[4677] in Central_America
New quotes for Sun Nov 29
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Initializer.SysDaemon)
Sun Nov 29 16:48:38 1992
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 92 16:48:14 -0500
From: root@charon.MIT.EDU (Initializer.SysDaemon)
To: ca-mtg@bloom-beacon.mit.edu
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jefft (Jeff Tang):
"Of course you're being watched. It's a film, idiot!"
--- Tom Servo
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kyt (Kwongyee Tan):
I took the one less traveled,
that made SOME of the differences.
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lud (Jeffrey T Ludwig):
Home: 140 Clarendon Street #914 || MIT Lincoln Lab Office: M119
Boston, MA || phone: (617) 981-5239
02116 || fax: (617) 981-0156
phone: (617) 437-9850 || email: lud@athena.mit.edu
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nosaj (Jason M Sachs):
Bill went into work. He was fresh, clean, and nervous: it was his
first day. He had on his tie and suit and had polished his shoes---his
wife had wandered into the bedroom and asked him why he had been sticking
his right foot under the shoe-polishing machine for the last half-hour,
and then Bill snapped out of whatever daydream he was having, and raced
downstairs and into the old beige Chevrolet with one suspender dangling
from his back, his wife calling at him, telling him not to forget to
pick up some mucilage from the drugstore after work and he yelled back
that he would, despite the fact that he wasn't quite sure what mucilage
was---and even his hair was in order for once. Bill took a deep breath
and stepped through the doorway of Uebersafe, Inc., wondering what exactly
his job would entail.
The recruiting man for Uebersafe hadn't mentioned what kinds of things
people at Uebersafe did. Security, was what he said, and nothing more.
(And recruiting, thought Bill in hindsight.) Maybe it was too secret to
mention.
Bill was actually glad that they hadn't exchanged much information: he
had been fired by his last two employers for "not contributing to company
growth". Imagine! It was sort of okay the first time... but the second---
couldn't they have been more creative? Bill wondered how they had managed
to get the exact same wording... and then he remembered, first of all,
that they were his uncles and that they had lunch together every Wednesday,
and second, that they each had this big, black book of Management (the
one that Bill never got to see) which probably had whole chapters on Not
Contributing to Company Growth. It just wasn't fair; Bill was a model
employee---he never arrived so late that he got there after lunch started,
and he never left so early that he didn't come back from after lunch break,
and he didn't take too many pencils, and he was never coming up with
outlandish new ideas, just the same old ones that didn't quite work, but
he never told his uncles that they didn't work because they might be upset,
and he was always the first to volunteer for business trips---so why
did they fire him?
No, all the recruiter asked him was what he was good at, and Bill
replied, "Mechanical drawing." Bill's favorite pastime was sitting out
on a field, with his drafting board and T-square in hand, and
sketching the clouds, complete with dimensions and hidden lines. To
Bill, they occasionally looked like the sprockets, gears, and
camshafts of the future, and one of these days, he was going to work
for someone and they would come up with a rough idea for something
that Bill had once sketched, and he would pull out the
sketch---complete with dimensions and hidden lines---and show it to
his supervisor; Bill wanted to make sure he didn't miss that kind of
opportunity, so he figured he'd better get right to it. The artists
were insulted, and his fellow draftsmen ridiculed him, but he didn't
mind.
"You're hired," said the recruiter, and so here Bill was, on the doorstep
of Uebersafe, Inc., the following Monday.
He knocked on the door.
A guard answered, and Bill gave him his name. The guard brought Bill
to someone's office, and the someone led Bill to an important person's
office, and the important person led Bill to a the office of a smiling
guy named Guy, who turned out to be the recruiting man's nephew. He
led Bill down the hall, out the door, up the fire escape to the roof,
across a plank to the roof of a neighboring building, down the stairs,
down another hall, into an exhaust vent, through the exhaust vent,
making a few right turns here and there and a few left turns here and
there and a few wrong turns here and there, and out into yet another
hall, and into a nearby office. The smiling guy named Guy flipped on
the light, and began to shove some paper piles to one side.
"Is this my office?" Bill asked.
"Hold on; don't be so anxious," said the smiling guy named Guy, as he
located a secret panel which covered a secret switch. He flipped the switch,
and a bookcase slid back, revealing a door, which the smiling guy named Guy
went through, indicating that Bill should follow.
After a few more turns and tribulations, they reached a small screen
door. Bill heard a whirring noise from behind the door. Opening the
door revealed a second screen door, and then a third, the whirring
noise becoming louder as each door was opened in sequence. Finally,
Bill and the smiling guy named Guy walked in.
The room was a tremendous Quonset hut at least forty feet high at its
apex. The whirring noise was coming from a series of fans near the
ceiling. Also near the ceiling was a series of pulleys, around which
were strung ropes that supported some large black metal boxes. People
were pulling on one end of each of the ropes, hoisting the boxes high
into the air, and then, when they neared the ceiling, someone led some
large pigs from a large fenced-off area in the corner of the room,
which contained many of the squealing animals, into small, fenced-off
squares directly underneath each of the pulleys. Then, a buzzer went off
and a light began to flash, and the men pulling the ropes let go,
and the boxes fell---
"Wow, am I going to work here?" asked Bill.
"No, don't be so anxious," said the smiling guy named Guy. "This is
the reverse-engineering area; we take our competitors' safes and see
what their impact is on the creatures you see here---" Men in white
suits untied the ropes from the safes, and carried them off into an
adjoining room. Other men in white suits lifted up the unmoving,
flattened forms from within the fenced-off squares into another
adjoining room. A third group of men in white suits took out tape
measures and recorded the positions and qualities of splattered blood,
and then a fourth group of men in white suits came and squeegeed the
blood into a recessed basin toward the edge of the Quonset hut, and
then a fifth group in white suits came and took away the white suits
from everybody else and wheeled them off to the laundry.
Then the smiling guy named Guy tugged on Bill's arm and led him down the
hall into a similar, large room with whirring fans, the only difference being
that the safes were reddish-orange. "---and then they bring the data into
here, where different people, who've never seen the safes in the other
room, try to get our safes to perform just as well." Bill noticed that
he emphasized the words `our safes' with a sense of pride. "You may be
noticing the strange color of our safes." There was that sense of pride
again. "We've done testing, and we've found that our pigs just squeal
like mad when they see reddish-orange. Besides, this way the blood doesn't
stain the safes during the reverse-engineering stages."
Bill got a general tour of the plant, from the biology labs in which
new types of genetically engineered pigs were being dreamed up each
week, to the PBP (Pork By-Products) division in which in-house
merchandising, reuse, and disposal was done. Bill even got to see the
new Physical Computing facilities, where computer-simulated pigs were
being flattened by computer-simulated safes using state-of-the-art
technology. And each time, Bill asked, "Is this where I'm going to be
working?", and each time the smiling guy named Guy told him not to
be so anxious.
Finally, they entered a small, dimly-lit room containing about a dozen
drafting tables, most of them occupied by hunched figures wearing
glasses and holding T-squares or French curves or compasses,
depending, as Bill saw, on whether they were drawing screen doors or
white suits or Quonset huts, each complete (or in the process of being
completed) with dimensions and hidden lines. The smiling guy named
Guy led Bill over to a desk in the corner, on top of which was a
wooden sign with the letters B I L L done in fresh blood courtesy of
the PBP division.
"This," said the smiling guy named Guy, "is where you will be working. And
remember, don't be so anxious."
Bill was anxious. "So," he asked, his heart racing at the sight of
all the drafting gear. "Am I going to be designing the next line of Uebersafe
safes?"
The smiling guy named Guy laughed. "No," he said, laughing even harder.
"Don't be ridiculous. Only a few select people at the top of the company
ladder get to do that."
"Well, then what will I be doing?"
"You should first check in with Herb, your supervisor, down the hall in
room..." He got out a scrap of paper from his pocket. "...307b. He'll give
you your exact assignment."
A waitress came in, with a pile of plates and silverware, and a large
platter of pancakes and freshly-cooked bacon. The draftsmen got up
from what they were doing and started eating and socializing.
"Actually," said the smiling guy named Guy, heading toward the food,
"I think it has something to do with drawing the plans for new animal
enclosures; they want them to be optimized to yield better data for
the reverse-engineers."
Something had been bothering Bill for a while, and though he had
kept it to himself earlier, Bill could stand it no more. "What is this, a
security corporation or a slaughterhouse?"
Everyone turned around, including the smiling guy named Guy and the
waitress who was about to leave. There was silence. The faces of the
draftsmen looked even paler than they normally were in the dim light.
The smiling guy named Guy had stopped smiling.
Bill was fired on the spot.
The smiling guy named Guy led Bill to a door leading out into a nearby
alleyway. "You had to do that, didn't you? We had high hopes for you,
you know. Such high hopes...." The door slammed shut behind him, and
that was the last Bill had to do with Uebersafe, Inc.
Bill remembered his promise to his wife at that point, and shuffled
down the alley, dejected, to find the parking lot where he had left
his car so he could go find a drugstore. He wondered what mucilage
was, since he was supposed to get some, and had a funny feeling it had
something to do with pigs.
--- End of Central America ---
