“You think it’s a joke or a typo?” asks the accounting clerk. His manager looks down at the expense report, his face registering the same misgiving as the clerk’s. There, just below Transportation, Lodging, Meals, and Entertainment, in the space reserved for miscellaneous expenses, Steve had written: Two goats...$150.

“I hope so,” replies the manager “To my knowledge, no telecommunications company has ever reimbursed a goat purchase.”

Lack of precedent notwithstanding, it wasn’t a typo, and it turned out to be legit. Call it a faunal expression of the emerging global economy, part of the cost of doing business in remote and culturally disparate countries.

The author of the unusual expense report is my brother-in-law, whose insights and exploits have occasionally graced these pages. Steve has a job that many people in the technology sector would covet. He is a consultant, an Alpha Geek you might say, and he travels the world installing global telecommunications networks. The job sounds exciting, and it inspires travel and earnings envy. But the day-to-day reality of working in exotic locations is distorted by imagination, and the work itself is often more glamorous in the telling than in the doing.

Steve’s job frequently takes him to troubled regions of the globe where successful completion of a project requires not being deterred by such petty annoyances as gunfire, coups, or threats of nuclear war. Happily, Steve is qualified to tackle such challenges by virtue of being old enough to be careful and young enough to still believe nothing can happen to him. So, when others head for the airport to catch the first flight home, Steve stays on to finish the job.

Over the last decade, Steve made six trips to Pakistan to work on a satellite-based compressed voice and data network. The network is controlled by the military, which plays a central role in the nation’s governance since the country is dominated by fear of neighboring India. Although culturally ancient, Pakistan has existed as a nation only since 1947, when British-controlled India was partitioned to create a homeland for India’s Muslims. Whatever opportunity the fledgling nation had to attract economic investment and tourism vanished with the region’s political stability. The revolution in neighboring Iran, the bloody Afghan war, and the ongoing dispute with India over Kashmir diminished the likelihood of investment or overland travel through that part of Asia. The country remains

geographically isolated, reliant on ancient agricultural practices, and victimized by a bureaucracy that is corrupt and unresponsive.

The network Steve was sent to fix has over 200 nodes and two hubs: one in the capital, Islamabad, and one in Karachi to the South on the Arabian Sea. Getting there is not half the fun. To reach Pakistan from the U.S. East Coast requires about 22 hours of flying with stops in Tokyo and Bangkok.

The first time Steve arrives in Pakistan, he is met at the Islamabad airport by an armed driver whose job is to deter kidnappers and shoo away a large contingent of aggressive baggage handlers. The city looks like an arms bazaar. Neighboring wars have spawned a proliferation of military and paramilitary activity. Small-arms traders openly hawk their wares on the street, and soldiers man machine gun emplacements at many intersections. Noticing his dismay, the driver tells Steve, “Do not be concerned; we will take a different route to work each day.” It is a grim reminder that he is there to replace a technician who was caught in a fire fight between thieves and police while visiting the gold market in search of a trinket. The technician left the next day.

Most everything in the city is in disrepair, and once broken, it stays broken because there is little money to fix it. But manpower is plentiful though frequently unmotivated. The hotel restaurant boasts an abundance of waiters, none of whom seem anxious to serve Steve. Perhaps they know that the local fare is tough on foreign digestive tracts. Meat is delivered by trucks piled with carcasses covered with flies. That evening after dinner, Steve gets sick. The facility that houses the network is a modern brick building operated by what is known as the National Logistical Cell (NLC). The NLC is controlled by the military, although it performs a variety of civic functions such as road building and repair. During the Soviet-Afghan War, it was thought to be a CIA front funneling weapons to the Afghans. In most regards, the facility resembles any other modern telecommunications installation, with two exceptions: The building has no heat, and the staff sleeps on the floor. Officers are provided housing, but enlisted men sleep in the computer room, turning off the air conditioning during the winter months to enjoy the warmth generated by the hardware. Using million-dollar telecommunications hardware as a space heater was having predictable impacts on their system.

Troubleshooting is problematic because no one does scheduled maintenance, and working machines are routinely cannibalized to fix broken ones. “It is culturally risky to report bad news,” says Steve, “so as long as the network is doing something, it is considered operational.” It takes Steve a week to stabilize the network sufficiently to identify the problems. The culprits are malfunctioning satellite modems. As satellites orbit the Earth, changing their position relative to the location of the data being transmitted, they must contend with the Doppler frequency shift. The satellite’s Doppler buffers were not turned on and Steve determined that the frequency shift was causing the eight-bit hardware FIFO (first in, first out) buffer to overflow. He discovered this by tracking the satellite’s orbit with an oscilloscope. (I told you he was an Alpha Geek). Presented with the invoice for technical support, the Pakistanis at first claim that the system was running just fine before he arrived. After the obligatory haggling, they agree to pay.

Last year, Steve was working in Karachi when the elected government was displaced in a coup. “You could see troops mobilizing in the streets, and everyone in the hotel ran off for the airport,” recalls Steve, “but I stayed because the airport is the first thing they close during a coup.” Nonetheless, he wasn’t able to complete his work, because a batch of Sun workstations scheduled for installation were held up in customs by the U.S. State Department. It would take six months to get the shipment approved.

So this year, he returned to install the workstations and fix 18 outstanding network problems. Before his arrival, the Pakistanis were reminded that the last payment for the network would be due when the open items were closed. By the time Steve arrives, the list had grown to 38.

Steve checks into his usual hotel in Islamabad, but is displaced a few days later by the arrival of President Clinton’s entourage. Some of the Pakistanis are incensed and

confused by America’s failure to intercede in Kashmir. They ask Steve repeatedly, “Why doesn’t the U.S. intervene as you did when Iraq invaded Kuwait?”

“Kashmir has no oil,” Steve finally tells them. As he is working his way through the open items, he notices a scarcity of replacement parts. “Where are all the spare parts?” Steve wants to know.

“They have not been delivered, Mr. Steve.” Which brings me to the unfortunate Colonel Fasid. Steve checks with the home office, and, indeed, they have been shipped. So he asks the former site manager, Colonel Fasid, what might have happened to the spares. The colonel claims to know nothing of any shipment, but, as fate would have it, he happens to have some spare parts in his possession, which he graciously offers to sell to Steve. Well, you don’t have to be Inspector Clouseau to figure out how the colonel came by his stash of replacement parts. So Steve tells him that this is indeed good fortune but, before he can authorize payment, he must verify that the parts in fact work. “Of course,” replies the colonel, and promptly sends cases of boards to the computer room.

Steve checks the serial numbers with the home office, and, praise be, they match precisely those of the missing spares. Being asked to buy back your own spare parts is a bit much, even for a rather tolerant guy like Steve, so he feigns outrage and reports the theft to Pakistani military officials. A team is dispatched to the colonel’s house to investigate, and what should they find but a large cache of equipment and other goodies that the colonel apparently pilfered over the years. “Being caught stealing was bad enough,” reflects Steve, “but not sharing the booty with his superiors was probably what got him arrested.” The disposition of his case is unknown, but Pakistani military justice leans toward the swift and the permanent.

“With all these distractions,” I ask, “why not support the site remotely?” “Can’t,” says Steve. “There are no direct-dial lines into the network. Every time we wanted to dial in, we had to send a fax asking them to hook up a modem. But the fax was being used as a copier and was always out of paper.”

“So what about the goats?” Steve explains that the goats were for two retired colonels who provided in-house technical support. He was in Pakistan during the Muslim feast of Eid, which is a holy day founded in forgiveness, remembrance, and peace. Perhaps foremost, it is a day of gratitude, and those who are able are required to make a sacrifice to Allah and to share the meat with the poor. Even for retired colonels, the expense was daunting. So Steve offered to purchase the goats, and one of the colonels invited him home to his village to partake in the celebration. He was honored to do so.

If Steve’s experience is any indication, flexibility, adaptability, and a dose of bravado are useful attributes in the new global economy. Jobs, however, particularly in Third World nations, are not always what they seem. Surviving coups, sacrificing goats, recovering pilfered spare parts.... “That’s never part of the job description,” says Steve,
“but you have to deal with it just the same.” But for all the cultural differences and disparate values, some similarities exist.

“We sacrifice animals here too,” says Steve. “We call it Thanksgiving. The main differences are that we sacrifice by proxy and we don’t share the meat with the poor.”