Scribblings

Everyone has bad days at work. Some people cope by drinking heavily, shopping recreationally, or blowing away their coworkers. I prefer to write something biting and satirical. When I quit my job at the World's Most Dysfunctional Office, I wrote an exit interview that one of my soon-to-be-ex-co-workers (who collected exit interviews-- everyone needs a hobby) declared mine a classic of the genre. The piece below is the result of many, many failures on the part of a client to understand that in a relational database, one number should do only one job. Without further ado...

The Number Fred: A Cautionary Tale

Once upon a time, there was a number named Fred. Fred worked in a state agency computer system, where he had to keep track of a lot of information. His benefits package was decent, and it paid well enough for him to afford a nice decimal place, so most of the time, he didn’t bother to think about his role in the general scheme of things.

Then, one gray and wintry morning, Fred’s world changed drastically. Because of state budget shortfalls, a slowing local economy, and a heated debate over project funding, several of Fred’s fellow numbers were downsized. Fred was one of the fortunate numbers, because he managed to keep his original job as an indexing number for a particular kind of document. There was a lot of grumbling among the downsized numbers, most of whom were hoping to get something better than factoring work. Many of these made unkind comments about the size and nature of Fred’s digits, but Fred was a team player and ignored them. He told himself that soon, they’d be making change in a burger joint somewhere.

Not long after the restructuring, the computer system’s supervisor, Mr. Software, told Fred that he’d have to take on some additional tasks. Fred found himself keeping track of the actual document he was supposed to index, in addition to the indexing information itself. When Mr. Software had explained Fred’s new duties, it had made sense, in the context of the drive for efficiency. “If you’re keeping track of the document and the indexing, we only need one number to do the job of two.” Mr. Software went on to say “We wouldn’t ask you to do this if we didn’t think you could handle it. You’re one of our best numbers—you might even say you’re a lucky number.”

However, Fred didn’t feel especially lucky. His duties had multiplied, and he discovered that it was very confusing to refer to both the document and the index. When people asked him to produce information, he didn’t know if they wanted only the indexing information or the entire document. Soon, Fred found that he could devote only a fraction of himself to each of his functions. He was scrambling to keep up with all the requests, and soon, he began to make mistakes. “I’m only finite, you know,” he would grumble to his coworkers. He was definitely starting to feel odd about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, the state agency had to go through another round of budget cuts, and Mr. Software came to Fred’s cube once more. “Fred, I know you’ve been working very hard lately. I hate to have to ask you to do this, but we need you to keep track of the process that produces the document, as well as the document and the indexing information.” Fred looked up at Mr. Software, trying to convey his abject misery through downcast zeros. Tragically, Mr. Software was oblivious to Fred’s difficulties; he was completely focused on function. “You’re the only one who can do it, Fred. Ms. Pi is always going on and on and on, and Mr. Zero can’t be divided.” Fred sighed, squared his shoulders, and agreed to do his best.

That was when things started to go badly for Fred. He found that his confusion increased exponentially when he became responsible for tracking the process, the document, and the indexing. Soon, Fred lost track of where he was and what he was doing. He became irrational, and started drinking heavily in the evenings. It wasn’t long before he was entirely unable to function. Finally, Mr. Software found him in an infinite loop, tightly curled in a fetal position around a ragged subroutine. Fred was sent off to a quiet, padded table cell in the country. Mr. Software hired another number, fresh out of college, to do Fred’s many jobs. “It’s too bad that Fred’s out of the equation,” Mr. Software told the Programming Committee. “Fortunately, there is an infinite supply of other numbers.”

Absinthe: History in a Bottle

By Barnaby Conrad III

I must admit that I probably wouldn't have picked up this book if I hadn't seen Moulin Rouge. Something about the Absinthe Fairy caught my imagination, though, and when I saw Absinthe: History in a Bottle, I couldn't resist it. I had no idea that the "Green Fairy" had been such a popular and controversial figure.

If you're not familiar with absinthe, it's a high-proof, minty, licorice-y liqueur flavored with herbal extracts, including wormwood. Wormwood is supposedly what gives absinthe its kick; it contains a ketone attributed with mild hallucinogenic qualities. It was the preferred alcoholic beverage of the bohemian crowd in France, in the decades leading up to the turn of the twentieth century.

Absinthe was also the most vilified recreational chemical in nineteenth-century Europe. Conrad's book starts out with the story of an "absinthe murder" in Switzerland. If you replaced the word "absinthe" with, say, "marijuana", it could almost read like a modern anti-drug case. Never mind that the murderer had consumed several liters of wine and brandy; it was those two glasses of absinthe that had driven him to murder. This incident became the poster child for a near pan-European ban on absinthe that is still in force today. (Absinthe is legal in Spain, and according to Barnaby, a good percentage of the Swiss are still producing it illegally.) Absinthe was accused of everything but the fall of Rome in a time when street drugs we know well today-heroin, cocaine, morphine-were not only legal, but so fashionable among the artistic crowd that jewelers created decorative silver and gold syringes.

From Switzerland, we move on to an art-history tour of café society. Barnaby's smooth prose leads us through a who's who of fin de siecle Paris-mostly painters and poets known for writing about or painting absinthe-drinkers, being absinthe-drinkers, or most commonly, both. Almost any Impressionist painter you care to name has at least one picture with some variation of "Absinthe Drinker" as a title. Barnaby has included many color illustrations of these paintings, as well as reproductions of absinthe advertisements, anti-absinthe drawings and tracts, and photographs of those people he discusses. There's also a great deal of absinthe poetry included in the book, alongside the sordid details of the poets' lives.

The book then goes on to put absinthe in a political and historical context with French anti-Semitism and the infamous Dreyfuss case. The author's account of contemporary French political wranglings over absinthe is an eerie precursor of the current American debate about tobacco-the public health problem versus the huge amount of tax money collected on a semi-controlled substance.

Overall, Absinthe: History in a Bottle, is a serious-though hardly sober-look at one of the many chapters in the history of controlled substances. It is neither long nor detailed, but it does provide a good overview. Its greatest success is putting absinthe into the context of pre-World War I history from an artistic, social, and political perspective.

1000 Years of Science
	Year 1000	Year 2000
Astronomy	Astrology is considered a serious science	Humans have played golf, left garbage on the moon
Chemistry	Alchemists try to turn lead into gold	Alchemists report cold fusion achieved in a bathtub
Meteorology	Rain of frogs attributed to Divine wrath	Hurricane Floyd attributed to global warming
Computer Science	Abacus is cutting-edge technology	AOL finally replaces hamsters on speed with a new server
Psychology	Demonic possession used to explain mental illness	Demonic possession, mental illness are hot topics on Jerry Springer
Pharmacology	Eye of newt, toe of frog	Better living through modern chemistry
Materials Science	Damascus steel	DuPont Spandex®
Cosmology	The universe revolves around the earth	Conclusive proof that Michael Jordan is not the center of the universe
Economics	The king needs money--pay up	Teenagers counterfeit U. S. currency using home computers
Archaeology	Dinosaur bones attributed to Biblical giants	Dinosaurs featured prominently on TV shows, movies, & cereal boxes
Geology	Earthquakes caused by angry gods	Earthquakes caused by underground nuclear testing
Medicine	Mercury is a common ingredient in medication	Mercury poisoning is a common illness
Biology	Flies believed to generate spontaneously from rotting fruit	Fruit fly DNA sequenced
Physics	A study of mystical forces that only a few people understand	A study of subatomic particles that only a few people understand
Mathematics	Use of the 0 imported from India by Arabic mathematicians	Indian mathematicians imported to the U. S.

I Think, Therefore, I Write

The Number Fred: A Cautionary Tale

Ten Reasons I Will Never Win the Lottery

Absinthe: History in a Bottle

By Barnaby Conrad III

1000 Years of Science