what is orc?

What is orc? No, it's not the Jeopardy answer to the clue: Creature Saruman bred for his army. It is a question posed to me by a co-worker today. What is orc? It came at the end of a long and particularly stressful day, when I was beset on all sides by inane questions, ignorant accusations, and general ineptitude. The co-worker had just realized that the cause of the latest customer issue about to be left on my doorstep like a dead mouse (of the furry kind) was in fact user error. Good, I quipped, that's one less orc that will have to fall to my sword tonight. It's how I de-stress, you see. I come home, pet the cat, scratch the dog's ears, pour myself a glass of wine and sit down to write, or to play one fantasy game or another where evil is easily identified and susceptible, given knowledge and skill, to the sweep of a sword or precise cast of a spell. But the response was only: what is orc? For a moment I was nonplussed. I work for a software development organization afterall. Nevermind that the software we produce isn't remotely related to games; it's virtually impossible to acquire more than passing knowledge of computers and not have been exposed to fantasy concepts. This was one of the "upstairs" crew though. Some leeway must be given. And because I have long since outgrown the naive notion that most people I talk to might actually read for pleasure as I do, I replied helpfully, "Did you see Lord of the Rings?" No. How can that be? The movies made millions, probably billions, of dollars. Was all that revenue generated by lunatics like me who went to see them more than a handful of times? What is orc? I began to doubt myself on the way home. Could it be that I'm the one seriously out of touch with reality? Am I the only one who finds American corporate reality absurd, demoralizing, and just plain stupid? Perhaps …. But now that I've pet the cat, scratched the dog's ears, and had my first glass of wine, it's time to sit down, paint woad on my face, sling my two-handed sword across my back, and go hunt some orc.