Monday, December 13
Enjoy/annoy
Those who know me are well aware of my enjoy/annoy relationship with my daytime job. For example, there's this "Classic Edge of Nowhere" "post" about what I was up to, from 11:59 a.m. on Tuesday, December 16, 2003. That's almost exactly a year ago:
Been sitting in a meeting. A unit meeting. A meeting of units. Pieces. Parts of the machine. Cogs. Square pegs, or are we round pegs? Yes. Round pegs. Square holes. Called cubicles. Translating Bossspeak into something resembling communication. Or information. Now I'm sitting here typing, storing information that was once instead my head, in my brain, as waves and pulses and electricity, I'm converting to other bits of electricity and storing it outside my body. Soon you will read this stored information. On the phone were people. Voices, really, voices of people. More information stored outside their bodies. We read off paper, which of course is just more information stored as symbols on thin mulched strips of water and paper. Trees. Trees have information, too. It's different. Most of us can't use it. Or understand it.
So, now that meeting is over, I'll sit by myself for a while, a strip of blue sky visible above the cubicle wall, below the ceiling. Sometimes a white strip of cloud matter forms behind a jet. I think they call it a contrail. I'll see that, and if it's windy up at 30,000 feet, five, no, six miles up, the thin stripe of cloud will blow around. I may look at it. I may not. Mostly I'll be staring at other types of information. Text. Bits. Bytes. Pixels. All of it pixels. Information wants to be free. Much of the meeting was about trying to control various types of information.
So I'll take information other people "submit" to me and convert and repurpose it for general audience readership. I'll convert all to a solid healthy American G rating. Or B, for Boring. Most of it is boring. But because I have skills of this nature, I get to convert information from other less skilled people and make it more consumable. And maybe people, other round pegs, will convert this information and maybe they won't, ingest and digest and regurge it for their own use. Some may even internalize said information. It doesn't really matter to me. Information wants to be free. I help set it free, despite my job description saying I must control it instead. No one notices. And in exchange for my time in converting and repurposing information, the owner of these square holes will convert some of its information, from bits and bytes, through some phone lines to a repository of information that I don't own but have access too. It's called a checking account and it has a bunch of numbers and pixels associated with it.
Sometimes I can use my brain and hand to write other numbers and names on a piece of paper I carry around and trade my information written on these pieces of paper for other things, like paper cups of hot chocolate, or stuff I just consumed, cheese crackers and a manufactured can of sweetened, additive-filled water. Amazing. What a crazy world.
Still. The sun comes up, the sun goes down. The wheel of night rotates the stars around the sky. The solstice is coming, the goose is getting fat, let's put a penny in an old man's hat.
Been sitting in a meeting. A unit meeting. A meeting of units. Pieces. Parts of the machine. Cogs. Square pegs, or are we round pegs? Yes. Round pegs. Square holes. Called cubicles. Translating Bossspeak into something resembling communication. Or information. Now I'm sitting here typing, storing information that was once instead my head, in my brain, as waves and pulses and electricity, I'm converting to other bits of electricity and storing it outside my body. Soon you will read this stored information. On the phone were people. Voices, really, voices of people. More information stored outside their bodies. We read off paper, which of course is just more information stored as symbols on thin mulched strips of water and paper. Trees. Trees have information, too. It's different. Most of us can't use it. Or understand it.
So, now that meeting is over, I'll sit by myself for a while, a strip of blue sky visible above the cubicle wall, below the ceiling. Sometimes a white strip of cloud matter forms behind a jet. I think they call it a contrail. I'll see that, and if it's windy up at 30,000 feet, five, no, six miles up, the thin stripe of cloud will blow around. I may look at it. I may not. Mostly I'll be staring at other types of information. Text. Bits. Bytes. Pixels. All of it pixels. Information wants to be free. Much of the meeting was about trying to control various types of information.
So I'll take information other people "submit" to me and convert and repurpose it for general audience readership. I'll convert all to a solid healthy American G rating. Or B, for Boring. Most of it is boring. But because I have skills of this nature, I get to convert information from other less skilled people and make it more consumable. And maybe people, other round pegs, will convert this information and maybe they won't, ingest and digest and regurge it for their own use. Some may even internalize said information. It doesn't really matter to me. Information wants to be free. I help set it free, despite my job description saying I must control it instead. No one notices. And in exchange for my time in converting and repurposing information, the owner of these square holes will convert some of its information, from bits and bytes, through some phone lines to a repository of information that I don't own but have access too. It's called a checking account and it has a bunch of numbers and pixels associated with it.
Sometimes I can use my brain and hand to write other numbers and names on a piece of paper I carry around and trade my information written on these pieces of paper for other things, like paper cups of hot chocolate, or stuff I just consumed, cheese crackers and a manufactured can of sweetened, additive-filled water. Amazing. What a crazy world.
Still. The sun comes up, the sun goes down. The wheel of night rotates the stars around the sky. The solstice is coming, the goose is getting fat, let's put a penny in an old man's hat.
