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.<\/p>\n
I’m talking about L. Paul Bremer. We call him “Jerry.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“Okay,” he said in his fluent but unmistakable Polish accent, “I will read it to you again.
\nJ as in ‘Joanna,’
\nB as in ‘brotherhood,’
\nR as in ‘republic,’
\nE as in ‘England,’
\nM as in ‘motherland’…”
\nand so on.<\/p>\n
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?”<\/p>\n
“No,” I answered. “He was being Polish!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonclassified-nonsense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}