Robots vs. Fairies(9)
I am also and forever Team Theme Park. I spend more time than is strictly healthy at Disneyland, and I adore the way the Park engineers can and do shape the environment to control what the guests see, hear, and experience. It’s like entering a fairy hill in a lot of ways, and I wanted to spend some time with a group of engineers who took that aspect of park design very, very seriously. Enter my fairy smiths, who’ve turned their eyes toward a different, somewhat more candy-colored future. . . .
QUALITY TIME
by Ken Liu
“Welcome to weRobot,” said the chipper HR representative. “Jake and Ron and the rest of us are all so looking forward to your contributions!”
“Are you a true believer?” the woman next to me asked in a low, conspiratorial voice. I looked at her, puzzled; her name tag said AMY.
She took a sip of her coffee, frowned, and then rapped her knuckles against the conference room table. The little coffeemaker in the middle of the table, a retro-looking, squat black cylinder with a chromed dome top, spun around until its single camera was aimed at Amy, who smiled and beckoned to it.
“A true believer in what?”
I whispered. I couldn’t help it. I knew I should be paying attention to the benefits presentation—Mom had emphasized no less than five times on the phone last night the importance of contributing to the 401(k) at my first job out of college. But I was feeling nervous (the slide on-screen at the moment actually said Our Impossible Mission), and Amy—forties, short-cropped hair, a tattoo of two fairies playing Nintendo on her left arm—looked like she had wisdom to share.
“The Myth of the Valley,” she said.
The coffeemaker rolled toward Amy, its motor humming softly. It stopped a few inches away and flashed the ring around its camera eye. Amy leaned forward to dump out the contents of her mug in the waste disposal chute at the side of the robot.
Then, instead of discreetly tapping out her new order on the touch screen, Amy leaned back in her seat and said aloud, “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”
Some of the other new hires—almost all of them my age—looked at Amy disapprovingly for this interruption; a few others chuckled. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” said Amy, a satisfied grin on her face as the coffeemaker filled her mug with the new beverage.
Instead of acting annoyed, the HR rep smiled indulgently. “I was a fan too. This is actually a perfect segue to the next slide.” She pressed the button on her clicker.
The new slide showed an old photograph of weRobot’s two founders, geeky college boys in their dorm room, surrounded by a mess of mechanical and electronic components as well as stacks of spiral-bound notebooks. “We believe that there’s no continuing mission more important than improving the lives of the human race through advancing robotics. We want every one of you to feel that you can make a difference, achieve what you thought was impossible, act like Jake and Ron when they started this company with a notebook full of diagrams that no one believed would work and eighty-five dollars between the two of them. . . .”
Amy leaned over to me. “Either that’s a terribly staged photograph, or one of the duo is no good at programming.”
“Oh?”
“Look at that snippet of Perl on their computer. Reading all lines into an array? No chomp?”
I looked at the photograph and then back at her, my face blank.
“Not a coder then?”
I shook my head. “I majored in folklore and mythology.”
Amy gazed at me with interest. “I like this; we should talk more.”
Great, I don’t even get the engineering jokes. I suppressed a rising wave of panic and sought refuge in some homemade chicken soup for the soul.
One of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley wouldn’t have hired a liberal arts major without having seen something in me, right?
The HR rep took out a stack of notebooks and handed them out. “Your first and most important benefit!”
The notebooks turned out to be pads of graph paper. I flipped open mine. Instead of the standard square grid, the sheets were imprinted with unorthodox patterns like spirals, honeycombs, tessellations of animal shapes, a scattering of random dots.
“Don’t follow conventional wisdom,” said the HR rep. “If a problem hasn’t been solved, that means you are meant to solve it! Think impossible . . . and then make it happen!”
“As corporate one-liners go, this one isn’t too bad,” whispered Amy. “Not as ripe for parody as Centillion’s ‘We arrange the world’s information to ennoble the human race,’ and certainly better than Bazaar’s shtick of having new employees build their own desks out of two-by-fours while chanting, ‘There should be nothing you can’t buy from us!’ Look at all the eager beavers!”
I looked around at the others in my cohort. Some stared at their notepads, unsure what to do with the strange gift; others looked inspired and drew in them with intense concentration as though they were already designing weRobot’s next great hit.
Amy took another sip of her tea. “Youngsters are so fun to watch. They love to be inspired.”
“Do you think we’re just being fed some lines?” I asked. Amy’s wry tone had me concerned that I had made a mistake. “Glassdoor has really good reviews of this place’s culture.”
Amy chuckled. “Like all their competitors in the Valley, they’ve got the shuttle buses and free nuts and fruits and ToDoGenie credits, and I’m sure they’ll give you as much responsibility as you can handle, plus the stock options to keep you here. But no one really succeeds here without believing the One True Myth.”