I’m wearing my White House Communication Agency hat again today.
I have to remember not to wear it in the rain though because I’ll probably only get another few months out of this thing before it’s too tattered. And you know I’ll never get access to another one anytime soon, eh?
So this young sailor walks past me where I’m telecommunicating at my laptop and drinking coffee and he does a quick turnaround and I can tell right away he’s going to ask me something.
I thought it was going to be about my http://www.blackfire.net bumpersticker on the laptop. Or perhaps my Richard Stallman GNU bumpersticker in the same place (one guy pointed at that once and said, you know? Richard Stallman DOES kind of look like a Yak doesn’t he?)
But no, he goes, does that hat say “the white house?”
“Yeah.” I tip my head down a little so he can read the rest more clearly. He looked at how else I’m dressed and I can tell he was making another one of those broad generalizations where I can’t possibly have ever worked for the White House press corps, right?
etc.
So there’s where I got to tell the first part of my favorite joke these days.
“Yes,” I said, “after signal corps I joined the team that had to acquire new ‘W’s” for all the keyboards and install and troubleshoot them.”
I let him off easy though. Right away there I told him I actually didn’t get to work directly for the White House ever, just all over DC as a freelancer, etc.
Usually if someone still believes me I go on to tell them that I was the one who had to assess security when Baby Bush insisted on moving his email computers OFF Solaris/Apache/PINE/LYNX and onto PC/XPPro/Outlook/Explorer.
And if someone still doesn’t realize I’m joking I go on to tell them that even though I’m neither Republican nor Democrat, I had to quit my job AND the republican party when I walked in on Bush, Mark Foley, Jeff Gannon and Ted Haggard doing the nasty.