Free The Weed Agency by Jim Geraghty Page B

it an opportunity for an extraordinary transformation to provide better services?’ ” 20 She looked around the room. “The fact that he’s raising the question suggests that to him it’s not resolved.”
    The looks from most of the senior staff were skeptical, with smirks and scoffs. Wilkins had a slightly kinder tone to the younger staff than most of the agency’s management, but even he came across as a bit condescending.
    “Lisa, it’s great that you put in this effort, but I think you’re probably giving these guys too much credit,” he said. “These guys don’t see nuance. He’s holding up this idea of a theoretical perfect reform, some ‘extraordinary transformation’ as a fig leaf to hide the fact that he’s really intent on chopping away all of us ‘relics of the past,’ as he so kindly put it. To dissuade him, you would have to offer such an … ‘extraordinary transformation to provide better services’ that he’d be left with his head spinning …”
    Humphrey suddenly jostled to life and began looking through the stack of folders and reports before him. Whatever he was looking for, it seemed to be at the bottom of the pile.
    “What …” he began, almost absentmindedly, “was … that mumbo-jumbo from the trollop in the tech department?”
    Lisa and Jamie exchanged a look, knowing he had to be referring to Ava.
    Finally, Humphrey found what he was looking for. A report marked:
    WEED.GOV
    A WEB ADDRESS PORTAL PAGE DATABASE
INTERCONNECTIVITY SYSTEM
    DECEMBER 1994
    U.S. National Debt: $4.8 trillion
    Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $91.2 million
    In two years, Ava had barely interacted with Humphrey. Once in a great while, the IT department would press-gang her into helping with senior staff’s frantic calls for help with their computers. She had heard all of the apocryphal IT horror stories:
Your mouse is not a foot pedal. The pop-out disk drive is not a cup holder. “You keep telling me, ‘press any key’—where’s the ‘any’ key?”
    If the Central Intelligence Agency was anything like the Agency of Invasive Species, Ava feared, any foreign power would be able to crack into any database by typing in the password “PASSWORD” or “1234.” Her innovative, groundbreaking technique of turning the computer off and turning the computer on again usually generated amazed stares that would have been fit for witnessing alchemy.
    Of course, since she was cuter than the usual tech-gnomes scurrying up from the IT department, she noticed men tended to call with new problems again, shortly after her first visit.
    Now she was in Humphrey’s office, and he and Wilkins were peppering her with intense questions about her proposal for her “Web address portal page database interconnectivity system”—queriesthat revealed they barely understood what it did, how it worked, and why it would be useful.
    “So you’re saying that we could share all of this information through joint-access databases, but … why wouldn’t we just pick up the phone and tell the person the same information?” Wilkins asked.
    “You can still do that, but with this, it doesn’t matter whether the person is at their desk or wherever—the information is there, 24/7, for anyone to access and use as they need it,” she explained, wondering why he didn’t seem to grasp this the first two times she discussed how agency employees would use the system. “And we’re talking about massive amounts of information. Data. Weed counts, everything we put into our reports. Data you can put into spreadsheets and charts and all of that.”
    “But that’s what fax machines are for.”
    She sighed. “No more paper jams. No toner replacements. No more PC LOAD LETTER messages.”
    “What you’re suggesting would take money, no doubt,” Humphrey said, making some sort of calculation in his head. “Our current budget, clearly, does not include room for the expenditures necessary to bring this to