The Billion Dollar Paperclip (p51-p56)

(Setting:  The Head Honcho's secretary discovers why government-procured items cost so much.)

While Freeman charged off to recruit an Insurrection Czar, another crisis began when the Honcho's personal secretary, Buxomus Blondus, announced that the government ran out of paper clips. Everyone ignored her, since the Honcho employed her solely for her impressive physical attributes. What she lacked in office skills was more than compensated for by magnificent breasts protruding from her chest like erotic missiles. Her firm, voluptuous ass wiggled below an impossibly narrow waist and above two impossibly long legs. The services she provided the Honcho were completely unrelated to office work. She didn't know how to turn on the computer, make copies, or take dictation, but she was the Honcho's sexual plaything. So, when she announced the paper clip shortage, no one noticed anything but her physique.

However, a homely secretary who was actually employed to do office work also noticed the paper clip shortage. In the past, this was easily remedied by a purchase requisition authorizing a buyer to procure more. Unfortunately, the Government Accounting Office had recently instituted severe purchasing controls to prevent fraud and abuse. The multi-volume Federal Acquisition Regulations were intended to safeguard against the reckless spending of federal funds.

The paper clip buyer took to heart the new regulations, which stipulated that a detailed specification was needed to avoid confusion about which paper clips were actually required. Should they be one or two inches long? Should they be blue, pink, or metallic? Should they be tin or copper? Should they be bare or plastic coated? The buyer dutifully notified the homely secretary that he couldn't proceed with her requisition without a comprehensive spec.

Unfortunately, she didn't know how to write detailed specifications, particularly for ordinary paper clips. Fortunately, a secretary who used to work in the Pentagon suggested consulting with military technocrats, who were adept at specifying intricate acquisitions such as nuclear weaponry and freeze dried beer.

The Pentagon technocrats were eager to develop the specifications for the government's paper clips. The mere mention of the Head Honcho, who chaired the Senate Ways and Means Committee, was sufficient to get design engineers immediately reassigned from the MX Missile Project to the Paper Clip Project. The Pentagon wanted to impress him with their technical wizardry to guarantee a continued torrent of funds to develop weapons capable of deterring any enemies contemplating attacking America, if such exist.

To fund the effort, a special appropriation was hustled through Congress, who assumed that when the Pentagon needed money for a project of vital strategic importance, it meant national security was at stake, as opposed to job security of the technocrats in the military-industrial complex. The code name Paper Clip Project also misled Congress into believing that a substantial "black budget" effort was behind this innocuous moniker.

With the $500 million dollar appropriation, the Pentagon assembled a crack team of engineers, who left no design consideration unexamined. For example, the paper clips needed to be durable, to avoid the expense of continually replacing them. Therefore, the engineers specified the rare metal Unobtanium, which has extraordinary tensile strength and resistance to corrosion. Unfortunately, its melting point is one million degrees centigrade, so the smelting process requires nuclear fusion.

Standard paper clips are either one or two inches long. However, the ergonomic engineers at the Pentagon determined that a paper clip 1 3/4 inches long provided the optimum balance between paper gripping surface and ease of handling. In order to prevent electro-static discharge near sensitive electronics, they had to be coated with conductive paint. They had to be magnetized to adhere to metals, and have a PH factor of -3 to prevent skin inflammation. According to OSHA standards, they also had to be weightless, to prevent back strain and carpal tunnel syndrome. Fortunately, weightlessness could be achieved by using the Pentagon's top-secret anti-gravity rays.

The paper clips had to be gray, to prevent eyestrain and to avoid discrimination lawsuits, since any other color would be construed by minority groups as a racial slur. They also had to be usable by physically challenged employees, so they were specified with miniature motors and rotors controlled by microcircuits that react to voice commands.

When the design effort was completed, the engineers applauded their accomplishment. In the grand tradition of the military industrial complex, another product had been developed that was going to cost 411 times its budget, be impossible to manufacture, and have a mean time between failures of 4.6 seconds. As colossal bundles of money fell into very deep pockets, the Pentagon delivered the paper clip specification to the secretaries in the Senatorial Office Building.

Now the procurement phase of the Paper Clip Project could begin. Three competitive bids had to be obtained from qualified manufacturers, with the contract awarded to the lowest bidder who met the specifications. However, the contract was actually awarded to the firm that enticed the purchasing agent with the best wine, prostitutes, and kickbacks. An unsuccessful bidder filed a lawsuit challenging the contract award, on the grounds that it was physically and morally impossible for paper clips to cost $3 billion per box, which was the winning bid. The lawsuit was thrown out because the secretary of the presiding judge had recently procured thumbtacks that cost even more. The judge concluded that this was the going price for government paper fasteners.

Despite being paid $3 billion per box, the winning bidder experienced staggering cost overruns because of the utterly unmanufacturable specification. Pre-production models kept failing the first article tests. The dust test, in which a paper clip was subjected to a desert sandstorm, was particularly troublesome. Sand kept gumming up the miniature motors and rotors, so it didn't respond to voice commands. Worse still, the handicapped people giving the voice commands got their vocal cords gummed up by the ferocious sandstorms. The manufacturer went through 26 prototype paper clips and 11 handicapped people before passing this test.

The environmental stress tests were also difficult. Since paper clips might be used in Alaska or Saudi Arabia, they had to survive temperatures ranging from -40 degrees to 150 degrees. The paper clips themselves had no trouble operating in these thermal extremes. Unfortunately, the test operators weren’t quite as durable. The first tests resulted in 14 hypothermia victims and 17 heat stroke victims. This problem was corrected by using dummies from the Education Department as testers.

The final hurdle was the nuclear survivability test, in which a five-megaton warhead was dropped on a paper clip. Amazingly, the Unobtanium clip survived the explosion. However, technicians suspected the test was flawed, because no other product had ever survived. For a more controlled test, a human holding a paper clip was placed at a desk on the test range. Another warhead was detonated. The control group, which consisted of the human and the desk, was obliterated by the blast, while the Unobtanium paper clip was unscathed. After examining the results, the technicians agreed the paper clip had indeed survived a legitimate nuclear test.

The manufacturing process was sophisticated and expensive. The smelter for the raw Unobtanium was actually a nuclear fusion reactor, with a core temperature of 1 million degrees maintained by four million-volt lasers focused on a plasma concocted of quarks and mesons. The cost to train the production workers was astronomical, because the manufacturer was required by its UAW contract to train existing workers rather than hire nuclear experts to operate the smelter. Their learning curve led to many errors, including a meltdown during a pre-production run.

Mining the raw Unobtanium was even more difficult. Unobtanium is found in a single deposit deep within the earth's mantle, directly below a habitat of the extremely endangered reticulated aardvark. So, the manufacturer had to do an expensive environmental impact study before drilling for the Unobtanium ore. They simulated the drilling process in a laboratory cage containing male and female reticulated aardvarks, while the Endangered Species Commission carefully monitored vital signs and reproductive activity. The only appreciable effect the drilling had on the animals was to stimulate fornication by creating a suggestive thought in the erotic lobe of the male's brain. The ESC reluctantly approved full-scale mining, and then moved on to prosecute a beachcomber for leaving a footprint in a protected sand dune along Lake Michigan.

Despite these hardships, the manufacturer eventually produced the paper clips. After four train loads of regulatory paperwork, $16 billion dollars of cost overruns, and the deaths of 43 unwitting test administrators, the paper clips were delivered to the federal government. The secretaries were elated. They nominated Buxomus Blondus, who originally discovered the paper clip shortage, to present the first box to the Head Honcho. Brimming with pride, she slinked into the Honcho's inner office and purred alluringly, "Honcho dear, I have something for you!"

"I've got a headache," replied the Honcho.