Are we not men? A data processing short story.

I GOT TO WORK

I got into work at ten after ten AM and settled down to read my email. At 10:30, Bob arrived with a sigh at his cubicle next to mine.

As he was unpacking "his" laptop (the laptop that the company gives us to work on at home), Ted-the-manager emerged from his samesize cubicle and said, "Bob, do you have a minute?"

Bob had a minute, of course.

Ted settled his bulk into the chair adjoining Bob's desk and said, "I need to talk to you about your screen saver, Bob".

Bob said, "what!?"

Ted said, "it shows nice pictures, nothing inappropriate of course to our corporate setting, and some of the girls think you have good taste in art."

Ted continued, "but Alice has complained."

Bob said, "oh".

A SONG FOR ALICE

Alice was known as a bit of a complainer. She was the user's liaison and it was her job to get in the programmers' collective face. Alice liked her job.

She would sometimes say things very deliberately to a person, in front of other people in meetings. She herself was thin and muscular, with a ratlike body, and she'd asked Bill in a meeting with the client whether Bill needed two adjacent seats to fly to Richardson. Bill was enormous.

She'd asked Tom, who is single, why he hadn't joined up to fight in Iraq; her husband was a Marine colonel.

She'd mocked Ed for verbosity in front of Russell.

Alice enjoyed reviewing, auditing (not professional auditing, of which she knew nothing), follow up, proofreading, walkthroughs and anything she could to "challenge the conventional wisdom": but Alice had no ideas of her own.

Alice terrorized the few secretaries remaining at the company and the many "temps" that came and went like wrens, or sparrows, with frightened quick motions on the job.

THE AMAZING FINISH

Ted: "she says you are wasting electricity."

Bob said, "but you said to leave our systems on so we don't waste time in the morning booting up."

Ted, raising his hand to quell Bob, said, "I know, and I need you to continue to leave your system up unless Willy tells you to reboot. The problem is that at this company you should realize by now that owing to Russell's personality, perception is reality at this company, and now Alice perceives you as wasting company resources."

Bob slammed his closed fist on the table, taking the scene into a new register.

"Perception!? Is!? Reality!? Perception!? Is!? Reality!? what is this, a meeting or a philosophy seminar? Whose 'perception' is 'reality'?"

Ted removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Bob, give me a break. Alice THINKS that it takes up a lot of electrical power to change the images on your screen saver, and maybe she is right. The other programmers' systems show the company logo when they aren't running and I think this takes less power. And you KNOW that that no longer burns the image on the screen."

Ted, sighing, said, "just deactivate it, willya? This is a business office, not an art museum. Don't make me fire you for using company hard disk space to store images for personal use."

Bob, sighing even more deeply than Ted, said, "they are jpegs, Ted, and they take less than a tenth of a percent of the total space, but hey, what ev er you say."

Bob had four kids at home. I had two kids in another state. This may be why Bob, sighing, activated his system (which was displaying God creating Adam) and went to Control Panel to turn off his virtual art museum, and then to Explorer to erase the folder containing his art collection, while I carefully gathered my few personal effects (not including the company laptop), and without saying a word to anyone, walked out the door into the bright sunshine of an only slightly polluted San Jose morning, clutching my few personal belongings and trudging to the peon area of the enormous parking lot, like a refugee in a newsreel.