The Queen’s iPod, Ear Buds and Music Were All ORPTUM Hand-Me-Downs
The Obama Administration’s controversial gift of an iPod to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II provided an early boost for the new White House Office of Regifting and Presidential Tchotchke Utilization Management.
“We’re thrilled, simply thrilled with the attention that President and Mrs. Obama’s gift received,” said Ashley Milsap, the executive director of ORPTUM. “Giving the Queen this particular iPod made a powerful statement about frugality, sensible gift-giving, elegance and the ‘new-dawn-in-America’ ethos of the Obama Administration.”
The Obamas presented the iPod to the Queen when they called on her during their stay in London for the Group of 20 economic meetings. Diplomatic protocol experts were quick to point out that the Queen already owned an iPod, suggesting Obama Administration insensitivity at best, or royal-bashing impudence, at worst.
Milsap brushed aside such suggestions with a single, frugal word: “Nonsense.” To make her point she laid out the history of the Queen’s “slightly used” new iPod.
The iPod first appeared at the State Department in early February when the new ambassador from Lower Malistuee presented his credentials to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Scarcely Recognizable Countries. In the old days of the Bush-Cheney Administration, the deputy assistant secretary would probably have taken the iPod home and given it to one of her children.
But under the Obama Administration’s new ORPTUM, the iPod was cataloged in a database and sent off to a shelf in a warehouse in Front Royal, Virginia.
White House planners began working on the presidential trip to London recognized the need for a gift that the President and his wife could present to Queen Elizabeth.They turned to the new ORPTUM database and quickly discovered the iPod.
When the iPod reached the White House, staff members were horrified to discover it was filled with dreadful misogynistic and racially insensitive songs. After a team of Federal Bureau of Investigation technicians thoroughly scrubbed the iPod’s hard drive, the White House tackled the chore of finding suitable “queenly” music to load onto it.
They returned to the ORPTUM database and found a CD of Broadway show tunes that an Iraqi tribal leader presented to General David Petraeus. An alert aide in Baghdad, recalling a recent memo about the creation of ORPTUM, had sent the CD to the new Front Royal warehouse.
With show tunes loaded on the iPod, all seemed in order. Then, during the transatlantic flight to London, a White House aide realized, to her horror, that the iPod was missing a pair of ear buds. She commandeered a brand new pair of high-end buds that one of the Air Force One backup pilots had purchased just hours before reporting to duty for the flight to London.
The Queen received her gift and ORPTUM put itself on the Washington bureaucracy map.