Part 98 (1/2)
Perry looked down. ”Sorry. I'm out of practice with people.”
”I hope you'll stay with us,” he said, thinking *I hope you leave soon and never come back*.
”You miss it, huh?”
”Sometimes.”
”You said working here --”
”Working here. They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it's like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?” He snorted. ”It's like turning around a battles.h.i.+p by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick.”
”I hate working with a.s.sholes.”
”They're not a.s.sholes, that's the thing, Perry. They're some really smart people. They're nice. We have them over for dinner. They're fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, *every single one of them feels the same way I do*. They *all* have cool s.h.i.+t they want to do, but they can't do it.”
”Why?”
”It's like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be c.r.a.p. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is s.h.i.+t.”
”Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent -- 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you'll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.
”Maybe people are like that. If you're 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who's 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that's 81 percent non-bogus.”
”I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But f.u.c.k me, it's depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others' flaws.”
”Well, maybe that's the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative.”
”So what are virtues?”
”Additive, maybe. A shallower curve.”
”That'd be an interesting research project, if you could come up with some quant.i.tative measurements.”
”So what do you do around here all day?”
Lester blushed.
”What?”
”I'm building bigger mechanical computers, mostly. I print them out using the new volumetrics and have research a.s.sistants a.s.semble them. There's something soothing about them. I have an Apple ][+ clone running entirely on physical gates made out of extruded plastic skulls. It takes up an entire building out on one of the lots and when you play Pong on it, the sound of the jaws clacking is like listening to corpse beetles skeletonizing an elephant.”
”I think I'd like to see that,” Perry said, laughing a little.
”That can be arranged,” Lester said.
They were like gears that had once emerged from a mill with perfectly precise teeth, gears that could mesh and spin against each other, transferring energy.
They were like gears that had been ill-used in machines, apart from each other, until their precise teeth had been chipped and bent, so that they no longer meshed.