“Supply Chain Logistics”
My husband has a specific way of telling people what I do.
Someone at a party asks. He leans in. His eyes dart around the patio. And out come the air quotes.
“She’s in…” — fingers up, curling, looking like he’s transmitting morse code — “…’Supply Chain Logistics.'”
If you’ve watched Jack Ryan, you know exactly what he’s doing. That’s the exact phrase John Krasinski uses when he doesn’t want you to know he kills people for Langley.
So now the entire cul-de-sac thinks I’m deep cover. And my husband will not break character. His air quotes are so aggressive they’ve stopped being a joke and started being a confession. They have wind velocity. I’m worried he’s going to sprain a knuckle trying to imply I know where Jimmy Hoffa is.
My ten-year-old daughter, however, just cuts straight to the financials. The first time I tried to explain my career to her, she blinked and said:
“Oh. So you smuggle drugs.”
No, sweetheart. I wish. That would involve significantly less paperwork.
But look, I can’t blame them. Let’s look at the evidence.
They think I have a burner phone. (I have a work phone. It rings at 4:30 AM on a Sunday because a shipment of steel widgets is trapped in a bureaucratic purgatory. Same existential dread.)
They think I run dead drops. (I manage a bonded warehouse. Technically, the goods inside do not legally exist in the United States. Physically, they are right there. Legally? They are in international waters. Try explaining that to a cop.)
They think I have a dangerous foreign handler. (I have U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They do not send flowers. They do not negotiate. Their love language is a liquidated damages notice.)
They think I speak in encrypted military cyphers. (I speak in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule. 8471.30.01. 9403.20.00. To you, that sounds like the launch sequence for a nuclear warhead. To me, that’s a standing desk and an automated data processing unit. It’s Tuesday.)
They think I have a cover identity—a job so utterly, mind-numbingly boring that no foreign asset would ever look twice.
And here’s the part that ruins my mental health: They’re right.
“Supply Chain Logistics” is the ultimate psychological warfare. It is the single most powerful phrase in the English language. You say it at a dinner party and watch a person’s eyes glaze over, buffer, and completely lose the will to live. Nobody has ever asked a second question about supply chain logistics. Nobody. In recorded human history. If you want a man to stop hitting on you at a bar, don’t tell him you have a boyfriend. Tell him you calculate anti-dumping duties on tapered roller bearings.
Which is exactly what you’d want… if you had something to hide.
So maybe my husband’s air quotes aren’t a joke. Maybe the cover is that it’s real.
I could tell you what seven-figure commodity moved through the Port of LA this morning because of one comma I placed in a footnote. But then I’d have to liquidate your assets.
This post will self-destruct the second I hit submit on the Automated Commercial Environment entry summary.