Consciousness is chemical.
Is this a truth?Knocking is Heard.
Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key.
|
|
Band-aid Incident
Believe it or not, I actually have a number of meaningful things to
accomplish at work now. Mind you, many of them are redundant and silly, but
at least I no longer have to Look Busy, because I can be, if I want to.
But I'm not letting all that stop me from writing a letter right now. See, I
just went on a quest for a band-aid, and it was a pretty freaky experience.
At lunch, I was playing Lunch Money (an extraordinarily strange and twisted
non-collectable card game) and one of the cards ("Uppercut" was the card, I
believe) gave me a really nasty papercut right where I was already nursing
an annoying little hangnail. It was bleeding a lot, so I was walking around
with my finger in my mouth and generally looking like a dork. (peanut
gallery: "You mean 'more like a dork than usual, right?'" me: "yeah, yeah")
Back at The Lab, I asked Robbie if there were any band-aids about. Turns
out there weren't. So I went out onto the rest of the 10th floor in search
of a band-aid.
Bull Atlyntic uses an open floorplan system where there's no big walls, but
lots and of cubicles and cubicle-groups. Every floor has the elevator shaft
in the middle, and then a maze of interconnected cubicles. Hanging from the
ceiling, there are signs that tell you where you are (W6, R4, etc.) like at
amusement park parking lots. A few of the cubicles belong to certain people,
but most are open cubicles--you're not allowed to personalize them, and
you're supposed to just take the first one you get to when you arrive in the
morning (echoes of Snow Crash in my mind . . .).
Anyway, the 10th floor has the glass-enclosed lab where I work, as an odd
aberration in the cubicle pattern. The whole floor is a lab, in a way, so
it made at least a little sense to have the cubicized organization for it. I
found the "secretary" for the 10th floor, and she showed me to the first-aid
kit for the floor. It didn't have any band-aids, so I went down the stairs
to the ninth floor.
Which was, in all ways, just like the 10th floor. Where the lab would be,
there was some bigshot's office. There was a small sign announcing that
this was the "Large Business Systems" floor, but you wouldn't know if the
sign wasn't there. Floor 9 had the same maze of cubicles with coordinate
signs hanging from the ceiling. And Floor 9 also had no band-aids.
I'm sure you can imagine how it went from here. Each floor had exactly the
same floor plan, the same cubicles. It was all oddly quiet. I peeked into
some cubicles and occasionally saw people working. I had to do that,
though, to assure myself there was activity going on. Each floor had a
secretary, who directed me to a first-aid kid that had plenty of anti-poison
stuff and poison ivy salves, but no band-aids.
Finally, on floor 3, I found a band-aid. I didn't need to ask anyone where,
because I knew exactly where the floor's kitchen would be, and exactly which
drawer in the kitchen would hold the first-aid kit.
After all that, I view this glass-enclosed lab as a little piece of home.
Sure, it has cubicles too (and we have to tidy them all up before we leave
each evening), but dang it, they're _our_ cubicles.
MA: your suggestion to wend the time away was a truly great one,
but the evil techie wizards over here have DISABLED the macro recorder
thingee in Windows. Instead, I spend time writing bogus help screens and
training scenarios. Example:
TRAINING SCENARIO #5:
DEMON INFESTATION IN SERVICE LINES
- You receive a phone call from a customer who complains that his phone
lines are infested by demons.
- Version 1.2 of expressTRAK does not currently support exorcisms.
- What is the workaround procedure for removing denizens of Hell from Bull
Atlyntic property?
The answer is only funny if you know how stuff works here, so I'll spare it.
They've Blinded Me With Science,
Nate
* * *
* * *
|
