SAALI Goes Home

I came in this morning and found Tom asleep in the break room. He was sitting at the table with his head on an open copy of The Red Tent. That’s the first time I’ve seen a man reading that, so I’ll have to ask him what he thinks. He falls asleep quite easily for someone who has coffee administered to him via an IV tube. When I told him that he could go home he said that in college, when he was in the library, he would paperclip a note on the back of his shirt collar asking whoever read it to wake him up if he was asleep, so that he could get a cup of coffee and keep studying. He said he was surprised by how often it worked.

I decided on Thursday to put the Being & Nothingness Cam Team members back on their regular shifts to prevent them from hanging around as a group chatting and starting to take being at work less seriously. When the computers are functioning again I want the B&NC Team to remember that this is serious business. I can’t tell them what kind of serious business, but by god, it’s serious.

At around 11 AM a guy from FedEx came by for “the pickup,” which I hadn’t asked for. I looked at his paperwork and it looks like the gentlemen in Irvine want back their (theoretically) sentient computer—SAALI-- that croaked the week before last and more or less sealed itself up when the power blew. Every seam, slot, vent and adaptor plug was melted shut. Dirk the cranky computer guy was creeped out, so he boxed it up like it was radioactive and it’s been in the back yard under some plastic ever since. I was happy to see it go. I don’t know if it’s coming back, but it didn’t seem too keen on functioning here, so maybe they’ll find it a better home.

Wildlife and Technology

I’m going to put the Being & Nothingness Cam Team members on their old rotations, since it looks like if I don’t they’ll just hang around here and turn the office into a coffee shop. Before I left, at around 1:30 AM, I decided I really would have them tackle the food moth invasion. It’s not exactly in their job descriptions, but, hell, they were coffee-crazed and seemed game. I had some old dish cloths in the store room and they got them damp and played wack-a-moth. Today all four rooms appear moth-free. I found out this morning that Phaye had a camera in her backpack, and I imagined Moth Team action shots: 3 adults in dark clothing and raspberry-colored berets, jumping up and down, swinging dish cloths against the walls. That could have been some serious modern art.

I caught Phaye this morning on the back step of the office squatting down taking a picture of something. When she heard me coming she hid the camera like a guilty child and moved away. There was a medium-sized garter snake curled in a heap in the sun on the wooden step. Phaye had gotten one picture before I came out, a little blurry, but I posted it anyway.

Phaye’s behavior is because, among other hiring conditions, no one may bring to work anything like a Blackberry, laptop, even a cell phone—nothing with chips, memory, rechargeable batteries, nothing. I’d love to work myself into a middle-aged frenzy expounding on evils of them-there modern gee-gaws, but I can’t. Among the multiple stipulations and prohibitions I agreed to when I accepted the Being & Nothingness Cam Project grant was that nothing along those lines could be the office. And, no, I don’t know why. I was alarmed when I saw Phaye’s camera and felt like a bad girl myself. She was outside, so I simply told her that she couldn't use it again.

We looked at the snake for a while and I wondered why it lay so still. It had to have been in the sun long enough to move and get away from us. I picked it up to get it to a safer place and it was stone cold.

Dead, I guessed. But while I held it in my hand it began to move and became alert. This made no sense: a cold snake in the sun? I walked across the yard and put it into some overgrown grass and after a few seconds it came to and got away under the nearby fence in a hurry. On the way back to the office I paused to pick up a coffee cup that had been left on the black table in the yard and the cup was cold. I felt the table and the black metal chairs around it—all of them in the full morning sun for a good hour—and they were all very cold.

Microwaves and Moths

Next week the Being & Nothingness Cam Project will again be tapped by a magic wand (sort of) and the theoretical cameras will be hooked up to the real computers. Now that the electrical upgrade and computer replacement are done I get to turn my attention to modifying office details. Tom, Sia, and Phaye are all coming in, even though there isn’t much for the Team to do. I tried to discourage them by making them wear their raspberry berets, but they’re still here, offering opinions and playing games of Guess the Geographic Origins of the Coffee.

I was going to get a microwave for popcorn and heating up water and stuff, but Sia is vehement that we mustn’t have a microwave. She said it would fry Phaye’s and her ovaries and make them useless. I’m assuming that she meant that it wouldn’t make the women useless, just their ovaries. Sia didn’t say anything about me, so I guess my ovaries are fine to fry. She wants a toaster oven, but I see one of the B&NC Team members here at 3 AM or so, toasting wheat bread in the oven, and getting distracted and then our little wooden house turned office burns down. They’re responsible adults and all, but between staring at monitors, extreme hyperness from the two dozen daily cups of coffee and horrible post-coffee crashes, they may not be attentive. Unless there’s a heating device that doesn’t need human attention and doesn’t destroy ovaries I’m stymied.

We’ve had an ongoing food moth invasion and they’re still around despite every molecule of edible material going into the electricians mouths last week. If Phaye had bought a bag of monkey chow while Space the capuchin monkey was here they would have eaten that, too. The shelf above the counter in the break room looks like it’s been licked clean, and the cupboard under the counter looks like a dog has been sleeping in it. If the electricians were driven to licking the shelves they should have just asked for more to eat. One of the guys brought his very sweet-natured pug in here every day, and while the dog was a gifted drooler and farter, he didn’t seem like much of a climber, so I don't think he's a shelf-licking suspect.

I don’t like the idea of spraying insecticide in here because the only ventilation, really, is the fans that Dirk installed to keep the computer equipment from overheating. In my minds’ eye I see those moths getting sucked into those fans and spit out, stunned but not dead, and then going on vengeful egg-laying sprees. When moths invaded my house last year I became a crazy person with a flyswatter and a towel, convinced that if I just kill this last one, I’d win. I think I'll occupy the B&NC Team by forming a moth Search-and-Destroy detail.

B&N Cam Team Bios: Sia by Tom

Note: We're proceeding as normally as we can until we get our equipment hooked up again, so I'm posting a new mini-biography of Being & Nothingness Cam Team Member Sia. If Sia stops smoking I'll work on gathering a gallery of art through the centuries depicting people smoking. I'll try to make the collection as dreary as possible and maybe find some sculpture centering around the subject of butts in interesting trays. It must be out there somewhere. gh

Sia is a thin woman in her mid-thirties with “dishwater blond” hair, normal-sized lips, and small hands. She wears gray or black t-shirts and puts on dark nail polish. She has a slight accent and says she was raised in “Europe,” and that her parents were French-Algerians and traveled with her around various countries where she got an uneven early education. Her name is a west-central African one that means “first girl.” She hasn’t said if she has siblings.

She came to United States when she was a teenager, and studied philosophy at Cornell. She says that she should have thought about being employable. It doesn’t take much to get her arguing. She’s a fast thinker and usually cites 17th and 18th century philosophers to back her opinions. What's annoying, though, is that she'll veer into political philosophy or try to jam multiple God-theory citations into debates just because she knows a lot about it. She has had “many jobs,” but the one she has mentioned is Information Technology at high-end audio equipment manufacturer.

She is single, but quite a few mens' names get into her conversations. She lives alone in a “mother-in-law” unit built recently over a garage. The big deal around here is that she smokes, although she’s gone from regular cigarettes to a clove/cigarette mix, and now it’s almost always clove. We have to have someone smoking so we keep up that great philosopher feel. You can smell old smoke everywhere, even though she always smokes outside. We're a little worried that she'll start on gum or a patch and that we'll loose part of our image.

The Letter I Sent to the Masomenis Corporation

Going back to my story of how I first swirled my toe in the pool that overflowed into the Being & Nothingness Cam Project, in July 2008 I wrote a hand-written letter on blank printer paper to the Masomenis Corporation in Redlands, California, to comment on an internet ad I had seen for an at-home defibrillator.

The only things I’d sent in the last fifteen years in my actual hand were my duck cards. At a garage sale ages ago I found a huge box of blank cards with a sappy painting of ducks on the front. I bought all of them, and have been sending them out for every occasion ever since. I still have about 200. If you want some let me know.

This is the letter I sent to the Masomenis Corporation:

“Dear Madam/Sir,

I am writing regarding your web ad for a home defibrillator. I am intrigued and I wish to obtain more information about your product before I consider purchasing it. I would appreciate something more specific and extensive than a sales brochure. Would you be so kind as to respond to this letter and answer the following:

Is it the same defibrillator that I would find at a hospital?

Would my seven year old daughter be able to operate it?

Is it small enough to fit on my nightstand?

Does it work on pets?

How do I know that it has high enough amplitude to be effective?

Will you train me?

What kind of paper does it take to record a read-out?

Is this legal in the United States?

I saw this ad because I was looking up information on my friend’s computer. I do not own a computer and that is why you are receiving a letter rather than an email.

If this is not a real product and your company is fictitious, then this is one of the better bogus devices I’ve seen advertised. Thanks for the laugh.

Sincerely,

g. holmes

Address”

This was a bunch of crap, of course, but I wanted to see if they would return my letter and answer my questions. After I mailed it I thought about the letter and getting a response for a few weeks, and then went on to do whatever I did next, which I think was gearing up for taking a performance nosedive at my government job. I’ll have to look at my date book.