Beware

Dad would drive the family home from our Sundays at camp. I, in the back seat, would make a game of riding the telephone wires with my eyes. The poles ran on for miles and miles beside the road, and between each pair of poles there was a swooping curve of wire. I would run my eyes along these curves at the same speed as the car was traveling. The symmetric up and down of the wire was interesting, and relaxing. Pole then curve, pole then curve. The rhythm of it seemed to drain all other thoughts from my head. Pole then curve, pole then curve. My eyes grew heavy. Up front my dad would see herds of deer browsing, or perhaps a black bear shambling through the woods as he drove along, but I saw none of these things. The symmetry of the wire had put me to sleep.

When I was sixteen, I got a summer job as a grocery packer at the Riverside Market on the other side of town. Every weekday morning, I would get up and walk a block to a co-workers house, and she would then drive the two of us to work. All day long I packed boxes and cans and vegetables and meat into brown paper bags. I got a short lunch and a couple of breaks each day, but mostly I just packed groceries hour after hour. Along about six we left for the day, and I would arrive home just in time to eat my dinner. This routine went on for months. At first I was interested in exploring the store and in meeting the other employees and in learning about what each of them did. As the weeks passed, though, I managed to master my menial job, and I learned enough about the store to satisfy my curiosity. Then I took to reading science fiction on my breaks and floating through the other hours of my workday on automatic pilot. Five days on, two days off. Five days on, two days off. I got so that I longed for Friday quitting time and detested starting up again on Monday. Five days on, two days off. Five days on, two days off. By September, when I left for college, I was floating through the weeks with my mind in neutral and my life on hold. The money was good, but I had sold that store my soul for the summer.

Every morning at 2 A.M., Barney the Blip would come and wake me up. I slept in my clothes, so all I had to do was give myself a shake and I was ready for the day. I'd walk quietly through the hootch filled with sleeping soldiers and I'd give a nod here and a nudge there, and the place would slowly start to wake up. Ten minutes later we would drag ourselves into the FDC bunker and replace the weary night shift. For most of the next four hours, we fired howitzer rounds out into the dark Vietnamese countryside. The guns were a dozen miles away, and so it was quiet in our bunker, except for the incessant chattering of the radios as we talked to observers in the field. All night long we used our many books and our primitive computer to aim the guns. After dawn things livened up a little, and we wrote our reports and handled daylight fire missions from aerial observers flying over the jungle. In the occasional quiet times, we would read or play chess. At 2 P.M. our shift was over, and the other guys would drag themselves in to relieve us. I sat in that low ceilinged bunker twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for the better part of a year. My life was on hold and in doubt, and my eyes were on the short timers calendar before me. When I first started working in the bunker, I had big plans for taking correspondence courses and bettering myself. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Gradually, I became like everyone else, a tired cog in the great green machine. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. I talked of nothing but home and how I was so short that I had to look up at snakes. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. I flew home to freedom ---- to discover that everything about my old life was gone.

In 1973, I fell in love with the machine. I tended it all day, and read manuals and wrote my own programs all night. There was always an interesting new development, a new person to learn from, and new place to travel to. I was surrounded by guys just like me, who could not let go. It was like a drug, this beautifully logical machine. This behemoth of computational symmetry. I gave it years of my time, and it gave me much satisfaction in return, but gradually it dragged me into an existence largely devoid of dealing with the rest of the world. All I did was work. A year passed, and then another. I chugged onward, learning more and more about the machine, and less and less about anything else. Another year flew by, and then yet another. I looked forward to some bright, brave computing future, where all things would be possible, and I would be a part of making it all happen. Another year passed, and then I thought to look backward, and I saw that all of my long hard years of work had left scarcely a ripple ---- in two years who would remember or care about any of it. Then I lucked out and met Pam and she led me outdoors again and we got married and, in due course, along came Pete. I still work weekdays and late at night on my old symmetrical friend the machine, but, in the evenings and on weekends, I very much enjoy being with my wife and son and pursuing life's other adventures.