background check…what?
Today Dave and I went to a federal building where we had a meeting with somebody in the IT Dept of this federal agency. The meeting concerned some kiosks that Dave had previously written programs for and we were stopping by to do some follow-up maintenance/upgrading of software for them.
Dave and I showed up at the building and, of course, we had to go through a metal detector and all that, just like at the airport. The only difference was that the old guy who we were talking to was much more talkative and friendly, especially when telling us he didn’t want to have to shoot us like they did the guy with the hand grenade a few years ago. All this he said with a smile, like he was offering us a plate of cookies. ????WTF! Uh, thanks dude…I think.
Dave and I headed upstairs and we had the meeting, where we were told that there were some concerns with this and that in the software and some of the kiosks had just shut down completely, so we’d need to take a couple of the computer boxes with us and troubleshoot them. Oh yeah, we can do that… Dave, you go get your car and take it to the loading dock and I’ll go with the lady here and get the towers and meet you down there.
Down in the loading dock, Dave called me to say that he was ready to come in, so the lady we had the meeting with told the security guys to open the door and let him in. In addition to having the door closed, they also had those metal poles that were about waist height that would lower down into the concrete hydraulically in order to let a car in, or keep a car out, as the case may be. It was a bit daunting, but it was kinda cool being behind the scenes in the loading dock of a federal building where they take security VERY SERIOUSLY, ya know?
As Dave was pulling in (after they’d conducted a search of his car), the lady who we had met with turned to me, “Oh yeah, we’ll email you the forms for the background check next week. But you can take the hardware today.” She said it with a wink, as though to say that she trusted us, but she had to go through the formality for the sake of protocol.
Hmmmm, that made me feel funny. Partly because of my knee-jerk reaction to Federal Background Check, but also because they actually might find something. For those of you not familiar with my Alaskan upbringing, there was an incident in highschool involving 8 of us and a bunch of beer and an FAA building. In Round One, the building lost. However, in Round Two: The Legal Round, me and a couple of the others lost.
After talling Dave about that, he said, “Don’t worry, it wasn’t a felony, so it’s probably no big deal.” And slightly afterward, he added, “Way to go losing the contract for us, dingdong! You’re fired!”
Well….we’ll see. Now it seems there are TWO legal entities interested in me for various reasons. What do you do?
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