Change in the Commonwealth

Remember when June 1, 2009, seemed so far away? That’s when CNMI immigration matters will grow some real teeth. Well, it ain’t far. It’s just 129 days down the road.

Don’t ask me how the enforcement details will zig or the policy nuances will zag. I’m sort of wondering that myself. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends are twisting in the wind over their immigration status. I’ve known some alien workers in the CNMI for over 15 years, thus demonstrating that (a) I am really getting old, and (b) I can’t really imagine the Commonwealth without this community, simply because I have no other frame of reference.

Maybe that’s one of those small and haunting lessons in life: If your surroundings and situation are pleasant, then you get so accustomed to familiar faces and familiar voices that you don’t notice them until they’re gone. The familiar is concrete. The absence of the familiar is abstract. Given that pleasantness is more rare than it is common (I’m well-traveled enough to state that fact definitively), any random changes are likely to be for the worse, since they invite reversion toward the mean. That’s just basic probability at work.

Which is to say that enjoying the familiar, in this context, is rational, not stubborn.

Here’s a random example. I shopped at the same sari-sari store for years, a very pleasant place, and I was really surprised one afternoon when I saw totally new faces behind the counter. The new people seemed like nice enough folks, but it did make the rhythm of life seem a bit different. I wound up switching to another store. Why? I have no idea. I didn’t have a reason to switch. But I didn’t have much of a reason not to, either.

Would the new guys take a check without a hassle? No idea.

Would they let me run a tab if I was short on cash? No idea.

Would they take back the occasional item that I’d return, after I discovered at home that it was 35 years past its expiration date? No idea.

Did I have the energy to ask these hypothetical questions to the strangers behind the counter? No.

None of these questions were particularly important, but therein lies the paradox: Since they were too trivial to ask, and therefore too trivial to solve, the old management was worth more to me than the new management, because the old management provided me with a higher level of known utility.

That’s a minor episode, so minor nobody normal would notice it, much less analyze it. But the stakes can get a lot higher.

In the big, bold world, when a lawyer leaves a law practice, or a salesman leaves a company, both of them might very well take a lot of their clients and customers with them. This applies even if the professional at issue is not a superstar, or even particularly above average. But their customers have a known level of utility which they attach to the professional, so they’re comfortable keeping it.

The very best thing about Saipan isn’t the scenery; I’ve been all over the tropics, and there are a lot of beautiful places. It’s the people that really make any place what it is. Well, on that note, I guess that big changes are just around the corner. The familiar routines of island life might be changing forever. Some people wanted this. Some didn’t. But, either way, it’s no longer abstract. It’s very close indeed.

* * * * *

The tech world is so full of nasties this week that they deserve special mention.

1. The Conficker computer worm is an “epidemic” said to be the biggest such infection in six years. It’s a bit of a mystery; the worm has yet to really do anything except spread, and nobody seems to know what this thing will do when it’s triggered.

2. According to John C. Dvorak’s podcast of Jan. 21, some models of Seagate hard drives may be experiencing a 30 percent failure rate. Coincidentally, my one and only Seagate drive (merely months old) died two days ago and I lost all the data on it. I’m not bothering to research the issue, but some of you might want to know about it.

3. According to several large newspapers, a hacker may have compromised credit card data Heartland Payment Systems, which reportedly processes over 100 million credit card transactions (wow!) per month, maybe including yours.

E[I]d is a pilot, economist, and writer. He holds a degree in economics from UCLA and is a former U.S. naval officer. His column runs every Friday. Visit Ed at TropicalEd.com and SaipanBlog.com.
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