Waste Department

To sum up: it took two hours to get to a cramped room with computer banks and safes, get a ten-minute briefing from a gum-chewing NRRC representative, and be told they have shirts on sale for $27.50.

Not impressed.

Even though "NRRC" sounds like something Curly would say three times to the other two Stooges, it actually stands for Nuclear Risk Reduction Center. Set up as a sort of computer-link version of the "Red Phone" between Moscow and DC, we deal with the NRRC (and the Russian equivalent) all the time for sending message traffic back and forth concerning inspections and other notifications. So they were nice enough to invite some of us down for a tour.

So now I can say I've been to the State Department. Even though I've walked past it a bunch of times, I'd forgotten where it is until we got out of the Metro Station right near where my brother lived during college.

One of our group, an Army Lieutenant Colonel, apparently misunderstood the meeting time at DTRA, so we left without him, carpooling to the Springfield Metro and taking the rail in. But he called and said he was on the next train, so we were forced to wait for him for twenty minutes at the visitor's entrance. We then walked down non-descript hallways (the building looks like it was built by communists, very square, very plain inside and out) to the NRRC. I don't know what I was expecting. Certainly not a "Wargames"-like ops center, but c'mon. Three middle-aged men and our gum-chewing, flaky hostess, who basically showed us 1995-era computers that are in use here and in the former Soviet republics, a sample message, and asked, almost apologetically, if there were any questions. Well, here's the NRRC, the briefing seemed to say. Yep. It's a room. A couple of people. A picture on the wall of Colin Powell singing Christmas Carols in 2002 in this very room. Also doughnuts. We weren't even offered a tour of the rest of the building, though they did take us down to the gift shop so we could buy state department aprons if we wanted.

My driver was staying behind to have lunch, so a navy enlisted guy and I asked to bum a ride from the late-arriving LTC once we got back to Springfield. Out to the parking garage, up to the fifth floor...and then discovered that you needed a special card to get out of the parking lot, so we had to walk back inside the station to buy one. Then back to the fifth floor...and he couldn't remember where he'd parked. He just kept pointing his key chain down random rows, pushing the remote unlock button until he saw the lights flash. Down to the fourth floor, nothing, oh, wait, I'm further down, up a level. *sigh*, said the Major and the Navy dude.

So that was five hours of my day I won't have back until I invent my time machine, but even then I seriously doubt I'd revisit this morning instead of doing something cool like telling Ulysses S. Grant about the F-117 or jumping to pre-World War I Vienna and kicking Hitler in the NRRCs.