B&N Cam Team Bios: Tom by Phaye

Tom is a 41 year-old man who has been married to Linda for 20 years. They met in college where they both studied philosophy. They have a 16 year-old daughter, Lee. Tom can be quiet, but when he argues he gets very intense and he can seem angry. He’s an excellent logical debater. If you get into a debate with him you need to have your facts ready.

He’s thick in the middle and it makes him seem short. He has great deep bronze skin and a reddish-brown beard and mustache. Maybe he’s Latino. He’s balding and I think that the raspberry beret looks okay on him, but he hates it. He hangs around in the break room and reads as much as any of us, he drinks as much coffee, likes sweet stuff, and when he eats a salad he looks sad. Tom and Gina and Dirk are hanging out after work lately, having beers at the taquaria.

He has trouble dealing with Lee and Linda. He says they’re angry at him all the time. It’s the usual teenage stuff, but sometimes he leaves the office and comes back an hour later without saying anything. He says that Lee is hopelessly texted and Facebooked. I think she might be mean. I came in the office one day and he was standing there, not moving, and his hands looked like he’d dipped them in sour cream. Lee had given Tom hand lotion because his knuckles were cracked, but she didn’t tell him how much to use, so he kept pouring it on.

As far as work goes he’s “philosophical,” in the common use of the term, and says that in all of life we wait to “see what happens,” but at least here we were told it's part of the job. He can sit at the line of monitors like a Terminator, staring back and forth without going crazy. He does the image captures for the web cams exactly on time. The images are almost always the same but he still pays close attention. On the monitor he sits in front of most often (the Being Cam-2) he has a post-it that says “Who the hell is Sartre and what has he ever done for me?”

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s kidding or not. He says things that sound funny, like that it’s just a matter of time until something alive comes up through the hole in the office floor again. He wants to print and sell bumper stickers that say “Choose Helpless.”

He says that the most dangerous phrase in the English language is “It’s self-explanatory.”

The First Letter to the Masomenis Corporation

As I mentioned in the 3/2/10 posting, I have been bringing my accountant/financial advisor, Bethann, up to speed on the genesis of the Being & Nothingness Cam Project.

I had seen an internet ad for a home defibrillator in July 2008 and thought that it had to be either a very bad home health care idea or a very good joke. The contact information was for the Masomenis Corporation in Redlands, California, with your basic email and URL information. God knows why, but I decided to write them an actual letter. On stationary. In longhand. The kind you put a stamp on. Freaky.

I felt the need to write a lengthy, weirdo screed, and while I did write a letter that night, it was short and crummy. After two decades of word processors I forgot that you can’t go back and make corrections, there is no spell check, and that, unless you’re demented, you won’t have even spacing and lovely margins. The letter looked horrible. In addition, I was distracted since I had violated my own Too Many Rodents rule. I have a lot of pets and I let them roam the house when I can pay attention to them. But if you let out too many rodents and don’t keep a close eye on them they get lost, get into dangerous places, or start chewing up stuff that you want to keep. So I cut my letter short when I heard the two chinchillas making grinding noises under the futon and the plastic clatter of the hamster exercise ball stop, which meant that Gerry was stuck in a dead end again.

I left the letter on my desk to reevaluate in the morning, and then got a broom to herd out Amon and Amzi and find Gerry to get him rolling again.

Trouble in BeretLand

Two readers have pointed out that my story has run into trouble in the raspberry beret department. In one posting I talked at length about distributing raspberry-colored berets to the members of the Being & Nothingness Team, mandating that they wear them as “work uniforms.” I made it clear that the berets were ugly and that each staff person was unhappy.

Then two days later I go waltzing along and complain that I’m being too nice to the Team and I mention as an example giving them berets. Like it’s a positive thing. What the hell? Am I keeping tract? Well, sort of. I have done my research. I know the youtoocanbeaphilosopher.org site by heart: black berets good, colored berets bad. Brightly colored berets just plain mean. I know this and you know this.

So this is how it stands: yes, I gave them berets, but I gave them the wrong kind of berets. I need to do my posts before I hit the vodka. Based on Tom and Sia’s sighs this morning as they pulled on their unattractive berets, I have succeeded in hats as punishment. And they don't even work at a fried chicken place.

Up next: we talk about force-feeding Sia Nicorette gum even at the risk of loosing our only smoking philosopher.

The Story So Far...

Note: These weekly story summaries were supposed to be written by a sentient computer program—SAALI--provided by the Project, but it only worked for 3 weeks and Gina is now writing the summaries. This ticks her off, since it means that she has to keep track of what’s happening. Keep in mind that Gina, while based on Gina and having Gina’s name, is not Gina.

Since January 18 the grant-funded Being & Nothingness Cam Project has moved along a disorganized path. The Project office is a tiny old house that Gina rented and renovated. The three Being & Nothingness Cam Team members—Tom, Sia, and Phaye—are well-educated philosophy scholars, whose primary job is to sit at a bank of computer monitors watching for and noting changes in images from a number of Internet web cameras that are focused on Being and Nothingness. The webcams are pointing at what are considered concepts rather than physical things, which means that this is fiction. Nothingness is a concept proposed by the 20^th Century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, while states of Being, or what Being is, can be argued all the time with anyone. It’s like conversations that you’ve had when you’re stoned. If you’ve ever been stoned, and I’m not saying that you have.

We do not know how many cameras there are, what they are looking at, where they are located or how they got there. The Team has tentatively dubbed 2 cameras “Nothingness Cams” and 2 cameras “Being Cams.” The Nothingness Cams, while prone to technical problems, have consistently shown Nothing. The Being cams images have been shifting and unidentifiable. The Team members have given labels to the cameras/images to avoid, to a degree, being caught in the sticky, swirling, suffocating eddy that is the pity and uncertainty of life. The names also help avoid the confusion that would arise if everything was called, “That one there.”

The B&NCT members are not too hot at following Gina’s directions, which has reinforced Gina’s already shaky faith in herself as a manger. Everyone is disoriented at being fictitious. Gina made a tepid run at discipline by making the Team members wear unattractive raspberry-colored berets at work.

A capuchin monkey that got into the office, we think, though a hole chewed in the floor, made for several exciting and poop-filled days until he bit Phaye. Then he disappeared and neither the Humane Society nor anyone else has found him.

Gina has hired two independent contractors, Dirk and Bethann. Dirk, the cranky computer guy, has kept all things technical purring along, and has undertaken other projects, including fixing the hole in the floor. He is spending more time at the office than necessary. Bethann is an accountant/financial advisor who Gina has asked to help her with managing the grant money. Bethann senses that she is stepping onto a Dark Ride. Gina does not.

Gina has been sent Cease and Desist orders and letters and received calls from the Central California Sartre Society, which claims that they have proprietary use of the Being & Nothingness Camera concept. Gina is going to have to meet with the CCSS representative, Aureliano Jose.

To provide Bethann background on how she got the grant for the B&NC Project, Gina began the story of how the B&NC Project was born. So far, we know that it has something to do with a web ad for a home defibrillator and the Masomenis Corporation.