Buck turned the dial to 1997 and activated the remote control for his time travel device.
*****
E-Taco and a younger, marginally fitter Buck were in E-Taco’s garage jamming together for the first time. Buck was playing an Ernie Ball Music Man Stingray 4-banger. Natural wood finish, black oval pick guard. The birds-eye maple neck was amazing. The bass was obtained in the days before Ernie Ball stopped using quality materials. Buck wouldn’t play a new Stingray even if they paid him. Well, maybe if they paid him, but it would have to be for a hefty sum, and people would have to know he’d been paid, because he wouldn’t want people to think he’d chosen such an instrument as his preference, but Buck digests. The one he was playing on that fateful day in 1997 was a classic.
Unfortunately, he was playing it through a disaster of an amp: the remnants of a Peavey Combo 300. It had been a decent amp when brand new. Serviceable, effective, but without much character. In his youthful exuberance, however, Buck has made it worse. He had taken it apart and tried to turn the combo into a separate head and speaker cabinet. Having no knowledge whatsoever about what makes for a quality cabinet, the sound was awful. The reason he had attempted this abortion of engineering in the first place was because he desired to play the amp through a 4x10 cabinet without the 15” speaker that was built into the original combo. Ironically, on that day, he was not using the 4x10 cab at all, and was stuck with the 15” speaker, which was blown, in its homemade cabinet.
E-Taco had just finished walking Buck through the chords to the Cars’ “Just What I Needed” when they were interrupted by a bright flash and a puff of smoke. Out of the smoke stepped an older, fatter, lumbering version of Buck 99, circa 2009. He stepped over some guitar cords toward young Buck, reached out his hands, nodded toward the Stingray, and said, “May I?”
Young Buck recognized who he was looking at and, thinking he was about to experience a revelation about where his own music skills would one day be, he gladly handed over the bass guitar to his future self’s hands.
“Thank you,” said the elder Buck, grinning. “You can keep the amp.”
Before young Buck could respond, future Buck hit a button on his remote and disappeared in another bright flash and a puff, leaving a heavy stench of ozone to assault their nostrils, and no means by which they could produce notes in the lower registers.
*****
“Back,” said Buck, plugging the Stingray into his Ampeg SVT.
“Did you pick up my silver Dan Electro while you were there?” asked today’s E-Taco.
“You mean the one with the lipstick pick-ups that M used to play?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Return of the Drone
“Suddenly, with a single keystroke, Buck 99 was actively writing again,” typed Buck on his MacBook Pro, his words appearing on an enormous 24” flat screen monitor for all to see. “It had been over two years since he’d flirted with disaster like this, tempting fate to strip him of gainful employment. For two years he had played it cool, kept his nose to the grindstone, working smarter, not harder, while his writing skills deteriorated, his dreams of becoming a successful writer dying a little bit each day. He would die no more.”
“We shall see,” retorted his evil nemesis, the little doubting voice inside his head, with a touch of maniacal glee. He’d heard it all before and was well versed in Buck’s broken promises. “We shall see...”
“We shall see,” retorted his evil nemesis, the little doubting voice inside his head, with a touch of maniacal glee. He’d heard it all before and was well versed in Buck’s broken promises. “We shall see...”
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Buck Tough, Body Not
Buck loved his new job coding Java web services, except for the part where he was hunched over his computer keyboard more than ever before. He didn't know which was worse:
(A) Enduring chronic back pain caused by muscle tension stemming from work-related stress associated with dealing with back-stabbing office politicos, a schedule packed with meetings designed to limit the time one had to actually accomplish any work, and other miscellaneous bureaucratic nonsense; or
(B) Enduring even worse chronic back pain caused by muscle tension resulting from bad posture associated with being hunched over a computer keyboard all day doing work he enjoyed.
With option (B), the day seem to pass much more quickly and there were actual moments of contentment, but the after-effects were nasty.
So Buck decided to double his efforts to stay in shape, hoping it would keep his body lean, mean, and most of all, flexible. To this end he played 5-on-5 basketball on Monday and Wednesday evenings with a bunch of guys from around the neighborhood.
To date the net effect of playing basketball has been negative bordering on catastrophic. Eight weeks ago he ran into one dude's shoulder and bloodied his nose, a collision described by one onlooker as "spectacular" ("Your glasses spun off like a whirly-bird," said one guy), and although the nose wasn't broken he did manage to bruise the soft palate between the roof of his mouth and his nasal cavity. This rendered him unable to brush his teeth or blow his nose for the next month, at least not without uttering loud obscenities within earshot of his children. He stopped the bleeding and got up to play some more that game but found that most of the guys had fled the scene and the game was over. Buck was just glad he still had all his teeth, because that was his first thought after the collision: he was certain some teeth were gone or broken.
Buck resisted returning to the courts for about two weeks after that in a vain attempt to recover from a freshly aggravated case of plantar fasciitis that was making him limp. Finally he hit the courts again, only to be bombarded by a series of meetings, family events, birthdays, and assorted reptile situations that kept him off the courts for a few more weeks. Then, before he made his triumphant return, he hit the weights and did some cardio work with an emphasis on muscular endurance in his calf and shoulder muscles to help his hoops performance. He also took to the courts to practice shooting, and he added some wind-sprint lay-up drills. It all paid off.
Buck hit the courts with a vengeance, and for once he actually played well. Please understand that Buck isn't terribly tall or stout, and as he approaches middle age he is losing a step. Basketball is not exactly his game, and improvement is not likely. He grew up playing tennis, but that makes his back feel terrible (because he has trouble adjusting his game to the realities of aging), whereas for some reason basketball does not. But Buck digresses: for the first time in his life on the basketball court, excluding all the times he played against kids half his size, Buck 99 was The Man.
Buck's performance started with a steal and a quick lay-up. Then one of his teammates found him streaking through the lane, fed him a quick bounce pass, and Buck scored the lay-up in heavy traffic. Buck returned the favor with an offensive board and an overhand outlet pass that the same teammate caught over the back in stride for a lay-up of his own. Three more times the teammate fed the ball to Buck in the paint, and although Buck was surrounded by trees he kept penetrating through to the light. Another steal convinced the opponents that dribbling the ball in his vicinity was a bad idea. As the games progressed and teams were switched up, he found himself opposite the one former teammate with whom he was connecting so well, and who had a good 6" height advantage on Buck. Buck got another steal and ran down the court, but the guy was athletic and got back in plenty of time to defend against him. It was 1-on-1 with no hope for Buck. His new teammates called for him to hold it up, and for a moment he acted as though he might, but instead he went into a dazzling array of moves including but not limited to behind-the-back and under-the-leg dribbling, a stop, a fake shot or two, a few pivots, and a fake pass, when suddenly he realized that his stunts had miraculously worked and the hoop was wide open at point-blank range. A few minutes later he concluded his heroics with an outside, turnaround fadeaway jumper to his weak side under heavy defensive pressure that somehow went in. It was magic. It was also pure garbage, but magic garbage nonetheless.
As the evening ended the guys complimented Buck, saying that he was the clear MVP for the day. Four games and he'd been on the winning team each time. He went home that night proud of his accomplishments and eager for more. There was only one thing wrong:
He had broken his finger halfway through the first game.
That was three weeks ago. The finger did not feel well, and it has become clear that the finger will never fully recover (if anything, it has gotten worse). He played again for the first time on Monday, taping the fingers on his left hand to avoid making the injury worse. This worked, but it affected all aspects of his game. He went 1 for about 20 from the field (making only a lay-up that a teammate had missed on a 2-on-1 situation), missed a bunch of easy lay-ups, threw up air balls from outside, and turned the ball over to opponents with ill-conceived and poorly executed passes. Whenever he touched the ball his opponents pretended to be his teammates and encouraged him to shoot.
Buck doesn't want to talk about basketball anymore.
(A) Enduring chronic back pain caused by muscle tension stemming from work-related stress associated with dealing with back-stabbing office politicos, a schedule packed with meetings designed to limit the time one had to actually accomplish any work, and other miscellaneous bureaucratic nonsense; or
(B) Enduring even worse chronic back pain caused by muscle tension resulting from bad posture associated with being hunched over a computer keyboard all day doing work he enjoyed.
With option (B), the day seem to pass much more quickly and there were actual moments of contentment, but the after-effects were nasty.
So Buck decided to double his efforts to stay in shape, hoping it would keep his body lean, mean, and most of all, flexible. To this end he played 5-on-5 basketball on Monday and Wednesday evenings with a bunch of guys from around the neighborhood.
To date the net effect of playing basketball has been negative bordering on catastrophic. Eight weeks ago he ran into one dude's shoulder and bloodied his nose, a collision described by one onlooker as "spectacular" ("Your glasses spun off like a whirly-bird," said one guy), and although the nose wasn't broken he did manage to bruise the soft palate between the roof of his mouth and his nasal cavity. This rendered him unable to brush his teeth or blow his nose for the next month, at least not without uttering loud obscenities within earshot of his children. He stopped the bleeding and got up to play some more that game but found that most of the guys had fled the scene and the game was over. Buck was just glad he still had all his teeth, because that was his first thought after the collision: he was certain some teeth were gone or broken.
Buck resisted returning to the courts for about two weeks after that in a vain attempt to recover from a freshly aggravated case of plantar fasciitis that was making him limp. Finally he hit the courts again, only to be bombarded by a series of meetings, family events, birthdays, and assorted reptile situations that kept him off the courts for a few more weeks. Then, before he made his triumphant return, he hit the weights and did some cardio work with an emphasis on muscular endurance in his calf and shoulder muscles to help his hoops performance. He also took to the courts to practice shooting, and he added some wind-sprint lay-up drills. It all paid off.
Buck hit the courts with a vengeance, and for once he actually played well. Please understand that Buck isn't terribly tall or stout, and as he approaches middle age he is losing a step. Basketball is not exactly his game, and improvement is not likely. He grew up playing tennis, but that makes his back feel terrible (because he has trouble adjusting his game to the realities of aging), whereas for some reason basketball does not. But Buck digresses: for the first time in his life on the basketball court, excluding all the times he played against kids half his size, Buck 99 was The Man.
Buck's performance started with a steal and a quick lay-up. Then one of his teammates found him streaking through the lane, fed him a quick bounce pass, and Buck scored the lay-up in heavy traffic. Buck returned the favor with an offensive board and an overhand outlet pass that the same teammate caught over the back in stride for a lay-up of his own. Three more times the teammate fed the ball to Buck in the paint, and although Buck was surrounded by trees he kept penetrating through to the light. Another steal convinced the opponents that dribbling the ball in his vicinity was a bad idea. As the games progressed and teams were switched up, he found himself opposite the one former teammate with whom he was connecting so well, and who had a good 6" height advantage on Buck. Buck got another steal and ran down the court, but the guy was athletic and got back in plenty of time to defend against him. It was 1-on-1 with no hope for Buck. His new teammates called for him to hold it up, and for a moment he acted as though he might, but instead he went into a dazzling array of moves including but not limited to behind-the-back and under-the-leg dribbling, a stop, a fake shot or two, a few pivots, and a fake pass, when suddenly he realized that his stunts had miraculously worked and the hoop was wide open at point-blank range. A few minutes later he concluded his heroics with an outside, turnaround fadeaway jumper to his weak side under heavy defensive pressure that somehow went in. It was magic. It was also pure garbage, but magic garbage nonetheless.
As the evening ended the guys complimented Buck, saying that he was the clear MVP for the day. Four games and he'd been on the winning team each time. He went home that night proud of his accomplishments and eager for more. There was only one thing wrong:
He had broken his finger halfway through the first game.
That was three weeks ago. The finger did not feel well, and it has become clear that the finger will never fully recover (if anything, it has gotten worse). He played again for the first time on Monday, taping the fingers on his left hand to avoid making the injury worse. This worked, but it affected all aspects of his game. He went 1 for about 20 from the field (making only a lay-up that a teammate had missed on a 2-on-1 situation), missed a bunch of easy lay-ups, threw up air balls from outside, and turned the ball over to opponents with ill-conceived and poorly executed passes. Whenever he touched the ball his opponents pretended to be his teammates and encouraged him to shoot.
Buck doesn't want to talk about basketball anymore.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
The 12
Buck understands that if you want to be a writer, sometimes you just have to start writing even if you have nothing to say.
Take today, for example. Buck doesn't have squat to say, but if you're reading this, then he's already taken up a few moments of your precious time for nothing. Are you entertained? Do you find this intriguing, or even mildly interesting? Doubtfully. So if you don't want your day to be a total loss, it is in your best interest to read no further.
You have been warned.
******************
"To provide some context for Buck's situation and the epic struggle he was about to face," typed Buck shortly after conquering a programming bug at work that had been bothering him since the previous day, "it is convenient to introduce a new term to represent a time scale that 21st century readers weren't aware of prior to its discovery in their future. The unit of time is called the g-pon*, equivalent to the average lifespan of known universes. A g-pon is roughly equal to 32.71552 x googol-plex Earth years, based on the precise duration of an Earth year on January 1st of the year 2237. When g-pon is used in the plural sense, it sometimes takes on a slightly different meaning, referring to an instance of a specific universe that occured sequentially prior to our own (see entire footnote below). For example: the phrase 'three g-pons ago' would indicate any time within the lifetime of a universe Alpha-3, which ran its full life cycle before our current universe (Alpha-0) began, and also indicates that two other universes (Alpha-2 and Alpha-1, in that order) ran their full life cycles before our universe began its first iteration.
Buck decided not to go into a universe's iterative properties. Some things were better left unknown.
"Anyway, eleven g-pons ago, an intelligent entity capitalized on the dark matter energy transfer betwixt universes to translate himself from one universe to the next in an effort to elude his enemies. This intelligent entity was the last of his kind, and in fact wasn't truly alive in any conventional sense at the time of his escape. Technology had enabled him to preserve his memories and thought patterns in a device which resembled a small orb, even as the horde of evil beings which had wiped his own race out of existence had brought death to his physical form. It was all part of a carefully orchestrated plan which required him to penetrate to the heart of the enemy home world. When he allowed himself to be captured and executed, his memories transferred to the orb which was hidden on that world. The orb served a dual purpose: not only did it contain the elements of his identity, but also it was a vessel devised to slip into the dark energy nodestream moments after its initialization. Slipping such an object through to the next universe brought no harm to the object itself, but as he well knew, such an action was best practiced deep in the vacuum of space, far from populated worlds, due to the dark energy anti-matter after-shock event that occurred in the source universe when such an event took place. In other words, when the evil beings executed him, they doomed their own home planet and its star system, wiping out a healthy chunk of their civilization along the way and leaving the scattered remnants of their species to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened."
Buck then decided that this was a patently ridiculous literary path to follow. He wasn't about to argue that memories and thought patterns (or general disposition, brainwaves, etc.) were equivalent to the soul, which is really what he'd want a character to have. So he found himself at a place where he was hypothesizing an immortal being (more like an "identity") who more or less latches onto the bodies and souls of those who happen upon the vessel. In other words, these beings who find the vessel remain true to themselves and their general nature, but they absorb his experiences and ways of thinking, along with those of anyone else who found the orb along the way. This goes on for several g-pons, of course, which brings him into the current universe where the orb manages to slip into a black hole, the same black hole, in fact, where Buck's ship is being smashed into plasma.
Does Buck obtain the orb and the memories of trillions of beings who have shared the immortal entity's life across the universes and use the knowledge contained therein to escape the fate of which he isn't even aware? Is it what makes him aware of his true, external circumstances? Or is some other character in Buck's life the keeper of the orb? How did the sinister beings track the orb down across the cosmos in their effort to seek revenge for the destruction of their civilization? Is the intelligence mentioned in last week's post behind the black racer snake's eyes one of these aliens out for the entity's destruction? Are these the same evil beings who were Will anyone really give a rat's ass?
How does dark energy create an explosion of any magnitude when it's really thought to be nothing more than the residual negative energy of empty space, containing an almost unimaginably low quantity of energy per cubic centimeter? You see, Buck actually went and looked this stuff up a few days after drafting the premise above. It turns out that dark energy accounts for something like 74% of the universe's mass, but it's homogeneous, spread out equally in little tiny portions throughout the void between the planets, stars, galaxies, clouds, clusters, and all the other stuff that's out there, a good 20% of which is called "dark matter," a blanket term used to refer to a whole class of invisible objects which scientists are pretty sure is out there (one example is dead stars which no longer produce light). So anyone who reads Buck's account of the dark energy anti-matter explosion is going to think, "Huh?" Buck doesn't want that: he's hardcore. He wants his science fiction to be possible.
So he decided, at least for the time being, to abandon this possible thread of fiction on his blog, but he did chose to go ahead and publish this entry. If for no other reason it's because he liked the footnote that he wrote below. Meanwhile, all that was left to do was explain the title, "The 12." At the end of each universe, or when the time is right, the entity creates another orb, and sends it and all the previous orbs through to the next universe. This is to propagate the new life form he has essentially created via the use of this technology. So there wasn't going to be just one entity, but in Buck's time, twelve (with eleven orbs, the orb for the current universe not yet created). The experiences and memories associated with each are wildly different, and of course each can come into the possession of any manner of intelligent being, so that equates to twelve bad-asses running around the universe alternately wreaking havoc, playing hero, or just plain wandering.
Of course, this too was full of holes, since the number of orbs could grow exponentially, since each possessor could make a copy and send it through. Buck considered that maybe there was some logical rule enforced that required all orbs to be brought together for another to be created. This would force the beings who possessed the orbs to seek out the others, possibly fighting for control of all of them. Naturally this reeks of being like the standard "Highlander" premise, unless Buck writes it more as a cooperative venture, which would allow for the revenge-seeking aliens to play a more serious role as potential spoilers of the original entity's grand plan.
Maybe Buck will take up this idea again one day, but what he really feels is missing is the human element, and how to make the reader give a flying fuck about the original entity and his mission. That, and what to call the bad beings. The right name for that species could make or break it...and what makes them special? What separates them from the orcs of the literary world?
"Cheers, oh faithful reader," writes Buck as he returns to work.
* Footnote: From the Encyclopedia Galactica, ST 3260: g-pon is pronounced /jē'- pŏn/, or alternatively, /jə - pŏn'/. Etymology: A form of snigglet combining the terms "googol-plex" (10 to the 10th to the 100th power) and "eon", an ambiguous measure of geologic time. The term was coined by Buck 99 in the 25th century but discovered by 21st century readers via a web log ("blog") that he somehow published on an actual, real-world blog on 21st century Earth's primitive Internet network from a nearly identical network located within a fictitious LifeNet© simulation context aboard a private spacecraft accelerating into a black hole's gravity well. How he managed to pull this off is a matter of continued speculation and arguably the most brilliant technological feat in the history of the human race. It is conjectured that he used the black-hole's x-ray emissions as the means to transmit the data, but how he mastered an understanding of singularities and their effect on time to deliver a message to 21st century Earth, and how he managed to ensure that a mechanism existed in the real world of 21st century Earth to receive the transmission and upload it automatically to the necessary network servers, remain enigmas that defy mortal comprehension.
The term itself did not come into widespread use until the 23rd century when scientists finally proved out several key facets of the nature of the cosmos as described in 99's blog. Prior to these proofs, it was widely believed that 99's blog was itself a hoax. This skepticism had persisted for several centuries due to 99's lack of advanced mathematical theory which rendered him unable to articulate in his blog the mathematical concepts scientists would need to understand commonly accepted facts that he had been taught in grade school.
A useful analogy taken from an actual event in human history would be to take a star Blukker player in her prime, stick her in an ordinary Plonomax Node Generator field, send her back to Medieval Europe armed with nothing more than an embedded universal translator so that she could communicate with the natives, and have her try to explain to them how to design and build a machine to return her to her own node. Impossible, right? Indeed it turned out to be, as was proven when archives came to light revealing that this exact experiment was performed by scientists under Hung-Xao's regime. It is believed the Blukker player was none other than Linda McCallister who is famous for having disappeared without a trace at the height of her career in the WLBS during the Shanghai Olympics, and that she was ultimately found guilty of witchcraft and burned at the stake.
At the heart of it, what Buck 99's blog revealed was that over cosmological timescales (which are non-linear, since universes are born and die sequentially in relation to each other yet exist in parallel), a universe's dark energy component fluctuates wildly, since dark energy is shared across universes while associating with only one universe at a time. 21st century scientists knew that the universe's expansion was accelerating and that the dark energy seemed sufficient to ensure a universe that expanded ad infinitum, but they failed to account for as-yet unobserved binding of dark energy by adjoining universes.
Take today, for example. Buck doesn't have squat to say, but if you're reading this, then he's already taken up a few moments of your precious time for nothing. Are you entertained? Do you find this intriguing, or even mildly interesting? Doubtfully. So if you don't want your day to be a total loss, it is in your best interest to read no further.
You have been warned.
******************
"To provide some context for Buck's situation and the epic struggle he was about to face," typed Buck shortly after conquering a programming bug at work that had been bothering him since the previous day, "it is convenient to introduce a new term to represent a time scale that 21st century readers weren't aware of prior to its discovery in their future. The unit of time is called the g-pon*, equivalent to the average lifespan of known universes. A g-pon is roughly equal to 32.71552 x googol-plex Earth years, based on the precise duration of an Earth year on January 1st of the year 2237. When g-pon is used in the plural sense, it sometimes takes on a slightly different meaning, referring to an instance of a specific universe that occured sequentially prior to our own (see entire footnote below). For example: the phrase 'three g-pons ago' would indicate any time within the lifetime of a universe Alpha-3, which ran its full life cycle before our current universe (Alpha-0) began, and also indicates that two other universes (Alpha-2 and Alpha-1, in that order) ran their full life cycles before our universe began its first iteration.
Buck decided not to go into a universe's iterative properties. Some things were better left unknown.
"Anyway, eleven g-pons ago, an intelligent entity capitalized on the dark matter energy transfer betwixt universes to translate himself from one universe to the next in an effort to elude his enemies. This intelligent entity was the last of his kind, and in fact wasn't truly alive in any conventional sense at the time of his escape. Technology had enabled him to preserve his memories and thought patterns in a device which resembled a small orb, even as the horde of evil beings which had wiped his own race out of existence had brought death to his physical form. It was all part of a carefully orchestrated plan which required him to penetrate to the heart of the enemy home world. When he allowed himself to be captured and executed, his memories transferred to the orb which was hidden on that world. The orb served a dual purpose: not only did it contain the elements of his identity, but also it was a vessel devised to slip into the dark energy nodestream moments after its initialization. Slipping such an object through to the next universe brought no harm to the object itself, but as he well knew, such an action was best practiced deep in the vacuum of space, far from populated worlds, due to the dark energy anti-matter after-shock event that occurred in the source universe when such an event took place. In other words, when the evil beings executed him, they doomed their own home planet and its star system, wiping out a healthy chunk of their civilization along the way and leaving the scattered remnants of their species to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened."
Buck then decided that this was a patently ridiculous literary path to follow. He wasn't about to argue that memories and thought patterns (or general disposition, brainwaves, etc.) were equivalent to the soul, which is really what he'd want a character to have. So he found himself at a place where he was hypothesizing an immortal being (more like an "identity") who more or less latches onto the bodies and souls of those who happen upon the vessel. In other words, these beings who find the vessel remain true to themselves and their general nature, but they absorb his experiences and ways of thinking, along with those of anyone else who found the orb along the way. This goes on for several g-pons, of course, which brings him into the current universe where the orb manages to slip into a black hole, the same black hole, in fact, where Buck's ship is being smashed into plasma.
Does Buck obtain the orb and the memories of trillions of beings who have shared the immortal entity's life across the universes and use the knowledge contained therein to escape the fate of which he isn't even aware? Is it what makes him aware of his true, external circumstances? Or is some other character in Buck's life the keeper of the orb? How did the sinister beings track the orb down across the cosmos in their effort to seek revenge for the destruction of their civilization? Is the intelligence mentioned in last week's post behind the black racer snake's eyes one of these aliens out for the entity's destruction? Are these the same evil beings who were Will anyone really give a rat's ass?
How does dark energy create an explosion of any magnitude when it's really thought to be nothing more than the residual negative energy of empty space, containing an almost unimaginably low quantity of energy per cubic centimeter? You see, Buck actually went and looked this stuff up a few days after drafting the premise above. It turns out that dark energy accounts for something like 74% of the universe's mass, but it's homogeneous, spread out equally in little tiny portions throughout the void between the planets, stars, galaxies, clouds, clusters, and all the other stuff that's out there, a good 20% of which is called "dark matter," a blanket term used to refer to a whole class of invisible objects which scientists are pretty sure is out there (one example is dead stars which no longer produce light). So anyone who reads Buck's account of the dark energy anti-matter explosion is going to think, "Huh?" Buck doesn't want that: he's hardcore. He wants his science fiction to be possible.
So he decided, at least for the time being, to abandon this possible thread of fiction on his blog, but he did chose to go ahead and publish this entry. If for no other reason it's because he liked the footnote that he wrote below. Meanwhile, all that was left to do was explain the title, "The 12." At the end of each universe, or when the time is right, the entity creates another orb, and sends it and all the previous orbs through to the next universe. This is to propagate the new life form he has essentially created via the use of this technology. So there wasn't going to be just one entity, but in Buck's time, twelve (with eleven orbs, the orb for the current universe not yet created). The experiences and memories associated with each are wildly different, and of course each can come into the possession of any manner of intelligent being, so that equates to twelve bad-asses running around the universe alternately wreaking havoc, playing hero, or just plain wandering.
Of course, this too was full of holes, since the number of orbs could grow exponentially, since each possessor could make a copy and send it through. Buck considered that maybe there was some logical rule enforced that required all orbs to be brought together for another to be created. This would force the beings who possessed the orbs to seek out the others, possibly fighting for control of all of them. Naturally this reeks of being like the standard "Highlander" premise, unless Buck writes it more as a cooperative venture, which would allow for the revenge-seeking aliens to play a more serious role as potential spoilers of the original entity's grand plan.
Maybe Buck will take up this idea again one day, but what he really feels is missing is the human element, and how to make the reader give a flying fuck about the original entity and his mission. That, and what to call the bad beings. The right name for that species could make or break it...and what makes them special? What separates them from the orcs of the literary world?
"Cheers, oh faithful reader," writes Buck as he returns to work.
* Footnote: From the Encyclopedia Galactica, ST 3260: g-pon is pronounced /jē'- pŏn/, or alternatively, /jə - pŏn'/. Etymology: A form of snigglet combining the terms "googol-plex" (10 to the 10th to the 100th power) and "eon", an ambiguous measure of geologic time. The term was coined by Buck 99 in the 25th century but discovered by 21st century readers via a web log ("blog") that he somehow published on an actual, real-world blog on 21st century Earth's primitive Internet network from a nearly identical network located within a fictitious LifeNet© simulation context aboard a private spacecraft accelerating into a black hole's gravity well. How he managed to pull this off is a matter of continued speculation and arguably the most brilliant technological feat in the history of the human race. It is conjectured that he used the black-hole's x-ray emissions as the means to transmit the data, but how he mastered an understanding of singularities and their effect on time to deliver a message to 21st century Earth, and how he managed to ensure that a mechanism existed in the real world of 21st century Earth to receive the transmission and upload it automatically to the necessary network servers, remain enigmas that defy mortal comprehension.
The term itself did not come into widespread use until the 23rd century when scientists finally proved out several key facets of the nature of the cosmos as described in 99's blog. Prior to these proofs, it was widely believed that 99's blog was itself a hoax. This skepticism had persisted for several centuries due to 99's lack of advanced mathematical theory which rendered him unable to articulate in his blog the mathematical concepts scientists would need to understand commonly accepted facts that he had been taught in grade school.
A useful analogy taken from an actual event in human history would be to take a star Blukker player in her prime, stick her in an ordinary Plonomax Node Generator field, send her back to Medieval Europe armed with nothing more than an embedded universal translator so that she could communicate with the natives, and have her try to explain to them how to design and build a machine to return her to her own node. Impossible, right? Indeed it turned out to be, as was proven when archives came to light revealing that this exact experiment was performed by scientists under Hung-Xao's regime. It is believed the Blukker player was none other than Linda McCallister who is famous for having disappeared without a trace at the height of her career in the WLBS during the Shanghai Olympics, and that she was ultimately found guilty of witchcraft and burned at the stake.
At the heart of it, what Buck 99's blog revealed was that over cosmological timescales (which are non-linear, since universes are born and die sequentially in relation to each other yet exist in parallel), a universe's dark energy component fluctuates wildly, since dark energy is shared across universes while associating with only one universe at a time. 21st century scientists knew that the universe's expansion was accelerating and that the dark energy seemed sufficient to ensure a universe that expanded ad infinitum, but they failed to account for as-yet unobserved binding of dark energy by adjoining universes.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Meditations
"Our hero, the intrepid Buck 99," wrote the blogger by the same name and who didn't really know what the word "intrepid" meant, "continued to fall inexorably into the infinitely dense oblivion of the black hole while his spaceship's damaged LifeNet© system (see "Into the Rabbit Hole", September 5, 2006, and enjoy the gratuitous addition of the copyright character) fed his slumbering mind a series of fictional scenarios designed to trick him into believing that he was leading a typical, middle-class, Caucasian, 21st century American life. As stated before, the singularity's effect on Buck's perception of time was inversely proportional to the accelerating rate of his descent, effectively rendering him immortal. Tragically, instead of forever surfing the waves of Oahu's North Shore as he would have been doing had the Hawaiian surfing program he intended to run been initiated, he was stuck doing time as a cube jockey thanks to his buddy e-Taco who switched the programs on Buck as a practical joke just before lift-off."
Buck checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was observing him as he typed his blog entry on client time. Not that it was a big deal: Buck was in a strange situation. He had a new client that he hadn't even met yet, so his days were spent teaching himself new skills which he would need once the client surfaced from wherever he was hiding to reveal what the actual project would be. All Buck knew was that he would be doing systems analysis, software design for web application middleware development, and the actual development work itself. He did not know, however, what system he would be working on or what business need the application would satisfy. For once, Buck was actually eager to get started. This was the kind of work he was born to do, and he was way ahead of schedule on the self-paced tutorials.
The coast was clear, so Buck continued his third person narrative.
"Buck wasn't sure whether he hoped he was a better programmer in his fictional life than he was in his real life. In real life he had made an egregious error when programming his ship's navcom system, resulting in the perilous situation with the black hole of which he was blissfully unaware." (Here Buck paused to consider the implausibility that he would be able to write about something in his blog about which he had no knowledge, and asked his forgiving readers to "suspend disbelief," to borrow a phrase from the vernacular of his fictional American context, and absorb the footnote* at the end of this entry as a possible explanation.)
"His real life error, however, had some unintentional and not necessarily undesired consequences. Sure, his self-aware avatar was stuck in a cubicle day in and day out, and yes, the program came equipped with an apparently incurable chronic back pain disorder. But he had immortality, and thanks to recent innovations in 25th century technology, he had free will within the Context. Yes, the Context enforced certain rules: he would age, he would die, and he did not have the telekinetic powers or x-ray vision he so craved. When he finally died within the Context, however, he would be re-initialized, and who knew what deviations from the original programing would follow as a result of distortions caused by the singularity? The possibilities were endless. It could be a fantastic adventure.
"Perhaps the greatest surprise of the whole experience was the existence of the wonderful Mrs. 99, and the life and family they had built together. Were they nothing more than objects instantiated by the Context and incorporated into his perceptions ? Buck didn't think so. They were too...transcendent. Mrs. 99's wisdom and emotional range was way beyond his and any of the 25th century programming powerhouses' capacity to reproduce. Instead, it was more likely that the unconscious mind had a back door through which it was connected to a network of other souls, souls belonging perhaps to bodies that, like his, had been sucked into the gravity well of the black hole. Had they, unlike Buck with the LifeNet© simulation, no consciousness available for them to draw on, and were therefore drawn toward his "reality" as to a beacon of light or a lifeboat adrift in dark, fathomless seas of non-being?
"In any event he was thankful for their company, because without them he wouldn't survive the horrors of Cubopolis."
Buck savored the syrupy sentimentality of what he had just written before caving in to the demands of the testosterone with which all true men are endowed. "Consider for a moment," he wrote to address the reader directly, "the lifespan of this magnificent black hole. Perhaps it is billions of years old. How many others have succumbed to its pull? Tens? Hundreds? Billions?
"A better question to ask might be what kinds of beings might it have drawn in? After all, Buck was in deep space, far beyond the range in which homo sapiens represented the only intelligence. Humans who had ventured this far and returned to tell the tale spoke of vile, unmentionable alien beings, abominations of nature of frightening appearance, terrifying intelligence, and sometimes even poor fashion sense. What if some of them were adrift in the sea of unconsciousness too, and were becoming naturally drawn to the beacon of Buck's LifeNet© scenario? What then?
"In what would become a classic great moment in bad timing, some of these beings would slip into Buck's simulation via the portal behind his unconscious mind at precisely the wrong time, when things were starting to go well. Buck had passed his Java certification exam, taken a relaxing vacation at home, taken some time to learn some new programming skills, and finally rid himself of the mantle of Project Manager by being staffed on a project to do precisely what he hoped to do: design and build software. It wasn't longboard surfing in a tropical paradise, but it wasn't project management either, and it guaranteed that he would be left alone to do his thing at least part of the day. The days always passed more quickly when he was immersed in the code.
"Other things were going well, too. Mrs. 99 was homeschooling the kids, and by all meaningful measures the change was doing everyone good. It was the right decision. Meanwhile, Buck had found a new passion: reptiles. Buck was now an amateur herpetologist involved with a local herpetological society, hanging out with scientists and academics and striving to conserve and protect the environments of reptiles and amphibians. He was also a budding herpetoculturalist, having acquired a total of nine pythons (seven Python regia and two Morelia viridia). It was possible that he might be able to manage a side business breeding them, or dare he dream? He might even turn it into a full-time career. He had become a moderator of a major herpetocultural site and a respected member of several others. The internet was a rapidly growing marketing channel for reptiles, and he had technical skills to bring to bear in that space. Life was looking up for Buck.
"He even managed to win the July 2007 Photograph of the Month on the herp society's web site. It was a classic close-up shot of a Coluber constrictor constrictor, and if you looked closely at the photograph, you could see the distorted image of Buck and his companions in the reflection of the snake's eye.
"But Buck failed to see something else in that reflection, something that by appearances was quite faint and may have been a trick of the light or something shadowy that might have been hovering just over his shoulder when the picture was taken, but in truth was surfacing from within an alien soul lurking hatefully behind the serpentine avatar that had writhed in vain to free itself from its human captors as the digital image was captured..."
...to be continued...
* Buck's explanation for how he can write about the black hole about which he has no knowledge: Buck is a creative writer, after all, and where, he asks, do creative ideas originate? The best ones always come to mind unbidden, as if from another place, but in truth they come from the unconscious mind, the back of the mind. The back of the mind knows more than it lets on. To hit a tennis ball correctly, for example, the body must coordinate hundreds of muscles making thousands of major and minor adjustments into one smoothly orchestrated physical act. The front of the mind cannot and does not keep track of all the details, of course: the back of the mind does. How hard is the pinkie squeezing during the follow-through? What's the left ankle doing as the racquet strikes the ball? Think about how complex such a simple act truly is. When a player is "in the zone," the front of the mind simply watches the ball and lets the back of the mind handle the rest (thanks to Timothy Gallwey, author of Inner Tennis, for the analogy).
So while Buck's conscious mind (or at least the consciousness he perceives within The Context) is unaware of the peril his true body is in, his unconscious mind, the back part of his mind, is still alert to the disposition of the body and what is really going on. LifeNet© has event handling to prevent the back of the mind from seizing control and awakening the sleeper except in emergencies (which the navcom missed, in this case, thanks to Buck's lackadaisical attention to detail when coding systems upon which his life would depend), but the unconscious self cannot be completely prevented from notifying the consciousness of things it deems of importance. In other words, Buck's unconscious self is expressing the truth as a wild idea which Buck's Context consciousness is mistaking for creativity.
Buck checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was observing him as he typed his blog entry on client time. Not that it was a big deal: Buck was in a strange situation. He had a new client that he hadn't even met yet, so his days were spent teaching himself new skills which he would need once the client surfaced from wherever he was hiding to reveal what the actual project would be. All Buck knew was that he would be doing systems analysis, software design for web application middleware development, and the actual development work itself. He did not know, however, what system he would be working on or what business need the application would satisfy. For once, Buck was actually eager to get started. This was the kind of work he was born to do, and he was way ahead of schedule on the self-paced tutorials.
The coast was clear, so Buck continued his third person narrative.
"Buck wasn't sure whether he hoped he was a better programmer in his fictional life than he was in his real life. In real life he had made an egregious error when programming his ship's navcom system, resulting in the perilous situation with the black hole of which he was blissfully unaware." (Here Buck paused to consider the implausibility that he would be able to write about something in his blog about which he had no knowledge, and asked his forgiving readers to "suspend disbelief," to borrow a phrase from the vernacular of his fictional American context, and absorb the footnote* at the end of this entry as a possible explanation.)
"His real life error, however, had some unintentional and not necessarily undesired consequences. Sure, his self-aware avatar was stuck in a cubicle day in and day out, and yes, the program came equipped with an apparently incurable chronic back pain disorder. But he had immortality, and thanks to recent innovations in 25th century technology, he had free will within the Context. Yes, the Context enforced certain rules: he would age, he would die, and he did not have the telekinetic powers or x-ray vision he so craved. When he finally died within the Context, however, he would be re-initialized, and who knew what deviations from the original programing would follow as a result of distortions caused by the singularity? The possibilities were endless. It could be a fantastic adventure.
"Perhaps the greatest surprise of the whole experience was the existence of the wonderful Mrs. 99, and the life and family they had built together. Were they nothing more than objects instantiated by the Context and incorporated into his perceptions ? Buck didn't think so. They were too...transcendent. Mrs. 99's wisdom and emotional range was way beyond his and any of the 25th century programming powerhouses' capacity to reproduce. Instead, it was more likely that the unconscious mind had a back door through which it was connected to a network of other souls, souls belonging perhaps to bodies that, like his, had been sucked into the gravity well of the black hole. Had they, unlike Buck with the LifeNet© simulation, no consciousness available for them to draw on, and were therefore drawn toward his "reality" as to a beacon of light or a lifeboat adrift in dark, fathomless seas of non-being?
"In any event he was thankful for their company, because without them he wouldn't survive the horrors of Cubopolis."
Buck savored the syrupy sentimentality of what he had just written before caving in to the demands of the testosterone with which all true men are endowed. "Consider for a moment," he wrote to address the reader directly, "the lifespan of this magnificent black hole. Perhaps it is billions of years old. How many others have succumbed to its pull? Tens? Hundreds? Billions?
"A better question to ask might be what kinds of beings might it have drawn in? After all, Buck was in deep space, far beyond the range in which homo sapiens represented the only intelligence. Humans who had ventured this far and returned to tell the tale spoke of vile, unmentionable alien beings, abominations of nature of frightening appearance, terrifying intelligence, and sometimes even poor fashion sense. What if some of them were adrift in the sea of unconsciousness too, and were becoming naturally drawn to the beacon of Buck's LifeNet© scenario? What then?
"In what would become a classic great moment in bad timing, some of these beings would slip into Buck's simulation via the portal behind his unconscious mind at precisely the wrong time, when things were starting to go well. Buck had passed his Java certification exam, taken a relaxing vacation at home, taken some time to learn some new programming skills, and finally rid himself of the mantle of Project Manager by being staffed on a project to do precisely what he hoped to do: design and build software. It wasn't longboard surfing in a tropical paradise, but it wasn't project management either, and it guaranteed that he would be left alone to do his thing at least part of the day. The days always passed more quickly when he was immersed in the code.
"Other things were going well, too. Mrs. 99 was homeschooling the kids, and by all meaningful measures the change was doing everyone good. It was the right decision. Meanwhile, Buck had found a new passion: reptiles. Buck was now an amateur herpetologist involved with a local herpetological society, hanging out with scientists and academics and striving to conserve and protect the environments of reptiles and amphibians. He was also a budding herpetoculturalist, having acquired a total of nine pythons (seven Python regia and two Morelia viridia). It was possible that he might be able to manage a side business breeding them, or dare he dream? He might even turn it into a full-time career. He had become a moderator of a major herpetocultural site and a respected member of several others. The internet was a rapidly growing marketing channel for reptiles, and he had technical skills to bring to bear in that space. Life was looking up for Buck.
"He even managed to win the July 2007 Photograph of the Month on the herp society's web site. It was a classic close-up shot of a Coluber constrictor constrictor, and if you looked closely at the photograph, you could see the distorted image of Buck and his companions in the reflection of the snake's eye.
"But Buck failed to see something else in that reflection, something that by appearances was quite faint and may have been a trick of the light or something shadowy that might have been hovering just over his shoulder when the picture was taken, but in truth was surfacing from within an alien soul lurking hatefully behind the serpentine avatar that had writhed in vain to free itself from its human captors as the digital image was captured..."
...to be continued...
* Buck's explanation for how he can write about the black hole about which he has no knowledge: Buck is a creative writer, after all, and where, he asks, do creative ideas originate? The best ones always come to mind unbidden, as if from another place, but in truth they come from the unconscious mind, the back of the mind. The back of the mind knows more than it lets on. To hit a tennis ball correctly, for example, the body must coordinate hundreds of muscles making thousands of major and minor adjustments into one smoothly orchestrated physical act. The front of the mind cannot and does not keep track of all the details, of course: the back of the mind does. How hard is the pinkie squeezing during the follow-through? What's the left ankle doing as the racquet strikes the ball? Think about how complex such a simple act truly is. When a player is "in the zone," the front of the mind simply watches the ball and lets the back of the mind handle the rest (thanks to Timothy Gallwey, author of Inner Tennis, for the analogy).
So while Buck's conscious mind (or at least the consciousness he perceives within The Context) is unaware of the peril his true body is in, his unconscious mind, the back part of his mind, is still alert to the disposition of the body and what is really going on. LifeNet© has event handling to prevent the back of the mind from seizing control and awakening the sleeper except in emergencies (which the navcom missed, in this case, thanks to Buck's lackadaisical attention to detail when coding systems upon which his life would depend), but the unconscious self cannot be completely prevented from notifying the consciousness of things it deems of importance. In other words, Buck's unconscious self is expressing the truth as a wild idea which Buck's Context consciousness is mistaking for creativity.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Retraction
Buck has been informed by one of his faithful readers (hereafter known simply as "The Professor") that the last installment of his continuing adventures had a more bitter tone than usual. After further review of the blog entry in question, Buck is forced to agree with The Professor.
Additionally, Buck notices that the overall structure of the entry is completely inconsistent with the chronicles' hallmark narrative, third-person format. Therefore, in an effort to right this wrong, Buck submits the following entry intended to convey the same information as the previous one, except that the new entry will follow all the conventions of the idiom as established over the history of this blog:
---------------------------------------------------------
"Suddenly," wrote Buck from his desk, a desk which exposed both his back and his computer screen to the scrutiny of his client, "the client called Buck and a fellow consulting associate into a conference room. Pleasantries were exchanged: the client was about to take a three-day weekend vacation to a distant metropolis, and the consultants were politely questioned about their own weekend plans. In a bid to discourage any requests that might compromise his weekend freedoms, Buck made sure to mention that he did, in point of fact, have extensive plans. That his plans were frivolous and easily rescheduled he neglected to mention.
"The client shut the door, sat down and immediately underwent a complete personality change. He proceeded to launch into a sarcastic tirade, for lack of a better term."
Here Buck struggled for a moment, certain that the English language offered a noun more apropos than "tirade," especially since the client's voice remained calm throughout, despite the hostile undertones in plain evidence. Since no such perfect word was forthcoming he elected to give up and move on, after a furtive glance over his shoulder to ensure that he was not being observed. "The client spoke of the project (actually it's a program) in a curious way. 'Let's pretend for a moment,' he began, 'that there's a project, hypothetically speaking, and let's pretend this project's name is Smackdown.' "
"Buck bristled with anticipated rage, for 'Smackdown' was the actual name of the project*, not a hypothetical name at all, and the client was engaging in sarcasm, a tool he had historically proven to be clumsy with at best. It meant bad news for Buck and his friend, for the client had adopted the kind of tone one takes when chiding errant young children. He was treating the consultants like little kids, serving up a dis [sic] of cold scorn with a side of utter disregard for peoples' feelings. He proceeded to rant about the 'health' of the project and complained that he shouldn't be telling them about it, but they should be telling him. To professionals such as Buck and his colleague, this went without saying, it being part of the established principles and dogma of program and project management with which they had been programmed. And what the client was proclaiming hadn't happened, i.e., that the consultants hadn't been forthright in providing him important information about the health of the program, had actually happened on many occasions, but the client had a way of not hearing what he didn't want to hear. He was also deliberately withholding critical information so that he would have an opportunity to make the consultants appear ignorant and incompetent, and he unintentionally exposed this fact during his monologue.
"Buck was not the target of the lecture," he wrote of himself in the third person. "He was just a guy who would have to deliver one of the slides of the PowerPoint deck that this whole attack was intended to elicit. The major things the client was complaining about were squarely the responsibility of Buck's partner, the PMO Project Manager. Why the client had decided to slam the poor guy in Buck's presence was beyond comprehension, especially given the context that the client's own managers and peers were absent from the room. Why attack a guy who is supposed to be helping you? Why attack your consultant, who is your advocate, when there is no political ground to be gained, no one present who can witness you pinning the blame on the outsider?
"It's not like the client didn't want consultants around," Buck continued, almost but not quite certain that nobody was watching him. "By contrast, it was this very client who had wanted to bring in the team of consultants to begin with to help him manage a disparate group of people who didn't want project management practices employed at all. The PM consultant was on his side!
"Worse," raged Buck, "the client had put the consultants in an impossible position, requiring just two of them to institute the entire program and project management infrastructure (bearing in mind that the program includes well over 100 people), execute against it, perform in the roles of what would normally be eight people, all while trying to deliver against an inherently ridiculous time line in a culture where the performers resented the program leadership and, as fate would have it, didn't even report up to that leadership! It was an enterprise doomed to fail, and Dickless knew it."
"Is this true?" asked the seductive and always alert Mrs. 99.
"Yes it's true," replied Buck. "The client has no dick."
---------------------------------------------------------
Buck would like to extend special thanks to The Professor for calling Buck out on the quality of his earlier post, and also to the writers of the movie "Ghostbusters" featuring Bill Murray for inspiring the climactic punch-line.
* "Smackdown" isn't the real name of the project either, but Buck protects his anonymity from the client, just as Clark Kent doesn't go around telling Lex and his buddies that his real name is Kal-El and that he likes to dress up in bright, flashy tights.
Additionally, Buck notices that the overall structure of the entry is completely inconsistent with the chronicles' hallmark narrative, third-person format. Therefore, in an effort to right this wrong, Buck submits the following entry intended to convey the same information as the previous one, except that the new entry will follow all the conventions of the idiom as established over the history of this blog:
---------------------------------------------------------
"Suddenly," wrote Buck from his desk, a desk which exposed both his back and his computer screen to the scrutiny of his client, "the client called Buck and a fellow consulting associate into a conference room. Pleasantries were exchanged: the client was about to take a three-day weekend vacation to a distant metropolis, and the consultants were politely questioned about their own weekend plans. In a bid to discourage any requests that might compromise his weekend freedoms, Buck made sure to mention that he did, in point of fact, have extensive plans. That his plans were frivolous and easily rescheduled he neglected to mention.
"The client shut the door, sat down and immediately underwent a complete personality change. He proceeded to launch into a sarcastic tirade, for lack of a better term."
Here Buck struggled for a moment, certain that the English language offered a noun more apropos than "tirade," especially since the client's voice remained calm throughout, despite the hostile undertones in plain evidence. Since no such perfect word was forthcoming he elected to give up and move on, after a furtive glance over his shoulder to ensure that he was not being observed. "The client spoke of the project (actually it's a program) in a curious way. 'Let's pretend for a moment,' he began, 'that there's a project, hypothetically speaking, and let's pretend this project's name is Smackdown.' "
"Buck bristled with anticipated rage, for 'Smackdown' was the actual name of the project*, not a hypothetical name at all, and the client was engaging in sarcasm, a tool he had historically proven to be clumsy with at best. It meant bad news for Buck and his friend, for the client had adopted the kind of tone one takes when chiding errant young children. He was treating the consultants like little kids, serving up a dis [sic] of cold scorn with a side of utter disregard for peoples' feelings. He proceeded to rant about the 'health' of the project and complained that he shouldn't be telling them about it, but they should be telling him. To professionals such as Buck and his colleague, this went without saying, it being part of the established principles and dogma of program and project management with which they had been programmed. And what the client was proclaiming hadn't happened, i.e., that the consultants hadn't been forthright in providing him important information about the health of the program, had actually happened on many occasions, but the client had a way of not hearing what he didn't want to hear. He was also deliberately withholding critical information so that he would have an opportunity to make the consultants appear ignorant and incompetent, and he unintentionally exposed this fact during his monologue.
"Buck was not the target of the lecture," he wrote of himself in the third person. "He was just a guy who would have to deliver one of the slides of the PowerPoint deck that this whole attack was intended to elicit. The major things the client was complaining about were squarely the responsibility of Buck's partner, the PMO Project Manager. Why the client had decided to slam the poor guy in Buck's presence was beyond comprehension, especially given the context that the client's own managers and peers were absent from the room. Why attack a guy who is supposed to be helping you? Why attack your consultant, who is your advocate, when there is no political ground to be gained, no one present who can witness you pinning the blame on the outsider?
"It's not like the client didn't want consultants around," Buck continued, almost but not quite certain that nobody was watching him. "By contrast, it was this very client who had wanted to bring in the team of consultants to begin with to help him manage a disparate group of people who didn't want project management practices employed at all. The PM consultant was on his side!
"Worse," raged Buck, "the client had put the consultants in an impossible position, requiring just two of them to institute the entire program and project management infrastructure (bearing in mind that the program includes well over 100 people), execute against it, perform in the roles of what would normally be eight people, all while trying to deliver against an inherently ridiculous time line in a culture where the performers resented the program leadership and, as fate would have it, didn't even report up to that leadership! It was an enterprise doomed to fail, and Dickless knew it."
"Is this true?" asked the seductive and always alert Mrs. 99.
"Yes it's true," replied Buck. "The client has no dick."
---------------------------------------------------------
Buck would like to extend special thanks to The Professor for calling Buck out on the quality of his earlier post, and also to the writers of the movie "Ghostbusters" featuring Bill Murray for inspiring the climactic punch-line.
* "Smackdown" isn't the real name of the project either, but Buck protects his anonymity from the client, just as Clark Kent doesn't go around telling Lex and his buddies that his real name is Kal-El and that he likes to dress up in bright, flashy tights.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Addendum to The Laws of Consultancy
The client will use you as a shield to hide his incompetence. Your job is to bend over and take it, bitch.
You are the client's advocate. His success is your number one priority. Your client can't succeed if you allow his weaknesses to be exposed. And if his weaknesses are so profound that you can't possibly avoid them being exposed, you must allow the burden of blame to fall upon you. It is your job.
God help you, though, if your client is so stupid as to actually believe the lies he spreads about your own incompetency, because then it will show up in the feedback he provides about you that ends up in your annual review.
So sayeth Buck.
You are the client's advocate. His success is your number one priority. Your client can't succeed if you allow his weaknesses to be exposed. And if his weaknesses are so profound that you can't possibly avoid them being exposed, you must allow the burden of blame to fall upon you. It is your job.
God help you, though, if your client is so stupid as to actually believe the lies he spreads about your own incompetency, because then it will show up in the feedback he provides about you that ends up in your annual review.
So sayeth Buck.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Patsy
Suddenly, Buck started typing again.
Over two months had elapsed since his last post, and it was almost two months between that posting and the previous one. Many things had happened in the intervening four months. Buck was no longer stationed in a printer closet five floors beneath an ultra-secure super fortress, frantically documenting an intranet portal’s content in a painstakingly manual page by page process to prepare for a migration that may or may not occur in late 2009, by which time all the content will have drastically changed anyway. No, those carefree days were gone now and seemed but a distant, blissful memory of a daydream.
Buck struggled to find the words to describe his new situation. Where to start? Perhaps by giving his new role a name, one that would summarize, in a word, the core truth, the absolute essence of his role. And that word he chose was this: Patsy.
“Let’s do a little role playing,” suggested Buck to his readers. “Pretend you’re a level 3 Business Systems Analyst with armor class 8 and 12 hit points. Here’s your character sheet [he hands you a piece of paper with complicated-looking facts and figures on it. You notice that your charisma attribute score is rather low]. “You receive a new assignment: define a requirements management plan for a program that will ultimately span over a score of projects tasked with integrating two financial institutions’ systems.
“There are actually three financial institutions involved: the parent company, who is your client, and who we shall hereinafter refer to as ‘The Client;’ there is Bank A who was acquired by The Client previously and who represents most of the business; and Bank B who has recently been acquired. Three institutions, three cultures, three totally different ways of doing things.
“Bank A has already been brought into the fold, but they’re a little like the French after the Nazis took over: there are snipers everywhere. The Bank B folks seem amiable enough, as far as Italian mafioso go. The program you are joining will be integrating Bank B systems with those of Bank A.
“The program has no governance model; therefore, there is no guiding vision for how to decide which systems should stay, which systems should be merged, and which systems should be retired. There is nobody at any level willing to step up to the plate and make the tough calls. The top dog says work it out amongst yourselves; the smaller dogs are fighting for turf.
“The program does not yet have a team structure or project teams defined. There are no project schedules. There is no risk and issue management plan. There is no scope document, Commissioner. The requirements are already late, and the top dog has crammed his hand way up his ass and pulled out a date for when the integration itself must be completed. Then he flung it on everyone and it stuck. Working back from that date, you see that it is impossible. You mention this, but The Client never changes dates, so you ask for more resources. 'Prove you need them,' is the response, which you know is patently impossible without the twenty or so tightly coupled project schedules that have yet to be completed. So everyone is tense. The situation stinks.
“Your job: create a requirements management plan. You have three days. On the fourth day you will shove it down people’s throats at a huge meeting in a far away city. You will be the first speaker, going ahead of the guys who will be talking to the same crowd about team structure, project management, and risk and issue management. There are snipers everywhere who will not hesitate to sabotage anything suspected of being a structured process designed to hold them accountable for actual work. You have two hours to speak.
“You are walking down the corridor to the conference room. You round a corner and [Buck rolls a twelve-sided die] a gelatinous cube blocks the way and closes in on you! You can see the rotten corpses of its previous victims suspended in its ooze! What do you do?”
Except for the gelatinous cube part, that all happened in January. Since then, Patsy--, er, Buck, has been set up to take the fall over and over and over again. He checked the mirror just this morning and still doesn’t see a target on his forehead, but he knows it must be there, because everyone else can see it but him.
Sucker.
Over two months had elapsed since his last post, and it was almost two months between that posting and the previous one. Many things had happened in the intervening four months. Buck was no longer stationed in a printer closet five floors beneath an ultra-secure super fortress, frantically documenting an intranet portal’s content in a painstakingly manual page by page process to prepare for a migration that may or may not occur in late 2009, by which time all the content will have drastically changed anyway. No, those carefree days were gone now and seemed but a distant, blissful memory of a daydream.
Buck struggled to find the words to describe his new situation. Where to start? Perhaps by giving his new role a name, one that would summarize, in a word, the core truth, the absolute essence of his role. And that word he chose was this: Patsy.
“Let’s do a little role playing,” suggested Buck to his readers. “Pretend you’re a level 3 Business Systems Analyst with armor class 8 and 12 hit points. Here’s your character sheet [he hands you a piece of paper with complicated-looking facts and figures on it. You notice that your charisma attribute score is rather low]. “You receive a new assignment: define a requirements management plan for a program that will ultimately span over a score of projects tasked with integrating two financial institutions’ systems.
“There are actually three financial institutions involved: the parent company, who is your client, and who we shall hereinafter refer to as ‘The Client;’ there is Bank A who was acquired by The Client previously and who represents most of the business; and Bank B who has recently been acquired. Three institutions, three cultures, three totally different ways of doing things.
“Bank A has already been brought into the fold, but they’re a little like the French after the Nazis took over: there are snipers everywhere. The Bank B folks seem amiable enough, as far as Italian mafioso go. The program you are joining will be integrating Bank B systems with those of Bank A.
“The program has no governance model; therefore, there is no guiding vision for how to decide which systems should stay, which systems should be merged, and which systems should be retired. There is nobody at any level willing to step up to the plate and make the tough calls. The top dog says work it out amongst yourselves; the smaller dogs are fighting for turf.
“The program does not yet have a team structure or project teams defined. There are no project schedules. There is no risk and issue management plan. There is no scope document, Commissioner. The requirements are already late, and the top dog has crammed his hand way up his ass and pulled out a date for when the integration itself must be completed. Then he flung it on everyone and it stuck. Working back from that date, you see that it is impossible. You mention this, but The Client never changes dates, so you ask for more resources. 'Prove you need them,' is the response, which you know is patently impossible without the twenty or so tightly coupled project schedules that have yet to be completed. So everyone is tense. The situation stinks.
“Your job: create a requirements management plan. You have three days. On the fourth day you will shove it down people’s throats at a huge meeting in a far away city. You will be the first speaker, going ahead of the guys who will be talking to the same crowd about team structure, project management, and risk and issue management. There are snipers everywhere who will not hesitate to sabotage anything suspected of being a structured process designed to hold them accountable for actual work. You have two hours to speak.
“You are walking down the corridor to the conference room. You round a corner and [Buck rolls a twelve-sided die] a gelatinous cube blocks the way and closes in on you! You can see the rotten corpses of its previous victims suspended in its ooze! What do you do?”
Except for the gelatinous cube part, that all happened in January. Since then, Patsy--, er, Buck, has been set up to take the fall over and over and over again. He checked the mirror just this morning and still doesn’t see a target on his forehead, but he knows it must be there, because everyone else can see it but him.
Sucker.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
BSA / PM 101
Buck has been asked to create a tutorial for becoming a business systems analyst (BSA) or project manager (PM) in today’s corporate environment. Today’s blog entry is that tutorial.
Now, any BSA or PM who actually takes his role seriously will try to tell you that there is a huge difference between these two roles and that one tutorial can’t possibly cover both of them. These same people will try to tell you that serious, extensive training is required for either one and that a mere blog entry can’t possibly suffice. Buck, however, urges you to reject this point of view as the product of lost souls desperately trying to justify their existence to corporate America.
Before moving on to the easy 7-Step program for becoming a BSA or PM, Buck wishes to make it clear that this tutorial is equally applicable to consultants and client company employees alike. The principles are universal. He would also like to say a few words about his 7-Step program:
“Hi, my name is Buck 99, and I am excited to share with you my 7-Step program for how to become a successful project manager or business systems analyst. These best practices have been invaluable to me in my career, and if you studiously apply them to your own professional development, then I am confident that you will be successful too.”
Here are the 7 steps for Buck 99’s program:
Step 1: Weave order out of chaos.
Step 2: Know who your customers are, and anticipate their needs.
Step 3: Convince people who don’t want to do what you need them to do to do what you need them to do.
Step 4: Check your fonts, keep them consistent from slide to slide.
Step 5: Never let anyone do anything without an approved change control, and try not to be the approver.
Step 6: Memorize the corporate-speak terminology, and use at least one buzz word every 5 minutes.
Step 7: Suck up to the admin and see if you can get her to handle setting up the meetings for you.
See? It’s that easy! After that it’s just a matter of tracking everything that needs to be done in a clumsy tool known as Microsoft Project, and blowing about 10 hours per week (of what would otherwise have been productive time) creating presentations in Microsoft Power Point and tweaking them so they look slick and professional, thereby drawing attention away from the actual quality of the content they contain.
Any questions?
Now, any BSA or PM who actually takes his role seriously will try to tell you that there is a huge difference between these two roles and that one tutorial can’t possibly cover both of them. These same people will try to tell you that serious, extensive training is required for either one and that a mere blog entry can’t possibly suffice. Buck, however, urges you to reject this point of view as the product of lost souls desperately trying to justify their existence to corporate America.
Before moving on to the easy 7-Step program for becoming a BSA or PM, Buck wishes to make it clear that this tutorial is equally applicable to consultants and client company employees alike. The principles are universal. He would also like to say a few words about his 7-Step program:
“Hi, my name is Buck 99, and I am excited to share with you my 7-Step program for how to become a successful project manager or business systems analyst. These best practices have been invaluable to me in my career, and if you studiously apply them to your own professional development, then I am confident that you will be successful too.”
Here are the 7 steps for Buck 99’s program:
Step 1: Weave order out of chaos.
Step 2: Know who your customers are, and anticipate their needs.
Step 3: Convince people who don’t want to do what you need them to do to do what you need them to do.
Step 4: Check your fonts, keep them consistent from slide to slide.
Step 5: Never let anyone do anything without an approved change control, and try not to be the approver.
Step 6: Memorize the corporate-speak terminology, and use at least one buzz word every 5 minutes.
Step 7: Suck up to the admin and see if you can get her to handle setting up the meetings for you.
See? It’s that easy! After that it’s just a matter of tracking everything that needs to be done in a clumsy tool known as Microsoft Project, and blowing about 10 hours per week (of what would otherwise have been productive time) creating presentations in Microsoft Power Point and tweaking them so they look slick and professional, thereby drawing attention away from the actual quality of the content they contain.
Any questions?
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Weekends in Cryptopolis
Buck is in Hell.
It is Sunday morning, and Buck is buried beneath a ton of worthless bullshit work down in the supply closet five floors beneath the client's super fortress. He anticipates being stuck here until 8:00 PM or so. He was here all day yesterday as well. He is alone. The weather outside is nice: high 60's, sunny and breezy, but he can't see it. The oubliette has no windows.
Buck learned this past week that the information gathered through the intranet site content inventory task he is performing will likely be shelved until the 3rd quarter of 2009.
That's right: 2009. By then the content that he inventoried will have changed drastically.
Yet the deliverables must be delivered. The project must be completed on-time and under budget. The show must go on. Buck does not receive additional compensation for the additional hours he puts in. And as to the fact that a relatively simple program could have been written in 2 or 3 days that would complete in just 5 minutes what Buck has been manually working on for over a month now, well, let's just say the client is paranoid and strictly forbade it.
As you might imagine, Buck is just about ready to blow a fuse.
Happy Holidays!
It is Sunday morning, and Buck is buried beneath a ton of worthless bullshit work down in the supply closet five floors beneath the client's super fortress. He anticipates being stuck here until 8:00 PM or so. He was here all day yesterday as well. He is alone. The weather outside is nice: high 60's, sunny and breezy, but he can't see it. The oubliette has no windows.
Buck learned this past week that the information gathered through the intranet site content inventory task he is performing will likely be shelved until the 3rd quarter of 2009.
That's right: 2009. By then the content that he inventoried will have changed drastically.
Yet the deliverables must be delivered. The project must be completed on-time and under budget. The show must go on. Buck does not receive additional compensation for the additional hours he puts in. And as to the fact that a relatively simple program could have been written in 2 or 3 days that would complete in just 5 minutes what Buck has been manually working on for over a month now, well, let's just say the client is paranoid and strictly forbade it.
As you might imagine, Buck is just about ready to blow a fuse.
Happy Holidays!
Monday, December 11, 2006
Superstar
Buck was desperate for someone to invent a way to record his dreams.
Last night he dreamed that he had backstage passes to a music concert, although it was unclear who the headline act was. Several of his friends were there, on guitars and keys or in the orchestra pit, but none of them are musicians in real life. Although the music had an orchestral element, it was actually something closer to popular easy listening music with an exotic twist, like something Sting could have put together. Buck remembers thinking in the dream that it was beautiful music.
The composition was well-suited for improvisational solos from various instrumentalists. Buck recalls a keyboardist and saxophonist taking turns. These solos were nice but nothing profound or exceptionally moving, though they contributed well enough to the melancholy of the theme. Then Buck sensed a commotion behind him, a ripple in the atmosphere. A special guest star had arrived: the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. Yes, Prince himself was making a surprise appearance!
Buck watched the superstar as he strode to a roadie who handed him a strange wireless headset instrument. The microphone extended from one of the earpieces like one of those telephone headsets that only a lucky few manage to secure in the Cubopolis call centers. There was also a wire extending from it to an odd-looking keyed instrument with which Buck understood Prince would use to augment his singing notes. He made a few quick adjustments, flipped a switch, turned a dial, and walked out into the spotlight. It was all very smoothly and efficiently executed despite the need for haste.
Buck worried that Prince was handling it too casually. The top of the theme’s cycle was quickly approaching while Prince made his adjustments and walked out on stage. Would he jump in on time? Would the other musicians see him there in time to hold back and give him the musical space he needed to deliver the goods?
They did, and Prince jumped in at precisely the right moment. The instrument sounded like an electric clarinet. His solo was simple at first, weaving concise melodic elements into the theme with sustained, clear notes, and only the most subtle trills and flourishes. Buck approved of the inauspicious opening, but for a moment he wondered if Prince was sufficiently prepared to pull it all together. Had he rehearsed? It certainly seemed improvised, and Buck could see in Prince’s facial expression that he was searching for something new. Certainly The Artist was a professional musician who knew the forms and wouldn’t botch it with missed notes and such, but would he be able to turn the solo into something transcendent as everyone hoped?
Then, around the fourth or fifth measure of the first cycle, after Prince had left a note hanging in suspense begging for a resolve, he kicked it up a single gear with a syncopated walk down the scale, the final few notes of which he bent and chorded with harmonizing notes. From there he smoothly transitioned into a higher gear and took it places that only Prince could take it. It was aggressive and masterful, yet not overwhelming, and it added a totally different color to the canvas. He had found what he was looking for, and it guided him into a second cycle and he soared upon its wings from there. And just when Buck was wondering what the next musician to solo could possibly do to top this performance, the band neatly concluded the song at the end of the cycle with a well-practiced ending, Prince’s solo tying in perfectly.
The crowd went nuts, and Buck was excited to have been able to witness it. Buck got to shake The Artist’s hand before he was escorted to his limo, then Buck helped the roadies pack all the gear. Buck also congratulated and thanked the other musicians, but everyone was still gushing over Prince’s solo. The dream involved a few wrap-up kinds of things before Buck finally woke up to find it was still the middle of the night.
At first, his mind still clouded in the delirium of sleep, Buck thought about what an awesome musician Prince was. Then consciousness slowly educated him. There had been no concert. Prince had given no solo performance. It had all been in Buck’s head. The theme, the orchestration, the solos, everything. He frantically tried to recall the main theme, but he only managed to pull half of it together. The second half kept drifting into a Duran Duran tune, although he couldn’t name which one. The Duran Duran number was a less perfect rendition of what Buck had heard in the dream, as if deep in the recesses of the unconscious mind there is a wellspring of pure, perfect music that isn’t accessible to the conscious mind. Duran Duran had once tried to attain that perfection but had fallen far short and missed the mark, clumsily adding elements and chord changes where none had been needed. Now Buck had heard the real thing, knew in his heart that it had been original, never before heard or successfully brought to life in the waking world of ordinary mortals. Yet try as he might Buck could not recapture it so that he might share it with the world.
Despite this frustration he actually smiled as he drifted back toward sleep, for there was one aspect of the experience that could never be taken from him:
That solo had been his own.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Has Buck Lost His Marbles?
“Buck searched everywhere, but he could not find his marbles.”
Buck was indeed questioning his sanity, based on recent events. On Thursday he pulled the trigger and bought two more ball pythons, a pair of genetic morphs known as “pastels” (or sometimes “jungle pastels”), and they were delivered Friday morning at
The tale as told from BP1 (male) in the first person.
_________________________
Mmm, it’s nice and warm and dark in here.
Shit! The hairless ape found me! The light! The light! There’s no place to hide! Where do I go? What do I do? I know! I’ll curl up into a ball and hide my head. Maybe if I can’t see it, it can’t see me.
Oh no! It’s got me, it’s lifting me up, probably toward its mouth. This is the end, hope it’s quick.
That’s weird, it’s not biting me. Hey! It’s putting me into a really small place. I like small places, but I don’t know this one, never seen it before, and it’s kind of cold. Let me flick my tongue and get my bearings, maybe there’s a way out.
Crap, there’s no way out. Ok, breathe, just breathe, try to relax, stay calm, wait until later and make my break then. At least it’s dark again.
Hmm, there’s something new over here, something kind of warm making some heat over on this side. Maybe if I…can…just…squeeze…around… There! That’s better. Still kind of cramped, but nice and cozy. Think I’ll take a nap.
Hey! What’s all that bumping around for? Can’t a guy get a little sleep around here? Just what the hell is going on out there? Is the world turning upside down? Damn! I’m upside down but I can’t right myself because it’s too cramped. Wait, ahh, that’s better, the world is right side up again. At least, I think it is. Crap! It’s changing again! I’m so confused!
What’s that thrumming vibration I feel? Is something coming to eat me? I don’t see any heat other than this little warm thing over here, ahh that feels sooo good. No, the vibration isn’t getting any closer. I’ll stay alert, though. I think I’m well-hidden, but some weird shit’s been going down, so I’d better not relax.
The thrumming stopped, but I’m still being moved around. Bizarre! Hiding places aren’t supposed to move! Whoaoaoaoaoaoa wha-a-a-a-at’s a-a-a-lll tha-a-a-a-t b-u-u-m-m-p-p-i-i-ing a-a-r-r-o-o-u-u-n-n-d? Ugh, this can’t be good. Aaiiiiiii! I’m sliding down, down, down, hope it doesn’t hurt at the bottom and DAMN! Did I just go UP really fast and do a 360 flip with a twist? What am I, some kind of acrobat?
I can’t take it any more! Help! Help! Somebody help me!!! Oh wait, that’s right, I can’t talk. No vocal cords. This sucks!
Is this shit going to go on all night? I’m losing track of all the stuff that’s happening. More thrumming, more lifting. Strange smell I just caught, like I’m not alone in this mess. Maybe someone else is in here with me. I think it’s been there all along but I’ve been so confused I haven’t paid much attention. And by the way, what does a guy got to do to get a bowl of water around here? The service here seriously sucks.
Oh now THIS is some seriously twisted shit. I can’t put my little forked tongue on exactly what it is, but it’s like I’m climbing way higher than I’d ever want to go, and the air feels…strange. Thin, or something. And what’s with the pressure? Where did it all go? That ain’t cool, makes breathing a bit of a trick. Thank Set the Almighty for this little warm thing over here, because I get the feeling that it’s really cold outside.
Ok, just when I was kind of getting used to the breathing thing, it changed again. Everything’s getting thicker, have to adjust my breathing again. And I feel so confined! I’m not sure, but isn’t this the time of day when I normally do my exploring? I need to stretch out! I’m going to get a cramp! Argh! I hope this new home isn’t permanent.
Wow, that weird pressure thing went on for a long time. Now it’s back to more of what was happening before. More bumping and twisting and thrumming and rattling and thrumming again, lots of starts and stops and starts again, now the hide is moving quickly, I can feel it, and now everything is still. Still cramped as hell.
Everything is still and then, the world starts to jiggle a little bit. Something’s happening, something terrible. Have they found me? Oh no! The light! They found me! Nowhere to hide, no way to move away! I can see their eyes, there are two of them, more hairless ape creatures, more hideous than the other one, they have spots! They’re exposing the top of my hide, they got these things they’re reaching at me with.
Hey, look at that, I was right! They got another one of us! Ooh, she’s a cutie, I like the little heart tatoo she has on her side. Too bad we won’t get a chance to meet. Too bad we don’t have language or we could work as a team to get out of this mess.
Oh crap, it’s the same thing with all these apes. You get all tense waiting to get eaten, but for some sadistic reason they want to play with their food first. Ooh, it just gives me the creeps them touching me like that. It would probably feel good it I knew it wasn’t just them trying to get me to relax before they stuff me into their mouths. Hey, what’s that? A dark place to escape to? Ok, steady big guy, you only got one shot. Ready? GO! Slither! Slither! Slither for your worthless little life!
I’m going to make it! The ape isn’t stopping me! I’m in! I’m in the hiding place! I found an escape route! Oh and it’s so warm and smooth in here! And – oh shit! The hiding spot itself is moving. It’s…oh no. It’s hairless ape flesh. I’m hiding on the ape. It knows, it must. Yep, sure enough, here come the grabbing things again. Damn! Oh well, maybe if they don’t eat me now I’ll have another chance later.
HEY! What was that? A sudden flash of very bright light, like the sun. I don’t really like the sun all that much. Well, at least it didn’t stay. That was way too bright for my taste, and no warning at all. How rude. HEY! There it goes again. What gives? Will this never end? Will I never be released from this madness? Oh, whoa is me.
Now the ape’s grabbers are holding me and placing me somewhere else. Those grabbers sure come in handy, I bet, but then how do the apes squeeze into little places? Seems the grabbers would get in the way to me. Moot point. So where are they putting me now?
Ah, I see, it’s one of these larger places where I supposedly can’t escape from. We’ll see about that later. I know these apes, they sleep at night, and that’s when I’ll make my move. Right now, though, I’m feeling about as tired as I’ve ever felt my whole life. So, what’s up with this new scene? I count one, two good places to hide. And that’s interesting, there’s another one, but it’s unusual, feels like there’s a lot of moisture in there. Note to self: check out that place later on. In the meantime, this little dry hiding place seems warmer than the other one. Think I’ll slither in there for a nice long nap. Ahh, that’s much better. [Yawn] Hope they didn’t eat the babe.
Now, where’s the DO NOT DISTURB sign?
Monday, November 27, 2006
Salute
Little known fact: Jos. A. Banks makes excellent slacks. When a small volume of liquid hits the material, the liquid "beads up" into tiny, invisible droplets rather than be absorbed in a spreading, embarrassing stain. The droplets are then easily dispatched at the scene of the crime using readily available toilet tissue.
Buck salutes the good clothiers at Jos. A. Banks for thinking through the practical considerations of life in Cubopolis.
Grappling with Demons
Buck was wrestling with the old, familiar dilemma: how would he find time to finish the important things he needed to complete when his days were becoming jammed with frivolous pursuits that brought him far more enjoyment?
“Take this blog, for example,” he typed, worrying as he did so that he might not be ready for the client meeting tomorrow afternoon if he didn’t stop goofing off and just use his brain for a few minutes to think through the client’s request. “Clearly this is time that could be better served doing whatever it is Buck is supposed to be doing right now.”
What exactly that something was, however, was not immediately clear, and it was precisely that gray area that Buck hoped to avoid addressing altogether. The client had given him an assignment so murky that Buck wasn’t even sure why they needed him to do it at all. Analyze a proposal that they had already written, forming recommendations based on best practices that they had already decided to discard. Be prepared to talk about the proposed process which had, at its core, a requirement that people should be permitted to bypass it completely if they deemed necessary. This was the kind of non-sequitur that left Buck shaking in his loafers.
His manager was still nowhere to be seen, recovering from surgery, but Buck had been promised some guidance by close-of-business Monday (a promise delivered via an email sent from the manager himself over the holidays), so he delayed the analysis until the expert manager had an opportunity to weigh in. Never mind that the “correct” action as dictated by the natural laws of consultancy would be for Buck to perform as much of his own analysis as possible before he talked to the manager, thus ensuring good feedback come review time.
Meanwhile, just twenty-three days separated Buck from his certification exam date. “If Buck doesn’t use this time to address the client’s need,” he pondered in the third person, “could he not instead use it to prepare for the exam?” This was, of course, a fair and legitimate question, yet Buck had no clue why he was procrastinating the test preparation effort. If he failed the exam then his company would not reimburse him the $200 that he had already spent to register for the exam, an exam that would bring him a certification that he pursued by own choice. This was the key point: why would Buck delay something that would ultimately allow him back into a field of work that he actually enjoyed? Was he afraid of failure, or of discovering his limitations? Was he intimidated by some of his firm’s “techies” and their almost godlike IT skills? Or was the inverse true, and he was actually afraid of success? By becoming truly successful at something and becoming all that he was capable of being, perhaps in the future people would set higher expectations for him than he was willing to accept. In the final equation, was he afraid of responsibility?
The more Buck thought about it, the more disgusted he became with himself. He decided to quickly publish the blog entry before it dragged on, then he’d go on to post a question that he already knew the answer to on a ball python forum. A quick check of his email would come after that, and then he’d call the manager on the phone instead of waiting for the call to come to him. If he had any time remaining after that, then he’d do the analysis.
He could always study for the exam at home later that night. Right after “Heroes.”
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Phlegmophobes Beware!
The situation is dire. Buck is buried deep beneath the bowels of his latest client’s downtown super fortress, stationed within a cramped, abandoned supply closet, facing an unknowable direction on the compass, miles of twisted passageways and security checkpoints from anything even remotely resembling a window, and surrounded by heaps of forgotten paper products, printer cartridges, envelopes, and, if his weary eyes are not mistaken, an ancient relic from a bygone era, a machine once known simply as a typewriter. “You’re kidding me!” he rasps in amazement through his disease-ravaged larynx when it dawns on him what the obsolete piece of junk next to him actually is. “I’m trapped next to a fucking typewriter?!”
But the typewriter is the least of his concerns, even though it is balanced precariously between an unused printer and a box of miscellaneous supplies, threatening to topple at any moment and send our intrepid yet highly infected consultant into the rewarding yet bureaucratically challenging world of workman’s comp. No, it’s the contagion that consumes his every waking thought, drowning him in rivers of phlegm and gnawing away at his sanity until he no longer believes that there ever really was a time when he was well. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine what it must have been like to feel healthy, but despite the awesome might of his powerful imagination, he fails in this endeavor. The dull weight of his every breath is too immediate, too palpable to be discarded for even a moment’s fantasy. In trying to conjure up the familiar feeling of finding the tennis ball right where he most wants it to be and smacking a beautiful cross-court forehand winner against his embattled foe, the wet cough suddenly and rudely intrudes, and the sore throat protests. The imaginary optic yellow
Which is exactly what the doctor told Buck, but Buck doesn’t have the luxury of rest. Buck already took time off last week to “rest,” but the results remain a bitter disappointment. Besides, the project is “fixed-price,” which means it must be completed on schedule or the firm takes the hit, and the top chamber of the hourglass is near empty and draining fast. Meanwhile, Buck’s manager on the project will be out for at least the next week to recover from a medical procedure but has failed to leave our hero with the instructions he promised before he left. Buck is the last man standing on a job that needs doing, so the doctor’s orders – repeated three times as if somehow the man suspected that Buck would ignore common sense – are regrettably discarded.
Now Buck has to extract meaning from a heap of flowcharts the client has given him that pertain to an operational area and subject matter of which Buck has no previous experience. Falling back on the Vanguard principle of consultancy (see the “99 Club” entry of September 29th, paragraph 7), he plans to reach out to experts within the firm, but first he must tie up some political loose ends. He dials up the manager’s cell phone and leaves a voicemail to follow up an email from yesterday requesting the required information. Then, after several hours of waiting, he decides it is safe to proceed up the chain, having given the manager ample opportunity to deliver the goods (which were due last week). The manager’s manager, a large hair piece, is the font of knowledge from which Buck will procure the names of the experts.
One email and two voicemails later Buck still hasn’t reached the head honcho. He is stranded, left to rot in the Cubopolis version of a medieval oubliette, a dank crypt from which the anguished cries of the despairing go forever unheard along with the fading, hollow echoes of a pair of dusty lungs striving explosively to expunge themselves from their languid human host.
So Buck is left to do what Buck does best. He pops a prescription narcotic and some nasal decongestant (either of which he would hastily endorse by name if they would be so kind as to actually work), and gets busy procrastinating. He submits an entry to his blog, this very one, in fact, idly wondering as he does so whether his experimental usage of the present tense really matters in the grand scheme of things, and allows that at least one positive thing has come of his predicament:
He got to use the word “phlegmatic” in a sentence.
*******
The ball python (see "What to Name It?") turned out to be a male, which explained the bargain basement pricing. Females get bigger than males so it was a bit of a disappointment for Buck, but he took it in stride. The creature was healthy and behaving in a manner consistent with an unstressed ball python: he wasn’t curling into a defensive ball when approached anymore, he was curious and gentle when handled, and he hadn’t once attempted to bite anyone but the mice. Since the mice were already dead and frozen and the snake didn’t get them until they were properly thawed, it turned out to be not too scary for the mice.
So Mr. Python was comfortable in his surroundings and Buck was left with a guy snake named Morticia. This would not do. In the meantime, Buck had received no suggestions for names as he had requested in a previous post. So he went, at least temporarily, with the name “Gomez” to keep faith with the Adams Family reference, and Gomez is now the official name on record at the veterinarian’s office.
Yet after that fateful day Buck remained unsatisfied with the name. He felt that people might miss the T.V. sitcom reference and instead interpret some kind of an Hispanic origin, which would amount to a minor educational misdirection since ball pythons are indigenous to western
Besides, Buck feared that yet another name change (Cleopatra, then Morticia, then Gomez) would convince his children and the playfully exasperated Mrs. 99 that Buck was indecisive at best, but probably something worse. Nevertheless, the imperfection of the name rankled like an old sore, or like a phlegmatic cough that stubbornly refuses one’s abjurations for a moment’s tender mercy. Thus he changed back to the present tense to implore you, gentle readers, to settle the score. The three options are:
1. Keep the name as it is, and call the pet Gomez.
2. Keep the name as it is, but call the pet “Mez” (think of how it phonically suggests “mesmerize”, and reflect on Buck’s mental health for asking you to do this).
3. Change the name to “Lurch,” keeping with the theme but evoking the sometimes clumsy way the animal changes his mind about which way he wants to go and, from time to time, tumbles from the couch.
Buck leaves the ball in your court, until such time that he gives up waiting.
Friday, November 17, 2006
Ask Buck
Dear Buck,
I’ve been reading your column and you seem like a guy who’s on the level. I’m hoping you can help me with a little problem I’ve been having.
Last year I cheated on my husband with another woman. At least, I think she was a woman. I’m not really sure because I was high on crystal meth at the time. I don’t think it mixes really good with the Lithium that my doctor prescribed for my bipolar disorder which was causing me to beat my husband over the head with a frying pan. My husband somehow regained consciousness, escaped from the basement, and found out about the affair. Now he wants to leave me but he can’t until he finds the kids. The voices are telling me not to let him have the kids because they will only spread the demons’ disease and bring about the end of all humanity. They’re hidden in the trunk of our Buick right now.
My question is this: Should I push the car into a river or into a lake? Or would it be better to pour gasoline all over it and set it off with some C4?
Signed,
Concerned in Canton, OH
******
Dear Concerned,
Buck is only a fictitious personality who writes about himself in the third person. He is not a licensed therapist. He recommends that you seek professional help from a licensed psychiatrist before taking any additional steps, and since your children will need water at least every three days in order to survive, he suggests that you insist on an immediate appointment.
Dear Buck,
Last year I met a beautiful woman who is a great cook. Now, in my line of work, if you want to call it that, I meet a lot of really fanati- er, fantastic chicks. The problem is I can never score. They promise me the world, but they never deliver the goods. Now I got this chick who can cook too, but do you think she can follow a simple recipe and add a stainless steel nail file or two into the cake mix? No chance of that! This broad is so stupid it makes me want to strangle her and dump her off the back of my recently repossessed fishing boat!
How am I ever gonna get out of here and get laid?
Signed,
Doomed on Death Row, CA
******
Dear Doomed,
Buck posts blogs. He does NOT dispense legal advice, nor would he have any knowledge about how to escape from a maximum security federal penitentiary. Without a direct knowledge of the internal politics of your imprisonment situation, he can only make the generic recommendation that you swap sexual favors for key information about flaws in the prison’s security system.
Failing that, Buck suggests that when it comes time to receive your final meal, request a cherry pie in the shape of a naked woman, then pull an “American Pie.” Don’t worry about getting caught: you won’t be embarrassed for long.
Dear Buck,
My sister and I are hosting the family Thanksgiving dinner this year, but we can’t agree on if we should use the smooth cranberry sauce or the chunky cranberry sauce. She says smooth and you slice it, but I say chunky so you can actually see and taste the cranberries.
Also, when setting the table, I think the fork goes on the right, but she says it goes on the left. Please help us before we raise our voices at each other and ruin Thanksgiving forever!
Signed,
Stressed Out in Schenectady, NY
******
Dear Stressed Out,
Buck says get a life! This column is for real people with real problems! He respectfully asks that you don’t write to him for advice unless you have a worthy problem that only someone like Buck can help you with. Please do not bother him with minutiae.
I’ve been reading your column and you seem like a guy who’s on the level. I’m hoping you can help me with a little problem I’ve been having.
Last year I cheated on my husband with another woman. At least, I think she was a woman. I’m not really sure because I was high on crystal meth at the time. I don’t think it mixes really good with the Lithium that my doctor prescribed for my bipolar disorder which was causing me to beat my husband over the head with a frying pan. My husband somehow regained consciousness, escaped from the basement, and found out about the affair. Now he wants to leave me but he can’t until he finds the kids. The voices are telling me not to let him have the kids because they will only spread the demons’ disease and bring about the end of all humanity. They’re hidden in the trunk of our Buick right now.
My question is this: Should I push the car into a river or into a lake? Or would it be better to pour gasoline all over it and set it off with some C4?
Signed,
Concerned in Canton, OH
******
Dear Concerned,
Buck is only a fictitious personality who writes about himself in the third person. He is not a licensed therapist. He recommends that you seek professional help from a licensed psychiatrist before taking any additional steps, and since your children will need water at least every three days in order to survive, he suggests that you insist on an immediate appointment.
Dear Buck,
Last year I met a beautiful woman who is a great cook. Now, in my line of work, if you want to call it that, I meet a lot of really fanati- er, fantastic chicks. The problem is I can never score. They promise me the world, but they never deliver the goods. Now I got this chick who can cook too, but do you think she can follow a simple recipe and add a stainless steel nail file or two into the cake mix? No chance of that! This broad is so stupid it makes me want to strangle her and dump her off the back of my recently repossessed fishing boat!
How am I ever gonna get out of here and get laid?
Signed,
Doomed on Death Row, CA
******
Dear Doomed,
Buck posts blogs. He does NOT dispense legal advice, nor would he have any knowledge about how to escape from a maximum security federal penitentiary. Without a direct knowledge of the internal politics of your imprisonment situation, he can only make the generic recommendation that you swap sexual favors for key information about flaws in the prison’s security system.
Failing that, Buck suggests that when it comes time to receive your final meal, request a cherry pie in the shape of a naked woman, then pull an “American Pie.” Don’t worry about getting caught: you won’t be embarrassed for long.
Dear Buck,
My sister and I are hosting the family Thanksgiving dinner this year, but we can’t agree on if we should use the smooth cranberry sauce or the chunky cranberry sauce. She says smooth and you slice it, but I say chunky so you can actually see and taste the cranberries.
Also, when setting the table, I think the fork goes on the right, but she says it goes on the left. Please help us before we raise our voices at each other and ruin Thanksgiving forever!
Signed,
Stressed Out in Schenectady, NY
******
Dear Stressed Out,
Buck says get a life! This column is for real people with real problems! He respectfully asks that you don’t write to him for advice unless you have a worthy problem that only someone like Buck can help you with. Please do not bother him with minutiae.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
What to Name It?
Buck didn’t have a lot of time to tell the whole story of the acquisition of his new pet. After all, it was the weekend, and who has time to write long, narrative blogs on their day off? There’s always plenty of time for that kind of thing during the weekdays when clients are convinced that he’s a busy man, so he decided to just post the pics on Saturday and let the images speak for themselves.
Long story short, though: he’d been researching ball pythons and planning the purchase for months with a target date sometime in the late January to early February time frame.
Then a reptile exposition composed of independent regional breeders came to town and Buck took two of his girls along to look at all the herps (that’s herpetologist terminology for reptiles and amphibians), and couldn’t help but notice the fine health of the snakes and the bargain basement pricing. He knew from inquiries with trusted sources that the breeders at the expo were reputable and did not import wild caught animals or animals hatched abroad and shipped overseas to the U.S. He left the expo exhilarated at having seen such a huge selection, but he felt deflated because he’d missed a grand opportunity.
When he mentioned the prices to Mrs. 99 (honestly believing that he was just setting her up for the next expo to come through town, whenever that would be), she surprised him by asking why he didn’t just go ahead, drive back to the expo before it closed, pull the trigger and buy a snake. So that’s what he did. He won’t bother his readers with details of the snake’s care in the week since acquisition, but he will provide a link for anyone interested in understanding exactly what it is that he got (http://www.anapsid.org/ball.html).
After he visits the veterinarian Buck will be able to confirm the gender of the snake. Is it a female (as the breeder claimed), or a male? Buck will reveal his pet’s name after the gender is known. Suggestions are welcomed!!!
Long story short, though: he’d been researching ball pythons and planning the purchase for months with a target date sometime in the late January to early February time frame.
Then a reptile exposition composed of independent regional breeders came to town and Buck took two of his girls along to look at all the herps (that’s herpetologist terminology for reptiles and amphibians), and couldn’t help but notice the fine health of the snakes and the bargain basement pricing. He knew from inquiries with trusted sources that the breeders at the expo were reputable and did not import wild caught animals or animals hatched abroad and shipped overseas to the U.S. He left the expo exhilarated at having seen such a huge selection, but he felt deflated because he’d missed a grand opportunity.When he mentioned the prices to Mrs. 99 (honestly believing that he was just setting her up for the next expo to come through town, whenever that would be), she surprised him by asking why he didn’t just go ahead, drive back to the expo before it closed, pull the trigger and buy a snake. So that’s what he did. He won’t bother his readers with details of the snake’s care in the week since acquisition, but he will provide a link for anyone interested in understanding exactly what it is that he got (http://www.anapsid.org/ball.html).
After he visits the veterinarian Buck will be able to confirm the gender of the snake. Is it a female (as the breeder claimed), or a male? Buck will reveal his pet’s name after the gender is known. Suggestions are welcomed!!!
Friday, November 03, 2006
Housekeeping
Buck was about to get to work on another blog entry when he realized that he’d left a few unfinished threads in previous entries. It was time to take care of some housecleaning before diving into new waters.
“First,” wrote Buck of himself using the third person format within quotation marks in a transparently gratuitous attempt to maintain the stylistic theme of the blog, “Buck emerged victorious in his battle against [Evil Credit Card Company #1] and [Evil Credit Card Company #2]. Visiting the branch location of […#1] turned out to be the key to victory. A certain Ms. Pretty [not her real name] was available to assist him, and Buck turned on the ol’ charm, portraying himself to her as an easy-going, whimsical soul caught in a bewildering and somewhat humorous bureaucratic conundrum, and instilling in her a sense of supreme confidence in her ability to help him successfully solve it. Of the background history he shared only the relevant facts which had brought him to her, and failed to mention the several nasty emails he had already fired off at random enemy reps which had successfully [following the previous blog entry] gotten some serious attention. He also provided the key paperwork provided by […#2] using […#1]’s logo outlining the phone numbers to call and the rules pertaining to closing his account without having to pay the annual membership fee.
“While Buck patiently observed Ms. Pretty dialing first the numbers on the paperwork, then the numbers provided to Buck via email from […#1]’s customer care reps, and finally a number obtained from her own Rolodex, he was amused to see that she was quickly becoming as frustrated as he was. To keep the encounter light-hearted he ventured a wry hypothesis that […#2]’s cardholder retention strategy was to make it impossible for cardholders and their proxies to reach them, and this comment had precisely the desired effect. She laughed, which meant she thought Buck was funny, and people almost always like people they think are funny. This meant she would try harder to assist him, and she did become angrier with […#2] because she recognized the truth of his observation. Suddenly Buck could see in her eyes that she was more determined than ever to close Buck’s account for him.”
Buck glanced nervously behind him to make sure nobody was observing him in the act of posting a blog entry. He was on his third day at a new client, although in the end it was just a different flavor of the same old Cubopolis. He was not likely to be observed, since he was five levels below ground and situated not in a cubicle, but rather in an abandoned printer room. Still, the room was arranged such that his back was to the door. He would have to be careful.
“After twenty minutes of VRU* navigation madness,” he continued, “Ms. Pretty got through to a human being representing […#2], who asked to speak to Buck directly to confirm some personal information and try to retain him as a customer. When this representative informed Buck that she could close the account but could not waive the fee, Buck opened up his official document and read aloud verbatim what it said on this topic. The words he spoke were, of course, in direct opposition to her claim that the fee could not be waived. Then Buck got to listen to some nice music while the representative spoke to her manager. While enjoying the soothing music he pictured the scene in his mind, the manager telling the rep that fees will not be waived, the rep replying that the customer seemed to have been reading off of something, and the manager scolding the rep not to assume anything. After a few minutes the music abruptly ended and true to form, the rep asked him what he was reading from. Buck happily obliged her and described the document and its origins to her, reading her several passages from several sections and describing for her in blistering detail the contents of the small print in the section pertaining to closing accounts and the manner in which fees would be waived. Then Buck got to listen to some nice music again (but was frustrated that the music didn’t continue somewhere in the middle of the composition but instead took him right back to the beginning of the exact same recording), and eventually the manager caved to the inevitability of his or her doom. Buck then had to persuade her manager (again, indirectly via the poor assaulted rep whose average call handle time was going through the roof) that it was necessary that a confirmation letter be sent to his home address, including the fact that the account had been closed and the membership fee waived.”
To make a long story short (or is it already too late for that?), Buck ultimately got his letter in the mail.
“Second,” he typed, remembering that he had mentioned unfinished threads (note the plural), “Buck felt it was time to revisit some of his initial goals regarding this blog to see if they were still valid.”
Let’s see, he thought, what were those two goals? Oh yeah: they were catharsis and practice writing fiction. Well, he had to admit that it was at least somewhat cathartic to write the blogs. He seemed in better spirits overall since he had started, and he had learned from what little fan support he had received thus far that he was not alone. Other cubicle dwellers out there were feeling trapped within the system and trying to fake their way through unscathed. Additionally, how cathartic did it have to be, he wondered, when it served the wonderful yet simple purpose of distracting him from more important tasks at hand? Tasks such as, for example, the analysis his client was paying him to perform?
As for the blog serving as a means for Buck to practice writing fiction, it was undoubtedly wonderful for that, as clearly the blog itself was one giant work of fiction. Certainly no professional consultant would take so much time to write such an extensive blog on his clients’ time, and it was way beyond the bounds of believability to conceive that a man whose greatest talent and unshakable vice was chronic procrastination could succeed so spectacularly in the role of project manager in any Cubopolis setting. No, clearly the blog was a complete work of fiction, perhaps written by a professional provocateur, or maybe a man with nothing better to do in his off hours.
Or was that last paragraph the fiction?
Buck signed off for the day, and promised his readers pictures of the new snake he purchased last weekend in his next post.
* VRU is short for “Voice Response Unit,” the systems you deal with before you get a real human at the other end - but then, you probably already knew that, and if you didn’t, then you’re clearly not a resident of Cubopolis and 90% of the so-called ‘humor’ in this blog is lost on you anyways.
“First,” wrote Buck of himself using the third person format within quotation marks in a transparently gratuitous attempt to maintain the stylistic theme of the blog, “Buck emerged victorious in his battle against [Evil Credit Card Company #1] and [Evil Credit Card Company #2]. Visiting the branch location of […#1] turned out to be the key to victory. A certain Ms. Pretty [not her real name] was available to assist him, and Buck turned on the ol’ charm, portraying himself to her as an easy-going, whimsical soul caught in a bewildering and somewhat humorous bureaucratic conundrum, and instilling in her a sense of supreme confidence in her ability to help him successfully solve it. Of the background history he shared only the relevant facts which had brought him to her, and failed to mention the several nasty emails he had already fired off at random enemy reps which had successfully [following the previous blog entry] gotten some serious attention. He also provided the key paperwork provided by […#2] using […#1]’s logo outlining the phone numbers to call and the rules pertaining to closing his account without having to pay the annual membership fee.
“While Buck patiently observed Ms. Pretty dialing first the numbers on the paperwork, then the numbers provided to Buck via email from […#1]’s customer care reps, and finally a number obtained from her own Rolodex, he was amused to see that she was quickly becoming as frustrated as he was. To keep the encounter light-hearted he ventured a wry hypothesis that […#2]’s cardholder retention strategy was to make it impossible for cardholders and their proxies to reach them, and this comment had precisely the desired effect. She laughed, which meant she thought Buck was funny, and people almost always like people they think are funny. This meant she would try harder to assist him, and she did become angrier with […#2] because she recognized the truth of his observation. Suddenly Buck could see in her eyes that she was more determined than ever to close Buck’s account for him.”
Buck glanced nervously behind him to make sure nobody was observing him in the act of posting a blog entry. He was on his third day at a new client, although in the end it was just a different flavor of the same old Cubopolis. He was not likely to be observed, since he was five levels below ground and situated not in a cubicle, but rather in an abandoned printer room. Still, the room was arranged such that his back was to the door. He would have to be careful.
“After twenty minutes of VRU* navigation madness,” he continued, “Ms. Pretty got through to a human being representing […#2], who asked to speak to Buck directly to confirm some personal information and try to retain him as a customer. When this representative informed Buck that she could close the account but could not waive the fee, Buck opened up his official document and read aloud verbatim what it said on this topic. The words he spoke were, of course, in direct opposition to her claim that the fee could not be waived. Then Buck got to listen to some nice music while the representative spoke to her manager. While enjoying the soothing music he pictured the scene in his mind, the manager telling the rep that fees will not be waived, the rep replying that the customer seemed to have been reading off of something, and the manager scolding the rep not to assume anything. After a few minutes the music abruptly ended and true to form, the rep asked him what he was reading from. Buck happily obliged her and described the document and its origins to her, reading her several passages from several sections and describing for her in blistering detail the contents of the small print in the section pertaining to closing accounts and the manner in which fees would be waived. Then Buck got to listen to some nice music again (but was frustrated that the music didn’t continue somewhere in the middle of the composition but instead took him right back to the beginning of the exact same recording), and eventually the manager caved to the inevitability of his or her doom. Buck then had to persuade her manager (again, indirectly via the poor assaulted rep whose average call handle time was going through the roof) that it was necessary that a confirmation letter be sent to his home address, including the fact that the account had been closed and the membership fee waived.”
To make a long story short (or is it already too late for that?), Buck ultimately got his letter in the mail.
“Second,” he typed, remembering that he had mentioned unfinished threads (note the plural), “Buck felt it was time to revisit some of his initial goals regarding this blog to see if they were still valid.”
Let’s see, he thought, what were those two goals? Oh yeah: they were catharsis and practice writing fiction. Well, he had to admit that it was at least somewhat cathartic to write the blogs. He seemed in better spirits overall since he had started, and he had learned from what little fan support he had received thus far that he was not alone. Other cubicle dwellers out there were feeling trapped within the system and trying to fake their way through unscathed. Additionally, how cathartic did it have to be, he wondered, when it served the wonderful yet simple purpose of distracting him from more important tasks at hand? Tasks such as, for example, the analysis his client was paying him to perform?
As for the blog serving as a means for Buck to practice writing fiction, it was undoubtedly wonderful for that, as clearly the blog itself was one giant work of fiction. Certainly no professional consultant would take so much time to write such an extensive blog on his clients’ time, and it was way beyond the bounds of believability to conceive that a man whose greatest talent and unshakable vice was chronic procrastination could succeed so spectacularly in the role of project manager in any Cubopolis setting. No, clearly the blog was a complete work of fiction, perhaps written by a professional provocateur, or maybe a man with nothing better to do in his off hours.
Or was that last paragraph the fiction?
Buck signed off for the day, and promised his readers pictures of the new snake he purchased last weekend in his next post.
* VRU is short for “Voice Response Unit,” the systems you deal with before you get a real human at the other end - but then, you probably already knew that, and if you didn’t, then you’re clearly not a resident of Cubopolis and 90% of the so-called ‘humor’ in this blog is lost on you anyways.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Buck At War
In order to provide the faithful with quality blog entertainment, Buck 99 decided to use a pair of enclosing quotation marks to get around the self-imposed 3rd person rule enforced on this blog.
The following excerpt is an email Buck sent to his enemy du jour, a company that is making it difficult for him to close a long-dead account, and who has instructed him that he should visit a branch:
“Dear [Evil Credit Card Company #1],
I will visit a branch, but I am displeased. I called the number you provided and was forwarded to [Evil Credit Card Company #2]. The call was disconnected but fortunately the [Evil Credit Card Company #1] agent had given me the phone number before attempting the transfer. Then I proceeded to call [Evil Credit Card Company #2] three times and was ultimately disconnected from each of those calls in three separate and distinct ways before making it to a single human being. All this taking time away from my day for an account I neither use nor want, and in fact believed to be already closed.
I suspect that the process has been intentionally engineered to make closing an account difficult. I include both [Evil Credit Card Company #1] and [Evil Credit Card Company #2] in this accusation. I also detect from your response that you haven't even looked at my account. The phrase "if the account balance exceeds $2500" gives it away. The balance is ZERO. The account has been dormant for years. Nice form letter, guys. Thanks for spending $0.25 servicing your customer with a pair of button clicks.
If the branch approach fails, then I may be forced to close the account by mail, but there is no way that I will pay a fee for that "service." How am I to ensure that my $20 won't be applied to the membership fee? Perhaps this is what happened the last time I tried to close this account.
No, I have a better idea. If the branch approach fails, I go to the Better Business Bureau and the SEC, with carbon copies for my senators and representatives at both the state and federal levels. I have personal experience with the success rate of this approach, having once been professionally responsible for responding to complaint letters forwarded to my major credit card corporation employer from these sources.
I've worked in the credit card industry for eight years and know how to ultimately win this engagement. Make it easy on yourselves and pave the way for me to close this account quickly and absolutely free of charge. No membership fee, no closing fee. You'll never get them from me, and you'll end up having to spend way more than $20 just fighting me and reversing any damage you do to my credit report. Expensive call center reps will experience very long talk times, and their supervisors and managers will end up on the phone a lot too. And the longer this takes me, the more I'll make sure it affects your bottom line. I'm already highly annoyed and frankly amazed that I have to physically go to a branch for this. This is the 21st century and I have to travel to close an account that has no balance? Are you kidding me? The manager there will get an earful, and I'll only just be getting started.
Since my statements say "[Evil Credit Card Company #1]" and not "[Evil Credit Card Company #2]", my battle is with you, not them. If you want me off your back, you will be my intermediary. You will do what is necessary to get [Evil Credit Card Company #2] to close this account (assuming your agent was speaking truthfully about [Evil Credit Card Company #2] servicing the account, but if you haven't noticed, I'm finding it challenging to trust you at the moment).
Good luck.
Regards,
[Buck 99]”
The following excerpt is an email Buck sent to his enemy du jour, a company that is making it difficult for him to close a long-dead account, and who has instructed him that he should visit a branch:
“Dear [Evil Credit Card Company #1],
I will visit a branch, but I am displeased. I called the number you provided and was forwarded to [Evil Credit Card Company #2]. The call was disconnected but fortunately the [Evil Credit Card Company #1] agent had given me the phone number before attempting the transfer. Then I proceeded to call [Evil Credit Card Company #2] three times and was ultimately disconnected from each of those calls in three separate and distinct ways before making it to a single human being. All this taking time away from my day for an account I neither use nor want, and in fact believed to be already closed.
I suspect that the process has been intentionally engineered to make closing an account difficult. I include both [Evil Credit Card Company #1] and [Evil Credit Card Company #2] in this accusation. I also detect from your response that you haven't even looked at my account. The phrase "if the account balance exceeds $2500" gives it away. The balance is ZERO. The account has been dormant for years. Nice form letter, guys. Thanks for spending $0.25 servicing your customer with a pair of button clicks.
If the branch approach fails, then I may be forced to close the account by mail, but there is no way that I will pay a fee for that "service." How am I to ensure that my $20 won't be applied to the membership fee? Perhaps this is what happened the last time I tried to close this account.
No, I have a better idea. If the branch approach fails, I go to the Better Business Bureau and the SEC, with carbon copies for my senators and representatives at both the state and federal levels. I have personal experience with the success rate of this approach, having once been professionally responsible for responding to complaint letters forwarded to my major credit card corporation employer from these sources.
I've worked in the credit card industry for eight years and know how to ultimately win this engagement. Make it easy on yourselves and pave the way for me to close this account quickly and absolutely free of charge. No membership fee, no closing fee. You'll never get them from me, and you'll end up having to spend way more than $20 just fighting me and reversing any damage you do to my credit report. Expensive call center reps will experience very long talk times, and their supervisors and managers will end up on the phone a lot too. And the longer this takes me, the more I'll make sure it affects your bottom line. I'm already highly annoyed and frankly amazed that I have to physically go to a branch for this. This is the 21st century and I have to travel to close an account that has no balance? Are you kidding me? The manager there will get an earful, and I'll only just be getting started.
Since my statements say "[Evil Credit Card Company #1]" and not "[Evil Credit Card Company #2]", my battle is with you, not them. If you want me off your back, you will be my intermediary. You will do what is necessary to get [Evil Credit Card Company #2] to close this account (assuming your agent was speaking truthfully about [Evil Credit Card Company #2] servicing the account, but if you haven't noticed, I'm finding it challenging to trust you at the moment).
Good luck.
Regards,
[Buck 99]”
Friday, October 06, 2006
Tweaker
Tweaker was the only person Buck knew who could take a perfectly smooth day and somehow wring an emergency from it.
The walls of the Mission Control Center (MCC) held the faint green hue of the status light. Sure, there were issues, but by and large things were going well. The tasks captured in the By-the-Minute schedule - an abomination born of project management practices gone horribly awry that our faithful readers will recognize as the primary deliverable for which our protagonist, the intrepid Buck 99, is unfortunately responsible – were systematically completing ahead of forecast in most cases, and well in advance of deadline dates in all other cases. This particular day had absolutely zero planned milestones of level “CRITICAL,” nor were there any tasks due for completion of levels “CRUCIAL,” “ESSENTIAL,” or even “MIND-BOGGLINGLY IMPORTANT.” And the only risk for which there was no contingency plan had not occurred (Risk ID 722568: “Sol goes supernova and destroys all customer records, and yeah, the world too”) and was deemed extremely unlikely to occur today, especially since Sol is well known to have insufficient mass to go nova, let alone supernova. No, the sun would not burn out, it would gradually (i.e., on an astrological time scale) fade away into white dwarf status followed tens of billions of years later by cold, dark oblivion. No explosions today. Today would be slow.
“Buck, when are you going to have the report ready?” she asked.
Buck looked up at the atomic digital clock on the wall. The time was precisely 11:25:42.0078 EST, which was exactly 2 hours 4 minutes and 17.0022 seconds prior to when the report was due to arrive in her in-box. Buck recalled, however, that the previous day he had promised her that today he would deliver the report a half hour earlier for her convenience (an extra 30 minutes to complete a 10-minute copy/paste exercise), but that still gave him 1 hour 36 minutes plus change. He re-confirmed his commitment by replying, “You’ll have the report at 1300 hours.”
His experience with Tweaker informed him that she was well on her way to freaking out about absolutely nothing, a daily occurrence since the beginning of the MCC execution phase. So in a vain attempt to head off that bit of nastiness at the pass, he had begun to prepare the report at 11:00:00, the moment of his arrival. Since there were no milestones to report, all he had to do was take the report that was published by the previous shift’s By-the-Minute Manager (whom Buck will hereafter refer to as Dr. Quack if he actually has reason to refer to him again), fix the erroneous details, and republish it. This would be a fifteen minute task, punctuated by numerous and various interruptions by other individuals eager to justify their existences by finding things to worry about.
At 12:15:07, Tweaker asked for an ETA on the report. “Almost ready,” responded Buck gruffly.
“Good. I need that by 1300 hours today, remember.”
Buck remembered and told her so. He was nearly certain that his tone of voice accurately conveyed his annoyance. Couldn’t she see the two people standing at his desk?
At 12:30:55 Buck glanced over at Tweaker. It was difficult to determine whether her ill coloring was a function of her anxiety or the lighting of the status indicator. He took no chances and tried to reassure her with an update. “Just a few more minutes.”
“I need it by 1330 hours, but it would be better if I had it by 1300. Will it be ready?” she asked.
At that moment the light in the room could have been any color at all, but all Buck saw was red.
Her tone spoke volumes about the degree to which she felt she was being put out by Buck’s perceived delay. Never mind that Buck had explained to her before his shift started that there were unlikely to be any changes since the morning report and she could go ahead and get started early by simply copying the morning report. They could always take the two minutes to reconcile the “deltas” (there were none) at 1300 or 1330, whichever she preferred.
Buck sensed her fear, could almost smell it like a dog, and toyed with the idea of capitalizing on it. If she failed to deliver her report by 14:15:00 EST, then in her mind she would stand out like a sore thumb as an incompetent who failed to deliver her report on time. Phone calls would be received and uncomfortable conversations would take place. A notation would be added to her dossier. This would not do at all.
Of course she would pin the blame on Buck, and Buck didn’t relish uncomfortable conversations any more than she did. He’d had his fair share over the years and knew that brand of torture too intimately. No, he would deliver exactly what he said he would deliver, and he would do it earlier than planned in accordance with the natural laws of consultancy.
Nevertheless, Tweaker chimed in again five minutes later, desperate for good news. Buck’s mouse pointer was hovering over the “Send” button even as she spoke. The time on the wall was 12:36:01, and Buck’s faith in the half-life of Cesium 133 convinced him of the accuracy of this measurement.
If Tweaker had been a contractor rather than a Cubopolis agent, then Buck would have immediately spoken the necessary words to embarrass her straight into early retirement. Unfortunately this was not the reality of the situation. If he berated this moron in the manner she merited, it could mean the end of his career as a consultant. He briefly wondered why this should concern him and enjoyed a brief, bright, inner glimpse into a possible future as a bulldozer operator, but in the end he meekly chose the path prescribed by the Doctrine of Middle Class Compliance (DMCC), the same path that would condemn him to remain contained “within the box.” He clicked “Send” and cheerfully informed her that the information was in her email.
“Oh!” she exclaimed as though in shock. “It’s early!”
Now Buck’s record had been consistent in this regard, and yet here she was publicly acting surprised. Clearly it was a poorly conceived power play designed to portray a contrast between the strong, dependable up-and-comer and the weak, unreliable consultant. Buck’s teeth clenched in fury, but after he thought about it for a moment he realized he had no cause for concern. The audience in the MCC had watched this same drama unfold every single day and were themselves historically prone to being tweaked themselves by this same tweaker. Besides, it was his job to make his client look good, even if it wasn’t really his client, just someone who worked for the same company as his client, which made her his client by proxy.
Tweaker ended up remaining appeased for all of ten minutes. Then the next hour was spent with Tweaker worrying over the format that Buck would use on the next day’s report. Naturally Buck couldn’t be trusted to handle these crucial details himself. As she hovered over him, peering over his shoulder, pointing at his screen and issuing instructions, she was completely unaware that the tiny MS Word icon entitled “Tweaker” on the bottom of his screen represented the minimized window of a blog entry exposing her inner essence to the world via cyberspace. Meanwhile Buck sighed in resignation and nodded periodically whenever he detected a pause in the cadence of her speech. He’d end up doing it all his own way tomorrow, just like he always did, because he’d tried it her way before, and her way sucked.
The walls of the Mission Control Center (MCC) held the faint green hue of the status light. Sure, there were issues, but by and large things were going well. The tasks captured in the By-the-Minute schedule - an abomination born of project management practices gone horribly awry that our faithful readers will recognize as the primary deliverable for which our protagonist, the intrepid Buck 99, is unfortunately responsible – were systematically completing ahead of forecast in most cases, and well in advance of deadline dates in all other cases. This particular day had absolutely zero planned milestones of level “CRITICAL,” nor were there any tasks due for completion of levels “CRUCIAL,” “ESSENTIAL,” or even “MIND-BOGGLINGLY IMPORTANT.” And the only risk for which there was no contingency plan had not occurred (Risk ID 722568: “Sol goes supernova and destroys all customer records, and yeah, the world too”) and was deemed extremely unlikely to occur today, especially since Sol is well known to have insufficient mass to go nova, let alone supernova. No, the sun would not burn out, it would gradually (i.e., on an astrological time scale) fade away into white dwarf status followed tens of billions of years later by cold, dark oblivion. No explosions today. Today would be slow.
“Buck, when are you going to have the report ready?” she asked.
Buck looked up at the atomic digital clock on the wall. The time was precisely 11:25:42.0078 EST, which was exactly 2 hours 4 minutes and 17.0022 seconds prior to when the report was due to arrive in her in-box. Buck recalled, however, that the previous day he had promised her that today he would deliver the report a half hour earlier for her convenience (an extra 30 minutes to complete a 10-minute copy/paste exercise), but that still gave him 1 hour 36 minutes plus change. He re-confirmed his commitment by replying, “You’ll have the report at 1300 hours.”
His experience with Tweaker informed him that she was well on her way to freaking out about absolutely nothing, a daily occurrence since the beginning of the MCC execution phase. So in a vain attempt to head off that bit of nastiness at the pass, he had begun to prepare the report at 11:00:00, the moment of his arrival. Since there were no milestones to report, all he had to do was take the report that was published by the previous shift’s By-the-Minute Manager (whom Buck will hereafter refer to as Dr. Quack if he actually has reason to refer to him again), fix the erroneous details, and republish it. This would be a fifteen minute task, punctuated by numerous and various interruptions by other individuals eager to justify their existences by finding things to worry about.
At 12:15:07, Tweaker asked for an ETA on the report. “Almost ready,” responded Buck gruffly.
“Good. I need that by 1300 hours today, remember.”
Buck remembered and told her so. He was nearly certain that his tone of voice accurately conveyed his annoyance. Couldn’t she see the two people standing at his desk?
At 12:30:55 Buck glanced over at Tweaker. It was difficult to determine whether her ill coloring was a function of her anxiety or the lighting of the status indicator. He took no chances and tried to reassure her with an update. “Just a few more minutes.”
“I need it by 1330 hours, but it would be better if I had it by 1300. Will it be ready?” she asked.
At that moment the light in the room could have been any color at all, but all Buck saw was red.
Her tone spoke volumes about the degree to which she felt she was being put out by Buck’s perceived delay. Never mind that Buck had explained to her before his shift started that there were unlikely to be any changes since the morning report and she could go ahead and get started early by simply copying the morning report. They could always take the two minutes to reconcile the “deltas” (there were none) at 1300 or 1330, whichever she preferred.
Buck sensed her fear, could almost smell it like a dog, and toyed with the idea of capitalizing on it. If she failed to deliver her report by 14:15:00 EST, then in her mind she would stand out like a sore thumb as an incompetent who failed to deliver her report on time. Phone calls would be received and uncomfortable conversations would take place. A notation would be added to her dossier. This would not do at all.
Of course she would pin the blame on Buck, and Buck didn’t relish uncomfortable conversations any more than she did. He’d had his fair share over the years and knew that brand of torture too intimately. No, he would deliver exactly what he said he would deliver, and he would do it earlier than planned in accordance with the natural laws of consultancy.
Nevertheless, Tweaker chimed in again five minutes later, desperate for good news. Buck’s mouse pointer was hovering over the “Send” button even as she spoke. The time on the wall was 12:36:01, and Buck’s faith in the half-life of Cesium 133 convinced him of the accuracy of this measurement.
If Tweaker had been a contractor rather than a Cubopolis agent, then Buck would have immediately spoken the necessary words to embarrass her straight into early retirement. Unfortunately this was not the reality of the situation. If he berated this moron in the manner she merited, it could mean the end of his career as a consultant. He briefly wondered why this should concern him and enjoyed a brief, bright, inner glimpse into a possible future as a bulldozer operator, but in the end he meekly chose the path prescribed by the Doctrine of Middle Class Compliance (DMCC), the same path that would condemn him to remain contained “within the box.” He clicked “Send” and cheerfully informed her that the information was in her email.
“Oh!” she exclaimed as though in shock. “It’s early!”
Now Buck’s record had been consistent in this regard, and yet here she was publicly acting surprised. Clearly it was a poorly conceived power play designed to portray a contrast between the strong, dependable up-and-comer and the weak, unreliable consultant. Buck’s teeth clenched in fury, but after he thought about it for a moment he realized he had no cause for concern. The audience in the MCC had watched this same drama unfold every single day and were themselves historically prone to being tweaked themselves by this same tweaker. Besides, it was his job to make his client look good, even if it wasn’t really his client, just someone who worked for the same company as his client, which made her his client by proxy.
Tweaker ended up remaining appeased for all of ten minutes. Then the next hour was spent with Tweaker worrying over the format that Buck would use on the next day’s report. Naturally Buck couldn’t be trusted to handle these crucial details himself. As she hovered over him, peering over his shoulder, pointing at his screen and issuing instructions, she was completely unaware that the tiny MS Word icon entitled “Tweaker” on the bottom of his screen represented the minimized window of a blog entry exposing her inner essence to the world via cyberspace. Meanwhile Buck sighed in resignation and nodded periodically whenever he detected a pause in the cadence of her speech. He’d end up doing it all his own way tomorrow, just like he always did, because he’d tried it her way before, and her way sucked.
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