An interesting aspect of my job is that my boss is brother to someone very famous. He may still have a price on his head of 1 kilogram of gold (though, I’m not sure how one would collect that from Al Qaeda). And he just came out with a new book last week.

I’m talking about L. Paul Bremer. We call him “Jerry.”

Mostly, this past week this triva has meant taking a break from entering 2005 receipts and statements into a tax database and watching Jerry on the Today show or listening to him on Fresh Air. Jerry is going to be on the Daily Show, which Berck and I try to watch every day (actually, the day after, since we don’t have a TV). So I wrote him an e-mail telling him what to expect from an interview with Jon Stewart. There are enough people on there who don’t seem to know what they’re getting into.

I know what Jerry’s e-mail address is because Duncan called me from a meeting on Friday asking me to look it up Jerry’s number. He’d gotten a call from a Polish journalist seeing if they could get an interview with Jerry that day. Duncan told me to call Jerry’s assistant and see what they wanted to do. I called the number marked “Business” in Duncan’s contact folder. But Duncan is bad about putting people’s home numbers in the “Business” field, so I either reached his assistant or his wife. In either case, she told me that I should give the Polish journalist Jerry’s e-mail address because Jerry was doing interviews all day and would have his cell phone off. I jotted down the e-mail address Duncan had listed there and waited for the journalist to call back.

He did rather quickly. (Caller ID said it was a call “outside of area.”) I identified myself and read the e-mail address off to him, spelling the first part of it out.

“Okay,” he said in his fluent but unmistakable Polish accent, “I will read it to you again.
J as in ‘Joanna,’
B as in ‘brotherhood,’
R as in ‘republic,’
E as in ‘England,’
M as in ‘motherland’…”
and so on.

I almost burst out laughing, but he was being quite serious. When I told Michele about it later, she laughed and asked, “Was he being funny?”

“No,” I answered. “He was being Polish!”