This week I didn’t need my GPS device to find my way to the office. Instead I watched clouds cast shadows over the foothills, the hide of a prehistoric animal wrapped around my internal text. Light shifts closer to spring. With GPS turned on, I moved toward a target, a self-directed arrow. No more days of getting lost, making a right and discovering a scenic look-out, a road side stand with the best strawberries ever, bits of manna. No time to go down the wrong path. See white rabbit enter building through rear security gate and swipe badge past the employee reader. Green. Down an orange hallway, engineers tuck laptops beneath their arms.
Past the mall towers of Hayward and Fremont I drive with a nail in the sidewall of one of my tires held together with goo that I’d injected through the tire’s stem cell, the old Nummi plant now transmogrified into Tesla, an electric car manufacturer; past Solyndra, solar panelist that was given a half a million dollars by the feds to be a bright star. But what’s that I hear? KZSU, companion of these 50 minute rides down to Cupertino where the deejay is having broadcast problems because she’s doing homework at the same time that she’s doing her show.
Soon I found my way to Lake Tahoe, which wasn’t Lake Tahoe, but the Great Salt Lake, so many conference rooms named after lakes where I was invited to sit around the table with helpings of stale pretzels and fudge cookies to thrash out the next business requirements document with team members dialing in and hooked up through a bridge. I sat and took notes while everyone clarified business process issues. Yellow stickie notes on a white screen, an entire wall covered in arrows and boxes, these petroglyphs from a high-tech era.
Notice a defibrillator cabinet installed outside the bathroom where toilets have both automatic and manual flushing options. Beatles today on the front cover of the company’s web page, high-tech employees: Men in Black. On the late-night shift, I talked with Elena who gathers up the day’s refuse and inserts plastic liners into wastebaskets. She’s looking for a better job in the cafeteria.
Time is tied to the device. There are no clocks. I walk softly and try not to look like an idiot. At meetings today with a Russian program manager, also with a director from England who’s hoping that her boss doesn’t get his knickers twisted around his neck when he hears about new due dates. There’s going to be a Linux server. My notebook floats in acronyms. Everyone says it will take at least six months before I understand what’s happening.
Invite polarities within the container of a circle. There’s no tooling around. I’m in the throes of database archeology. Morning. Ask not for whom the grass blower whines. Outside my window and sitting on a Jeffrey Pine, a crow croaks. Working on swing shift has opened up a new world of late night television, Jewelry TV with its siren call of tanzanite and mocha diamonds. I put the program on mute. Odysseus was on to something. Boot up the computer on my living room table layered with a history I never learned—the story of Genghis Khan whose armies passed skills through mountains, rivers, plains, from one civilization to the next.
Wouldn’t it be a century birthmark if a company chose to invest its capital in developing tools for its employees? Software tools that we can use rather than a hodge-podge of mismatched code and out-of-date text assets, an intuitive interface engineered across countries and teams. Beautiful tools. A well-honed axe. Doesn’t Nature always use conditioner? It’s in the code, sucka. An inner electric vocabulary that can be exchangeable, interchangeable, copiedleftright.
I’m having an out-of-cart body experience. Jewelry TV says there’s only 60 more seconds left on the tanzanite cross. I’ve passed by that station. After all, I’m not even a Christian. Genghis Khan assembled representatives from the world’s religions for a theological bake-off. No side was able to convince the other of anything. Soon alcohol took center stage. Christians started to sing. Muslims, who did not sing, responded by reciting the Koran, and Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. It was Shabbos for the Jews. Unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded: everyone had become too drunk to continue.
The BBC announced that on Black Friday, Americans will boost the economy by spending lots of money, cheerleaders dressed in jogging suits filling up shopping carts. Remember there are no baskets at WalMart, only carts. I stood next to an Asian woman near a shelf stocked with every kind of thing a person might need–pineapple rings, cranberries, chicken broth, baking powder and tins of cinnamon–she circled around like a hawk sizing up its prey, looked at me and said, “The prices are so low. I can’t believe it.”
Believe it. There was a toad strangler last night. In the morning, tree branches were clenched in prayer.