Page 590 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
within D.C. would be $3.80 per week for two Metro rides between Wash- ington National Airport (which, as you might expect, I refuse to call by the name bestowed on it in 1998, “Reagan”) and the Farragut West Metro Station, and (e) there would be the cost of a daily Metro ticket of, on average, $2.00 per day for four days each week—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and half each of Monday and Friday—I concluded that, over a period of two years, my intended tour of duty, the incremental cost to be incurred with respect to working in Washington would be EIGH- TEEN THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED FIFTY-ONE DOLLARS AND NINETY CENTS (!), give or take, and here I did not take into account the wear and tear on Kathy, the cost of gas, tolls, and other wear and tear attendant to four trips by car between Washington and Scars- dale; the totally unforeseen $1,860.75 that would result from the loss of a clutch on the Delaware Memorial Bridge as I drove to retrieve my belongings for the final trip home; and, finally, the huge unanticipated cost arising from a combination of Washington politics and “triangula- tion,” which will be discussed much later in this chapter. I also did not take into account my most assuredly modest, but then unknown, govern- ment salary.
But, who’s counting? When one is considering taking a job—indeed, a very different, important, and prestigious job—and weighing that prospect against sitting in a red sweatshirt with a (wonderful) dog (who was not, I should clarify, in the red sweatshirt with me), one does not count pennies. And, anyway, Kathy wanted me out of the house—for my own good and, as you would imagine, hers as well.
So I called Goldstein, got the contact information, set up the inter- views, and, for the third time in my life, boarded the N.Y.–D.C. shuttle, this time with some notion of how short the flight would be (thank you again, Judge Carswell).
I won’t bore the reader with an account of the interviews. By this time, I had located and skimmed the complicated statute that gave birth to and regulated the Resolution Trust Corporation: The Financial Insti- tutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, referred to by RTC lawyers as “FIRREA” (pronounced “fie-ree-uh”) and by adversar-
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