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This book is dedicated to all those cubicle dwellers who, in all their vast and multifaceted variety, labor thanklessly under the lash of insensate management to ensure that all the vital things in our lives do the things we expect them to do or, at the very least, don’t spontaneously explode at an awkward moment.
Serious Cybernetics Corporation
Johnson had made a point of calling the human resources department “HR” rather than its official internal company name, the Magrathean Ape-Descended Life Form Utilization Service, just as he called the department I had just joined “Security” rather than the Vogon Enforcement Arm.
I’d been boringly conventional and had a tuna and sweetcorn baguette from a machine adorned with a reproduction of Delacroix’s Liberty Being Too Busy Leading the People to Pull Her Dress Back Up across its front.
Bambleweeny
He tried to drop in on me unexpectedly on my third day while I was hot-desking in the Haggunenons’ room.
“In my old life,” said Wicked, “when I was a student, I used to program computers with them.” Because that’s how they did it back in the days when computers filled rooms and the Lunar Lander touched down using hardware less powerful than my mum’s thermostat. Wicked used to write his program out by hand and then use a machine that translated the instructions into lots of holes in lots of cards which were then literally “compiled” and fed into an optical reader.
I asked Reynolds if she could put the bodyguards on what we’d taken to calling the Unreality List of people that might be magical, members of the demi-monde or suspiciously weird. “It would save ever so much time,” Reynolds had said when we set it up, “if we just added the population of Florida right at the start.”
Golgafrincham
“He tests code,” said Victor. “His official job title is Chief Wowbagger but really that just means he’s an SRE with QA.” Which I googled later and discovered stood for Software Reliability Engineer and Quality Assurance. Which meant that it was his job to find faults in other engineers’ code and make sure they fixed it.
All of this, Silver reckoned, went double for Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn’t really believe it.
The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. —Anonymous
Coincidence? I should fucking cocoa.
“What have we got to lose?” I said. Nightingale looked up and gave me a strange, sad smile. “Oh, everything, Peter,” he said. “But then, such is life.”
the opioid addiction crisis in the American Midwest.
The world is full of rooms like this, for data storage, server farms or internet backbones, although 70 percent of internet traffic passes through Loudoun County in Virginia. Reynolds says she thinks that’s so spooks from the NSA don’t have a long commute when installing yet another tap.
Reynolds took notes on practitioner containment and the subsequent portrait American Woman With a Notepad and a Small Annoying Dog, acrylic on canvas, currently hangs in the breakfast room.
Peter not only misquotes Sir Walter Scott: O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive! But to add insult to injury, misattributes the quote to Shakespeare. This is entirely the fault of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
