You Think I Do WHAT? Vol. 6

Someone at the party asks what I do.

I’ve learned it’s easier to explain the job by what I don’t do. So I tell them the truth:

“I can help ship almost anything, almost anywhere. Just… not nuclear warheads. Not human remains. And nothing going to Russia, Iran, or North Korea.”

Silence. The specific kind where someone slowly sets down their drink.

Because here’s the thing about that sentence.

A normal person’s “no” is vague. “Oh, I don’t really deal with that stuff.”

My “no” has line items. My “no” has a footnote. It sounds less like a boundary and more like a rate card with three options tastefully crossed off.

You do not proactively rule out nuclear warheads unless, at some point, warheads were on the table.

And you do not specify “no human remains” unless somebody, somewhere, once asked — and now I carry the knowledge that they asked me.

The whole patio does the math in real time: if that’s the exclusion list… what, exactly, is on the menu?

“So wait,” someone says, very slowly. “Everything else is… fine?”

And this is where being good at my job ruins my life.

Because the honest answer is: “Well — with the right license, a valid end-use certificate, and as long as the buyer isn’t on the denied parties list—”

Stop. Talking. I can hear it. I know how it sounds. But I cannot stop, because it’s true, and I am physically incapable of being imprecise about export controls.

Somewhere around “end-use certificate,” a woman I have never met quietly hands me her business card and murmurs, “We should talk.”

We should not talk, Brenda. I am the guy who stops the thing you’re thinking about.

That’s the part nobody believes. I’m the wall. I read the regs so nobody accidentally emails a controlled part to the wrong country and becomes a headline. My entire career is the word “no.”

But I say “no” the way a sommelier says “no.” With detail. With authority. With a frankly alarming fluency in which warheads, to which regimes, under which subsection.

There is a real government list of people you are not allowed to sell to. I have most of it memorized. That is not a fact that makes a barbecue go smoothly.

So no. I am not an arms dealer.

I’m the guy who knows, down to the paragraph, exactly what an arms dealer can’t do.

Which, I’ve come to accept, is so much worse.