Folks, if any of you know how to use this, copy it, store it somewhere, and bless you.
I phoned NBS. They weren't interested. I phoned the Examiner and the Trib. That started to feel a little spooky, like ECorp had gotten there. But I don't mean to live inside my delusions; I decided to make a personal appearance, to show someone the documents. I decided to peddle across to The Daily Planet.
I took an old bookbag, laid the manuscript into with and lashed it across the top of my bikeframe to keep the straps from creasing my jacket, then ferreted up Alameda, across Slauson and Olympic through the weekday traffic until I came out on Second and Fairfax. I locked the bike to a cable that slanted from a phone pole, went into a john at the Farmer's Market, straightened my tie and waited for my sweat to dry and the color from my ride to leave my face before I marched across into the front office.
Maybe I need a mask or something. The mild-mannered guy behind the counter waved me off immediately.
"These are documents related to the operation of a nuclear plant."
"What happened?"
"What?"
"Which plant? Is anything happening?"
Where? Why wouldn't something be happening? I stammer.
"OK." Over his shoulder: "Do we have any reports?" A coworker's palms go up, out.
"I doubt you would have received any," I start. "That's why I came." He looks tired; I continue: "The structure of the plant--"
"No. Hang on. No, we don't need that. I appreciate your thinking of the Planet, but -"
"Wait, in the steamgens of these --"
"Is this recent?"
"Well, it's continuous, yes."
"No one has received any kind of a warning. Did anybody die? Do you know names or places? Is anybody hurt?"
"People --"
"No, nothing about nuclear plants -- look it splits open, it goes boom, the President says it will eat my grandchildren, sure. You got that, spit it. Go. Fight with me. But-- "
"Given the size of the nuclear power industry across --"
"No. Truly, no. Now look, I'm not unsympathetic. There's no use for this. You're wasting your -- I don't know, whatever you do with your time."
Why do I think that you meant you-all? I don't move. He gambles that a couple paragraphs will get rid of me, screws himself up to it.
"I printed stories about the plant -- ECorp's plant; that's who you're talking about, right? A leak here, and infraction there -- bam, there it is: big headlines, front page. Nobody reads it. Next one goes page eight, then sixteen.
"No: I pay for copy, pay for paper, pay someone to carry that paper around. Hey, I pay to advertise the paper -- so I actually pay people to read it, though they wouldn't know. Still nobody reads about leaks. Understand?
"You want me to put something in the paper that no one wants to read, that's called an ad. I got nothing against ads; I don't think anyone will read it. You want to pay me, open up an ad, say you stole that from ECorp? I don't think so.
And if that's really what that is, that wad of papers, you might want to put it somewhere and not go walking around with it."
Showing posts with label Ecorp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ecorp. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Basketball for Lunch
The game was fun in its way -- the basketball -- ties pulling on and off, hustling back to the office, shirts too sweaty, oddly tight. I'm too bullnecked for the clip-on ties, so I'm half-standing in the back of Cliff's mustang, trying to get my neck in his rear-view and get the damned noose tied while he careens around the downtown alleys he seems to know. The guys laugh and swear at my stumbling. "Five minutes" Cliff keeps promising. I'm thrilled to worry about getting in to work late: piss-all, maybe they'll lay me off. I might be lucky that way. Rudy's on about a class-action suit, but all he means is that LISA doesn't have the right to take back our work.
If LISA offered to hire me on permanently, what would I do? I do feel some responsibility to stay on, to get as much as I can. But then I even wish LISA would catch me, just so the fear would end. That scares me: you know that feeling when you watch someone at the side of the road and the car starts to track off?
I will exit somehow. It's like Fabienne talking about her own considerations when the doctors diagnosed her leukemia. As she put it,
Maybe Carl makes the most sense. Stealing from LISA is a drunkard's walk.
In my case, that means I leave without being caught or LISA catches me. I can never know it's too late until it is. I can never feel I've got enough on ECorp: no information will shut it down. The hour basketball game may be just the thing. It's more a gesture anyway, best because it's pointless, as though we had no idea whom we were flipping off. Which I suppose one never does.
"We're temps, Rood." Could there be a case?
"We still have rights. No one does this."
If LISA offered to hire me on permanently, what would I do? I do feel some responsibility to stay on, to get as much as I can. But then I even wish LISA would catch me, just so the fear would end. That scares me: you know that feeling when you watch someone at the side of the road and the car starts to track off?
I will exit somehow. It's like Fabienne talking about her own considerations when the doctors diagnosed her leukemia. As she put it,
"I tried a class action suit. I thought it would work, you know, many people die, no one cares. I had been a small role in a movie. I am young enough men will feel sorry for me.
"But I spoke to a lawyer, no? He said my chance of leukemia was a few percentage points higher for the background radiation of the plant. There might be some chance, perhaps, a class action suit. Who wants to live in court with cameras?"
Maybe Carl makes the most sense. Stealing from LISA is a drunkard's walk.
In my case, that means I leave without being caught or LISA catches me. I can never know it's too late until it is. I can never feel I've got enough on ECorp: no information will shut it down. The hour basketball game may be just the thing. It's more a gesture anyway, best because it's pointless, as though we had no idea whom we were flipping off. Which I suppose one never does.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Filing Stolen Papers
So,
someone analyzes my responses to see I'm too stupid to be an engineer. I don't suppose I'll confuse them. They dumped over a hundred temps that trained with me, all but eight or nine. We repeat that the others read too slow -- nervously, I suppose, though I wish as often I were laid off. The supers nod, but I can't make those numbers work. For what Ecorp spent to train that room, the slowboats can't have cost too much.
What might LISA check? We each get documents, fresh stacks, each the size of a novel in printed type. We each wade through a couple stacks or so a day. We read, we classify each doc by site, date, topic, activity, personnel -- a set of numbers, a couple words. The supers get a batch, record hour and minute, hand out another batch. They spot-check everything, revise nothing. They send it back. The slowest get laid off, they say, plus Jim.
But I have to photocopy at lunch or evening. I skim ahead, hang onto docs overtime. I can't photocopy at LISA, of course. A guard actually stands at the machine. Branley told me, laughing, and I actually walked back down the hall with him to say hello to the guard. We annoyed him, I suspect, but mildly; and it seemed like the least suspicious thing to do at the time.
So I copy the docs at the library, Alambres Public Library, just across the street and about a half a block down. But that means I have to skim thru the docs and look for copy, then hang onto the docs til lunch or 5 oclock. If I copy at noon, I leave the copies in a copy of Sartre's Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr -- something no one's apt to disturb.
The irony of which makes this work better as fiction, doesn't it? Assuming there's no dead body turns up, or none with a name on it.
someone analyzes my responses to see I'm too stupid to be an engineer. I don't suppose I'll confuse them. They dumped over a hundred temps that trained with me, all but eight or nine. We repeat that the others read too slow -- nervously, I suppose, though I wish as often I were laid off. The supers nod, but I can't make those numbers work. For what Ecorp spent to train that room, the slowboats can't have cost too much.
What might LISA check? We each get documents, fresh stacks, each the size of a novel in printed type. We each wade through a couple stacks or so a day. We read, we classify each doc by site, date, topic, activity, personnel -- a set of numbers, a couple words. The supers get a batch, record hour and minute, hand out another batch. They spot-check everything, revise nothing. They send it back. The slowest get laid off, they say, plus Jim.
But I have to photocopy at lunch or evening. I skim ahead, hang onto docs overtime. I can't photocopy at LISA, of course. A guard actually stands at the machine. Branley told me, laughing, and I actually walked back down the hall with him to say hello to the guard. We annoyed him, I suspect, but mildly; and it seemed like the least suspicious thing to do at the time.
So I copy the docs at the library, Alambres Public Library, just across the street and about a half a block down. But that means I have to skim thru the docs and look for copy, then hang onto the docs til lunch or 5 oclock. If I copy at noon, I leave the copies in a copy of Sartre's Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr -- something no one's apt to disturb.
The irony of which makes this work better as fiction, doesn't it? Assuming there's no dead body turns up, or none with a name on it.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Orwell's Grave
"Four verbs," Aetna says -- Edna. Edna -- Aetna -- is from The Far Side, roughly pyramidal, sits beside me or across the table in the War Room at LISA M-F 8-5 and jokes with the dozen or so of us who've survived the recent eighty-some percent attrition rate.
The supers kicked back my Friday batch of documents today; I must have looked perplexed.
"They'd really like everything that happens in these documents to fit under four verbs," she continued. I'd really like that, too. LISA gets the documents from ECorp, her only customer after five years of happy corporate marriage. ECorp seems to get them from all over. They're from the NRC, Zzptech, Westinghouse, Bechtel: resumes, discussions of steam generator corrosion, redundant signatures for shipments coming & going -- it's hard to tell which.
Four verbs. The super actually walked over to my desk to mention that the word accident did not exist for LISA: "We call that an incident. No. Accident, if there ever were an accident, I'm not a highly enough placed official to chew you out about it." Then, walking away: "And that's not to imply that there is such a thing."
Does this sound like something I was supposed to have known?
So imagine, George Orwell writes a book, calls it 1984. He gets it published, even read, read so much his folks incorporate his words into daily English. I'd call that time for brews and congratulations. But no, the people he would burlesque use his piece as a guidebook -- to the extent that no one in charge anywhere at any time during six weeks of training could say or would say, "Yo! Asshole! four verbs."
So why write why move? Hey, go ahead, buy a place in Seaside or San Anselmo and let the wind blow when Zztech opens the pressurizer and "blows it out" for cleaning. I'll go write loveletters to carp.
Aetna took it better. She does:
She must have meant to be comforting: she near-swallowd the guffaw when my eyes bugged. Like me? Am I unzipped? Should I shave my whiskers, or does that look like I'm trying to hide?
I barely talk at LISA. I try not to look long at anyone or swing my shoulders as I walk. Maybe she saw the bicycle I lock to a phone pole outside the office lot. I had not taken Aetna to be perceptive. So clearly she has perceived more than I and is willing to be generous.
"No, really," she went on, "What is it you do?"
Eat, sleep, move when poked. Until five seconds ago I smuggled documents out of the information service of a nuclear energy facility.
"I mean, do you paint, do you write?"
I flatter myself -- but, well, you see.
"You're not invisible, you know."
"No." I don't have a third eye either. Is this something everybody sees?
"Oh, Jack, you're fine. But all this regularity has to just bug you, this business of having to classify things just the way we-all do, of having the supervisors review each little thing and send things back when you would normally classify everything some way no one even imagines."
No one even imagines?
She talks on to smooth my nerves, but the gestures hint broadly that she knows nothing of what would make me nervous, then:
"People know things about you, Jack, just like you know things about them. Sometimes we find it easier to not speak. Don't we?"
Do we?
I need to be misunderstood. I need someone who doesn't care:
The supers kicked back my Friday batch of documents today; I must have looked perplexed.
"They'd really like everything that happens in these documents to fit under four verbs," she continued. I'd really like that, too. LISA gets the documents from ECorp, her only customer after five years of happy corporate marriage. ECorp seems to get them from all over. They're from the NRC, Zzptech, Westinghouse, Bechtel: resumes, discussions of steam generator corrosion, redundant signatures for shipments coming & going -- it's hard to tell which.
Four verbs. The super actually walked over to my desk to mention that the word accident did not exist for LISA: "We call that an incident. No. Accident, if there ever were an accident, I'm not a highly enough placed official to chew you out about it." Then, walking away: "And that's not to imply that there is such a thing."
Does this sound like something I was supposed to have known?
So imagine, George Orwell writes a book, calls it 1984. He gets it published, even read, read so much his folks incorporate his words into daily English. I'd call that time for brews and congratulations. But no, the people he would burlesque use his piece as a guidebook -- to the extent that no one in charge anywhere at any time during six weeks of training could say or would say, "Yo! Asshole! four verbs."
So why write why move? Hey, go ahead, buy a place in Seaside or San Anselmo and let the wind blow when Zztech opens the pressurizer and "blows it out" for cleaning. I'll go write loveletters to carp.
Aetna took it better. She does:
"Don't worry. This sort of work is hard for people like you."
She must have meant to be comforting: she near-swallowd the guffaw when my eyes bugged. Like me? Am I unzipped? Should I shave my whiskers, or does that look like I'm trying to hide?
I barely talk at LISA. I try not to look long at anyone or swing my shoulders as I walk. Maybe she saw the bicycle I lock to a phone pole outside the office lot. I had not taken Aetna to be perceptive. So clearly she has perceived more than I and is willing to be generous.
"No, really," she went on, "What is it you do?"
Eat, sleep, move when poked. Until five seconds ago I smuggled documents out of the information service of a nuclear energy facility.
"I mean, do you paint, do you write?"
I flatter myself -- but, well, you see.
"You're not invisible, you know."
"No." I don't have a third eye either. Is this something everybody sees?
"Oh, Jack, you're fine. But all this regularity has to just bug you, this business of having to classify things just the way we-all do, of having the supervisors review each little thing and send things back when you would normally classify everything some way no one even imagines."
No one even imagines?
She talks on to smooth my nerves, but the gestures hint broadly that she knows nothing of what would make me nervous, then:
"People know things about you, Jack, just like you know things about them. Sometimes we find it easier to not speak. Don't we?"
Do we?
I need to be misunderstood. I need someone who doesn't care:
O gentle reader, do not leave!
Friday, May 4, 2007
snoitisnarT
Sorry to leave abruptly. There's a rhythm to this; I'll get it. I imagine a You: When I don't write, You get pissed. When I get pretentious, you feel shame; you don't forward the site. You stay away, but only for a bit.
So go ahead, pretend I'm real.
I'm staying with my father, have for months since I got back from Paris broke and 40-some hours awake, startled at the width of suburban streets.
I explain for myself if not you.
I don't mean to present this as romantic or deliberate or other-than-fuckupped. I came, I wrote, I floundered. I had some idea that I could write truth, so no one read to say I sucked. I sat ripping pages out of Writer's Market, nothing to smoke them with. Phillipe loaned me a couple grand to relocate: "Come to Paris." Whyever not? About the time the money left I left my address book and passport on a car in the Rue de francs bourgeois long enough to get a couple car-lengths away and turn -- oops.
The Embassy folk Place Concord felt I'd behaved badly. The Embassy must be a fun place to work. "You meet the strangest people," as an elegant ancient man with a curling handlebar moustache told my aunt Monica one time on a bus in Culver City as she leaned over and glanced at his sketchbook to verify that he was, indeed, Salvador Dali.
The embassy does filter the people entering. But then, I qualified -- a blue-eyes-no-Qu'ran thing, I suppose: as an American citizen, I had a right to know why I couldn't return home.
Now I wish I were back at le Beaubourg, thankful again at the grey rain slanting outside, proud owner of a chair with a view of two library stacks. Do I miss it? Or does seeing the rainwater jet through the handcarved gargoyle mouths on Rue Saint Denis give me a way to avoid being in my father's home in Lakewood CA speaking Aeromilitary with you --
-- and dealing with my job for ECorp, at LISA, where I classify the documents of said industry in a language which contains just four verbs, none of which involve leak, break down, irradiate, brainfart or fuck up.
No no no: moi, je suis poete: so I've just got to find what rhymes with incident.
So go ahead, pretend I'm real.
I'm staying with my father, have for months since I got back from Paris broke and 40-some hours awake, startled at the width of suburban streets.
I explain for myself if not you.
I don't mean to present this as romantic or deliberate or other-than-fuckupped. I came, I wrote, I floundered. I had some idea that I could write truth, so no one read to say I sucked. I sat ripping pages out of Writer's Market, nothing to smoke them with. Phillipe loaned me a couple grand to relocate: "Come to Paris." Whyever not? About the time the money left I left my address book and passport on a car in the Rue de francs bourgeois long enough to get a couple car-lengths away and turn -- oops.
The Embassy folk Place Concord felt I'd behaved badly. The Embassy must be a fun place to work. "You meet the strangest people," as an elegant ancient man with a curling handlebar moustache told my aunt Monica one time on a bus in Culver City as she leaned over and glanced at his sketchbook to verify that he was, indeed, Salvador Dali.
The embassy does filter the people entering. But then, I qualified -- a blue-eyes-no-Qu'ran thing, I suppose: as an American citizen, I had a right to know why I couldn't return home.
"All you have to do is bring in five Americans who do have ID's to vouch for you."
"Can I get them to come into some office in Los Angeles?"
"Don't you know anyone?"
"I'm American."
"The United States Government will not issue a passport with no way of
identifying you."
"Can I get a dozen Frenchmen to say I'm not French?"
"American citizens with identification. Do your best."
Now I wish I were back at le Beaubourg, thankful again at the grey rain slanting outside, proud owner of a chair with a view of two library stacks. Do I miss it? Or does seeing the rainwater jet through the handcarved gargoyle mouths on Rue Saint Denis give me a way to avoid being in my father's home in Lakewood CA speaking Aeromilitary with you --
-- and dealing with my job for ECorp, at LISA, where I classify the documents of said industry in a language which contains just four verbs, none of which involve leak, break down, irradiate, brainfart or fuck up.
No no no: moi, je suis poete: so I've just got to find what rhymes with incident.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Mayday
"You work for ECorp."I'd thrown my bicycle in the back of his pickup where he pulled over on that long stretch near Walker Narrows -- an act of faith, but an innocent one -- thrown it in and jumped into the cab grateful enough. Then I got the novelistic long moment, his head framed in the window of the pickup, the eyes the ears the nose the line of the hair no one I knew: no one from Voltage Temps, no one I'd passed in LISA's corridors sneaking to the john. And I considering how fast the truck might be going, how the asphalt would rasp and tear were I to jump, where or whether a point might come in which I could snag the bike from the back, snag it and have a few feet down some road before he might turn.
The pops of the shotguns just off at El Cuello Rojo Trap and Skeet spoke
Time
Time
Time .12 gauge, 20 gauge -- For years my father reloaded shells from a huge tin of slow-burning Unique powder someone had special-ordered and abandoned. They'd flash a good foot out of a 25-inch barrel and roar; I listened for his roar.
Time.
"Yes," I answer, answer the driver who has pulled over. If he knows, what can I tell him?
"Ha! Look at yourself, man - no, your eyes: look in the mirror. You fool! Like I can't spot an engineer so close to ECorp, nothing else for fucking miles."Nothing else. Voltage Temps signs my checks; I work for LISA, at the office there in Alambres, so of course I work for ECorp:
"Don't we all?"
"Who else but an engineer would peddle through the middle of nowhere on a bicycle with his shirt open and his tie flapping in the air like a goddamn dog's tongue."
I don't know any engineers: what I'll write comes without expertise.
"You headed down the bike trail, down the river?"
"Sure." A little out of my way, but I'd ride with no traffic, and that would do.So I sat and looked at the ducks on the river. I decided to write you, to write this, to actually post it.
Just don't believe a word.
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