Politicking…
This food is really good, but then it ought to be considering how much the attendees here are paying for it - $5,000 a ticket according to Nat. Obviously most of that is going into his pop’s campaign fund but it still leaves a reasonable enough amount to pay for the dinner and wine. Not that me or Nat are getting any wine of course, just fruit juice for us. What they are really buying, according to Nat, is access and influence. They get to be seen and, more importantly they expect to get a chance to meet Nat’s dad or at least his campaign team. Put across their opinions. Seek whatever favours they think they might be able to negotiate in return for their support if Nat’s dad wins the election and gets into power. Nat explained all that to me as we were getting changed earlier. Oh, and yes, he said most of the attendees would be stumping up similar amounts of cash to go to the other candidates’ fund raisers too. Hedging their bets, making sure that whoever wins the election they still have some link to the strings of power.
There are ten people on our table as well as me and Nat. Except Nat has vanished. He was here for about ten minutes as we all sat down here in the dining room after the cocktail reception beneath the rotunda. That wasn’t too hard, but pretty hectic. Me and Nat just wandered around making sure we said ‘Hello’ to lots of people. Nat’s got a real way of spending barely two minutes with people but making sure they feel like he’s known them forever, and he always says something like ‘I’ll make sure pop knows you were here supporting him, and don’t hesitate to get in touch in future.’ He said it makes people think they have a more direct line to his dad rather than having to go through the campaign staff. He never actually gives them his contact details though. Just shakes hands again, smiles and moves on…
According to the campaign lady who gave us our seating plan and a quick briefing earlier this afternoon, the people on our table are important. Mostly long-time campaign donors for the Bauers. Being put with Nat is another way of making then feel special, that they have a close link to the Bauer family rather than just being ‘campaign cash cows.’ We just have to be nice to them, entertain them for the duration of the meal and give them the feeling that they really matter. Everything was going pretty well for the first few minutes. We all sat down, me and Nat placed opposite each other on the round table with five people put on either side between us. Everybody knew who Nat is, and he introduced me briefly – a ‘friend from Allegheny River Military College- and we then launched into plenty of small talk as the first drinks were poured and the entrées arrived. Well, appetizers as they call it here. For some weird reason Americans think the main course is called the entrée. Like as if they even need to know any French to realise that the first course is the ‘entry’ to the meal. Churchill was right, we’re definitely two nations divided by a common language, even if entrée isn’t actually English. I wonder how Americans get on with the snooty waiters you get in France?
It seems most of our guests have either seen Nat when he did his Christmas concert thing, or they saw the tv documentary about Allegheny College, or saw him playing his sax at the July 4th celebrations a few days ago in Pittsburgh. Some even realised it was me there with Elizabeth duetting as Nat played. All dead useful. It gave us something to break the ice with, and my accent soon opened the small talk wider. I think if I had claimed I really did know ‘er Maj I’d have been believed. It’s weird when you think about it. They kicked us Brits out and love being a Republic, but they kind of want a royal family of their own too. talk about having your cake and eating it. Maybe Governors should start wearing a crown. The Bauers certainly seem to be on their way to founding a ruling dynasty. Nathan, Prince of Pittsburgh, has a bit of a ring to it…
Just as the appetizers arrived, a smoked salmon mousse with crème fraîche, lime and dill served on a jet-black dish to emphasise the colours and textures of the food, Nat got a tap on the shoulder from one of his dad’s campaign team, made a brief excuse and left after promising “I’ll only be gone a moment, Craig here will be delighted to look after you for a minute or two.”
A minute or two would have been no problem. I was happy with the small talk stuff. Even ten minutes wasn’t bad, but he’s been gone nearly twenty minutes now and everybody’s just about finished the first course, so the conversation is going to ratchet back up a couple of notches.
“So, Craig, you were telling us that you’re on your way to Gettysburg tomorrow. That’s quite an important place to us Americans. Isn’t that right, dear?” As Mr Wiśniewski looked across to his wife for confirmation I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. I think I’ve got this covered. I can hold the fort a minute or two longer.
“Yes, Sir, so I understand, but I agree with your President Lincoln though. Whatever we think of Gettysburg, it can’t really compare with the sacrifices made there by the troops that fought there. They were truly the ones that consecrated that ground with their blood. Paul, sorry, Nathan’s pop, Mr Bauer, said we shouldn’t just go there as tourists, we should try and understand what Gettysburg really means, make sure anything we ever do lives up to the ideals enshrined there.”
See, I did listen in during my Saturday morning Civics lessons at Allegeheny when everybody else was out learning to march. I know most of the important bits of the Gettysburg address. I think I’ve said the right things. Everybody at the table is smiling or nodding.
Mrs Wiśniewski smiled, a smile that seemed to ripple across her whole voluminous body, and looked around the table. “Now, isn’t it refreshing to meet young people who take these things seriously? Do you agree, Mrs Wardlow?”
Mrs Wardlow is a sparrow of a woman, thin and fidgety in stark contrast to Mrs Wiśniewski, who could be anybody’s favourite aunt. “Well, I dare say so, but they are rather thin on the ground. Most people these days, young people, even older people, almost any people but us, don’t seem to realise just how fortunate…”
Bloody hell, she’s going to launch off on a diatribe about manners and respect or some sort of stuff like that. A couple of other people are looking at her, slightly concerned too. This is meant to be a polite, genteel, social gathering, not a whinge-along with Wardlow. How do I shut her up? Politely, of course. Got to be polite. Anything I say will reflect on Nat and his pop.
Her glass!
“Excuse me, Mrs Wardlow, your glass is almost empty. That wine must be very good. Please, let me top it up for you. I take your point though: the wine waiter should have noticed that.”
That’s bought us thirty seconds. And a smile from the chap who was sat next to Nat. Mr Moustache. I can’t recall his name. Buggrit. Now I’ve caught his eye I have to say something. Fill in the time until the proper main course arrives. At least it’ll stop Moaning Minnie from kicking off again if I can get somebody else talking.
I don’t actually have to remember Mr Moustache’s real name. Just address him as ‘Sir’. I picked that up dead early from dad. People are usually impressed if you call them Sir. Or Ma’am, of course, if they are a lumpy. It’s polite and respectful and means you don’t have to remember a hundred names at a do like this, but they’ll certainly remember you.
“Sir, I believe you mentioned you’re in charge of the ambulance service here in Harrisburg? That must be an important role...”
Come on, face-fungus, help me out here. Push the conversation along a bit until Nat gets back. Mr Moustache is smiling again. I think he’s taken the bait. I hope I remembered correctly. I’m going to look a right divvy if he turns out to be the undertaker or a plumber or something.
“Well, very nearly. I certainly hope to be, someday soon.” He’s smiling as he takes a sip of wine. Several people round the table are smiling and nodding. I can’t be a million miles away then.
“I’m the President of McGregor Medical. We’re the premier private ambulance service in Harrisburg and several counties around. Preferred by all the major insurers and hospitals. We have quite an ambitious expansion programme ahead of us, assuming we find the legislative environment receptive to certain changes of course.”
“Oh, that’s good. Can’t have too many ambulances around. If you need one of course. Then you want it fast.”
I’m not sure I’ve said the right thing. He’s looking a bit irked. Where’s Nat got to? I can see the servers starting to troop in with the main course, and we’ll be the second table to be served, so I just need to put the lid back on whatever can of worms I’ve opened and then everybody’ll start talking about the food again as they fill their faces.
“Well, Craig, from a strictly business point of view, you can have too many ambulances around. The important thing to me is that when somebody needs an ambulance, it’s a McGregor ambulance that they use. And that they can pay for it of course.”
He’s smiling. Do they really have to pay for ambulances over here? I guess they do. Dad said to make sure I had my medical insurance card at the very front of my wallet behind that little see-through window thingy. He said that’s the first thing people check if you get splattered by a bus. They don’t bother scraping you up off the street if you haven’t got one.
“But all joking aside, Craig, it’s a very difficult balancing act. Making sure you have the right number of ambulances in the fleet. In the right locations. At the right time. If you have a lot, you can spread them around, provide good response times, but it’s wasteful of assets. Most of the time, most of them will be sat idle. And put them in the wrong places and some parts of the fleet will be overstretched, but others will still be idle. It’s inefficient. Costs money too. Slashes profitability.”
Hey, that’s actually interesting.
“Hmm, kind of an ‘on-call, distributed fires’ problem.”
“A what?”
Damn, I didn’t mean to say that out loud. Now everybody’s looking at me.
“Err, it’s kind of the same problem the Finnish Army had back in their Winter War with Russia. The Russians invaded them when everybody else was worrying about Hitler in Poland. The Finns had a tiny artillery force, not enough guns to go round to provide fire support to their army, and the Russians had a massive advantage in numbers.”
“I don’t see the similarity at all…”
“It’s just maths, and some smart thinking of course. The Finns solved it.”
Was that a pin that just clanged off the floor and reverberated around the room? Blank faces all around the table. I guess military tactics and statistics aren’t what they paid for tonight. I’ve got to explain this to Mr Moustache, but I’m going to bore the pants off everybody else. Him too if he isn’t smart enough to cotton on. I wish the servers would get a move on with that ‘surf and turf’. It sounded good on the menu. Lobster tails and rib-eye steak with seasonal vegetables.
“Well, traditionally, artillery was deployed in groups – called batteries – all lined up alongside each other. That meant they could concentrate their fire on a target near them, but if the enemy attacked somewhere else the artillery couldn’t do anything about it. That’s kind of like just having your ambulances concentrated in just a few ambulance stations. Anybody near them gets a good service but people far away don’t.”
“I’m not entirely sure I see what you’re getting at, but go on…”
“The Finns had a clever officer in charge of their artillery. He broke that tradition of guns in tight batteries. He spread them out, thinly, to maximise the ground they covered. On its own though, that’s a bad thing. It means you can’t concentrate their fire together. At any time, lots of the guns will still be too far away to contribute to the battle. So, you have two opposing requirements you have to get to converge. Coverage and concentration. You can do maths on that. And the clever thinking bit was the survey and planning. The Finns surveyed their ground and worked out the best way to distribute the guns so that most of them could be useful, most of the time. Tuned the efficiency of their system. It’s just what my company has been doing for Three Rivers Telecom back in Pittsburgh…”
I can’t believe I just said that. It’s not my company. It’s Will’s company. Well, I guess it’s my company too. Just a little bit. We’re all partners. And it is the same concept. Maximising coverage with minimum assets. It doesn’t matter what they are. Cannon. Cell towers. Ambulances.
Several people are smiling and nodding. I don’t think they have grasped it yet, but they’re starting to see what I’m getting at.
“Think of a hospital as your primary target, Sir. You need to spread your guns, err, ambulances, round the district so they can all get to the hospital in a specified time. But then they also need to be distributed widely enough so that each of them covers as many secondary targets as possible. Those are your patients. You need to be able to maximise the number of secondaries you can reach, but always remain in range of the primary target, the hospital. It gets complicated in real life of course, you’ll have to consider things like traffic conditions at different times of day, and demand too. I guess some areas get more demand than others. But it can all be done in statistics if you put the right data in. Computers just chew up data these days.”
“You have a company? Aren’t you a little young for that? I know you college boys are smart but…”
“Yes, Mrs Wardlow. I’m only a junior partner though. We’re just a start-up right now, but we have ideas. Nat’s our Vice President. And we have contracts. We’re on the upswing of the revenue curve.”
Yes, that’s what Nat said in his presentation to me and Will. Revenue curve. It’s business world speak for making money.
“Everyone starts somewhere, Mrs Wardlow. I do hear most entrepreneurs make their fortunes before they are twenty-five. Isn’t that so, Arnold?”
Thanks, Mrs Wiśniewski, I owe you a top-up of your wine just as soon as I can. Mr McGregor is nodding. Looking thoughtful.
“So, Craig, let’s assume for a moment that you know my business better than me. I already have my ambulances spread around over several hubs. More on call at certain times of day when experience has shown demand is highest. How would you advise me to do better?”
“I don’t think we know your job better than you do, Sir. We didn’t try and tell Three Rivers Telecom we were better than them at providing a phone network. We aren’t. What we do is try and analyse the problem for them, using better data. They can get on with the real day to day operations while we do the ‘blue skies’ thinking. Look at stuff objectively. Not be scared about breaking the accepted wisdom. We just let the maths and data do the donkey work.”
I think I’m at least breaking even here. Maybe even starting to win a bit of ground. Mr McGregor - “Arnold” - is still looking interested and nobody else at the table has their eyes glazing over yet. Well, maybe Mrs Wardlow is looking about dopey but I thinks that’s more to do with her third top-up of wine.
“Maybe for your problem, we’d run a model that looked at taking your ambulances out of the few stations where they are now and spreading them real thin. Plotted up singly, on call, as far apart from each other as the data allows. Factor in historical demand – you’ll already know that better than us of course, have that data for us. Then we add another layer. Real time traffic conditions. We can get that from tracking the average speed of mobile phones as they move about in cars. Even when they aren’t making a call, phones are affiliating to all the cell towers near them to maintain network coverage. We can probably even do Doppler shift measurements on the affiliation frequency as a secondary check. I’d need to check that out with our Chief Technical Officer though. We have access to our own survey aircraft to gather telecoms data. Then we iterate: reconfigure the network of ambulances to make up for the gap in coverage caused every time one goes off on a call. Dynamic force positioning to maximise firepower. Er, patient coverage…”
“Whoa, Boots. don’t steal my job! I’m VP of marketing and Customer Relationships remember. You’re just meant to be the Bright Ideas Guy. That’s our title for him, Mr McGregor. Our Chief Imagineer. He’s right though, we could help you out…”
It’s the bloody cavalry. Right on time. And with the steaks arriving too. Everybody’s chuckling at his comment as Nat effortlessly slips back into his seat and starts dishing out a few individual compliments to the ladies present before he turns back to the table as a whole.
“My apologies, ladies and gentlemen, my pop needed a word with me. It seems the press would like to do a short interview with me too after he’s spoken with them.” Nat cast a glance at me as he continued. “I wouldn’t hear of doing it right away though, we can do things like another time. Now please, do start, no need to let politics get in our way tonight, this lobster looks delicious and as for the ribeye steak… Sourced from your chain, of course, Mr Adelmann, pop wouldn’t hear of going anywhere else for our guests tonight. Only the best is good enough.”
Nat’s looking happy. I don’t know how much he overheard as he came back but he seems to approve of what I was saying. I covered for him well enough, I think. Nobody seems to mind or feels let down Nat was gone, and Mr McGregor is looking very thoughtful. He’s not shot me down in flames anyway.
* * *
“Sorry about abandoning you at dinner like that, Boots. And for having to vanish again as soon as we got back here to our room, I promise I’m not going anywhere else…”
“I know, Nat, I’ve locked the door. Confiscated your shoes too. And that’s about the millionth time you’ve apologised so far. Honestly, it’s okay. I managed without you. You weren’t gone long, and I could get used to this high society wining and dining stuff. Even that Mrs Wardlow wasn’t too bad once I started topping up her glass every time she started to offer an opinion.”
“Manage, Boots? You did way better than just manage. You practically had Mr and Mrs Wiśniewski begging to adopt you, and as for Mr McGregor, that was a stroke of genius. He’s partly the reason I skipped off again, I introduced him to pop’s Chief of Staff, Ned Hirsch, got the ball rolling on that idea I suggested before he forgets it. You know, where Mr McGregor agreed to consider donating some excess capacity from his ambulance services to the public hospitals, free of charge, in return for access to the State Traffic Engineer’s data on traffic conditions. Great win-win situation, Boots. Pop gets to announce he’s going to improve the response times and availability of public ambulance service provision, and Mr McGregor gets an additional data source to improve the accuracy of his fleet management. I guess all we need to do now is prove he does have some excess capacity to donate.”
Nat’s smiling as he unties his bow tie, but there’s a slight hint of worry there too. I mean, it was an amazing idea he came up with, suggesting to Mr McGregor that he should give some free ambulance rides each day to the public hospitals, especially in the poorer parts of Pennsylvania, in return for being given access to the data the State’s Highways Department collects on average journey times and congestion bottlenecks and stuff every day. Actually, he can get that for free, the Highways Department is paid for from taxes so it’s public domain data, but the key is that Nat hinted it can be arranged so Mr McGregor gets it in real time instead of having to file access requests every month and getting huge downloads of outdated data. That’s where we come in, of course. Nat’s offered to put together a proposal for a feasibility study for our company to do some analysis of traffic data and road capacity, just covering a small area around one of Mr McGregor’s existing hubs, showing how he can get better efficiency by re-distributing his ambulances. The problem is that though Nat’s totally ace at the business speak and marketing being Vice President and stuff like that, he hasn’t got a clue how we can actually do it.”
“I managed to get a call through to Will whilst you were off wheeling and dealing, Nat. He’s sure we can do it. Loved the idea of using some of the data he’ll get from flying the radio frequency analyser in Travis’s plane next month to do phase and Doppler shift analyses on phones travelling around in cars. He says that can be correlated with the Highways Department data, refine it, build a flow model to overlay on the geo-spatial mapping, calculate the optimum distribution of ambulance positions to get the best response times, hourly, in a given area. Keeping up, Nat?”
Nat’s keeping up. Well, as much as he needs to. He’s happy to let me and Will do the technical stuff so long as he gets to do the money making.
“Me and Will can work together. I’ll look at the maths behind the multiple convergent equations we’ll need, and he can code it and programme some software to iterate the through the problem every few minutes. That’ll give McGregor Medical near enough real time fleet management, Every time the software identifies a duplication of resource, it’ll ping up a warning and recommend moving the conflicting ambulance to a new position. That’s the point where you dad stands to gain. Well, at least the hospitals and sick people do. The software could link into the despatch centres for the public systems, identify any need for an ambulance near the route the spare McGregor ambulance is going to use and then task it to pick up a patient as it moves to its new location. McGregor Medical get their optimum coverage back and somebody gets a free ride in a private ambulance as the net reconfigures.”
“You make it sound easy, Boots.”
“It is easy, in theory anyway, Nat. Just statistical network reconfiguration. Modern artillery systems do it all the time to maximise their on-call fire capability. The Finns started it off yonks ago, and they only had slide rules, pencils and paper maps.”
“I guess that won’t stop Will asking for us to spend some more on computer chips though, Craig.”
“Pretty sure of that, Nat, but Vilho Petter Nenonen probably asked for a pencil sharpener and an eraser…”
“Who?” Nat’s looking puzzled. Just standing there, bewildered, almost finished unbuttoning his shirt but now frozen to the spot. I’ve got him vulnerable now.
“Nenonen, Natters. He was a general in the Finnish artillery. Invented the concepts of distributed on-call fire that are still used today. The ideas you’re trying to sell to McGregor Medical. Best buck your ideas up, boy, learn your history. And whilst we’re at it, what’s this about a tv interview?”
