Success Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over
And getting a different result.
3
The secret behind the Mt. Hood door wasn’t so interesting. This was a corporation, a business, not a Stanley Kubrick movie.
Rows of desks topped with packets of paperwork filled the space, a sole desk facing them all like a stern mistress. The dozen virgins were ushered in by their bemulleted shepherd who sat at the head mistress’ desk. He ordered them all to sit, whip out their licenses and social security cards, and to go at their paperwork. This included previous employment, addresses, phone numbers, STDs, former lovers, socially accepted kinks, the works. A chance to really shine on paper.
Rob didn’t know there’d be a quiz, and he hadn’t brought his social security card. This is because he was an idiot. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He’d worked his whole life, so long as his whole life started at sixteen. The only job which didn’t demand to see his papers had been under the table work for a coffee shop owning cougar down on her luck. The infamous “economy” had taken a wrong turn somewhere after 9/11 and her cafe shut down after a few months of bad scones and botched lattes.
Do you know how hard it is to screw up a latte? It’s just espresso and milk. Rob did and he managed to botch it every time, anyway. He did it every single day, the same stupid way every time with watery espresso and the milk steamer spraying like a leaky old man, until one day the cougar who owned the place announced he was fired. He immediately walked into the Jiffy Lube two blocks down and was immediately hired by a far less attractive man who would later fire him anyway.
Jobs came and went. But cougars were forever. He’d never confessed to anyone he missed that lady hard. Mostly because he could only confess it to his girlfriend, who would most certainly poison him at dinner shortly after. That’s the thing about food. You never know if this meal is poisoned. You can’t base it on the last meal you had, which obviously wasn’t spiked if you’ve survived long enough to consider it. But that didn’t mean the next meal wasn’t.
Consider the noble, farm-raised turkey. It knows without a doubt the farmer is its friend. Consider the evidence! Every day, the farmer unsteadily waddles to the turkey pen and dumps tons of food in there. On purpose! He feeds them each and every day and even talks to them a bit about this or that thing. Real chummy confessionals! But then one day in November, the traitor comes along bearing an ax rather than food and it is too late to run, my sweet, little friends. Try not to be such a turkey next time.
“Hey,” Mullet gruffed, intruding on hardcore epistemology. “Are you going to smile into space like an idiot all day or are you done with your paperwork?”
“I’m done,” Rob confirmed as he handed the stack over.
“Good, get out. Down the hall to Denali. They’ll let you in.”
Rob stood, left Hood, and wandered down the hallway where he saw Duderich leaning against the wall near a door adorned with a page that said, “Denali.”
“Thou hast maketh thy mark upon thy parchment labors?” Duderich inquired.
“If that means paperwork,” Rob replied. “Proud new owner of a binding contract. I think they literally own my ass now. But just the ass.” Rob moaned and gyrated his hips to prove it. “The rest of this is all mine still.”
“Thou art marvelously vulgar,” Duderich chuckled. “Doth thou fancy the imitable post of squire?”
“Easy, dude. We just met. I don’t want your post no matter what its name is. You are a guy, right?”
“Verily,” Duderich confirmed. The dumb bastard actually seemed proud of it.
Rob squinted in suspicion. Only women said they were men. Men didn’t have to. They had better things to worry about than whether someone thought they were a man or not. Like whether the women were conspiring to murder them privately or for an audience. An audience meant poison. He’d have to keep an eye on this douche. Accept any snack offers with caution.
“So,” Rob queried. “What goes on in there?”
“Hardware,” Duderich replied, searching and failing to find the old-timey turn of phrase necessary. He actually seemed embarrassed. “Testing.”
“No old timey way to say, ‘hardware testing?’”
Duderich just shook his head. The sad bastard. The sad, stupid, womanish bastard.
Suddenly, the Denali door ripped open and a short man with glasses and a ponytail squinted at both of them, looking distinctly dissatisfied with what he saw.
“You two here for hardware?”
“Verily,” Duderich affirmed.
“Yay,” Glasses droned with mock excitement as he waved them inside. Looking at Duderich, he said. “At least you know the drill even if you’re a retard. Go snatch a movie and grab a playback station.”
“Fish,” he barked at Rob over his shoulder as he walked down the row and stopped in front of a workstation. “Get over here.”
“Am I Fish?”
“Sure. Get over here.”
“Haha,” Rob laughed like an idiot and hopped in an approximation of either a fish or a worm on a hook down the row towards his brand-new boss. It was important to make a good first impression.
“That's hilarious,” Glasses intoned. “Anyway, here’s how this works. Make sure media is present in the console and press the power button. Wait until it loads the game after the splash screen, then count it as a boot. If it doesn't load the game, count it as a fail. Repeat. Keep track of how many passes and how many fails and tell me at the end of the day alongside your lot.”
“What does it look like when it fails to boot?” It was important to be seen asking questions.
“You’ll know.” It was more important to be seen answering them.
“Wow. This sounds great.”
“It isn't.”
“Just do this all day?”
“Yeah.”
“For money?”
“If you can call it that.”
“It's more than I've ever made in my life.”
“Woohoo,” he deadpanned. “Moving on up. What'd you do before this? Make scones? Change oil? Sell air filters?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” the lead replied over his shoulder as he walked away. “That’ll be there when you get back.”
Rob got his bearings and squared up on his workstation. Four Xbox consoles, arrayed in a two-by-two grid faced him from beneath a small television resting upon a black, metal shelf. To the left of the consoles sat a small switch with four sets of video cables plugged in, possessing four large buttons that looked like they’d click real satisfying if you pushed one. A blank piece of paper and a pathetic pencil nub rested to the right of the consoles, along with four copies of an Xbox game called Fusion Frenzy.
He pressed the Eject button on each console, watched the disc tray slide out, and put a copy of the game in before closing the trays. Making devil signs with both hands, extending his pointer and pinky fingers, he pushed the power buttons on all four consoles twice. He giggled like an idiot for a few seconds and watched the Xbox logo splash across his tiny television. Then, he pressed a button on the switch to check the others. Each booted to the title screen of the game he’d inserted.
Each proudly exclaimed, “Fusion Frenzy!”
He made four individual check marks on his sheet of paper at the upper left, dropped his pencil nub, made two devil signs with his hands, then powered the consoles off and back on again. He gave it a few seconds before checking each console again. All four booted up successfully, and he dutifully made four more individual check marks on his mostly blank paper. He powered them down, he powered them on, and he rinsed and repeated this process for four hours, ignoring everything else.
His mind fell into a comfortably numb sort of silence. There were no screams, no car exhaust, no wrenches clattering to a hard, squeegee friendly floor. He wasn’t covered in motor oil. No one was screaming at him. There was just the task at hand. A task he set to with a strange, spectrum-placed intensity. This was the stupidest thing in the world, turning Xboxes off and on again all day. The absolutely most moronic thing ever. And he was into it. He was in the video game industry now.
Still, it was a relief when two hours passed, and he was allowed outside to smoke. His new boss, Glasses, was out there smoking, too. So, he walked over and asked him the only real question he could have after turning Xboxes on and off for money.
“Why do we do this? Is this a Star Trek episode?”
“Fucking hell, another one,” Glasses sighed. “You know how it says Lot A on your consoles?”
“It says Lot B, I think.”
“You know how I don’t give a shit? Shut up. Each lot has a different configuration of hardware in it. Hard drive, disc reader, processor, so on. We change what parts go into a full console as we make new ones. We can get different gear that does the same thing for less money, but we need to make sure it works as well as the last bunch did. So, we boot test the things endlessly to create test data. If it works as well as the old lots did, we save money making each new console. So, we make more money.”
“Couldn’t machines do this? It’s really repetitive. Labor value theory says this is a bunk job and I haven’t seen one fail yet.”
“Talking yourself out of a job on the first day? You’ll go far here, kid. If it fails even once out of a thousand, we want to know.”
“A President will say doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result is insanity. People will believe it was a wicked smart thing to say. They’ll even blame it on Einstein, so they seem smart instead of smarmy and stupid.”
“Well,” Glasses replied. “It's 2002, not 2008, and we make things here. Meaning we have to make sure they actually work. Presidents are cunts, not engineers.”
The boss frowned, curious if he’d said anything funny, as Rob bowled over, clutching his gut and laughing as hard as he ever had. All he’d ever wanted from a career was a laugh and a paycheck every day. So far, he was one for one.
Not counting those two weeks he was zero for ten.