An Enquiry (4) - Communication

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He settled himself at his work-desk, in front of his laptop and plugged headphones and a boom microphone into his mobile phone. He shuffled the notes he had arranged to his right and, with deliberation, sent the text message to say that he was free. And then he waited.

Scarcely a minute had passed before the phone rang – “Anastasia calling” said the message. He tapped the screen to accept the call.

“Hello. Jim Gray speaking.”

“Hello Mr Gray. My name is Anastasia Litvenyenko” said a clear voice. She certainly didn’t have and English accent, but she didn’t have any very obvious accent at all. “We exchanged messages a little earlier today. Is it convenient for you to talk now?”

“Yes, certainly, I have as much time as you need.”

“Good. We won’t take much of your time today anyway. Dr Medinger and I have looked at your resume on-line and we think you may be suitable for what we want to do. Would you be available for an informal interview in London later this week.”

“Yes. I can come to London. That will not be difficult at all. When would you like me to come?”

“Would Wednesday or Thursday suit you? We would like you to come in the morning and spend all day with us.”

“I would prefer Wednesday, but Thursday would be fine too.”

“Good. Wednesday at 10:00 then. Is that acceptable? I will send you the details of where we are.”

“Yes. That’s convenient. I have your phone number if I have any problems. Can you tell me a little more about the assignment?”

“I’ll send you all you need to know in the eMail. Dr Medinger and I look forward to meeting you on Wednesday.”

And then she ended the call. Jim was left, looking around the room. He was going for a job interview the day after tomorrow, and he didn’t even know what the job was!

(Part of the “Tyson” project: 5th January 2017 – 322 words)

An Enquiry (3) - Contact

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Jim took the long way to the pub. The short way was a mile there and a mile back. The long way took more than 2 miles over the hill on the journey out and made for a circular walk. As he walked the midday sun warmed his face, but the wind was cold, and he could see frost remained in the shadows.

The pub was warm when Jim went inside. A log fire burned in the grate and Jim went over and rubbed his hands in front of it after he had stuffed his cap and gloves in a pocket and hung up his waterproof jacket. He nodded to Ned who started to pour a pint of bitter.

Jim sat at the window table, reading the newspaper he had picked up from the bar. There was nobody else there apart from Ned the landlord and he was busy arranging glasses and stocking up the bottle-cooler cabinets at the back of the bar.

Jim knew the television suspended high on the wall was on but the sound was turned down. He hadn’t noticed what channel it was tuned to, but at this time of the day it was probably tuned to one of the rolling news channels. He wondered about what he should do about lunch. It would be easy to pick something up in town, but he would have to eat it there. He knew there was food in the house, so he decided that, in the interests of his waistline he would walk home after his second drink.

He had just started his second pint of beer, when the phone in his pocket vibrated. Pausing to fold the newspaper, put it to one side and put on his reading glasses, he fished it out and looked at the screen. He had been sent an eMail by Anastasia Litvenyenko. Now that was a surprise!

(Part of the “Tyson” project: 4th January 2017 – 315 words)

An Enquiry (2)

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He spent the next hour analysing the short request to be added to someone’s professional network. The writer had let the standard text at the start, but after that they seemed to have effort into writing the request. They had certainly read what was available on his various on-line profiles, and had read several blog entries. They referred to him by name “James Gray”, starting with “Mr Gray”, but using other variations in an intelligent way. They knew what his interests were.

The writer was someone called Anastasia Litvenyenko. Researching her on-line was not difficult, but it didn’t yield as much information as he hoped. She was the personal assistant to someone called Gustaf Medinger and was based in North London. There wasn’t really mention of a “company” and it wasn’t clear what business Litvenyenko and Medinger were involved in. Medinger’s profile talked about “technology” but in a round-about way, hinting about computer systems, chemicals and bio-technology. There were certainly interesting people but what did they really do? That wasn’t clear at all. It certainly wasn’t clear what they wanted, except that they thought they had “a proposition which will interest you”. Jim continued to be enticed and even intrigued.

Having done the research, writing the response was relatively easy. For the most part Jim simply answered a few questions and expressed a willingness to communicate with either Litvenyenko or Medinger. When he was finished, he read through what he had written. He thought about “sleeping on it” and then decided that it was better to reply immediately. The mouse pointer hovered over the send button for a moment and there it was gone! Congratulating himself on completing the task, and, reminding himself that he would probably never hear from either of these strange sounding characters again, Jim shut down his laptop, dropped his mobile phone into his jacket pocket and went out for a walk. The clock said the time was after midday, the sun was over the yardarm, so he was going to drop in at the pub.

(Part of the “Tyson” project: 3rd January 2017 – 340 words)

An Enquiry (1)

“I’d like to add you to my Network.”

That was how the note started. It was like so many others he received, from people who were trying to “grow their list of contacts”, junior recruitment agents who either had some hopeless contract they wanted to foist on someone or had nothing better to do than trawl the business equivalent of social media, or outright chancers. Just occasionally there was a message from someone he had known in the distant past, or what read like a genuine enquiry. It was just possible that this eMail was one of those, that rarest of things, a message from someone who was presenting themselves as a human being and wanted to communicate with another human being about something which might be of interest to both of them, rather than someone simply going through the motions as an organic cog in the corporate machine.

He had anticipated a rather boring morning clearing any administrative backlog and then working on one of his pet projects for a couple of hours, before going for a walk around lunch-time. And if the walk should just happen to pass the pub (which, coincidentally, it usually did), then he might pop in for a couple of drinks. That was how most of his days went these days. He was by no means rich. He had to watch the pennies, but he wasn’t desperate for work either. He had enough money coming in from his pension and a few other things to keep things ticking over. He didn’t feel the sense of urgency which he had at times in the past. He knew he was drifting through life and he didn’t mind at all.

He looked at the email again. If all it had said was “I want to add you to my network” is would have been consigned to the electronic bin immediately. He was no longer interested in the limited kudos of accumulating “contacts” and “likes”. He had plenty of both for all the good which they did him. This note was different. The person, and it certainly was a person rather than a “bot” of some kind, or someone pasting in some standard text, seemed to have actually read his profile. There it was in the phrasing: “I have some work which I thing you will find interesting”. That was echoing the hint from the top of this profile: “always looking for something interesting”. It was true he didn’t look as actively as he once had, but he was still looking, in a passive sort of way. And then there was the follow-up phrasing “would suit someone with your experience” and then listing some obscure programming languages which he certainly knew but hadn’t used for years. He was confident, without looking that they were mentioned somewhere in the long list of assignments which formed his online resume. Someone had actually read what was on his profile and seemed to have taken some time to write an invitation which he would find enticing. Well, there was no point fighting it. He was enticed!

 (Part of the “Tyson” project: 2^nd January 2017 – 514 words)

Years, Months, Days

This is intended as an exercise in “stream of consciousness”. It isn’t thought out. Don’t take it seriously!

One of the things which interests me is how the language and symbols we use can affect the way we think. This is sometimes known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though really that is a misnomer).

At this time of the year we quite often use language which refers to the “beginning” and “end of” the year. There is a lot of “looking back” and “looking forward”. References to the Roman god “Janus”, who was the god of doorways among other things, are appropriate.

The thing is, a circle has no beginning and no end (and I know that the Earth’s orbit round the Sun is not circular, rather it is elliptical). Any beginning or end we choose is arbitrary. Western European convention just happens to have chosen a date which is close to the Winter Solstice, and we happen to have given a particular importance to years.

There are calendar systems which are more lunar than solar. They emphasise the months rather than the years, and as we all know months do not fit neatly into years.

Worse than that, days do not fit properly into either months or years. That is what the leap-years (and leap other things too) are all about. The underlying problem is that days, months and years are actually independent of one another, but humans like to join them together, and if at all possible we like to do the joining in a regular way.

One of the products of the French Revolution was the so-called “Republican Calendar”. The Republican Calendar attempted to make the months days and years “line up” neatly. It also tried to force things to be decimal. The result was complicated, though it did give some rather poetic names to things. It didn’t catch on at all. In fact the only reference to it that I can think of in the modern world is the dish “Lobster Thermidor”.

 (1^st January 2017 – 317 words)

Greater London House

This is intended as an exercise in “stream of consciousness” and description. The location is real, but I am not going to “let the facts get in the way of a good story”. Don’t take it seriously!

When I worked for Foster Wheeler Power Products, they were based in Greater London House, opposite Mornington Crescent tube station.

The building is distinctive and famous. It used to be the Carreras Cigarette factory before it was converted to offices. When I was there it was painted a cream colour and had lost some of its decoration. It has subsequently been restored to something like its original glory. It really is a spectacular building. An art-deco Egyptian temple in the middle of London!

The building takes up a full block. It’s a slightly irregular shape to fit the site. The main building stands on pillars and it has a car park underneath. Viewed from above it is a “ladder” or extended figure of eight to allow for light wells through the building. Foster Wheeler’s offices were on the second floor. Power Products has since been absorbed into Foster Wheeler Energy (or sold to Rolls Royce) and moved to Reading.

When I was there I remember the office had a suspended hardwood floor which was taken up to install some specialist equipment. The windows were original Crittall steel. One unusual aspect was that the goods lift in the North-West corner of the building had a set of doors which served the outside world, and another set of door opposite which led into the building and the man who acted as the security guard and goods inwards controller had a desk in the lift which he rode up and down all day! Maybe it wasn’t that unusual, because the tube station at Mornington Crescent has a similar arrangement where the ticket offices are in the lifts. If you wanted to buy a ticket (everyone I knew, including me, had a season ticket) you bought it in the lift. I tended to use the stairs from the platform level, even though they were really only intended as an escape route. They wound their way around a circular shaft.

 (31st December 2016 – 328 words)

This is another one of those “scenes without a story”. The idea came to me, and I thought I would write it down. I don’t know what “the plot” is supposed to be. I think this would be an opening for a story. It creates all sorts of possibilities. The “back-story” is just that. Not part of the story, but the ideas I have in the background.

Watch Changeover

John stretched and glanced at the clock. It was coming up to change-over time. Usually he wasn’t too bothered whether it was early or a little late, but today he had something to say, and that made it all see a little more important. He poured himself a mug of coffee, scratched behind his ear and waited.

He was sitting in the communal area. The crew of every ship developed their own traditions as to how they did things. Traditions evolved as new members joined and old members left. Eventually it felt as if the tradition belonged to the ship itself, rather than the crew members. Of course, there were procedures, but traditions mattered too. On the “Scarab”, the tradition was that changeover took place in the communal area. They had other traditions too; like dressing formally for meals. They even wore pretend paper neck-ties, anything to vary the monotony.

Peter came in. He poured himself a mug of coffee, pulled back a chair, sat down and yawned.

“Morning. Anything exciting happen overnight?”

It struck John that talking about morning and overnight was another one of those traditions. This ship operated according to a variation of Earth Zulu time, even though that was completely irrelevant out here.

John took a sip and answered “Yes. For a change something has happened. Do you remember those spikes of static, we were wondering about?” Peter nodded. “Well I think I may have found an explanation but there’s something even better first”.

John paused for effect and watched as Peter leaned forward. “Well?” He drawled. “What is it? We could do with something interesting around here.”

“Here it is.” Said John, pointing at a diagram on his notepad, “You can see here,” he indicated on the screen, “that we have an incoming object. On its current trajectory it will cross our path during your shift.”

“Oh! I shall look forward to that,” yawned Peter. “Have you told Head Office? And I don’t suppose there is any risk to us, is there?”

“Yes, No and No” smiled John. “Yes, I sent an alert as soon as the systems spotted it, no, there is risk to the ship. It should be visible as it passes, and no, there is no risk to the Earth either, and there is a little more.” He was enjoying this.

Peter took a leisurely sip from his mug and looked at his colleague. “Well. Do go on.”

Back Story

I imagine this story set some time in the future. This is not the super-hi-tech world of Star Trek. There is no faster-than-light drive. Communications are at the speed of light (and over long distances that means slow).

Mankind has made it to the planets if not the stars. One of the things that has happened is that we mine the asteroid belt. Most of the actual mining is automated. Robot machines mine an asteroid and process the material into convenient lumps of metal, which are then boosted into a long elliptical orbit back towards Earth. It’s a convenient way of getting around pollution problems but does present problems with energy (sunlight is a bit diffuse out there).

One of “the jobs” is that there are people who make long slow trips around the asteroid belt inspecting how the robots are getting on and picking up the products and sending them Earthward (or sunward) if you prefer. The habitable parts of the ships are fairly small. People do it for various reasons, mostly money, some to break drug habits and “forget” and some unpaid as a variation on Community Service or a prison sentence. Most of what these people do could really be done by automated systems but there is a desire to have someone on the spot to make decisions, so the systems have been adjusted to give the people something to do.

Of course, this story is partly ripping off “Rendezvous with Rama”!

Note: I found this file on 31st December 2016 while doing some end-of-year tidying up. I'm posting it here, but not including it in my exercises for today.

(655 Words. Originally created: 22^nd December 2015)

See also: follow-up