Wednesday, August 10, 2005


The New Delhi office was kept dark to save electricity and increase productivity. There were to be no distractions of extraneous light, although the darkness did sometimes facilitate a certain lack of discipline. Ravi began his day of work by looking through his bookmarks. He commenced surfing blogs, reading the capsulized perspectives presented in the posts, clicking his way through the no man's land of monthly and weekly archives. He ranted, raved and praised, in guestbooks, shoutboxes and comment fields, changing identities faster than a chameleon in a kaleidoscope. At some blogs he was the entire audience, so engaged was his enthusiasm for the pleasures of surfing. It was a kind of high that raced through his veins at the speed of a DSL download. An e-mail arrived sending him more links, and he surfed those, too. By mid-afternoon he hadn't done anything but look at blogs. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was his supervisor and he had something to say. "Ravi, we've chosen you as employee of the month. Our management and our customers are extremely satisfied with your work. Nobody here generates as much Website traffic as you."

Story #265

10 comments:

LiVEwiRe said...

changing identities faster than a chameleon in a kaleidoscope... that is great imagery! Now, if I could only find such a job.

The Mushroom said...

I have one of those jobs, though an email yesterday says that we're going to be getting screenshot software (apparently QA doesn't believe we know how to operate our semi-functional tools correctly and wants to watch, since the audio wasn't enough for them) and notice that doing non-work related things during those 45 minute wait-for-reboot/download/etc. calls will not be tolerated. I'm planning on setting my screensaver to activate after 10 minutes so we'll both have something interesting to watch while nothing happens.

M.P. said...

I think you invented a spy! That's why he got the award of "Employee of the month"! :)**

The Mushroom said...

Why does that picture make me want to hum "Neon Lights" by Kraftwerk?

Now we know why drive-in movies died a death -- people kept bringing their laptops.

Indeterminacy said...

Livewire: I did a google "chameleon in a kaleidoscope" and found out there's a band by that name. So I'm not that original, after all.

Mushroom: In most of Europe, you can still goof off, as companies are not allowed to monitor employee internet useage except in extreme cases.

M.P.: I got the idea for this from one of those google ads "Guaranteed Website traffic". What are they going to do? Pay people to visit my Website?

Mush: I miss drive-in movies. They must have vanished while I was over here. The ones I used to know have all been turned to parking lots.

Everyone: I may take the day off today, sorry. But I don't think I can come up with a good story by tonight. Too many other things going on. We'll see.

Eric said...

excellent as usual!

Doug The Una said...

If Ravi wants to move into management he should try social services.

Anonymous said...

Great story, I love every one of them.

On one of my jobs I had to do the sunday-shift at a call center. It was a very quite shift - as people usually tend to have less problems with the particuale subject on sundays.

It was in the early days of the internet and it was around new year. We had 10 computers standing around, all connected to the internet. It was two of us, which meant so much wasted bandwidth!

The local newspaper had this online vote: "How will the new year be?"

I hacked together a little Javascript which voted for "very bad" every 3 seconds. I wrote some HTML for opening this script in 20 Frames. We let it run all day. On 8 computers. (The other two computers we used for real surfing.)

In the evening the count was somewhere at a couple of thousands votes seeming to prove the Germans are very deppresive.

Next day the newspaper installed a script that disables double votes.

Indeterminacy said...

Great story, Dushan! I keep coming across surveys that say the Germans are pessimistic and depressed about the future. Maybe that was you, but I kind of think that's the trend.

I have a CD by an East German group from just after reunification. They're called "Die Vision", the CD was "Torture". One of their songs seemed to reflect the brief euphoria of the time. It's positively deluded, when one hears it today. The realities of one Germany have long since caught up with that euphoria. Having one's idealistic dreams fail to materialize often leads to depression and resignation.

I actually found the text of that song in a forum:

---
When the sun moved down in the holy war
Its all forgive and forget
Sing a song with us for a better world
Sing schalalalala

Sing it out loud a song for a better world
Sing Schalalalala
Sing it out loud a song for a better world
Sing schalalalala
Sing it out loud

And a stranger enters paradise and wants to spoil our song
Sing a song with us for a better world
Sing schalalalala

Sing it out loud a song for a better world
Sing schalalalala
(2 x)

See the old man has been waiting for us
And wants to join our song
Sing a song with us for a better world
Sing schalalalala

Refr. 2 x
------
And the sun will rise again for us
When the war is over and done
Sing a song with us for a better world
Sing schalalalala

Refr. 2 x

Indeterminacy said...

There's a kind of ironic poetry in the fact that the above spam comment should land here. I guess I'll leave it as a monument to ironic poetry.