Posts Tagged ‘ fiction

The Crawl

She stands outside the door of the establishment, leaning against the sticky, gum covered wall, and drags in herĀ cigarette. Her face is of a child, but the rest of her body is of a worn woman. Her paints are stained, one of the pockets has a large hole, and her stomach overflows over her belt. She can’t be that old, maybe 22. But already she is past her prime, forever destined to the world of “what’s your order?”

In this quiet establishment, they serve slices of gray 24 hours a day to anyone and everyone with a buck to spare. She stands there on the padded mat behind the money maker, waiting for someone. With a blank stare on her face, she stands there and does absolutely nothing, devoid of any thought. She sees the slow march of pennies into her pocket, but is this state worth it? A penny slowly crawls across the floor towards her, one reaching her every 10 seconds. Between the pennies, her life is useless. On the pennies, her life is stateless.

This Company

I have so many things to do today. My company just got bought out by Google which will be excellent in the long run but has generated a massive list of things for me to do. First off, I have to meet with the Google lawyers. They are going to discuss Google policy on legal issues and help me properly merge my assets into the company. Then I get the tour of the Google campus, the legendary Google campus. I get to see the Google way, start a 20% project, eat free food, build ziplines over ditches and put myself in streetview as often as I can. They are going to show me my new offices where my team will move, supposedly it has a great view and is nice and open, with a ball pit in the middle of the conference table just like EA Tiburon. I will eat lunch in their cafeteria and I have been told it is thousand-fold better than what I am used to. This afternoon I have to work on moving into my new home. I have not actually seen it yet, but one of my team who has lived here his whole life picked it out for me. It’s not huge, but it has a nicely sizedĀ lot that overlooks the bay. Located on one of the mountain sides, it has a mile long driveway up to it through woods. This afternoon I need to position my furniture that is hopefully there and get my computers up and running. Then I have to figure out what I am going to do for dinner. Microwave pizza?

So much time has been sunk into this thing. I started it fresh out of college. And I am now 37. At least 10 years of working every day at any odd hour to keep everything running. Server down in the middle of the night? I had to go fix it. Someone called in sick, I had to cover. At least I have Ethel who never gets sick or sleepy. No wonder I eat microwave pizza at 2 in the morning. It’s a 10 man operation with all of us pulling silly hours. But the revenue just pours, growth is Hiroshima on steroids, and we run on caffeine. At least I don’t have to write press releases and emails. I have Ethel for that. Students love us, corporations love us, governments love us, I love us. We have put so much time and money into Ethel to get her to perform so well. She gets overloaded often though. Come exam season, we just pour caffeine into our systems to keep going. At least I did not have to find time to write this journal entry, I let Ethel write it.

…oh, I see Ethel forgot to mention exactly what Google bought: her. Our latest product revision, that we at the office like to call “Essays That Hopefully Everybody Loves”