2014 - The Year in Review

Introduction

It is of course only in retrospect that we can decide what were the most important news stories of the year.  Isn’t it therefore somewhat uncanny how, if we look back now, we can see that albertnet covered all the most newsworthy happenings, even though I only blog four times a month?  How is it that my posts line up so perfectly with everybody’s “biggest news of 2014” lists?  Man.

Of course it’s not enough just to digest the news—we also need to learn some lesson from it, and take some action in our own lives.  Exactly what this lesson and these actions should be aren’t always easy to determine, so I’ve distilled them into handy slogans for you, one per month.  So, read on to distill all of 2014 into twelve easy steps to improving yourself and the world.

Note:  this will probably be my last-ever “year in review” post because this is a royal pain in the ass and I’ve finally had it.  Dang.  At least my youngest daughter supplied this groovy poster:

January:  Just lie

I know, “just lie” seems like an improbable slogan for how to be better in 2015.  But if you just take a moment to recall the big news from January—I’m talking of course about the Great Velveeta Shortage that was predicted (by Kraft) but that never actually came to pass.  In case you don’t remember this one, Kraft warned consumers that demand for Velveeta could exceed supply during the NFL playoffs.  And just in case consumers suspected this was just an attempt to drum up sales (e.g., “while supplies last!”), a Kraft spokeswoman explicitly said, “This is not a marketing/advertising campaign.”

No, albertnet didn’t report directly on the make-believe Velveeta shortage, preferring to tackle the larger issue of lying in general.  With my post Santa Denial, & How Lance Armstrong Taught Me to Lie, I described how my own ability to lie improved over the years as I watched one of dishonesty’s master craftsmen, Lance Armstrong, steadfastly deny his doping.  Kraft should really hire Lance as a consultant before their next big hoax.

Wait, you might be thinking.  Should I really take away the lesson “just lie” from these stories?  Well, yes, if you’re trying to sell food that isn’t really food, or victory that isn’t really victory.  Just make sure you come clean later, like Lance did, to teach everybody to be more skeptical.  Velveeta shortage, indeed!

February:   Learn from your mistakes!

In February, I posted a decidedly didactic essay, in which I urged my fellow cyclists not to ride in the rain and cold.  I decried the notion that riding in the rain makes you a badass, by contrasting the petty suffering  of cyclists to that of 19th-century sailors who manned the deck in all kinds of rain and snow, beating their hands against the frozen sails to ward off frostbite.

I was alluding, of course, to another badass sailor, that being Jorge Salvador Alvarenga, the fisherman from El Salvador who spent over a year adrift in the ocean catching birds and drinking turtle blood.   Alvarenga has since vowed to stay away from the ocean, which makes all kinds of sense.  You, too, should learn a lesson.  Not to stay away from the sea, necessarily, but to learn from your mistakes, or—better yet—learn things the easy way.  (Hint:  you can do this by continuing to read about my hard-learned lessons via this blog.)

March:  Bitcoin – The Emperor’s New Money!

In March, I took a moment to explain bitcoin to the masses, which essentially meant explaining why it’s such an absurd, doomed financial instrument.  Not surprisingly, my perspective was immediately validated when, days later, it was reported that the bankrupt bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox found 200,000 bitcoins, which had previously gone missing, in an old wallet.  (“Old wallet” in this context means an old digital wallet that was thought to be empty.)  What does it mean to find an electronic representation of a made-up currency lying around in an electronic representation of a wallet?  It means you’re living in a fantasy world.

Incidentally, the value of those 200,000 bitcoins was reported as being worth $116 million at the time.  Well, that was back in March.  Those same 200,000 bitcoins are now worth only $63.6 million.  (And if you’re reading this long after December 31, 2014, I predict you’ll find it’s dropped even more.)

April:  Don’t fluff that aptitude test!

Normally, when I use the phrase “sample intelligence test” or “genius quiz,” I’m referring not to an actual written exam but to an opportunity life presents to test our mental mettle.  (And if I’m honest, I usually use these phrases to mock one of my children—for example, when one of them is struggling to operate a can opener and I say, “Don’t think of it as a can opener, but as a sample intelligence test”—just to keep the pressure on and take her down a notch.)

As you will recall, not one but two pressing news stories involved such life tests, and how a person dramatically failed.  First, of course, was the airline passenger who mistook the cockpit for the lavatory, terrifying the pilots and getting himself arrested.  And then there was the homeless guy who broke into a motel room to spend the night, not noticing that it was actually a museum exhibit:  the room where Martin Luther King was assassinated. 

Earlier that very month, I blogged about one of those rare non-life-initiated, written aptitude tests, which began with a questionnaire about my race that sent my mind reeling, and a Scantron form with unnumbered boxes snaking in every direction across the page, putting me almost into a panic even before I read the first question.  What does this have to do, exactly, with the airline passenger and the homeless guy?  I’ll let you figure that out.  Think of it as a little genius quiz.

May:  The umpire strikes back!

Microsoft Word’s imbecilic grammar checker has flagged “umpire” above and suggests I “correct” it to “empire.”  I guess they assume their software is a tool for merely regurgitating other people’s content.  Sweet.

I didn’t mean “empire.”  I meant “umpire,” dammit.  I’m talking about umpires striking back after being attacked.  I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the big news in May, about the unruly baseball fan in South Korea climbing a fence and putting the umpire in a headlock.  Well, they sure showed him … dude got a lifetime ban from that stadium and narrowly avoided a $48 fine!

I got my own comeuppance in May after attacking a group of self-appointed arbiters of cycling culture, the so-called Velominati.  Of all my 283 posts to date, none has received so many negative comments.  The Velominati also trashed me in their own pages.  (Do I mind?  Actually, no.  In keeping with the old adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” my blog has enjoyed increased traffic ever since that fracas.  And, I hasten to add, I stand by all my criticism of those silly Velominati rules.)

June:  Dads are people too!

June brought the earth-shattering news of a study finding men are actually more sensitive than women.  (I’m not, of course; I’m often called a “heartless, unfeeling iceberg,” though mostly by myself.) 

As if in response to the aforementioned article, a day later I posted an essay, What Are Fathers For?, that showcases the sensitivity of the modern man—not just to things like Father’s Day cards, but to touchy issues, like whether fathers serve any real purpose, and to what extent our helpfulness and solicitousness actually cause us to lose our children’s respect.  Colud it be, I wondered, that we should just get out of the way?  I guess I could handle that, and just hang out at the Hotsy-Totsy Club with my degenerate friends.

[Okay, we’re halfway home.  Yeah, I know this post is long, but chances are good that, like me, you neglected the 24-hour news cycle all year, so you’re really getting off easy.  (I hope you know I’m missing out on watching “Dr. Who” with my teenager right now.)]

July:   Spelling counts!

Once again, my blog and the greater news media converged this month.  Almost the same day I blogged about how nobody in Hawaii seems able to spell, back on the mainland a baseball team committed a serious spelling error itself, dishonoring its star player 15,000 times in one fell swoop.  I’m referring, of course, to the Colorado Rockies celebrating their shortstop, Troy Tulowitzki, and specifically his league-topping batting average, by making a whole slew of commemorative t-shirts with “Tulowizki” printed on them.  (In case you missed it, they spelled his name wrong.)

There’s nothing very funny about that, which makes it even worse than some of the Hawaiian spellings.  Our favorites were “Bubba’s Buger” and the salubrious “Acai Bowel” (both of which were items on menus). 

August:  Talk to the hand (not the handheld)

In August I decided to review a taqueria in Hawaii, but didn’t have a laptop on me.  No problem, since I had a smartphone … right?  Well, I never got very good at typing on the touch-screen (maybe my fingers are too stubby), so I used the voice recognition feature.  This yielded some amusing errors and a couple of new turns of phrase I rather liked (e.g., “when it folded in 2007 it was a great opera”).  Of course, this is all harmless fun when you’re just talking about burritos.  When the same technology is applied to a ton and a half of steel that can do 80 mph, that’s another matter, and here my blog prefigured the really big news in August, which was the scathing report J.D. Power gave of the current state of the art in automotive voice recognition.  For example, you might clearly ask your car to turn on the AC, only to have it search for nearby pizza places.

September:  Rats are people, too!

It’s funny how we think of rodents.  Mice are cute and all, but rats—with their big fat hairless tails—are almost universally reviled.  Birds, meanwhile, poop on us and get away scot-free.  (Who hasn’t been pooped on by a bird?  And who has been pooped on by a rat?)  In fact, many of us—such as my own daughter—make a special effort to feed birds in our own backyards.  I’m not aware of any castigation of birders, until their actions breed rats, as was famously described here in the sordid tale of a crazy bird lady attracting rats to a community garden.

Of course my finger was right on the pulse of this growing societal ill, as I demonstrated with my September post  I Don’t Smell a Rat which chronicled the shockingly bold rat who took up residence in my backyard, shamelessly stuffing himself on the expensive seeds we’d earmarked for local birds.  This rat caused family strife by seeming to ignore my cat, who in turn seemed to ignore the rat.  What was I to do, other than berate the cat?  Poison seemed too harsh (for either of the little mammals).  So I did nothing, which worked out fine because opportunity ushered in Misha’s finest hour—her apotheosis from old, lazy layabout to fierce, fearless, brilliant slayer of vermin!  Yeah, that’s right, she got medieval on that rat’s heinie, despite it being just about the hugest rat I’ve ever seen!  Go Misha!

October:  Subject sweets to serious science studies!

For decades I’ve subscribed to the “glycogen window” idea, that being that simple carbs consumed right after intense exercise will greatly enhance recovery.  I only ever had empirical evidence of this principle, until my daughter stepped up and tested it, rigorously, for her school science project.  If you somehow missed this post, click here and see if you don’t find her methodology, execution, and conclusion to be utterly compelling.

Ah, if only the professionals were so thorough!  This same month, a study by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) rebuffed the long-held and universally accepted premise (far more mainstream than the glycogen window theory) that consuming carbs is beneficial during endurance exercise.  That’s right, they denied the benefit of taking in calories during hours-long efforts.  Critics proposed that the EFSA’s finding was due to evidence not being presented properly or some such nonsense.  The more accurate conclusion, obviously, is that all the funding for that study should rightfully go to my daughter.  Sheesh.

November:   If you can understand it, it ain’t “Andrei Rublev”

I’ve long believed that the acid test for intellectual cred is being able to watch, and understand, the Russian movie “Andrei Rublev,” and until last month, I didn’t think I could actually do it.  After all, I’d tried before, but crashed and burned.  What a triumph, then, to actually prevail, and glean enough to blog about it (here).  It’s a good thing this viewing triumph bolstered my confidence, because as all educated people know, the biggest news worldwide in November somehow never got translated into English.  

If you’re one of those who missed out, don’t worry … it’s not your fault.  I’m referring of course to the business with the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, “Russia piece of evidence awakening spirituality,” which was covered only in Indonesian.  I wouldn’t have bothered painstakingly translating the article, except that it mentioned that the works of Andrei Rublev adorn the walls of this cathedral.  I guess once you’ve made it through the movie, your intellect is forever improved, to the point that an article in English hardly seems challenging enough to bother with.

December:  Just say “no” to shopping

I will confess that my blog lagged behind world news a bit in December.  I was so busy celebrating the lack of public interest in Black Friday, and the suggestion that Americans are actually finding better things to do than shop, that I missed the bigger story about retailers wanting to open on Thanksgiving Day itself, just to extend the consumer frenzy even further.  Fortunately, there’s a backlash to this development.  In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need a backlash, and wouldn’t need consumers to pledge not to shop on this holiday, but of course a perfect world wouldn’t give bloggers like me as much to make fun of.

In closing

At a loss for new year’s resolutions?  Well, you could do worse than to turn my 12 month-by-month slogans into action next year.  And if that seems like too much work, resolve to get all your news from albertnet next year.  That’ll save you a lot of effort, since world news and this blog are pretty much saying the same thing anyway…

Happy new year!

From the Archives - The TechCorp Files, Part II: Aptitude Test

Introduction

This post is Part II of an essentially nonfiction archival tale from 1995.  Click here for the first half of the story (and a discussion of what I mean by “essentially nonfiction”).  This second installment is almost 100% true; only some playful hyperbole (e.g., “my contact lenses took on the shape of potato chips”) and a pseudonym interfere with the veracity of my account.

Where I left off:  I’d finished most of the interview process with “TechCorp,” and was sitting down to begin a written test that would help determine if I had a future with the company.

The TechCorp Files, Part II – June 9, 1995

I knew going in that the test would be multiple choice, and that it would consist only of mathematical and logical problems beyond the scope of my college education in English Literature.  (The informational handout even said, “The verbal/vocabulary skills often included on standardized tests are not part of this exam.”)  I was not, however, prepared for the exact nature of the test.  Perusing the cover of the test booklet, I learned that the test was developed by IBM during the late 1960’s, and was called the “Computer Programming Aptitude Battery Test.”  Something in the title smacked of redundancy, and yet it simultaneously seemed to be missing some words.  I suppose I was looking for “Computer Programming Aptitude Assault and Battery Test.”

Before I began the test, I was given a card to fill out.  It asked for my name, my college major (if any), my gender, and my race.  But … why race?  Suddenly, with this important exam looming before me, I suffered some sort of mental tornado, flinging around issues of intelligence, race, society, Our World, and a lot of other grand notions that had nothing to do with the next letter in the sequence of b a k r m v and so on.  I will now stray from my main subject—the test—to discuss my mental storm, just as it had overtaken my already worried brain.

The first thing I’d read on my application, which I’d filled out on the day of my interview, was a statement about equal opportunity and the total absence of unfair discrimination in the hiring process.  This was normal and expected.  Now, however, I was being asked my race as a part of a Computer Programming Aptitude Battery Test.  These two matters seem unrelated, and should be.  But I couldn’t help trying to connect the dots, having recently read a review of The Bell Curve.  Based on the review, I’d decided that the writers of The Bell Curve were morons, and the fact of them being published writers making money off of scholastically veneered racism made me angry.

(Is it okay to judge a book and its author by a review, without reading the book itself?  Of course!  That’s what reviews are for!  Besides, I’ve judged books on less substantial grounds than that; for example, I decided not to read The Bridges of Madison County after encountering, in an excerpt, this declaration from its hero:  “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.”  No competent writer could pen this, let alone allow it to appear in his finished book.)

My mind—so recently a blank slate on which to scrawl intricate mathematical and alphabetical formulas—had now become overrun with mental static,  such as “Since I’m not applying for a computer programming job, why am I taking this test?” and “Am I even being considered for this job, or are they just gathering data for some examination of intelligence and race?” and “Could this actually all be a psychological experiment?”  The test had not even begun, and already I had my hand up and was asking the receptionist, who was also the proctor, “Ms. Swift, can I please leave the room?  My brain is full.”

No, I didn’t actually ask her that.  It’s from a cartoon.  But just once I’d like to be able to use that line in an actual classroom situation.  Instead, I pondered the legal and societal implications of what I should write down on the form for “race.”  I toyed with the idea of writing “white,” but decided nobody would want to hire a wise guy.  (Smart, yes.  Wise, no.)  Then I began to really sweat:  what am I?  What could I put?  “European ancestry”?

Obviously, it occurred to me to put “Caucasian,” but given the climate of the exam—IF YOU DO POORLY ON THIS TEST, YOU WILL HAVE NO FUTURE!—I suddenly began to doubt myself.  Caucasian?  What is that, anyway?  It ends in “-asian,” but I’m not Asian.  What does “Caucasian” mean?  Does it mean my ancestors came down from the Caucus mountains?  Where are the Caucus mountains?  Aren’t they in, like, Russia?  I knew I should have learned my world geography better!  Finally I wrote “Caucasian,” with trepidation, feeling like I was already just guessing, and yet the test hadn’t even begun.

It got worse from there.  Ms. Swift handed me the Scantron form, and it was the most confusing thing I’d ever seen.  The sets of choices (A,B,C,D,E, with little boxes) weren’t even numbered.  And, instead of boxes running from left to right, and from top to bottom, they ran in every direction possible.  There were numbers, but only sprinkled in here and there.  Apparently at certain points during the exam you were supposed to rotate your answer sheet 90 degrees.  I hadn’t even opened the test booklet, and I was already lost.  Finally Ms. Swift showed me how to insert the answer sheet into the back of the book, and slide out a little sliver of it at a time, to line up with the questions in the book.  It was a little like using a Secret Decoder Ring.

The first section of the test was not a surprise to me, for I fully expected the dizzying array of convoluted algebra problems.  Unfortunately, the choices of solutions to the problems were not in the format I would have used.  When pressed for time, I prefer to compute things in my head, completing steps without the use of scratch paper.  Of course, this process only yields answers, whereas the test’s choices of solutions were only partial setups—that is, first steps—for solving the problems.

And the setups were monstrous, from my point of view.  The algebraic formulations suggested as answers simply didn’t look like the ones I would have used.  Matter of fact, they looked downright ugly.  I came to realize that I have always organized my algebraic formulas according to subconscious artistic principles, the violation of which was now confounding me.  To my horror I ran out of time with many problems totally unexplored.  I had thought I would have more time.  Could there have been a mistake?

Perhaps, perhaps not.  Perhaps the entire exam was simply a means to forever rid TechCorp of me and my hopes of employment.  Perhaps this test was a trap, a setup.  Maybe my failing score would be the preamble to my rejection letter.  After all, hadn’t the woman interviewing me looked me right in the eye at one point and said, “I don’t like you, Albert.  I don’t like you at all”?  (Well, she actually hadn’t, but she’d sure given me that impression.)

But now the “Reasoning” section of the exam was over, and I was on to the dreaded “Letter Series” section.  It was barbaric.  The letters danced in my head.  Within minutes, I had actually become dyslexic, if not aphasic.  Then I had my first migraine.  The letters blurred before my eyes.  It dawned on me, subconsciously (since my entire consciousness was in overdrive, contemplating how the alternate letters in the first part of the series might actually repeat themselves in reverse in the last part of the series), that these letter series problems were in fact much harder than the example given in the intro/warning literature I’d been given.

My mind began the equivalent of a jazz solo.  My soul, as though praying, sought out a muse, some kind of divine infusion of insight.  My testicles shriveled into hard, dry acorns.  My neck became a piece of coat-hanger wire that has been bent back and forth, back and forth.  My hands sweated, turning the plastic Choice #2 pencil into a slick, warm stalk of asparagus.  My contact lenses took on the shape of potato chips: first Lays, then Ruffles.  A tuneless rhythm beat in my head, like the tattoo of a racing hard drive.

All at once, this section too was over.  The day before, my interviewer had advised me to guess on all the remaining problems when my time was up, since I would have a 25% chance of getting each problem right (which, she insinuated, was about the extent of my chances anyway).  However, Ms. Swift proved to be a merciless taskmaster, refusing to give me an extra ten seconds to fire at random.  Besides, the answer sheet was so complicated this wouldn’t have worked anyway.

The next section was “Number Ability.”  This was basically just arithmetic with either very large or very small numbers; a typical problem had two things multiplied together, and this product divided by a third number.  The idea is that even using a calculator you would scarcely have enough time to finish the test (you had, in fact, less than 13 seconds per problem).  The trick was to notice that pairs of numbers, if rounded off, had special relationships lending themselves well to shortcuts.  If you took the right shortcuts, and had a knack for estimating your degree of error, you could reach an answer that would be fairly close to the choices given in the test booklet.

The idea of certain numbers having special relationships to each other was not new to me.  My ninth-grade math teacher was particularly keen on these kinds of things, and had trained me well.  Still, I resented myself for having never memorized all the tables of logarithms in the back of my math book, along with the methods for using these logarithms to great benefit in such computations.  Still, I actually finished the section.  This immediately struck me as the crowning achievement of my lifetime.

The last section of the exam had not been exemplified in my test warning handout.  It was called “diagramming” and involved computer-program-style flow charts.  An example problem is that a grain factory needs to produce a certain amount of grain, in a certain mixture and at a certain level of quality.  Many factors can vary the quality:  temperature, pressure, and accidental variances in the composition of the grain.  There are all kinds of scenarios involved, with all kinds of “if-then” statements conveyed by arrows and cells and things, and basically it was about the most complicated hypothetical scenario I’ve ever bothered to contemplate.  Certain cells had question in them (e.g., “Does the sample meet minimum standards?”) or an instruction (“Add more grain”) but others simply had numbers.  My job was to choose the question or instruction that belongs where the number is, so that the flow chart would make sense, and would provide a solution to the problem.  Each flow chart had 7 or 8 missing cells, and if you didn’t understand the overall flow, you were hopeless.  It was a lot like solving a murder mystery, but one that required collection of clues prior to the murder.  What made the test devilishly tricky was that in some cases, I couldn’t possibly fill in cell 1 until I’d figured out the proper input for cell 5.  Until I realized this bit of trickery, I was really stuck.

However, the frantic pace had taken a hold on me.  My brain cells, as impotent individually as steers, now stampeded en masse.  All my neurons were firing in unison.  Nothing could stop me from figuring out answers.  Perhaps not correct answers, but answers nonetheless.  I probably could have provided, in short order, some kind of answer to almost any question at all.  So accelerated were my thought processes, I probably could have even wrested some meaning out of an e.e. cummings poem.  Uncannily, I finished the test before Ms. Swift could even come to thwart me again.

And now I realized I had been in that office for an hour and a half, and was therefore an hour and a half late for my regular job:  a job which is not only within my abilities, but which pays me real money for my efforts.  A good job, I reflected.  A job which could easily come to an end if anybody bothered to scrutinize my elaborate excuses for missing work.

I left my answer sheet on Ms. Swift’s desk.  She was nowhere to be seen.  I wandered, lost, out into the lobby.  I found somebody.  “I’m done with my aptitude battery test,” I told this random person.
oooooo“You’re what?  Did you say ‘done?’”  She acted as if I’d said, “I’m menstruating.”  The word “done” didn’t seem to click.
 oooooo“Yes.  Ms. Swift never came and stopped me.  I guess she’s waiting until my time is up.”  I was beginning to realize the wild improbability of my situation.
 oooooo“Well . . . don’t you think you should go back and maybe, uh, check your answers?”
 oooooo“Oh, no.  There’s no point in that,” I said.  I almost said, “there’s no hope,” but stopped myself.  “I wouldn’t have enough time to go over anything,” I said.  “It’s over.”

I was dismissed, and I staggered outside, into the sunlight, blinking and squinting.  The world was still going on.  None of the people on the street had any idea what kind of intellectual butchery had just been done at my hands.  For all they knew, I was possessed of a fully functional mind.  I walked down the street towards work, trying hard to reconstruct some fragment of self esteem.  I’m still a good person, I reasoned.  I’ve never committed a felony.  I’ve never drowned a kitten.

And I could pass the drug test, anyway.

From the Archives - The TechCorp Files, Part I: Interview

Introduction

Short stories are a slippery thing. If a story is true, it can be spun as a simple yarn, and no more is expected of it. Formal fiction, though, gets subjected to all kinds of critical evaluation. Is there a story arc? Is some kind of Truth revealed? Does the main character grow? After all, with all the freedom in the world to contrive characters and actions to make your point, you’d better say something.

I’ve found that if you try to dress up a true story as fiction, you’ll crash and burn. I tried this, in a writing class. Amazing things that actually happened to me were dismissed by the instructor as “totally unrealistic.”

One problem with my earlier writing is that I didn’t bother separating fact from fiction. I thought this was playful and fun, but I’ve come to realize it probably just confuses the reader. Besides, it deprives him or her of a sense of wonder when something unbelievable is actually true.

So it is with the following story, which is essentially nonfictional. Except where clearly noted (e.g., “Okay, I didn’t really say that”), almost everything happened exactly as I tell it. For example, I describe a pre-employment aptitude test, which was real. And, on my way to take the test, a homeless person really did pick a fight with me. I faithfully documented what he really said, and he really did seem to attempt to wring the neck of a parking meter. That said, there’s some hyperbole too; for example, the parking meter’s neck didn’t break. By exaggerating like this, I inadvertently pushed the whole episode into the realm of fantasy, where it didn’t belong.

I could go fix those problems in this archival tale, but a) that’s too much work, and b) the hyperbole is kind of fun. So instead I’ll preface what follows by itemizing what is truly fictional, so you can appreciate that everything else is true. Here are the other fictionalized bits:

• The interviewer’s abrasiveness is exaggerated through dressed-up dialogue;
• Names of corporations have been changed;
• Other job candidates’ credentials have been exaggerated;
• The Swan’s Oyster Depot episode is entirely fictitious.

A final prefatory note: given the length of this introduction and of the story itself, I have broken this post into two parts. No, I’m not indulging people’s shortening attention spans, à la Twitter. I’m just getting more mileage out of this story, like the magazines from Dickens’s time that used to publish novels serially. My second and final installment will go up in about a week, freeing me to work on my tax return.

The TechCorp Files, Part I – June 9, 1995

Last week I had an interview with TechCorp. A stern, cheerless woman scanned through my résumé.

ooooo“1350 Filbert Street?” she asked.
ooooo“That’s the apartment.” I said. “Where I live.”
ooooo“Nice place?”
ooooo“It’s all right.”
ooooo“Dana, imagine you’re in the desert—”
ooooo“Which desert?” I asked, uneasily.
oooooShe stared at me, exasperated. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “The Sahara.” She paused. “You’re walking, and you see a tortoise...”
ooooo“What’s a tortoise?” I demanded, with some trepidation.
ooooo“You know what a turtle is?” she said, quietly, disgusted. “Same thing.” She paused again. “You flip the tortoise onto its back. Its stomach is baking in the hot sun. You could flip it back over, but you don’t. Why is that, Dana?”
oooooI glared at her.
ooooo“They’re just questions, Dana,” she said soothingly. “Designed to provoke an emotional response. Now I want you to tell me the first thing that comes to mind about … your mother.”

Well, actually, that’s not how it happened. That was from a movie. Just once I’d like to have an interviewer say those things. I know I’ve been tempted, when interviewing somebody myself, to mix it up a little.

Of course, it’s much easier to relax and have a good time when you’re holding all the cards. I was far less comfortable here. My chair, a modern grey mesh fabric one that you might find on the Starship Enterprise, was improperly adjusted, and it was all I could do to keep it from pitching back. Somebody had configured it for lounging, feet up on the desk. Is this a ruse, I wondered, to see if I will modify my environment to best suit me? I’m a guest here; do I dare attempt a complex adjustment?

I tried to relax. I devoted my energies to leaning forward, sitting up straight, making eye contact, and trying to impress this rather severe woman. Not being a professional recruiter, she only pretended to know what to ask, and what to say.

ooooo“Now, the role of this division of TechCorp has nothing to do with the consumer-oriented service that you surely associate it with,” she told me. “It’s kind of difficult to explain. It takes a long time working here to realize exactly what it is we do.”

ooooo“Is it something found in the home?” I asked, helpfully.  No, I didn’t really say this—I only thought it. And once I’d thought of it, I couldn’t think of anything else. So I said nothing. My chair was now swallowing me up completely. I was shrinking, rapidly, approaching the size of a small child.

ooooo“Our products,” she said flatly, “involve high-speed packet network data transfer. We sell to huge companies. Our biggest account is MegaFi. You surely never knew this before, but MegaFi itself is not a corporation. It is a non-profit organization that makes money for banks. It makes gobs of money. And what we do for them, is. . . .” She paused again. “Look,” she said, “I am communicating to you across a vast gulf of ignorance and darkness.”

Okay, that’s not really what she said. That’s from a book. But what she did say, which I can’t precisely remember, had the same effect. At this point it was do or die. I needed to take control of this interview, dammit. So I began to just talk, with little regard to my interlocutor’s opening salvo. Through a series of carefully arranged statements, I gradually tried to insinuate myself into the job, so that eventually my employment at TechCorp would be automatic. Over the next hour, I hoped, I could move right into a discussion about promotion, and maybe even early retirement—ultimately, I could come out of the interview with a handsome severance package.

But she would have none of it. For her part, she continually buried the prospect of my employment deeply within the hypothetical realm. When I gave her my references, she said, “We will contact these people in the event that you happen to make it that far into the interview process.” She went into a cruel discussion of the myriad invisible opponents I was up against, most of them Oxford Rhodes scholars with “F-15 fighter jock” listed under “hobbies” on their résumés. She hammered home the point that I had come late into the game, which was in fact a source of irritation to her because I was dragging out the recruiting process. But eventually, and begrudgingly, she told me to make an appointment to take a written exam designed to evaluate … what? My intelligence? My worth as a human being?

ooooo“Funny you should mention a test,” I remarked. “I dreamed I had to take a test at a Dairy Queen on another planet.”  Actually, I didn’t say this. It’s from a song. But just once I’d like to use that, in context, and my little story here may the best chance I ever have.

I was actually eager to take the test. Not since 1992, when I took my last multiple-choice exam, had I enjoyed the opportunity to undergo such a straightforward and concrete challenge. Since graduating from college, in fact, life has taken on a rather nasty guerrilla-warfare bent, where performance is measured by subtle, person-to-person, tactical coups de grâce instead of by objective test results.

ooooo“You may be expecting something easy,” she warned, “but many people find our test very difficult. If you think this will be a routine ‘do-you-have-a-pulse’ kind of assessment, I think you’re in for a shock. I repeat, it is a very difficult test. Many people have complained. Some become outraged. Some never fully recover from the experience.” She paused. “But you appear to be young and healthy.” She gave me a packet of information about TechCorp, along with a two-page explanation of the exam itself. I took it home and read it. I have it in front of me. I will quote from it.

“Please come prepared....” it begins. “As the interviewing process proceeds you will be asked to take a test designed to measure your ability with numbers and your reasoning and logic skills.” I believed this was right down my alley. I believe I am rational and logical, and those who know me believe, at least, that I have a heart of stone. I looked over the sample questions, and this is one of them:

“Select the next letter in the sequence.

bakrmvmvkr_ 1 2 3 4 5

ooooooooooooa b k l m

The alternate letters in the first part of the series (b,k,m) repeat themselves in reverse in the last part of the series (m,k,_). Therefore, the next letter should be “b”, which is in column 2 of the possible answers.”

The part about “b” being in column 2 of the possible answers made perfect sense. I looked at the number 2, scanned straight down, and indeed “b” was right there. The part about “b” being the right answer, however, gave me more difficulty. True, I have had similar test questions throughout my life, and as a youth was often able to solve them. On “Sesame Street,” or perhaps it was “Electric Company,” a person (or perhaps a clown, or a mime—I don’t remember) would pace back and forth along a row of similar objects, while an unseen singer sang, “One of these things is not like the others/ One of these things does not belong. . . .” Usually the objects were three rabbits and a hare, or three turtles and a tortoise, but sometimes they were more obvious: three beach balls and a basketball. On these latter occasions I solved the riddle even before the mime did.

But this sample test question seemed much, much harder. Perhaps you got the answer, right off. Perhaps you’re smirking a bit, trying to imagine my mental struggle. Perhaps the only confusing thing about the problem for you is deciding how it could have presented me with any difficulty. But I’m just an English major, okay?  Yeah, I know it’s a pattern of letters, from the English alphabet, and yeah, I’m familiar with these letters and can handily recite the alphabet . I could even recite the alphabet backwards if I had to pass a drunk-driving test. But I don’t drink, and I don’t drive, and knowing the alphabet has nothing whatever to do with the solution to the problem. Letters and even words don’t give me a leg up unless they’re written by a long-ago dead British writer like William Blake, okay? My sweet spot is appreciating wonderful, colorful, deeply expressive phrases like “cold hot dog.”  Sequences like “bakrmvmvkr” don’t do a lot for me.

The test description (warning, really) went on to advise that “some people have found that practicing with a standardized test prep book has helped quite a bit.” But the handout they gave me had only half a dozen questions, and with the test looming—it would be first thing the next morning—I had no time to visit bookstores asking for prep books. The test warning might as well say, “Study all you want, but we cannot imagine anything could save you, you miserable pudknocker.”

With the “letter series” problems exemplified above, the test would allow 10 minutes for completing 26 questions. That allows 23 seconds per problem, not counting the time I would spend doubled over in pain. Allowing for about 15 doubled-over seconds per problem, I came to realize that I simply lacked the brain power required to obtain a respectable score. I decided to seek outside assistance.

I strolled down to Swan’s Oyster Depot, and Ralph, the guy behind the counter said, “We got fresh sea scallops on special today. Just $45 for a half-pound. They’re so fresh, we haven’t even caught ‘em yet! Have a seat, it’ll take us ten minutes to haul in the nets. By then we’ll have processed your loan application.”
oooooI shook my head. “Not today, Ralph,” I said.
ooooo“You sure? They’re mighty fresh. God made them just this morning.”
ooooo“No, I need brains today. You got anything smart? An engineer, maybe?”
ooooo“Hey, we got a doctor. Hauled him in this morning. I know, that’s not so fresh, but the price is good. No engineers though. Almost had one, but he figured out how to dismantle our nets. Made off with a lot of bait, too. Have to harpoon him one day. So how about the doctor brains?”

I came home with a small, paper-wrapped bundle of brains. Ralph said he gave me the best part, all left-brain stuff. I booted up my computer, set the brains on my mouse pad, selected “Run” from the “File” menu, then typed “a:\install.” My hard drive chattered for a while, and moments later my intelligence had increased dramatically. I instantly had a new understanding of the world, and I became deeply depressed.

The morning of the test, I showed up early. Nobody was there. What to do? I took a walk around the block, and gave a homeless man a dollar in change. He tried to give me a Street Sheet but I was trying to achieve a total mind vacuum and didn’t need any more information, especially about life on the streets, to gum up my brain. He said, “It’s okay, man, I’m just another of God’s chilluns.” Then another homeless man intentionally stepped in my way and I bumped into him.

ooooo“DO YOU WANNA SEE A FIGHT!?” he cried. “I’LL SHOW YOU A FIGHT, MAN! I’LL SHOW YOU ONE!”

I assured him, politely but firmly, that I did not want to see a fight. He made the offer several more times, and, perhaps for effect, began wringing the neck of a nearby parking meter. It bent like a reed in the wind. When he finished, its neck was broken, its dial said “VIOLATION,” and the man was still yelling, “DO YOU WANNA SEE A FIGHT!?” At this point I noticed he was wearing a rather nice suit, and I wondered if he’d torn it off a guy like me. I extricated myself from the situation somehow, but showed up at the test a frayed bundle of nerves.

I was handed the test booklet. You may raise an eyebrow here at my use of the passive voice: “I was handed the test booklet.” We are taught to use the active voice— “I betook the test booklet”—because the active voice is more powerful. I, however, have deliberately chosen the passive voice here to describe the powerlessness of my position. I was not the master of my destiny, in this room, with my plastic Choice #2 pencil and my two somehow sad pieces of scratch paper. I was to be merely the passive recipient of one and one half hours of intellectual assault. A mental punching bag, if you will.

Tune in next week for the thrilling finale of “The TechCorp Files.”