"I'm God, Baby!"

A good machinist is hard to find.

The arrival of our first one predated my hiring only by a little, but he had already found time to fall behind on his work.

We knew we were meeting our new machinist that day, but after waiting for him for 20 minutes most of us had busied ourselves with our computers doing trivial work or trying to figure our if we had the time wrong. We barely noticed him when he wandered in: you don't normally expect strangers to show up on a federal base, and sometimes you just stop looking for them. The man wandered up to Tie-Dye's desk where he made himself comfortable, primarily by kicking his muddy shoes up onto my boss' keyboard. Tie-dye looked at him, then at me, then back at the man at his desk, trying to piece together what was going on.

"Excuse me," it was Tie-dye's very politest voice, "but, who are you?"

The machinist casually laced his fingers behind his head and pressed his feet into the desk to lean back, "Who me? I'm God, baby!" Turning to one side, he made a little clicking noise at Daniella and nodded at her in a manner I'm sure he thought was devastatingly attractive.

***

She was livid, "You have got to get rid of him."

Crash always believes in the best of everybody, "Aww now, I know you've had your misunderstandings... but he does great work..."

"You don't make Holocaust jokes to jews."

"How would he have known you were Jewish?"

***

I'm not sure if it was the fact that he tried to randomly purchase magnesium (a rather flammable metal) instead of aluminum, that he randomly powder-coated a component likely to overheat in black and billed the project for it, or the fact that he tried to make the body with tack-welds which fell apart. Personally, I was most amused by when Daniella tried to have a talk with him so they could sort out their differences and learn to get along, and he accused her of "trying to get him alone because she wanted him." No matter the cause, it wasn't very long until we sent him on his way.

"Fuck it," Crash threw the powder-coated tack-welded sheet metal box aside in annoyance, "I wouldn't use it as a urinal."

The next machinist misprogrammed an expensive CNC mill so that it thought the metal wasn't some place it was. It did a full plunge through the workpiece's surface, got stuck there, grabbed the part we were working on, shook it like a rag-doll, ripped it in half, and dragged the top half out of the vice and into the ceiling of the machine so it could trash that for good measure.

The next machinist hid his files on a secret server and regularly threatened to not let anybody have his work when he believed his paycheck was late. He was, in reality, one of the only ones being paid on time.

Another one sprayed Sys with a can of compressed air for cleaning things, turning it upside down so it sprayed it in liquid form. He thought it was pretty funny, but Sys got a hospital trip for the burn.

A good machinist is hard to find.

A Brave New Job

We're being taught how to write and how to speak.

"Never say we would crush the competition, we have only the utmost respect for our competitors..."

The desks of the hall form a large semi-circle and we're all seated quietly, each clutching an identical bookbag, a gift from our new employer. We also each have a laptop, a shirt...

"And now it is time for lunch," the orientation lead smiles and leads the 20 of us to a cafeteria. We're all the people who began work on this day, they call us a class.

"Ribs or salmon?" the cafeteria employee asks me.

I stare at him blankly before finally managing an "uhhh."

The employee looks concerned, "You know...if you don't like..."

"Oh no! I like!"

***

It's a few weeks later and another smiling cafeteria worker is holding a lobster claw in a pair of serving tongs. I'm immediately struck with the realization that I have no idea how to eat this item and that I will be figuring it out in front of a large number of coworkers.

"It's ok," I tell her, "I have enough food, no thanks."

***

"You're so lucky," my friends told me.

"Is it true they feed you three meals a day?"

"Is it true they do your laundry?"

***

I roomed with a bunch of people from this place briefly years ago. Their refrigerator was eerily empty save the bunny food which contented Carne. I worked for the feds, she worked for something similar, and we use to talk about how the way our other housemates were so dependent on their workplace was a little creepy.

One of these housemates, Sharpie, fell off his bike and skinned his arm. The company nurse fixed him up, but he wore the bandage in the shower. Seconds later he came running out of the bathroom in a towel talking clutching his burning injury.

Carne and I laughed at him for wearing his bandage in the shower and expecting any differently. He laughed too once we pointed it out, "you know, I use to know that."

"They all drink some hardcore kool-aid over there," Carne shook her head, "bet you it's something they put in the water."

I laugh, "So that is what the cafeterias are for..."

***

The sign above the ribs says they were cooked in molasses. The meat is tender and falls off the bones, and a touch sweet. I assume that's from the molasses, though I have never had anything like this before so I wouldn't know for sure.

"You'll never be far from food," the orientation lead tells me, "we have snack kitchens..."

***

"Don't you think this is all a little excessive?" Giraffe asks me.

"Yeah, but it is how it is around here I guess."

***

I'm sitting at an awards dinner, courtesy of the feds, earlier this year. Sys's dad is sitting nearby and laughing with us.

"I wonder sometimes," I said, "if I could just hop from company to company on crazy employee benefits and just outrun the rate of reality catching up to these places and them realizing it isn't affordable."

His dad throws back his head and roars, "You missed out on the real chance for that, kid. This is nothing compared to how it was in the 90's."

***

"It's just like A Brave New World," Giraffe said.

"Isn't that about some crazy dystopia where everybody is oppressed?"

"Well yes, but it's completely voluntary and they are all happy."

"Then home come are they oppressed?"

"The book talks about that a lot."

"What?"

***

I'm walking through the halls for what turned out to be my final interview. A perky HR lady is asking me my least favourite interview question.

"And do you have any questions for me?"

My eyes clutch the walls, searching frantically for something which will make me sound smart yet curious.

"You changed the brand of juice in these refrigerators since I was here last, didn't you?"

"Oh," she smiles, "Yes, well we have panels here which study things like this, and if they changed it I suppose that means that the new one is healthier."

There is a brief an awkward pause where the HR woman innocently smiles, and then adds, "You really do learn something new every day here."

***

"When you start work," Doug said, gesturing to the Torii building, "We'll miss you."

"I don't understand."

"Well you'll never leave work there. You'll never come here anymore."

"That's silly."

"Well, why would you want to leave?"

***

I sat down and looked back at the mental list of things I wanted when I was homeless and compare them to the things I want now. While I still want a car and maybe a boyfriend or some other form of social ties to this place, pretty much everything else has been taken care of: food, shelter, medical insurance, free time, and respect for my work. I find it odd to realize that the list is a lot shorter but I am not a much happier person, in fact in some ways the optimism afforded to me when I was homeless of rapidly becoming un-homeless and general excitement probably meant I was happier then in my day-to-day life then than I am now.

***

"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel–and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill... they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave."

The Savage was silent for a little. "All the same," he insisted obstinately, "Othello's good, Othello's better than those feelies."

"Of course it is," the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead..."

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand..."

"But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

A Brave New World, Chapters 16-17

"You're still coming here," Doug smiled.

"Yeah. I think it's not good for me to spend all my time there."

Memorize

"17 squared is...?"

"Erm..."

"Oh come on Pika, you need to know this."

"Not with a calculator..."

"You should really know this, its not like you will carry a calculator everywhere with you during life."

I have a calculator in my backpack, but normally I just use the one integrated into my cell phone. I carry this phone everywhere, and I have not seen a phone in the last 5 years which doesn't have such a calculator on it.

***

They call us the search engine generation. We are storing less and less knowledge in our minds and have come more and more to rely on our ability to rapidly locate data than our actual knowledge of it.

***

I'm thumbing through yet another applicant's exam, first for the easy short answer questions before I even begin working out if the code they wrote is correct.

"What pins," the exam asks, "do you need to drive in order to put a number on the four 7 segment displays on the Nexys II by Digilent?"

"I have no experience with this display," the response reads.

Its a shame we don't have paper applications anymore. Crumpling up the application and trying for a two point swoosh into the trash can might be strangely gratifying. That particular board was chosen to be obscure, the question was meant to be one of character. If the applicant so much as pulled up an image of that board on Google he would find the numbers he requires have physically been printed on the front of the board. I find the concept that you would expect anybody to have memorized everything he needs laughable.

***

"Did you know," the priest asked, "that when paper first became widely available in ancient Greece that the older philosophers had a fit about it?"

The art of being in high school seemed to lie in pretending very hard that nothing a teacher could ever say would be interesting. After pause sufficient enough to indicate that he didn't plan to continue until we responded I shook my head.

"Yes," he said, "they thought that students would never learn anything because they could always just write it down instead."

***

"Your language skills are terrible, you'll never pass in any social context" my mother said, "you can not even recite poetry."

"Most people don't even read poetry anymore let alone memorize it..."

"This," she pointed to her bookshelf, "is what educated adults know. Some day you will grow out of this childish phase and want to pass as an educated adult you know."

Somehow I remember feeling distinctly like I wouldn't.

My mother was irritated and persistent, "Recite! Poe!"

"Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though,"

"Its that's Frost. I said Poe."

***

Meet Drummer. Drummer scored the best of the applicants on his technical exam, attends an ivy league school, and currently has an internship with a fairly respectable federal agency. He, in a similar previous episode of distraction, once named all 151 original Pokemon on a sheet of paper. He's a phenomenal coder and I have no issue with his performance or raw intellect.

"Could you name all 50 states?" he asked me.

I laughed, thinking he was being funny.

"No, seriously, if we printed blank maps of the United States do you think you could put the right titles in all the states?"

"Yeah, and I am sure you could too."

"I'm not..."

"Lets try."

Sys was up for the challenge too. The states were easy enough, and with enough discussion we got all of the capitols (although Sys contributed significantly more to that list than I did.) Drummer, partially from his mind and partially from random eavesdropping exclamations such as "oh yeah, Kentucky is a state!" managed to fill in most of his map.

Here's a photograph we took of it. It is worth noting that the two states Drummer has lived in are Georgia and New York.

After a merry round of below the belt comments about Drummer's education and general intellect he started looking slightly sad.

"How did you even pass 5th grade?" I asked.

"Well," he shrugged, "I knew it all then...I guess I just...forgot."

"Forgot?"

"Some of these states...aren't even important," he says.

"Of course they are all important!" I snap, "this is the country we live in. You should know at least all the parts of it..."

"Actually, I think its defensible," Gadget joined in, "I mean...he can always go look up the gory details if he wants them right?"

"No," I insist, "there is a basic minimum that you need to not look like an idiot in any historical or political discussion. This is fundamental knowledge for an educated adult."

Educated adult? I am slightly creeped out to hear my mother's words come out of my mouth. Is my insistance on what I consider basic geography as outrageous as I found her insistence on poetry? It might be possible. If the ancient greeks thought paper was a scandal, my parent's generation loathed handheld calculators in favor of Poe, might it be possible that in a few years memorization tasks like basic geography be rendered obsolete? Throughout the whole progression of human history we have slowly kept less and less in our heads and more and more in our tools. Where do we, as a generation, draw our lines of dependency?

***

I'm walking across the lab. Drummer's on break at his desk, sandwich in hand, staring at his screen.

"Penny for your thoughts," I say.

Drummer takes another bite of his sandwich and tilts the monitor so I can see it with his other hand. Across the whole screen I can see a map of the United States, completely labeled this time.

"Ahh, you're studying?" I asked.

Drummer nodded.

It warms my little heart.

The More You Know

Sys sits at his computer behind me looking puzzled, "When did XKCD start getting dirty?"

"What are you talking about?" I asked "XKCD has always been like this..."

"No, its always nerdy...not dirty."

"Nerds tend to be pretty dirty..."

Sys shakes his head.

"No, here" I said as I started searching for previous less than family friendly editions and rattling them off.

Sys shakes his head but views the evidence I present. Sys has been the designated high school bitch of my lab for just over a year now, but realistically he's treated like any college intern in my lab despite being only 17. Since he can handle the workload of a college kid he has earned all the privileges that come with it. I sometimes wonder how it is for him to return to the real world where his underlings, the designated high school bitches of other labs at my work, are his classmates.

We're expected to mentor our high school students in exchange for the coffee and copies. On a technical level Sys has probably gained more education than any other student. However, most of the life lessons I hand him are, normally completely inadvertently, more than a little unconventional.

Sys clicks quietly through the links and nods, conceding the point made. I hear the mouse fall silent as he tilts his head and stares at the screen for a moment.

"Pika, I don't get this one."

"Huh?"

"What's a furry?"

Across the lab Bobby chokes a little on his water bottle laughing. Drummer looks at me wondering how I'm going to handle this.

"Well," I said, "this is one of those things that if I tell you it won't make you any happier a person...but you do have an Internet connection so if you're really determined you can look it up yourself."

"What kind of an answer is that?"

"You ever heard the story of Pandora's box?"

Sys sits for a minute and then returned to his work. He typed for a good 120 seconds or so before his typing slowed and he stared at the screen. Then suddenly, he leaned forward and the tempo of the strokes quickened. There was a very slight pause before he leaned back again and shouted to the room, "Ohhh NASTY!"

The whole lab bursts out laughing.

Sys is pretty irritated, "Why did you show me that?"

"Dude," I said, "we totally warned you."

The lab trolled him briefly with a discussion of furries and then the laughter died down. Eventually work resumed. It wasn't until several hours later that I caught Sys shaking his head out of the corner of my eye.

"What's wrong man?"

Sys shakes his head again, "Fuzzies are so nasty."

"Man," Bobby laughed, "at least get the title right."

"There really are many worse things on the internet," Drummer offered cheerfully.

Sys opened his mouth for a moment to ask a question then shut it again and went back to work.

Academia will tell you that the pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of happiness. The Internet has taught me that there are rare sets of circumstances where I beg to differ.