Robot dogs in the workplace
I do not work alone. Neither by day nor by night. In the nighttime, I am accompanied by my superhero partner, Captain Pippi. By day, under the disguise of some thrift store buisness casual, I share my daily toil with C, a fellow superhero whose true identity I cannot reveal for obvious reasons. Let's just say he is the King of Discs and leave it at that.
I will say more about the Captain later. For now I want to share with you the adventures of C and myself in our strange gnostic purgatory.
Our employer at the Daily Planet is, among other things: highly intelligent, dangerously manic, a man of great integrity, a man of neurotic extremes, a truly decent human being, a good writer of prose and a poor writer of headlines, wealthy and eccentric, completely clueless, slightly clever, acutely aware, occasionally mysoginistic, highly imaginative in the most bizarre ways, utterly unimaginative in the most obvious ways, an avid reader, a world traveler, an aspiring philosopher and crazy. Out of respect for this man of many contradictions, I will refer to him here only as J.
J wants a robot dog. Not just in the way that I want a plasma screen t.v. or a manage a trois with Tori Amos and Johnny Depp. He REALLY wants a robot dog, and he intends to have one.
In fact, he wrote an article in the paper about the robot dog he wants: Sony's soon-to-be-discontinued Aibo, a robotic dog which can chase balls, interact with humans and has a 384 MHz brain.
Now C and I are excited. Maybe C less so than me, because J has had him searching all over the web for one of the little guys, which are being bought up like crazy after Sony announced they were discontinuing the line.
So C is a little more directly affected by J's idiosyncrasies in this matter. Then there's the money factor. To quote C, "If he can afford a $3,000 robot dog, he can afford to give us a raise."
Nonetheless, we're all quite excited about the prospect of a robo-dog coming to the office. I've never been a fan of "bio-dogs" (as Aibo fanatics often refer to real dogs), but the Aibo I can get behind. No pooping, no feeding (besides a little coal-juice which it suck from a wall socket periodically). To me, that sounds like a good pet.
Besides, we think it would be a great selling point for J to bring the dog with him on a leash when selling ads. Who could say no to a man with a robot dog?
C and I are the pillars of the Daily Planet. We have been there for the long haul, by which I mean two or there months. Most last less than two weeks. The problem is that J is crazy; most of the people who come to work there just can't handle it for long.
But C and I are experienced in the ways of crazy people. We sometimes induce craziness intentionally; it's the oldest superhero trick in the book. To quote a fellow crazy superhero, "At one end is insanity, you go around the circle to sanity, and on the other side of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity is unsnaity."
Like I say, oldest trick in the book.
Anyway, once you've had to hold a fellow psychonaut back from accidentally hurting himself while he ran in a circle in the dirt, screaming 'Jesus Fucking STUFF!!!' at the top of his lungs — all the while knowing that the person in question chose to be here in this moment, and would choose it again if offered the choice, and so would you — your sense of how much insanity (or unsanity) is tolerable gets a little bit skewed.
Hence C and I endure where mere morals have faltered time and time again.
I merely reconcile myself to the fact that part of my work is social work, and an opportunity to be a healer and a mirror (that's one of my superpowers, by the way) to an emotionally unstable individual. C, I can only imagine, finds it tolerable because one of his superpowers is the ability to see through veils of illusion — at least far enough to know that's what it is, and often further. That, and he has a little superhero-in-training to feed.
So we remain and watch the operation evolve and change at an accelerated pace, as people come and go. It's like a little micro-civilization in high speed; players strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard from no more. And we, the elder statesmen of this fast-forward empire sit in unsane contemplation, watching our proverbial beards grow longer and recalling things that no new sales girl ever dreamed of.
Remember the aspiring playwright? Remember when they trained my class to take over the whole paper in a week, without telling us that everyone else was leaving. Remember when waking up before dawn still held bitterness?
All things pass, and while C and I are old here, there were, in the early days, a few who remembered the time before us. They had a name for that ancient age. They called it "Last Fall". Ah, I remember the Fall. A time of scarcity and cold, and descent into the limitations of matter following the Long Summer.
Still, the wheel ever turns. We watch as the sun returns, knowing that a new magic will rise again as it invariably does, when the heat of Sol's radiant eye warms the very air we breathe and fills us with the fire to dance all night again under open skies, and call down the old gods and raise up fires to the new, and rejoice and fuck and celebrate and stir the cauldron once again!
I will say more about the Captain later. For now I want to share with you the adventures of C and myself in our strange gnostic purgatory.
Our employer at the Daily Planet is, among other things: highly intelligent, dangerously manic, a man of great integrity, a man of neurotic extremes, a truly decent human being, a good writer of prose and a poor writer of headlines, wealthy and eccentric, completely clueless, slightly clever, acutely aware, occasionally mysoginistic, highly imaginative in the most bizarre ways, utterly unimaginative in the most obvious ways, an avid reader, a world traveler, an aspiring philosopher and crazy. Out of respect for this man of many contradictions, I will refer to him here only as J.
J wants a robot dog. Not just in the way that I want a plasma screen t.v. or a manage a trois with Tori Amos and Johnny Depp. He REALLY wants a robot dog, and he intends to have one.
In fact, he wrote an article in the paper about the robot dog he wants: Sony's soon-to-be-discontinued Aibo, a robotic dog which can chase balls, interact with humans and has a 384 MHz brain.
Now C and I are excited. Maybe C less so than me, because J has had him searching all over the web for one of the little guys, which are being bought up like crazy after Sony announced they were discontinuing the line.
So C is a little more directly affected by J's idiosyncrasies in this matter. Then there's the money factor. To quote C, "If he can afford a $3,000 robot dog, he can afford to give us a raise."
Nonetheless, we're all quite excited about the prospect of a robo-dog coming to the office. I've never been a fan of "bio-dogs" (as Aibo fanatics often refer to real dogs), but the Aibo I can get behind. No pooping, no feeding (besides a little coal-juice which it suck from a wall socket periodically). To me, that sounds like a good pet.
Besides, we think it would be a great selling point for J to bring the dog with him on a leash when selling ads. Who could say no to a man with a robot dog?
C and I are the pillars of the Daily Planet. We have been there for the long haul, by which I mean two or there months. Most last less than two weeks. The problem is that J is crazy; most of the people who come to work there just can't handle it for long.
But C and I are experienced in the ways of crazy people. We sometimes induce craziness intentionally; it's the oldest superhero trick in the book. To quote a fellow crazy superhero, "At one end is insanity, you go around the circle to sanity, and on the other side of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity is unsnaity."
Like I say, oldest trick in the book.
Anyway, once you've had to hold a fellow psychonaut back from accidentally hurting himself while he ran in a circle in the dirt, screaming 'Jesus Fucking STUFF!!!' at the top of his lungs — all the while knowing that the person in question chose to be here in this moment, and would choose it again if offered the choice, and so would you — your sense of how much insanity (or unsanity) is tolerable gets a little bit skewed.
Hence C and I endure where mere morals have faltered time and time again.
I merely reconcile myself to the fact that part of my work is social work, and an opportunity to be a healer and a mirror (that's one of my superpowers, by the way) to an emotionally unstable individual. C, I can only imagine, finds it tolerable because one of his superpowers is the ability to see through veils of illusion — at least far enough to know that's what it is, and often further. That, and he has a little superhero-in-training to feed.
So we remain and watch the operation evolve and change at an accelerated pace, as people come and go. It's like a little micro-civilization in high speed; players strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard from no more. And we, the elder statesmen of this fast-forward empire sit in unsane contemplation, watching our proverbial beards grow longer and recalling things that no new sales girl ever dreamed of.
Remember the aspiring playwright? Remember when they trained my class to take over the whole paper in a week, without telling us that everyone else was leaving. Remember when waking up before dawn still held bitterness?
All things pass, and while C and I are old here, there were, in the early days, a few who remembered the time before us. They had a name for that ancient age. They called it "Last Fall". Ah, I remember the Fall. A time of scarcity and cold, and descent into the limitations of matter following the Long Summer.
Still, the wheel ever turns. We watch as the sun returns, knowing that a new magic will rise again as it invariably does, when the heat of Sol's radiant eye warms the very air we breathe and fills us with the fire to dance all night again under open skies, and call down the old gods and raise up fires to the new, and rejoice and fuck and celebrate and stir the cauldron once again!
posted by PanDoor at 10:00 AM
2 comments
