It just hit midnight here in the Greenpeace Information Bunker in Joburg.
This place starts buzzing at 7:30 AM when we have our daily strategy
and update meeting, then just doesn't quit until between 3-4 AM when Tom Turner and our coalition partners put the ECO Equity newsletter to bed.
Oxfam has an office across the hall, folks from Friends of the Earth and WWF are in and out all day, press and delegation members come by to get or trade information, everybody trying to navigate the peaks and troughs of adrenaline-fuelled activity.
Every day there's a press event to prepare or a full-court political attack to be made. A leaked document reveals an ally going soft. The political team swings into action to chart out a swarming strategy -- somebody to confront a delegate in the halls, somebody to plant a question with another national delegation, somebody making calls back to media and Greenpeace offices in their own countries to mount a little democratic pressure from the home turf. It's an elaborate, cutthroat game of high-stakes political chess.
Sometimes I wish Greenpeace had the kind of money Exxon has, so we could do it the easy way: just buy a leader's election for them.
The stage set for this maniacal opera is our little four-room office. It's crammed with computers, boxes of documents, cell phones charging, dried fruit, brochures, briefings, office supplies and empty coffee cups. It smells of humans living in close quarters. Cables spaghetti around the room. Someone has hung a mock delegate badge on the potted plant in the corner, identifying the tall leafy creature as a representative from a "Major Group."
A linux server on a laptop sits on my desk, quietly keeping information flowing around the office network, out to the Greenpeace world, and around the planet. The server gets a desk all to itself (which means I do too!) -- an incredible luxury in this elbow to elbow space.
But keeping the server happy is one of my jobs here, and the server needs its space. Too many times in other mobile offices, we lost the entire network when somebody decided to borrow the ethernet cable from that innocent looking little laptop. CRASH, everthing in the office goes down. Press officers scream. Eight computer traffic pile ups. Printers stutter in mid sentence, press releases stall in mid sound bite, pictures going out to agencies go blank, web pages wilt. IT guy goes from hero to zero in 225 milliseconds.
So server gets its own desk. Cables get duct-taped to the table. Annette, our Kiwi logistics possum, growls at anyone getting too close.
Susan, one of our press officers, keeps a set of post-it notes in her filofax. There's big numbers written on them, and every day she makes a dramatic moment of ripping the next one off... 6 days to go!
6 days left. Jeepers. Are we winning yet?
Posted by brian at August 29, 2002 12:47 AM