just comp her room for both nights?

ME: I know, but we can't because we don't have directorial approval for the first night. Look, I know it doesn't make sense, but can you please just go ahead and charge her for one night?

HOTEL CLERK (annoyed): All right, then, if you say so. (Checks computer) That'll be $149 plus tax -

ME: Oh wait, sorry, no. We can't pay more than $85.

HOTEL CLERK (slightly incredulous): The government rate is $149, ma'am.

ME: I know, but our travel budget has been cut and our agency's policy doesn't allow us to spend more than $85 on lodging.

HOTEL CLERK: If you're hard up, you know, I did offer the room for free just a few minutes ago.

ME: No, you see, we're not allowed to accept free stuff without directorial approval. She absolutely has to pay for Saturday. Just not more than $85.

HOTEL CLERK: Are you allowed to pay less than $85??

ME: Of course - I mean, that's just the cap; it's the most we can pay; if some place offers a room for less then we pay less.

HOTEL CLERK: Okay. How about $0?

ME: Nonono! Look - please can you just give her the room for one night for $85, please!

HOTEL CLERK: I really don't see why this is necessary.

ME: It's policy! Without directorial approval, we can't accept anything over $25 in value!

HOTEL CLERK: Oh, really? Have you subtracted $85 from $149 lately?

ME: That's different! That's not the same! We're negotiating!! I'm a tour planner!!!

HOTEL CLERK: You certainly could have fooled me.

***

The thing is, I figure, after fifteen or twenty years of working in the government sector, all of this might begin to make real sense.

And at that point, I really hope somebody goes transportational and shoots me.

----------
*Long story. Love your legislature!

Lay Low

April Fools' Day is a good day to call in sick. Well, except that of course your boss will totally know you're faking.

The only real drawback to my wonder job is that sometimes I have to deal with members of the (eeeewwwww!) Public. Usually it's just via email, and that's not so bad; but it sucks when the Public gets a hold of my phone number.

The Public is very annoying. If you've told it once, you've told it a thousand times. But does it remember? No! The Public asks the same exact stupid question again and again and again. It's enough to get right up a bureaucrat's nose. Frankly, the Public could stand to learn a thing or two about collective consciousness.

So today, my phone rings, and a soft, hesitant voice says, "Yes, hello, I'd like to get some information about travel?"

My friend Tony does this every so often. "Yes, ma'am," he'll say when I answer the phone, "I need some information on -" "OH SHUT UP, YOU DO NOT!!!!" I'll shout. And very lucky I am, I might add, that every time this has happened, it has indeed been Tony on the other end of the line.

This person did not sound like Tony, but he didn't sound like the Public either. "Um," I said.

He addressed me by name. "You do work with travel information, don't you? I need some help planning a trip to San Angelo."

Oh, I don't think so. "May I ask who this is?"

He burst out laughing, and much to my surprise did not turn out to be a friend of Tony's, put up to the task for his unfamiliar voice, but one of my April conference registrants. That little stinker. See if he gets any snacks on the bus!

So I sent Tony a text to tell him about it. He's at a surveyors' conference with Pinche, a coworker of his I dated for a few months, a little over a year ago. We're on cordial terms - though we don't see each other except when we occasionally end up in joint social settings, and greet each other with a kiss on the cheek and make small talk, you know how it is. "Did I tell you," Tony texted me, "Pinche got engaged?"

Whoa. So Tony sent me a few more details; he met a girl online, and they'd only known each other about two weeks, so it was pretty sudden. I wasn't quite sure how to feel - a little shocked - I guess that sort of thing always has an impact. "Tell him congratulations for me," I texted back. "I hope they will be very happy. He's a good guy."

"And guess what else," my phone lights up to tell me, "April Fool's!"

If I'd just stayed home today, none of this would have happened.

...Wait, What?

The things you hear at work. My!

"My software skills just aren't up-to-date," sighed a coworker who had, inexplicably, stopped into Robbie's cube to chat with the two of us today. We'd never really spoken to him before. He works in the IT branch of our section. "I had to learn Access, SQL, all kinds of things. If I hadn't, they might have let me go.

"That's what happened to Tuck," he went on. "He didn't have very good skills, so they found some silly pretext to fire him on. It was really sad. Tuck was the last person who worked here I felt really close to."

Here Robbie and I had to refrain from looking at each other, because Tuck is the guy who became obsessed with our former cube neighbor Audrey, sent her an agonized four-page work email about how she was the first woman he'd ever cared for since his high school girlfriend had cravenly dumped him 30 years before, and made remarks indicating he might be a danger to himself and to others; and in the course of the ensuing formal investigation, went transportational and made death threats against the division head, which led to the long string of bored security guards we had cooling their heels near our work area for several months. This was a pretext?

Our coworker went on at some length. I hate to discourage friendliness, but my mumbled hints at really needing to get back to my desk to check on a project were going unnoticed, and for reasons I won't get into, the only way out of Robbie's cube was over the wall. We murmured politely and looked at the floor and smiled. Awkward!

He told us about where he went to school, his childhood, and where he was born. "I was the result of a broken condom!" he informed us cheerfully.

Robbie and I once again did not look at each other.

Eventually we did escape - or were released, I should say; we didn't go over the wall. I wonder what Robbie will do in a week and a half, when he finds himself suddenly working among lots of normal people. Will he be able to adapt? What if there isn't anyone ridiculous there? He'll be off balance.

What if they have a sensible business strategy there? How will he cope? As I was getting ready to leave, I heard someone in my neighbor's cubicle expressing frustration over a project we've been working on. Management wants immediate action, but have little idea exactly what that action should be. (Of course I'm aware that mindset is not at all unique to my agency, because if it were, there'd be no such thing as Dilbert.)

"Which direction we're going in is going to determine a lot of which direction we go," remarked the woman in my neighbor's cube. I wrote it down right away. You never know when the agency might decide to hold a competition to come up with a new motto.

I'd split the prize money with Robbie.

Elegance and Etymology

You know the conversation's going downhill when you find yourself having to explain who David Niven is.

Not to be confused with Larry Niven, who is (as far as I know) rather a better science fiction writer than David, but is not as likely to wear a cutaway and kid gloves in public.

David Niven played James Bond in Casino Royale. You know - the real one, with the Bacharach theme music. I consider him to belong to the same breed as James Mason, with an impeccable, yet unstudied and wholly good-natured elegance. He's a little more polished than Mason, though. And here's an interesting bit of trivia for you: Audrey Hepburn once glanced at him over the rim of her champagne glass and hiccupped, and that's how the word "debonair" came into existence. Look it up if you don't believe me!

Nonetheless, it pains me to tell you that one of the very best friends I've ever had did not know who David Niven is. I can't reveal the details of the conversation that led to this, but I can tell you it nose-dived pretty quickly, with my friend finally offering to have me whacked by the transportational stalker who lost his job over my former cube neighbor Audrey.

Not to be confused with Miss Hepburn.

Favor Curry

The best part of being a meeting planner was all the free lunches.

Actually, this is not entirely true. The free dinners were better. Fam trips (these are basically all-expenses-paid trips, including airfare and luxurious meals and accommodations, intended to familiarize meeting planners with a destination so that they will want to hold events there) were the best of all, only I never got to go because the only one I ever got invited to, in Geneva, Switzerland, was scheduled to end just three days before I was due with Anna.

She was born eight days late. I totally should have gone.

My current job is not very likely ever to send me to Europe, unless there are some fairly drastic changes in the way Texas state government is structured. But I did get taken to lunch today by some of my business contacts from Corpus, who were attending our conference in Austin. San Antonio, Atlanta (Texas, not Georgia), Pharr, Houston, and Laredo were there as well.

The guy from Laredo inexplicably reminds me of Carl Sagan. Well, it's not inexplicable that he reminds me of Carl Sagan - he looks, sounds, and acts sort of like him, and is clearly very smart - but it is a bit puzzling what a person who would remind anyone of Carl Sagan would be doing in Laredo. So I asked him; and he said he's originally from Massachusetts, and apparently just up and decided he'd like to live in Mexico City. So, in rather methodical fashion, he opted to move first to Laredo as a test environment.

But I didn't find out if he still thinks this was a good idea.

He brought a beaker of water and a PH testing kit to lunch, tested the beaker, the drinking water, and some tap water, and performed a few impromptu experiments on me and another of his tablemates. Smart guy. A little odd, maybe, but very bright people generally are. When I was a mere slip of a girl and all my classmates had ginormous crushes on Sean Cassidy (I'm dating myself here, but you know what they say about that*), I had a ginormous crush on Carl Sagan. I'm a little odd, too.

Robbie works with the guy from Houston. When Robbie and I were still very new (we started this job at the same time), Robbie called Houston to ask him a question. A secretary answered the phone. Robbie asked to speak to his contact.

"Oh, he passed away," said the secretary offhandedly.

"What?" said Robbie, taken aback.

"He's passed on," the secretary repeated.

"Oh my God. I'm sorry," Robbie exclaimed.

"Oh, it's okay," the secretary said.

Robbie hung up and told a senior coworker, who was surprised. "I just talked to him two days ago," he said, "and he didn't sound sick!"

And of course it turned out that the guy was not dead at all, and so all this time, we've just assumed the secretary was... well, a little on the transportational side. But we didn't tell this story to the guy in question until his unusually substantial and hearty-looking ghost attended the conference this week. He was puzzled, and after thinking about it for a day or two concluded that the secretary had misunderstood because someone whose first name was the same as his last name had died a couple of years before Robbie and I started this job.

I only hope she'll think it's funny that some people she's never met in Austin have assumed she was bat-shit insane for about a year and a half.

The conference is finished now, and overall I think it was a success. At the end, our supervisor lined all of us analysts up in front of what was left of the audience to thank us, and my contact from Corpus pointed to me and shouted out, "I'll take the one second from the end! How much?"

And that beats out free lunches, dinners, fam trips, and maybe even the tins of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies the sales staff at the Doubletree used to drop off in the meeting planning department where I used to work, once a month or so.

Well... maybe not the cookies.

----------------
*"You always get some when you're dating yourself!"

Flirting with Disaster

When I went to lunch with former coworkers yesterday, I tagged along with a current one, J. She's cool, but I've never really gotten to know her that well. She's sort of an on-and-off member of the three-martini break group - she often doesn't come to break; and when she does, she hardly ever finishes her third martini.

On the drive to the restaurant, we got to talking about stalkers, of all things. Don't ask me how we got on that subject. She was telling me about one she used to have a few years ago; and of course shortly after I started there, my cube neighbor A had a huge incident with some poor crazy bastard who became convinced that they had a tacit, but serious relationship, just because she once asked him conversationally if he weren't cold without a jacket on. A's stalker pushed things a lot farther than J's, who apparently backed off not too long after he should have; A's lost it completely and got fired, and to this day we have a security guard stationed in our hallway, every single day except the second Tuesday and last Friday in odd-numbered months that contain the letter E. (Or something like that. I have not yet actually figured out the pattern; but then, I'm not much of a stalker.)

"Damn," I said to J in the car. "It seems like, where we work, every girl gets a stalker. Where's mine???"

She laughed, but looked at me a little oddly. Nobody understands me.

She had to stop on the way and get stamps, and from the post office parking lot I got my first glimpse of the newly demolished Intel Shell. I stepped out of the car to snap a picture with my phone.

It looks pretty messed up, but not, perhaps, quite as thoroughly demolished as I'd expected.

The demolition charges went off this past Sunday, early in the morning, and I heard the booms from my house. Being mostly asleep and not remembering that the demolition was scheduled for that morning, I didn't know what they were. They didn't sound like anything I could identify - sort of like very loud thunder, but without the rumbly dying-away bit. The house that backs up to ours is steeply uphill, and they have a huge, somewhat rickety-looking addition that comes right up to the fence, looming over our backyard. We keep thinking that one of these days, it's just going to give way and slide right down the hill and crush us. I thought perhaps Sunday was that day.


But it wasn't, so I'm still here, and will still be going back to work on Monday, more's the pity. Perhaps I'll see about posting a job requisition for my very own personal stalker. My division is rife with likely candidates. Must have skin.