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enterprising businesses saw a new opportunity and started using ‘Subdividable!’ as a sales inducement. Including, for instance, used-car dealers that were willing to sell you a car as an agglomeration of separate little transactions for front bumper, right rear wheel well, alternator coil, spark plug, and so on, the purchase structured as thousands of different $4.99 transactions.
Springfield is the state capital, by the way, as well as the site of an incredible amount of Lincoln memorabilia.
Also, the causal issues related to legal liability for the incident turned out to be incredibly complex. The manufacturer’s specifications for the doors’ pneumatic systems did not adequately explain how the doors could close with such force
If you begin to get the idea that other people can actually live by the clear, simple principles of good advice, it can make you feel even worse about your own inabilities.
Anyhow, all this is part of the question of how I came to be posted here in Examinations—the
Meaning I was much more like the Christian than either of us would ever be willing to admit.
He seemed lithe and precise; his movements had the brisk economy of a man who knows time is a valuable asset.
the presentation had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it.
You’re watching As the World Turns,’ until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—‘ You’re watching As the World Turns’—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement.
‘You are sitting on an old yellow dorm couch, spinning a black-and-white soccer ball, and watching As the World Turns, without ever even acknowledging to yourself this is what you are doing.’
remember glancing and seeing that the older, mustachioed student beside me’s class notes were almost unbelievably neat and well-organized, with Roman numerals for the lecture’s main points and lowercase letters, inset numbers, and double indents for subheadings and corollaries. His handwriting itself looked almost automated, it was that good.
He was not anxious to ‘connect’ or be liked. But nor was he hostile or patronizing. What he seemed to be was ‘indifferent’—not in a meaningless, drifting, nihilistic way, but rather in a secure, self-confident way.
the first instructor I’d seen at any of the schools I’d drifted in and out of who seemed a hundred percent indifferent about being liked or seen as cool or likable
became aware for the first time that ‘authority’ was actually something real and authentic,
remember thinking that maybe the sub had mastered that trick in Uncle Sam posters and certain paintings of seeming to look right at you no matter what angle you faced him from.
Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.
‘Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.’
Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later—the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.’
‘In today’s world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts.
snow—I can remember watching large, tentative, individual flakes of snow falling and blowing around aimlessly in the wind generated by the train through the window of the CTA commuter line from Lincoln Park back up to Libertyville, and thinking, ‘This is my crude approximation of a human life.’
in. I should mention that my father didn’t drive—he’d been a devotee of public transportation—and
and the memory involves seeing this from above the table in such a way that a beam of light from the food court’s overhead lighting far above fell through one of the star-shaped perforations in the tabletop and illuminated—as if by a symbolically star-shaped spotlight or ray of light—one particular advertisement among all the page’s other ads
the substitute’s diagnosis of the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated, and that now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling, and organizing that torrential flow of info.
under conditions of extreme tedium, complication, confusion, and absence of comprehensive info. The Service was, in the words of one of the Examinations instructors at the Indianapolis TAC, looking for ‘cogs, not spark plugs.’
I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was that I worried a lot. I
What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point—otherwise we might as well all just be computers downloading raw data to one another.)
The sun beat palpably on the Gremlin’s metal roof; a franchise bank’s digital Time & Temp sign, which we sat idling in view of for several minutes, kept flashing first the time and then YOU DONT WANT TO KNOW, presumably for temperature, which seemed to me an ominous preview of Peorian wit and culture. You can imagine for yourself the air quality and overall smells involved.
And there was the REC’s elaborate and obviously expensive facade, which extended from just above the main entrance to the middle of what appeared to be the fifth floor; it was some kind of tile or mosaic representation of a blank IRS 1978 Form 1040,
holding either a piece of white cardboard or a small erasable whiteboard with the name DAVID WALLACE in neat block capitals.
This, although I didn’t know it at the time, was my first glimpse of an Immersives Room, of which the main REC structure contained a handful. The most striking thing about it was the quiet. There were at least 150 men and/or women in that room, all intently occupied and busy, and yet the room was so silent that you could hear an imperfection in the door’s hinge
The way hard deskwork really goes is in jagged little fits and starts, brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men’s room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener,
I’d always felt frustrated and embarrassed about how much reading and writing time I actually wasted,
Phantom refers to a particular kind of hallucination that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom.
The truth is that there are two actual, non-hallucinatory ghosts haunting Post 047’s wiggle room. No one knows whether there are any in the Immersive Pods; those Pods are worlds unto themselves.
‘The point,’ the CTO said with a bit of an edge to her voice, ‘is that your job is to determine which returns give evidence of maximum auditability in terms of (a) profitability, and (b) expediency.
‘Though volume and throughput are no longer the criteria by which a Post’s performance is judged and evaluated.’ An involuntary grimace went over the Personnel aide’s face as he spoke. Sylvanshine knew this aide’s shoe size and total blood volume, but not his name. ‘The evaluative criteria now concern return on audit,’ the CTO said.
‘In the bad old days, it was throughput.’ ‘The average rote examiner could clear between twenty-seven and thirty files per day.’ ‘Now it could be four, five files a day—if your Audit-to-Cost ratios are good, you’re in line for an outstanding six-month performance review.’
Suddenly it wasn’t that he’d stepped in shit so much as become shit.’
and was crazy—Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist.’ ‘Didn’t anybody at your school ever have names like Joe or Bill?’
‘These are shells of men I’m saying. If Glendenning can get any throughput he wants out of this crew… Some look catatonic. One might be an idiot savant. I haven’t seen him yet.’
‘What am I, a machine?’
This was boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt. This made the routing desk at UPS look like a day at Six Flags.
Note too that interesting first appears just two years after bore. 1768. Mark this, two years after. Can this be
‘Fear of disks. Fear of drains. Fear of pretty much all spiral movements in liquid, across the board.’
I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy.
I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy.
The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
‘There’s something kind of tiring about you,’ Rand observes. ‘Talking to you.’ Drinion nods. ‘It’s like you’re both interesting and really boring at the same time.’
Drinion is actually levitating slightly, which is what happens when he is completely immersed; it’s very slight, and no one can see that his bottom is floating slightly above the seat of the chair.
