BELOW THE BELTWAY
By Gene Weingarten

The wastebaskets of the Washington Post newsroom fill up each day with relentlessly chirpy mail from PR people alerting us to important news, such as a new line of home furnishings that “makes accessorizing rooms easy and fun with decorative pillows from . . .”

Actually, I am looking at exactly that news release, which I rescued from a trash bin along with a dozen others. Blatantly commercial items like these never get published in big, influential newspapers. But PR people — bless their indefatigable hearts — keep sending these items in, tiptoeing that taut tightrope between optimism and desperation.
Just how desperate are they? I designed an experiment to find out. Now, I know some of you might call this experiment cruel. However, others might call it very cruel.

I explained my proposal to Lisa H. Morrice, 44, a PR agent from California: I will write glowingly about her client’s pillows if she will tell me something really humiliating about herself that I will also print.

(A colleague of mine had been skeptical of this gambit: PR folks may be desperate, he reasoned, but they have their dignity.)

Just how glowingly, Lisa wondered.

Very, I said.

“My husband dumped me for a younger woman,” she said.

At this moment, I gave my doubting colleague a cheerful thumbs up.

“She was a blonde,” Lisa continued. “A secretary. And I’m not ugly! And . . . ” Lisa showed no signs of stopping, until I informed her she’d made the cut.

Lisa represents Houles, Europe’s largest manufacturer of trimmings, fabrics and decorative accessories. Houles has a new line of richly colored, lavishly textured pillows that, in my professional judgment, provide an exciting, affordable ensemble for any living room or den. They’re available locally at Calico Corners in Rockville.

Tom Coyne, 31, of Coyne Public Relations in Fairfield, N.J., was representing Nabisco recently at a publicity event to introduce Mini Oreos. He had rented a 70,000-pound cement mixer to dump Mini Oreos into a minivan through the sunroof. (Don’t ask.)

Tom explains: “So, anyway, I’m a pretty big guy . . .”

He is on speakerphone. A co-worker yells: “Portly!”

“I’d classify myself as husky, not portly,” humphs Tom.

“Anyway. My pants are a little snug, and I jump off the back of the cement mixer and I completely blow out my pants. My backside is exposed. Tighty whities. I immediately go into my ‘Hey, I blew out my pants,’ walk, trying to hide it. But there are 50 little boys who we brought there to eat cookies and milk, and they all start pointing and laughing.”

I observed that writing about this event won’t be all that embarrassing, since Tom’s co-workers already know the story. True, Tom said: It’ll come as a surprise only to all the top corporate honchos at Nabisco, his biggest and best client.

Sold. Tom represents In the Company of Dogs, a premium specialty catalogue and Web site (inthecompanyofdogs.com) that makes stylish cold-weather apparel for dogs, including the phenomenal Muttluks, which are $ 40 water-resistant booties.

Erin L. Hagenbuch of Caster Communications in Providence, R.I., invited her boyfriend’s parents over for a meal. Only 23, proud of her competence and eager to make a good impression, Erin tried to make her home beautiful — washing, cleaning, even refinishing the wooden furniture. Everything went splendidly until dinner was over. Mom ‘n’ Dad attempted to leave the table but found themselves fused to the too newly varnished chairs.

Erin represents RBH Sound Inc. of Layton, Utah, which has introduced the C-6100SE, a “truly unique” series of in-wall loudspeakers that eliminate detrimental acoustic effects while remaining unobtrusively concealed in the wall. Available for only $ 3,500 a pair, these speakers can be ordered through www.rbhsound.com.

Samantha Lee Joos, 24, is a PR specialist from Pittsburgh. While attending an industry luncheon recently she was seated next to a PR big shot, someone she hoped she might someday approach for a job. Samantha was on her most dignified behavior.

A package of her papers spilled to the floor. Gallantly, Mr. Big bent to retrieve them. They were scattered, so he had to slowly gather them up.

Unfortunately, Samantha had been in a hurry, and grabbed the wrong package. This was lavishly illustrated material belonging to an Internet client of hers, advertising his products.

One was something called the Ouchless Whip.

One was an intimate cylindrical object for use by women, made of Pyrex so as to be “dishwasher safe.”

And one was a product for men called . . . well, I can’t tell you what it was called. It was a play on the name of the product Aqua Velva.

Samantha represents the Intromark Invention Catalog, which can be ordered at 1-888-438-1747. This catalogue contains such items as flexible golf tees, a battery-operated scouring toilet brush and a lucky wishbone to hold lottery tickets to your refrigerator door.

In all, I phoned 15 PR people, nine of whom leaped at the chance to mortify themselves in print in return for a few meager lines of positive ink for their clients. (I chose only the most embarrassing). One Atlanta publicist told me an elaborate tale about the time he came to work as a deejay at his college radio station and was so inebriated he threw up on the air. When I asked him the name of the school, he began to hem and haw, and finally admitted he had made the story up. Understand this: He was ready to debase himself for something he didn’t even do.

My final tale involves Alicia Levine, 28, a PR person for Pan Communications in Andover, Mass. Alicia listened to my pitch, then said she’d think about it. I took that as a no, but she eventually called back, whispering furtively so her co-workers couldn’t hear. She spokerealfastlikethis.

“In my sophomore year of college I was on an intramural basketball team, and I was up late the previous night, too much partying, and there were about 100 or 200 people in the stands and as I got out on the court, I had those Velcro pull-off pants? And I pulled them off? And I realized I forgot to put underwear on.”

Not so bad, I observed, since she was wearing trunks, right?

Long pause. Very quiet:

“I was butt naked from the waist down.”

Wow, I said.

“I got a standing ovation,” she said.

I had promised that my enthusiasm for the commercial products in this column would be directly proportional to the humiliation the PR person had to endure.

Alicia represents MuseumShop.com, the world’s largest online store of museum and cultural gifts. MuseumShop offers a fabulous array of one-of-a-kind products, perfect for Christmas gifts. My favorite is Chess Nuts, a limited-edition chess set created from nuts and bolts and encased in a leather-wrapped box, available at the insanely low price of $ 125. In my opinion this store represents the pinnacle of human achievement.

This part of Scotland – or off Scotland – is a beautiful place, though, despite an alarmingly suspicious security presence. Clear waters, calmness and rolling glens either side. A few whitewashed houses on the loch shore. But I didn’t go for that scenery. Instead, I went to visit six ships that are anchored there, in what the shipping industry calls “lay-up”. A lay-person might call it being “mothballed.” These have been terrible times for  shipping. Several years ago, shipping was booming like no other industry. Liner companies were flooding ship yards with orders. Freight rates were good and millionaires were being made. Then in 2007, the freight rate dropped calamitously overnight. Shipyards found their clients could no longer pay for ships. And ships already in existence became surplus to recession-era requirements. There were two choices: scrappage or “lay-up.”

Lay-up comes in three varieties. Hot, cold and warm. There are technical explanations for each of these categories, but for the non-engineer, hot means engines and all systems on, but not moving, and the other two mean something in-between. Cold is everything off. There are six ships on Loch Striven. They all belong to Maersk Line, an enormous Danish company that is the world’s largest commercial shipping line. It is so big, it contributes 15% of Denmark’s GDP. It has an in-house shop called Stargate (after its famous blue and white star logo). It is named after Maersk McKinney-Moller, one of four children of Arnold Peter Moller, whose father, a sea-captain, founded the company in 1904. Really, it’s like a huge global conglomerate called Fred. In the shipping world, I have yet to find anyone with bad things to say about the company. Filipinos, who supply most of the world’s crew, like to work on Maersk ships, because conditions are good. Maersk, unlike many other shipping companies, still chooses to have a sizeable number of its ships fly the British flag – the red ensign – when many other companies have “flagged out,” flagging their ships at registries run under the name of – but often not out of – Liberia, Panama, Mongolia, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, etc. Maersk is the de facto British merchant navy (the “British Maersk navy,” someone tells me). But the scale of the recession is such that even Maersk suffers, enough to decide to put its ships into layup.

I went to Loch Striven on a press trip organised by the company. We were there to look at the set of a new BBC children’s sci-fi gameshow, Mission 2110, which is being filmed on the Maersk Boston, one of the ships in the raft (the ships are anchored, obviously, and tied together by very thick rope, and so referred to as a raft). When the BBC was scouting for locations, it was thought that an empty container hold looked so unusual – in the relentless rhythm of the shipping industry and just-in-time delivery you hardly ever see a totally empty one – that it could happily serve as the headquarters of the Roboidz, evil robots who want to take over the planet and must be defeated by children getting fuel rods from them. There is now an 80-strong crew, including a couple of dozen children, who live on-board during the week. The ship’s crew have been accommodating (when I asked to see the gym, I found it turned into a schoolroom) and they must like the company, because being stuck on a raft is, even in the gorgeous if wet surroundings of Loch Striven, extremely dull.

The master of the Beaumont, one of two mother ships (its generators supply the other three “daughter ships”) is David Johnstone. His usual ship is the Maersk Kelso, but he took this commission – it’s not clear whether he volunteered or simply followed his contract requirements – and has been stationary since June, when the ships first came up the loch. And there the trouble began. The glens on either side of the loch are sparsely populated, but they are not empty. The ships sit only 500 metres from houses on either side. After the trip, I went to see Mary and Jim Lamb, who run the headquarters of Clan Lamont (as in former Chancellor Norman), in their house. It’s 100 metres from the water’s edge. The ships seem to be directly behind the picturesque Highland cattle grazing on the field next to Mary’s garden. They are very, very close. “We were given no warning,” Mary told me. “One just appeared one day, and that was that.” She doesn’t blame Maersk, though: All the local objections – and there were many, most collected on the pugnacious local site ForArgyll.com – are focused on Clydeport. Maersk says it located its ships where Clydeport told it to, once the company had decided on Loch Striven for an anchorage, and that the position of the ships has been carefully chosen by considering currents and katabatics, a word I was introduced to over lunch in the galley, local winds, in this case from the glens, that can come down and whip up in to a right old frenzy. Not unlike the writers of ForArgyll, who describe Maersk’s efforts to dampen down discord as “a charm offensive.” That is only partially fair, as Captain Johnstone is charming but not offensive. He is well-regarded and well-known in Rothesay, where the ships do their victualling but not their drinking (Maersk runs dry ships, and mariners can’t come back drunk even after shore leave). Maersk has done its best to smooth waters. The Loch Striven residents were invited to a reception on-board – Mary Lamb wore her red stilettos because she said, “it said ‘reception’” – which alarmed the crew waiting for her on the tall and slippery gangway that you climb from the pontoon below. It’s scary even with boots on. The company will donate the BBC location fee to a local charity, yet to be decided (though lifting those bounced bombs was one suggestion).

I am charmed because I love ships, but I can see that you might not want to live with six floating ten-story buildings in front of your house. Mary Lamb is making the best of an unsatisfactory situation. “I don’t like them sitting at the bottom of my garden. They are awful looking things. But they are here to stay. They’re our nearest neighbours so we have got to be friends.” I’m sympathetic to both sides, and think it wouldn’t have taken Clydeport much effort to mollify local feeling. People are sympathetic to the necessities of lay-ups. In a Rothesay restaurant – the same one where a man came up to our press trip party and told us our boat would be ready at 9.30 in the morning, though we didn’t know who he was and he hadn’t made it clear how he knew who we were – the owner said, “they say the recession’s over, but I’ll know it’s over when those ships sail away.” She said it was sad to see them there. It is sad: they are magnificent ships, and they look magnificent sitting in the quiet waters of the loch (above bounced bombs).

After Tunnock’s tea-cakes and drinks on the bridge, where I got nostalgic for my container ship trip ten years ago and anxious to book others, it was ten decks or so down to the engine room. It was gleaming, as you’d expect on a ship crewed by engineers (and one cook) with not much to do. “I do miss the buzz of being at sea,” said Chief Engineer Stuart Underwood. “Here, you can always leave something until tomorrow.” Underwood, like the Captain, is a Scot. He has a small farm in Argyll, a few hours away, but he’s been in the loch for months and not yet got there. I ask him about the environmental implications of the ships (after asking about the sewage treatment, obviously). Most of the world’s ships are propelled by bunker fuel, which is a refinery waste product. It’s only a short step up from asphalt, and just as foul. Ships emit 3% of the planet’s greenhouse gases, along with as much particulate matter as road traffic, according to recent research from the US government agency NOAA. But in Loch Striven, the ships are using low-sulphur fuel. It’s more expensive, but cleaner. After complaints about noise and too many lights, when the ships first arrived, Maersk did an acoustic survey. From Mary Lamb’s front garden, I could hear a faint hum. But I could also get in my car and drive away.

I’m not technically minded, or less than I should be, so I didn’t follow all the technical discussion going on. But I did understand that this lukewarm lay-up poses technical challenges, because it’s never happened before. Though ForArgyll talked of “rustbuckets” arriving, five of the six ships are only a couple of years old. They are here because they’re a victim of a risk that went wrong: They were built to be faster than most container ships, and designed differently (sleeker lines, less cargo space, engine and accommodation decks in the middle of the ship not aft, as is usual). They were supposed to do a shuttle route between China and the US, travelling at over 30 knots, which is a lot. Modern tea-clippers. But that speed requires huge amounts of fuel, and as soon as the B-class – Maersk Beaumont, Boston, Brooklyn and Baltimore – were built, the price of fuel went through the roof. They couldn’t be run at their top speed because it would have cost $35,000 a day. So they never did their intended routes, and they never steamed at their intended speed. And when the recession took hold, they were the first into lay-up. This isn’t the first time someone has thought of building fast container ships: In the 1970s, the shipping entrepreneur Malcom McLean, who gave the world containerisation, built S-level ships that were meant to do the same thing. They weren’t a success either, and were bought by the US Navy.

It is odd, therefore, to descend into the spotless engine room of Maersk Beaumont and find bits of it wrapped in clingfilm. I assume it’s some special ship variety. It is not. “Just the stuff you buy in the supermarket,” said the Chief, somewhat bemused at my curiosity (though not as bemused as he was by my continual questions about sewage treatment aboard). Humidity is a huge problem in lay-up. As is the fact that no-one really knows whether you can switch off a ship with no detrimental effects. Modern ships have ropes and sextants, but the ropes are synthetic and the sextants are plastic. There are charts, but there are also banks of computers. A modern ship is as hi-tech as an aeroplane. It has auto-pilot. It can be steered by a joy-stick. And no-one is sure, after you switch all that hi-tech stuff off, how it will perform when it is switched on again. For myself, says the Chief, a true engineer, there are too many electronics. When there’s an electronic problem at sea, it’s hard for us to see it. When it’s mechanical, we can see it and fix it.

There are other concerns. A sign outside the galley says, “Remember, fresh water is an issue now.” Of course it is. It has to be imported and it’s expensive. Each delivery costs £4000, then £250 a ton. The ships use two tons a day usually, and four times that with their extra BBC crew. No-one wastes water on-board.

We take a tour along the prop shaft. It’s 100 metres long. The Chief says he comes down here sometimes “to think.” I start to think, too, but about the fact that we are now underwater. This is reinforced by Tony, Maersk’s group fleet boss, who, as we get to the end of the shaft, taps on the ship and says, “this is where you’d be cutting through in the Poseidon Adventure.” Ship people think the Poseidon Adventure is daft, of course. “The lights would go off, and you wouldn’t be able to find your way from one deck to the other, let alone up to the hull.” Still, it’s enough to make me feel queasy, suddenly, and glad to get back above the waterline. The Chief seems happy to show us around. It’s a break. He misses sea life. “The ship is a living thing, it’s on the go 24 hours a day. To say this is a graveyard is a bit strong but it’s a totally different environment. I’d rather be trading.

The trip back to Rothesay seems colder, and I’m reluctant to leave the ships, which get smaller and smaller in the camera lens, until they are what they are from Rothesay harbour: six far-off cream boxes rising from the loch, out of place but oddly at home. The next day, in a local shop, I ask the shop-keeper what he thinks of things. He looks suspicious.

“Are you from Maersk?”

No.

“Are you from ForArgyll?”

No.

Okay then. He asks me what I think of them. I say it’s a shame, that they should be trading.
“Why did they put them in front of the houses?”
I say, because it’s the best place because of wind and currents.
He says, “Bollocks. They say they can’t be too wet or too dry but it’s always drizzling on Loch Striven. This is the wettest part of Scotland.” He says someone told him they will be there for years, like the oil tankers were in the 1970s, the ones that rusted away. I say I don’t think that’s likely. I tell him they are fast and modern ships.
He thinks for a minute.
He says, they should be the first ones out then.