The Twilight Report

What was 2004? It was a year of stolen and disputed elections in Georgia and the Ukraine, the rise and fall of Howard Dean and John Kerry, the first private space flight and the end of the "X-Prize," disaster in Darfur, prisoner abuse in Iraq, expansion of the European Union, the death of Ronald Regan and a month of flags at half mast, the return of Greek Olympics and a very smug presidential victory. In less political but tragic terms, the worst natural disaster in my memory has occurred in Asia as Tsunami death tolls top 135,000 according to CNN.com.

For me, the year started out as a bleak one in the coldest New York winter I have ever experienced. My mother came to visit me for her birthday. We stayed in Manhattan and it was bitterly cold.

Lowel and Johanna

I took a lighting class at Dutchess which was a blast. Some of my friends from Black and White II were taking the class and I met some other cool people. It was so much fun working with those people, including the teacher, Lowel Handler.

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In Short, 2004 was A Great Year and I have high hopes that 2005 will be even better.

Because the writers guild is on strike, today's episode of The Twilight Report will be a flashback episode. I am going to tell you about a legendary former employee of The Company. To protected this person's identity, I will refer to him using the pseudonym "Bill." For those of you who already know this story, please forgive me if I get any of the details wrong. I didn't know "Bill" well, but I did meet him and talked to him a few times.

The first time I met Bill, he was giving me a ride to West Point so that we could watch Army get beat by some Christian private school. He was telling me that he really didn't want to work for the company, and would rather go back to school to study Art. He also wanted to visit Australia, and since I am from Australia originally, we had something to chat about. He was a moderately big guy, and he drove an enormous green station wagon. We got to the tailgate, had some BBQed food, played a drinking game and made our way up to the football stadium to watch the game. Army was playing some private religious school (as mentioned) so I dubbed the game "Army vs. God." Needless to say, Army has a terrible team and lost a close game. When I got back to where the cars had been parked for the tailgate, I discovered that Bill had left without me. Fortunately one of my friends gave me a ride.

Bill wanted to get laid off from The Company so that he could get the juicy severance package and go back to graduate school. Keep in mind that this was a few years back when The Company was having these big massive layoffs every six months, so you would think it wouldn't have been that hard for him to arrange it. However, Maintaining employment at The Company is never a logical affair, and try as he might he could not get them to fire him. His approach was to dress more and more casually every day. Very gradually, until (I am told) he came to work in his pajamas, when allegedly, Nobody said anything about it.

Back in the day The Company had a reputation formality and suits, those of you who know which company I work for know this. Things have changed. Today, our work environment, especially for those of us who are engineers, the dress code is very lax. Usually I come to work with a nice casual shirt, although today I was feeling especially casual and so wore my University of Arizona Math Nerds T-Shirt, which was given to me when I graduated as a Math major. So although I can't say that I was there, I can say that Bill's story is not so far fetched.

Since dressing down didn't do the trick, Bill decided to just go ahead and move to Australia and go to graduate school to study Art. Without telling management. He wanted to see how long it would take The Company before they stopped paying him. If you have seen Office Space and know about the bureaucracy of Corporate America, you know that this could take years. In Bill's case The Company moved at the lightning speed of several weeks to terminate Bill's employment.

Sometimes, I sit in my office (here is where the Flashback fade effect brings us back to the present, you can see me sitting at my desk typing this into my computer as I wait for another timing run to complete), and wonder whatever happened to Bill. But mostly I wonder what Australia is doing with him. He seems like the sort of person who would do well there.

I arrived in Concord at about 8:30pm. Only half an hour late, and had I not been delayed at departure, I would have probably been on time. I circled around a couple of times while Sherry tried to describe where her apartment was over my cell phone, but eventually I found the place and parked in a slot marked "Visitor." I was on my way up to Maine and had asked Sherry if I could crash at her place on the way up so as to break up the long drive. That was what I had said anyway; my main reason was to see Sherry a friend of mine who had recently quit The Company to go to back to school to study patent law.

She showed me around her new apartment, which is entirely too cute, if a little noisy from the nearby street. She showed me her schedule for each week which was blocked out every weekday from 8:00am to 10:00pm, and then told me, without a hint of irony that she hadn't really gotten serious about school yet. I showed her my portfolio from my Color1 class, and we talked about numerous things, including what would happen to "The Group" now that Joanna had left the Hudson Valley for Berkeley. She told me how much her apartment was costing me, which was low compared with the Hudson Valley, but high for a student, which is pertinent, since she is a student now. I told her how excited I was for her in her new endeavor. I would have liked to have told her how proud all of us were of her, but the thought didn't come into my head until later. I slept on the floor that night and the traffic outside didn't bother me too much.

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