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irarelypostanything · 5 years

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Slice of Life[6]

[Andy]

“There have been some increasingly controversial topics in the news,” began Andy, in the milionth meeting they were holding that week, “and I know that not everyone here is in agreement with regard to personal beliefs. Though there is some merit to discussing these topics, I would encourage you to do so outside of work.

“So please,” he continued, “for the love of the old gods and the new, stop arguing about the last episode of Game of Thrones.”

“It was kind of bullshit though, right?” asked Jake, to murmurs of approval.

“I haven’t watched it yet,” complained Kevin.

“Spoiler,” said Jake, “it sucked.”

“Jake, please.”

“There was a shocking twist about Tyrion being the Night King.”

“Kevin, Jake may or may not be messing with you.”

“I did think the part where Eddard rose from the dead was a little out of left field, though.”

“Amy, please proceed with your presentation.”

Amy was standing in front of their conference room’s projector. Her long, dark brown hair was tied into a bun, and her usual Davis badminton jacket was replaced by a white button-up.

“Thanks Andy,” she said, relieved that the meeting was back under control, “as I was saying, this project is worth roughly 25.6 million dollars, collectively. As is the usual case, the largest defense contractors are going to take the majority of business.

“But this is where things get interesting. I’m going to have to be intentionally vague about the next portion of this, since we’re in a nonclassified setting, but we have certain...capabilities...that even some of the largest corporations don’t. Thanks to some wise decisions we made early last year with regard to our research allocations, we are actually the first team we know of that can use...”

Her voice trailed. “Well, that’s also classified. But the figures aren’t. Look at this.” The slide changed. “We are poised to become the government’s preferred vendor for the entire sensor, and all we have to do is give them a taste. They expect delivery within three weeks. For this to work, all teams have to collaborate perfectly.”

“It’s really important that we execute this now,” agreed Andy, “that means it’s really, vitally important that we not let our meetings diverge into arguments about petty bullshit.

“Kevin, we’d like a status report from you. What’s the important software issue you said you wanted everyone to know about?”

“I know we were told not to compile on the hardware,” began Kevin, “but unfortunately, with our system, it’s unavoidable. The time stamps are messed up, so doing basic things like compilation is surprisingly difficult.”

“Why not code it in Python?” suggested Jake. “that way you won’t need to compile it.”

“Wow,” said Dan, with mock amazement, “switch programming languages. Brilliant. This is the kind of empty-headed bullshit that only a hardware engineer would come up with.”

“Right,” Jake retorted, “because messed up time stamps is a hardware issue. Do you guys also give your system administrators mops, then give your janitors root access?”

“Switching to python actually isn’t a bad idea,” said Ryan, “but there’s a much more obvious solution to this problem. You can-”

“Hang on,” interrupted Dan, “care to repeat that comment about root access?”

“You guys don’t understand separation of duty,” said Jake.

“You guys don’t understand fuck about fuck,” said Dan.

The next half hour went about as productively as that conversation.

[Nora]

Saturday. It was a surprisingly clear morning, for San Francisco, and the sun was just starting to rise. Because it was San Francisco, though, the morning was ice cold.

Nora made her way up the steep trail of Mt. Davidson. Kevin said he knew every trail and angle at this place, and she believed him. The park was tiny. She reached the peak with ease. She glanced in the direction of the sun, then turned away to look at downtown in the distance. She could see the bay, and Castro, and a bunch of major downtown buildings until her view reached Sutro Mountain.

She pulled out her cell phone. “This is boring,” she told Kevin through the speaker.

“Did you know it’s the tallest hill in all of San Francisco?”

“Highest of the seven hills?”

“Sure.”

“What, because of the giant cross?”

“I admit that the giant cross is cheating, but the point still stands.”

“Not sure what the big deal is, to be honest. I’ve had a more fun time at Bernal Heights, and that place has some pretty good coffee.”

“Giant blue building.”

“What?”

“Find the spot where Balboa is, look a bit to the left, and you’ll see that giant blue building. It’s a water tower. We used to sneak up there, forever ago, when we were young.”

“Okay...”

“I used to love this city. It’s not the same now. Whenever I came back it was never the same, always a little different. So I started to come home every month, then every other month. The last time we spoke, it was my first time back in almost a year.”

“Well, what’s changed?”

“It’s just different.”

Nora looked at the tower, then at Kevin’s high school, then at the water again. From a distance, it was all tiny. Like none of it mattered.

“You used to love this city,” asked Nora, “and now you don’t because it’s changed?”

“Exactly. You took the words right out of my mouth.”

“So you believe that the city you once loved is gone. I believe that the city you loved never existed.”

“That’s morbid.”

“Seriously, how much of it had you really seen?”

Nora looked again at the view. “Oh wait, technically you’ve seen quite a bit of it.”

“Technically.”

[Kevin]

Sunday. Kevin was at a church. Again.

After another sermon, a middle-aged person named Leo (whom he had met a couple of weeks ago) sought him out.

“Hey Kevin,” he said, “do you know a lot about social media?”

The question hit him with surprise. Kevin had once been obsessed with social media.

“I know a little bit,” said Kevin, “why do you ask?”

“I’d like to give our church more of an online presence, but it’s all new to me. What do you know about Facebook groups?”

“Well,” said Kevin, “not too much. I know that you can pay to have the algorithm favor you, so you get more traffic. I also know that you can integrate it with Google Analytics, and I believe the algorithm will favor you if you can rack likes or comments in a five-minute window.

“The whole thing is very calculated. The emojis you use, whether you use GIFs, whether you use tags...all of these are taken into consideration when considering your post placement.”

“That’s all fine and good,” said Leo, “but you don’t sound super enthusiastic right now about Facebook.”

“Have you heard of Life Church?”

“No.”

“It’s a nice resource, it’s an online church, but it’s just a little bit too good. It’s hard to describe. It’s ridiculously high quality video, full Facebook integration, professional band. You can view the likes and comments in real time.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s weird. All of this is weird to me for some reason. Doing that kind of thing for a church? I prefer sites like Medium. I can harvest so much sweet, sweet data.”

“Are you okay? You just turned red.”

“You know, I get crazy about this a lot. I used to be a normal guy. A couple likes here, a couple likes there. I started to find forums where I could get 100 likes a post, consistently, and I started to get a presence. Click, like, share. Click, like, share. It’s no way to live, man. Every second a feeling of wanting judgment, every act of communication a desperate plea to please the algorithm.

“But this one time, this one night I’ll never forget, I put up an article that went #trending. It got 36,000 Facebook shares. Pretty okay, sure, but then I found the real analytics. 3 million hits. 3 million people read it, all around the world.”

For a little while, Leo just stood there. Finally, he spoke again.

“Kevin, I just want to share some videos.”

“Oh, okay. Have you considered YouTube?”

“What’s that?”

Kevin walked back to his apartment after lunch. Part of him wished he could be as enthusiastic about church as he was about technology, but there was still something he couldn’t get over. It was a belief that was fundamental to him for as long as he remembered. It was a belief that went against everything he had read in every book of the bible.

Kevin didn’t think it mattered what people believed. All that mattered to him was what people did.

Some Christians donated to the poor, built schools, saved lives. Some atheists donated to the poor, built schools, saved lives. Both Christians and non-Christian people had done great things, and horrible things, but so had Muslims. And Hindu people. And scientologists, and probably a million other religions. But no one thought it was okay to believe that your beliefs didn’t matter.

Kevin wasn’t sure if he believed in everything or nothing. He figured it was impossible to believe in nothing, because that would mean that he still believed in something.

[Dan]

Monday. 8PM. Dan was one of the only people in.

It was a long meeting, followed by a crucial lunch meeting, followed by coding, followed by another meeting. These past few days had been tough on everyone, but Dan sometimes wished he could just hole up, not talk to anyone, and code.

He finally had a few hours to himself. This was when he felt most productive.

2, he thought. 2, 4, 8, 16…

Dan’s weapon of choice had always been C++. He knew bitwidths, 56-megabyte proprietary structs, obscure abbreviations that only meant anything to him, Andy, and the Department of Defense. He knew 18 different ways to bind to a socket. He knew 19 different ways to accidentally bind to the socket incorrectly, which is why he was careful who he hired.

He looked at his code. 100 lines. 18 minutes. It compiled, implemented a client/server, verified that both sides were properly using the data. Not bad. He added error handling, comments, varied conditions. He updated his code like a skilled writer polishing his prose, and like a skilled writer he knew how important every individual unit was. He knew how significant the difference was between --i and i--. He knew the implications of using [] on a vector instead of .at()

Having accomplished his main goal, he decided to spend a few minutes making fun of other people on Github issues.

He saw one branch of code where someone failed, failed again, then tried changing all the include statements from using “” to using <>. Dan laughed.

He saw one branch of code where someone tried to log everything as fatal. This was surprisingly common, especially for people too dumb to figure out how to set log level. Dan laughed.

Then Dan saw a branch made by one of his best friends.

Ex-friends. No one ever figured it out. Things were mysterious, but for reasons he never understood this friend’s family chose not to mention their company (or Dan) once. But how did it happen? This was also mysterious. Dan compiled a list of all the things he had learned after college, and it was long, but one item stood out:

When an obituary omits cause of death, that usually means it’s suicide.

What appalled Dan wasn’t the act itself, but the sheer indifference that their company displayed. They just didn’t care. His cubicle was replaced by an intern’s, then another intern’s. That’s more or less how he felt the company regarded this death. It was a name tag change, a commented out line in payroll. It frustrated Dan to no end, the sheer meaningless and triviality of the ordeal.

Silently, when he was sure no one was there to hear, Dan wept.

He cried to a timer. When five minutes passed, he got back on track with coding.

#short story #fiction

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