He came from a private practice
with a pad of graph paper,
budget constraints marked at top-right,
design specifications listed below.

Working in this manner
for the duration of a six-month contract,
he drafted the previous employee’s coffee mug
as a vehicle to drink beef bouillon
that left a brown crust at the bottom of the cup.

He brought along his own spoon
to break the cube into its constituent liquid parts.
He also had a stack of napkins
to blot his mouth before and after meetings
where he sat in front of the white board.

On the last day of the last week of his contract
he recommended that the company go with an orange carpet.
The color blended together, he said, hot and warm elements
mixing a kind of slow chili beneath everyone’s feet.

For each work-space, he proposed a philodendron to mark
a cubicle,  bequeathed a folder of computer print-outs
and offered other options like the application of pictures,
posters, and macramé wall hangings near the kitchen area.

The following year,
they installed a carpet.
It was red.

I am a data packet that wants to be delivered into your electronic arms.

Open your gateway. Let me stream into your memory. Hold me forever.

Here on this sacred abalone ground where we receive each other

with a single message. You already know what it is.

They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. — Isaiah 2:4 & Micah 4:3

I mean the Mommy button,
milky in construct,
pliable in design.
Always with the same effect.
Leave my daughter?

You knew I couldn’t.
Whatever she needed,
I was going to give.
Choose life, you say.
Choose life?

Where does love fit in?
Don’t give me one of those
either or propositions.
I’m a cloud in the sky
chasing other clouds.

For years I waited
until my room grew dark.
Any silk clothes
I shoved to the back
of my closet.

Maybe you’re getting
a kick out of this.
Me? I’m tired of acceptance.
I want to press my skin
against his sweet breath,

not walk in the door
to a blinking message machine.
Did I say how his hair
is the color of spring
on wet pavement,

how his smile lifts me
like the song of a chorus?
I hope you’re enjoying this,
to see me hanging
from one side of the bed.

Today I am none of those things. I am in the office working late. It is a special evening, the hour when new product enhancements are scheduled for release. Out from the darkness of engineering and staging sandboxes, new services are born into the light of a store.  Covers go up to give teams time to validate, which means commercial business on these pages screeches to a halt. Blogs identify the sudden pulling down of tent poles and wonder what’s happening. There’s a buzz on the Web. Could this mean a new phone, more magic?

Before the main event, work groups gather one last time for dinner. It’s a feast for the long hours ahead ranging from gourmet pizzas, or for larger work groups, a meal with delicious curries, lentils, and vegetables preferred by the predominantly Indian software engineering crowd.  Tonight the word is Chinese. I’m expecting two tables with offerings of vegetarian and meat options. I’m hoping for garlic eggplant and tofu with egg-rollish things, stuffed spiced munchies and different dipping sauces joined by a selection of waters and sodas sitting in ice-cube baths. All plastics are recyclable. Welcome to the future.

After we eat, my group walks past lime green walls to locate an empty conference room. In this part of the building, rooms are named after lakes. A project manager enters wearing shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a resort in Napa Valley. He removes a pair of ear buds and says, “With everything that happened today, I’m keeping on my happy face.”

Someone in the know responds. “I told him we’re not going to roll-out anything until we validate in staging.”  In the hours proceeding launch we relive the drama, meetings and phone calls and work-arounds to make up for the fact that one service is incompatible with another and how engineers on the project tried to reassure everyone that everything would be okay despite the fact that they had blown process out of the water. “And don’t forget, this wasn’t your normal got-cha.”

A small group passes through our doorway and says,  “Have you read my email?” followed by a tirade in another language, a global company where we join hands and fall down together.

Close to time, dial into a chat that binds all conference rooms  and participants. We are quality assurance, business and content owners and engineers who monitor the site as each service with its code and new content is blessed and flies out an electronic door. We plug computers inside table outlets. If someone is without an extension, people promise to swap during the long night.

The chat goes down.  Something is wrong.  We’re greyed out.  Okay.  A conference call number gets circulated via email. Each room can listen in on the play-by-play. In short order, the chat comes back online, each ping another voice. The place is filthy with engineering genuis.

“Can we start testing?”

“Go for it!”

“GOB is back up.”

“Sami, do you still see issue number 4?” followed by a “No,” and a happy face.

It’s not time to be OOO, away from floating hierarchies of data that meet inside an arena. The stands are packed with crowds of people watching a lion-tamer encircled by a ballerina on horseback.

I’m in Staging, the sandbox where we are hoping for a minimum of static before a new enhancement goes live.

“How is issue 3?”

“Fine is a long story.”

“Can we have a full list?”

“ETA from SPM is about 10 minutes away.”

“Randy, are we restarting shipping?”

The night passes with a variety of pings.  People roam from one room to another with questions, clarifications.

“BR PHS looks funny.”

“Lorenzo, funny is not part of the QA vocabulary. Try harder.”

Almost there. Most issues are no longer reproducible. Once again, I’m almost OOO. It seems digital but it’s not, almost home where trees are bloated with rain, like a dinner party after a great meal, everyone leans back.

All the rain we’ve been having, white petals on the ground confusing the seasons. Almost home where tomorrow if I’m lucky I’ll see a red-tailed hawk splice the sky into blue film strips. I’ll want to run that movie. Almost OOO. Hi-ya, Robert Frost.

“Sitting in front of the computer, my brain and hands connect in a singular, focussed way across the keyboard.”

I’ve worked from home for most of my adult life, more like worked at home after I finished working at a desk, rushing back to get dinner ready.

The kids are gone, I’ve moved along in jobs.  I’ve succeeded as an information worker who occupies a niche between software engineers and the website content other people read. Now I’m able to WFH, which means that on occasional Fridays when I am not needed to attend a meeting or offer an otherwise physical presence in a cubicle, I can remain in my sweat pants, connect my computer to the VPN (virtual private network) and shield myself behind the company’s firewall except for occasional forays to the greater outdoors, the Internet, where I check email and Facebook.

I’m plugged in most of the time.  Mornings when I get up, evenings before I go to bed, log on to check bug reports.

Provided with a good network connection, these days I can move my brain around from home, work, commuting on the bus, or offsite on vacation, and function equally as well from any  location, like a song  released from its CD or a book removed from its hardback covers ready to interract with anything that comes its way, thank you Jonathon Keats’ Virtual Words.

Technology offers language filled with algorithms and acronyms, stand-ins for words most everyone’s forgotten. My brain can ache with the buzzing.

In the olden days, when I was not WFH but working at home, I came home to cook flank steak crisscrossed with a knife and rubbed down with garlic on each side and flavored with a squeeze of fresh orange juice to give it tang; always macaroni and cheese–the kids loved that–and chicken cooked in all the innumerable ways chicken allows itself to be cooked – boiled, baked, breaded, fried; haphazard menus of spaghetti and something else, turkey cutlets, lentil stews, chile con carne. Garlic bread,  a different kind of language.

Now I have passwords and usernames that I carry turtle-like  from one system to another and hierarchies of data that precariously balance on functions, services and calls. I move between the language of life and computers.

Scary as it seems, sometimes it feels as though my body is a carrying case to transport my brain from one locale to another. If a hands-off mouse is created, well, you know what that can mean. But I don’t think that will happen…Sitting in front of the computer, my brain and hands connect in a singular, focussed way across the keyboard. Everything else recedes into the background: a ringtone, the tea kettle, the leaf blower outside a  window. I create a circuit between the screens I’m analyzing and chats that are open up on my computer in an effort to eliminate possible variables of error.

Somewhere a boy is eating a kernel of popcorn on a first-floor landing.

A young girl walks by with an iPod strapped to her upper arm and a Raiders patch on her jeans.

I like that my hands and my brain deeply need each other, a partnership. I think people are meant to work that way even when we’re WFH.

In Israel, the color of a yarmulke is a code
about where you stand along that country’s
divided political line

Male and female mallards swim
on the pond at Leona Canyon,
surveying cattails

Home from work, I grab my iPad and open a Scrabble-like game that ingeniously allows me to compose words with players half-around the world, or in this case, with my sister who lives in New York.

Of course, I can’t get any satisfaction by whining that she’s taking too long or demanding that the word she just put on the board does not exist in any language. She beats me no matter what I do.  We usually compose one word a day. The app keeps score, never asks for a pencil or a napkin upon which to tally numbers. It has a built-in dictionary and referees all questionable words. Sometimes I don’t agree with its calls. The computer sanitizes the playing field.  If I keep losing, I am the only one at fault.

I also have a second game in play with razzledazzle11 who lives in parts unknown and faithfully adds his or her word to the board on a daily basis. I don’t know if my opponent is male or female and have stopped trying to intuit some gender from the game board.

Once I contribute my daily word to both my sister’s and razzledazzle’s games, I push Scrabble or its app look-alike aside. This has been a warm-up to the real game, Super 7.

I discovered the app  as a new user searching the Internet for top game apps. It looked simple enough, no terrain to cross, no monsters to dodge, no virtual worlds to build. (Did I also mention that the download was free?) All the game required was to connect numbers with a swipe of my finger, draw a line so they would add up to seven. Anything above seven produced a screen of angry skulls. Easy. A great pastime to avoid doing serious stuff like dishes or laundry. Super 7 begins with numbers slowly entering stage left and right, cascading from top and bubbling up from the bottom of the screen with a soothing melody playing in the background.

On first play I panicked, my breath quickened. Numbers rained in from all sides when my primordial brain and sense of survival kicked in. I realized that others may have their Mario Brothers, but I had Super 7.  Here was a game that helped me to practice life lessons scaled down to their breathtaking simplicity: to relax when under assault, to allow the innate motion of things to play out before necessarily responding, to ensure that there are never too many variables in play at one time, and to understand that larger discs do not move on screen as quickly as smaller ones, and can often lead to angry skulls. As a person who loves metaphor, I read things into the game that probably their creators had never intended. But no matter.  It worked for me. It was a great training for Project Management. Over and over again I returned to Super 7 to see if I could beat my high score and to enjoy a new-found cool in the world of shit happens.

Where had I been all these years? Instead of reading books, I should’ve been at video arcades perfecting my hand eye coordination and driving vehicles up the vertical side of mountains.

I do note, however, that my opponent is no longer a person, but a software routine. Chess master, Gary Kasparov who has been practicing with computers for many years, probably does a slow ho-hum right about here. But even as I exclaim hurray! after beating my last high score or when I don’t, what a pile of dukey, I realize that Super 7 can’t provide me with a real person.  Of course, that’s not why I play the game and there are innumerable flesh and blood people in my life.

What concerns me is that with cities and the federal government constantly slashing budgets and making the social needs of people a diminishing return, our tax dollars are being invested less in the public space, and more in private worlds that let us create virtual realities and relationships. The public space also has allowed the Occupy Movement here in the United States to take hold.

Entertainments are wonderful and needed. Maybe they scale better than real life. But I think it’s important for us to hear and see each one another, to take in and rub shoulders with the entire person. To make our voices heard. Our encounters with ideas, music, and people are increasingly lacking context. So much floats around us and slips through our fingers. Here’s a pitch for the concrete. After all, I’m a child of cities. I think it’s important for children to have schools, parks, gymnasiums, and playgrounds. I think it is important for all of us to have common areas. Defend the public space.

Two words come to mind: space and money.

The limitations of my physical living space led me after so many years, to return to the public library. I could borrow books and return them without a need to covet their pages on my personal shelves. Then there was the question of money. Books like everything else have become enormously expensive. Those two factors pushed me toward accepting in this case, the iPad, an aesthetic device that made me feel better about being a traitor to the printed word. But I forgave myself. Didn’t Gutenberg turn everything upside down with the invention of printing press, making knowledge accessible to people who never had the chance?

I got over my initial hurtle, which has opened a new relationship to the book. The word has been liberated from its covers in the way that songs were released from their place inside albums and CDs, floating around and alighting on my forehead.

My first e-book read was “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” a nonfiction collection by science fiction writer, William Gibson.

While I’ve been aware of Gibson, my sci-fi reading has mostly been limited to authors like Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, and Ursula Le Guin. That might change. Anyhow, Gibson’s book struck me as a good place to begin my experiment. I downloaded a copy from the electronic marketplace. Here are my initial responses.

Whoa! This is a different place. The change is absorbing me more right now than the book.

I don’t have any sense how “far” I am into Gibson since the book itself is a flat screen and I can’t physically hold any number of pages in my hand. What I hold is my iPad, a device that doubles and triples as a browser, a game center, camera, and so many other things that is only limited by the number of “apps” I have downloaded from the Internet. As Gibson would say, I had suddenly moved away from a “function specific device.”

What I hold is not a book, although I could be resting on my bed propped up by pillows. But the device itself is not a singular one. Although referenced by one brand name, an electronic reader can be a pliable platform, capable of being transformed as soon as I finish reading. In fact, I can listen to music on the same device while I read. And the difference in the physical experience doesn’t stop there.

I’m not physically aware of the place I am relative to the entire manuscript. Without a physical book, I can’t see where I place my bookmark. Of course I know when I begin the first page, but as I continue, the only marker I have is the page number displayed at the bottom of the screen. The iPad conveniently inserts its own electronic bookmark, automatically opening to the page where I left off. The electronic book eliminates the obvious beginning, middle and end or “linear” quality of books.

No longer recognizably moving along a trajectory from point A to point B until I put the book down with hopefully a satisfied exhalation, I am just always “reading.” What I am left with are individual words that have been freed from their book covers, naked as they were, to travel the Internet

I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing. It’s just different. Maybe reading Gibson is helping me to think this way.

The truth of the current matter as it currently reveals itself, is that e-readers are not as portable as books. Why? Not because they’re difficult to carry around. It’s mostly because people aren’t comfortable using their high price tag devices in public. There’s always a chance that someone will swipe an e-reader and not in a good way, either. Until these readers come down in price, I think they will continue be used in private, relegated to the bedroom or couch or airplane seat, places where if I lose the thing, it’s my own damn fault. On the other hand, iPads today have a means of tracking themselves so if someone pilfers my iPad while I’m reading on a bench at Oakland’s Lake Merritt, I can get a GPS location and pass that information along to the authorities, scary as it may seem. I’ve also heard that certain classrooms are now beneficiaries of grants that allow groups of kids to carry an iPad in their backpacks to and from school. But for now, I think most people, like myself, will opt for carrying their paperback to the beach and keep the e-reader of whatever kind, for more close-to-the chest encounters. I could be wrong.

On days when I’m sick or stay in bed on the weekend, I opt for the comfort food of a paperback book without the need to run interference with an ID or password.

Sometimes I crave the old-timey public kind of space.

Around Lake Merritt
I have a lifetime pass to humanity
with its necklace of lights
strung around the throat of Oakland,
the first designated wildlife refuge for birds.

To get there, I drive past storefronts—

Cut it Out Again Tammy’s Bible Book Store
Rose the Tailor Happy Garden
Chopsticks Express Runaway Slave Tattoo
King Kong BBQ Wash Time
Bail Bonds 877 You Walk
Yummy Duck Divine Doors
Tim’s Auto Body Juan’s Pizza

Lake Merritt where kids ask
if ducks fly and water bottles roll from the suck of lips,
ear buds and pay pals eat time,
money is on everyone’s mind. Honk if you think
I’m full of it. Lake with its necklace of lights
strung around the throat of Oakland
for all us strange birds.