I spend 9 hours a day working to save people time. Does that make sense? Does it add up? If you have a car that theoretically saves you time when you drive to Boston but an industry is spending millions of hours to design and manufacture cars then can you really say it saved any time? And if you drive for a living then the car hasn't saved you any time at all. In fact, it's all a complete fraud. "We're saving time." Bullshit. Total bullshit. Someone invented a noose and it'll save you time in getting to the grave. Die faster!
Believe me if you spend as much time manufacturing high tech stuff as I do then you would begin to question if there is any truth at all to its purported benefits. Basically what happened was I earned enough money to buy some tires and a six pack of beer so someone else can navigate a submarine remotely or test chemicals in the atmosphere...which will take up all of their time. What does it mean to save time? I believe I know since I spent 8 months using all my account of saved time. I figured, fuck it. Time for a withdrawal. I'm saving it and I will use it. I'm not going to die with a balance of saved time. No way. And at the time I went to Mexico I could not raise my arms above my head and walked stooped over and penniless, shitting blood for five years...so I didn't think it was smart to buy the bullshit that I worked to save someone else time.
Whatever, it's a social convention that's been swallowed like the bait you throw out to catch bass in the lake.
Speaking of death...I'm taking care of Bonnie this weekend. She is not only deaf but now she is also blind and needs drops put in her bugging eyes. I have to look at her belly when she is laying down to make sure she's still breathing. Give her mouth to mouth resuscitation when she gags.
I need some paint to decorate her Elizabethan cone. Like, color it to match her coat. I feel bad for her but I wasn't much different this last week. A full 40 hours working on a single impossible harness with a dozen breakouts and pins and connectors and strain reliefs. The stress actually broke me and the boss gave me a warning. The stress was too much and I was abandoned on the factory floor without food or water and I would come home to a 99 degree attic and pass out from exhaustion and then awake at 5am to do it again. I sort of laughed because the indignity of dying because I was wasting away under florescent lights building mystery machines was too beautiful. There was no music and no one speaks. We drag our bodies to work and home...it's almost like what we're doing is important but we actually have no idea what we're building. Some might say it is intelligent design but I call it something different. Anyway, I was deathly sick and lost the sight in one eye, it was weeping for no reason and I developed lung congestion and the pain in my neck is bad enough for me to take advantage of the bulk pain killers the company supplies because everyone there has diabetes and bad backs. This is exactly what a human life is worth...I had no idea what day it was and wandered the concrete floor in search of pins and crimpers and did not pass humans but shells of fleshy robots. So this is it, I figured there wasn't much difference between death and a lifetime of cable assembly. I mean, really. That's my excuse why I wound up in the woods with Kenny trailblazing through a forest of downed trees. I was on my moped and that meant dragging it under logs, coughing, sweating. Kenny, a punch drunk lug who looks like he fell out of the tree of hard knocks and hit every branch on the way down said I looked like a beaten man and he was right. Kenny rode his 650 Honda over branches and ended up in someone's backyard while I fell down the hill near the old age home. We sang our ode to Jackson the dwarf goat and for a second the labor and wasted time was worth it because as you know I worked at Bauer moving hockey equipment for this piano that Mr. Hawkins beat into submission. That night I ended up in Prescott Park in the grass making a video I can not post.
Anyway, this job is as physically easy as a job gets but the existence of this job is like a dagger in my heart. These products are indestructible. They are the opposite of biodegradable and we're shipping out hundreds of miles of copper. This is literally how you would treat a planet you were plundering because your ship is waiting to take you home to Jupiter in a few minutes. I wonder if Bill Gates hasn't already colonized another planet and Earth is just like a spare parts bike to the elite. Because this is how you would behave if there were no environmental consequences. It feels like we're so obsessed with preventing our extinction that we're going to cause our extinction. You got New Yorkers walking over dead homeless people. Come on, Bill, you think mankind is going to relocate to another planet? A job like this will kill me if I work at it or not. I'm inside the death factory and I can see that it's unstoppable. This relates to my opinion that the education system failed utterly but I don't want to get into that right now.
I'm also resisting the urge to commit to the manufacturing because in my mind it is a choice between that and life. The memory of certain people fades with the complexity of these harnesses. I love to do things well and to do these things well means a tolerance of 3 mm over a distance of 31 ft. That will produce a professional connector array. But it also demands I treat friends and memories like the heavy baggage that is slowing down the ship. Like, I'll drag the ocean bottom when I pass this way again. Ha! I thought my priorities were right but apparently they are fucked. I wonder how family and friends can encourage such a thing. Are they really family? Are they friends?
Or is that where they put me in the hierarchy of their demands? I come right after soft toilet paper and paying the cable bill?
Well, I don't have toilet paper or a cable bill. And if the vote is for me to embrace the war against the environment, and to embrace it so fully that their memories are less important than where IEOG-J2 #22 will connect to AEIGG J1 #7 on a robotic cable harness then I've definitely misunderstood something. Or they'll forgive me when we're having a barbecue and I steal a little time to practice crimping a #18AWG D-sub AMP Reverse sex socket...because it's more important...it saves people time....
Here's a multiple choice:
Which do you want?
A:
B:generic technology
Circle your choice. You may only choose one.
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