Serendipity, PUSH ON

Gerald:4 of my hats

 Floor of NYSE, me center.

Anthropologist

Mil.

Me and President Ford

Missions, operations and goal achievement.

I've been on "jobs" for lack of a better word,

when we went way beyond our supply lines

and support systems, were on our own, ALONE.

It happens when serendipity strikes,

and instead of making it to level 3,

your very difficult target, you battle

so hard, effectively when you look

up your on level 7.

And the thing most do 

is stay put and consolidate the victory.
Bask.

But finding your self beyond the goal

beyond all expectations, you continue

to push on. And thats when you get beyond

support systems, and in the zone.

Of course there are strategic considerations,

you wouldn't do this if you were on a battle line,

too much risk of friendly fire. Or flanking.

Or if your assignment was to retrieve some data,

or person.

But there are cases where its good.

Recon or Cell Penetration or finding a backdoor.

In both the Meat and cyber worlds.

Where you have the foresight to NOT to

stop with the current victory and push on to
see how far you can go.

If you push this paradigm to its limits it can

become a zero error game.

And zero error games can be successfully played.

But if you discover your in a zero error game to

late, your finished.

A real Zero Error game has the effect of enormous

focused concentration.

And there is an addictive flavor to it, an adrenalin rush

to it.

One of the zero error games I've played was a Knife

fight in Morocco, I spent the night at the Embassy.
1980's.

My second swipe of the blade I realized I was in a

ZERO ERROR game. I lost some skin off a finger.

I quit swinging for his fingers and went after his

torso. To Cut him OPEN. 

But you have the flavor now.

Marines do it all the time.

Kill an ambush and go on looking

for another one.

There is that type, flavor of games

on the WWW and in the meat world,

on the strategic level.

It is rewarding and disappointing

when sometimes the proof of success  
is someone disappears from the Internet, 
your left wanting more.

Some times you end out there so far,

your boss calls you a liar,

till you show him the product/proofs.

At points your adrenalin is being pumped

by an oil well, and you have to appear,

present as if everything were normal.

Other times you make it to the top goal,
way above your objective 

and find your self not quite prepared.

You reached the summit, and find a formal

dance party in progress, and of course

your wearing mountain climbing gear.

And somebody is asking if you'd like

to do some push ups.

AND YOU JUST DONT WANA.
You've just climbed a mountain,
bypassing base camp, and somebody
is faulting your operational persona
for not wearing formal attire. 
Irritating and exhilarating; both.

The loss of physical strength, fatigue.

is much easier to deal with than

Mental fatigue. I've worked 48 hr days.
Its hard, bounce back slow.

I find if I keep my reward commensurate

to or in excess of accomplishment I last

a lot longer, less trouble with burn out.

Has to be some form of fun, even if twisted.

I think arguing the Koran with a terrorist fun.

I love tracking someone down for a month,

and using every exploit, advantage, technology,

mole I have access to. Thats fun.


There have been two times in my life that
the pressure was so immense and prolonged
I thought I might break, I didn't, but I did crack.
And had to take some time off, to regroup,
refocus and come down before continuing.
Each time its gotten easier and feel less like
breaking and takes more pressure to interrupt
actions. In each of the two cases its gotten 
easier.

But I feel like I've screwed up when I reach

the peak and find I'm wearing mountain equipment

to a formal.

But theres just no telling where the 'end game' WILL

end. Sometimes your just glad you have an end game.

Some times its like dominoes other times its like

mole hunting.

And strange as it sounds, I have no idea what blog 

post/Intel is going to get maximum hits. 

Some of the Intel I think is just Genius, gets panned.
Thats disappointing.

Some of the Intel I throw in at the last min. gets 70%

of the hits. Thats disappointing too.

Recent hot news sometimes gets the hits and
some times doesn't.

We have had operations where a blog post was written

for one person, some one that didn't even know who we

were, but we knew who they were.

We just needed to deliver a message without them knowing
they were reading a message.

And some posts are written for a specific audience,
some are PSA's, we don't write for hits.  
But the reading audience is a weapon.

Some posts are part of an operation, but all true.

I love comments, some comments have deserved

their own post and I did. And I OK all comments

unless they are spam.

Fun Part of the job are the toys.

Hard part of the job are the toys.

The paranoia you get used to.

And you actually can get used to

waiting. That came as a surprise.

I wanted to share with readers what some of this

work is like from the inside sometimes, subject to OPsec.

Hope it made sense.

Gerald

Anthropologist

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