Fools Pantheon Michael decides to get a real job. His mother had warned that this would eventually become necessary, but being young he chose to ignore her aquired wisdom. Its not like he was never employed, its just that he had never really had to tow someone elses line. There was one summer job, first year in college, where he had to get up at seven AM, be there at eight, and leave at four PM. He didn't find it very stimulating and never did it again. Since then he has supported himself in various non-standard ways, being a sound man for small bands, teaching art at a University, building widgets for people, even managing a science meuseum's electronics shop. None of these activities placed heavy requirements on his time, at least to the extent of specifying a particular hour of arrival. The arrival time, usually unreasonably early in the day, was always the sore point. This is, in fact, the precise point that caused his mother to share her knowlege of the business world. Eight AM was her idea of the right way to start a job. At the moment of decision, Michael is working in his bedroom as a computer consultant. There have been no parent surrogates prying him from a pleasant sleep for the ridiculous purpose of being somewhere else in a groggy state. He may stay up until 3 and 4 am working, but he never starts before 11. The difficulty is that the pay is pretty spotty, though good when it appears. A chance encounter with Brian gains Michael an interview in a smallish engineering company. The interview lasts for four hours, but results in a concrete offer, which he snaps up. His mother is pleased that he will finally have to get on a normal schedule and not "waste the best part of the day". And he will have health insurance. Fortunately it doesn't work out that way. At first, he trys to get to work at a 'decent' time every day. He notices that no one notices. He starts staying late to get on with things without being bothered. Soon he is back to normal. The one problem is that there is a big project to be finished. Make that two problems, the second is that no one really understands what the project entails. As time goes on, the company president begins having regular meetings with the engineering staff, to make sure nothing "falls through the cracks". Michael discovers that the president really has no idea what belongs between the cracks either. One day a gentleman introduces himself to Michael. "Hi, I'm Norris". "Nice to meet you", Michael says a bit distracted. "I'm the project manager", Norris says expectantly. "Oh, yeah I saw your name somewhere." Norris waits a few seconds, "Well, how's it going?" He seems genuinely concerned. Michael begins to explain some obscure aspect of his current task. Norris looses the thread of the conversation and eventually wanders away. Later on Michael asks Brian what a project manager is. Brian explains that Norris is susposed to be in charge of getting the finished product delivered to the client, who has already spent some millions of dollars and is waiting rather impatiently for results. By this time it has become apparent to everyone that they are losing fighting a losing battle. The deadline has passed without a wimper and still no one has connected all the dots together into a working system. Through political inexperience, Brian and Michael become the only two engineers that have a chance of completing any portion of this task. They end up working twelve hour days, debugging things wire by wire. Norris, it turns out, is an ex-boxer with connections in big industry. He doesn't know a byte from a sandwich, but is very good at keeping the client's hounds off the company's back while their employees try to make something work. He is also good for procureing pizzas and bottles of Wild Turkey at midnight. Norris feels that he should stay and supply any moral support required by his dedicated engineering staff. He also knows that they will be out the door minutes behind him if he leaves. One night, Brian and Michael are fiddling with a problem that has proved to be intractable to their combined reasoning powers. Some circuit boards will work in some physical locations but not elsewhere. Others work elsewhere but not there. Added to this is the general problem that many of the circuit boards just don't work at all. To complete the task requires a full set of circuit boards working in one place at one time. Its midnight and the boys are getting pretty punch drunk. Brian has already fallen off his chair once that evening and Michael is doing his Three Stooges imitations. They have swapped every part imaginable so many times that they have forgotten what they imagined just moments before. Norris is half asleep on a stool with an expresion of despair on the parts of his face that aren't too badly smashed up. Michael has an epiphany. He turns to Norris and asks, "What's it like to have your professional future in the hands of a couple of Yahoos?" Norris laughs before he realizes the full implication. Brian says, "I think its the backplane, its the only thing we haven't swapped out twice." "Ground loops", Michael says with conviction. Morris nods as if this explains everything. He closes his eyes and rubs them. When he opens them again the boys are gone. Some years before, at the beginning of the Michael's science museum carear he fielded a request to deliver a piece of test equipment to two of the museum's assistant directors. Michael finds them dismantling a huge pile of equipment, the purpose of which is to connect a sleeping person to an electro-encephalograph and project pictures of brain waves onto a big screen using a high power laser. After some delicate questioning Michael determines that the two physicists are trying to find the source of a loud hum in the output of this monstrosity. After gleaning some more disinterested answers Michael takes a piece of wire and connects two power distibution boxes together, drawing an impressive but harmless spark. The hum goes away and Michael leaves the sheepish scientists to reassemble the nightmare they have created in their laps. The problem was a ground loop, as any competent rock and roll roadie could have told them. This was Michael's first brief brush with Yahoodom. Michael becomes fixated on the concept. Most people think of a Yahoo as an annoying person without redeeming social value. Maybe some guy in a dirty Bud T-shirt yelling non-sequitors at a baseball game. Jonathan Swift's Yahoos lived in trees and, for their own amusement, defecated on travelers using the roads below. Michael extends the concept by requiring that his type of Yahoo be someone that is needed for some task, but still otherwise entirely uncalled for. Like explicit medical photographs of normal human genitalia, neither art or pornography, the Yahoo is someone whose skills are absolutely necessary under certain conditions. Michael's Yahoo can thus get away with murder, as long as he or she keeps producing. The Yahoo concept gains creedance when the project fails. Norris disappears and the boys are given raises. Their direct supervisor asks if he can be a Yahoo too. Brian thinks it may be possible to capitalize on Yahoodom by starting a consulting service which would be hired by companies to bring their competitors to their knees from within. Among the advantages are a double salery and absolutely no performance pressure. Advertising would have to be word-of-mouth, much the same as the Hashisheen. The Yahoo concept is finally proved when Brian and Michael find themselves thrown together again a few jobs down the line. Jack, the current project manager, cajoles the boys into going to dinner with a group of clients and other company people. Jack choses to ignore their statement that, since it is free, their plan is to drink as much as they can in the shortest possible time. It turns out to be thirteen at the table, with Jack as Chirst, and Brian and Michael at the far end, in the Judas position. The boys are true to their word and lay in plans for a Winebaggo trip though the Midwest wearing plaid suits and mohawk haircuts. The rest of the disciples gravitate towards the center of power and do their best to ignore the Yahoos. At one point Michael looks up to see Jack glance at him and then say, "Yes, but they do good work". No one asks them to dinner with clients again, but there are still expense accounts. Later on Sally asks Michael about his 'Geeks from Hell' sweat-shirt, which features a computer terminal with a smashed keyboard and an icepick driven through the screen. He feels compelled to elucidate the Yahoo theory for her. "Well, really there's a heirarchy of types of people. "You start with a primordial stew of Beings", Michael begins. Do you have a pen?" "The world after creation, but before differentiation". She hands him a felt-tip marker. "Here". "Exactly", he continues. "Occassionally a Dweeb floats to the surface." "Dweebs? Aren't they like nerds?" "Yeah, but Nerds come later on". Michael spreads out a napkin on the counter. "So, Dweebs are people that aren't really capable of anything. They usually make futile attempts and sometimes succeed out of sheer doggedness and perversity". He draws a wavy pattern at the bottom of the napkin and then dots the waves with little logs. The ink bleeds. "Then come the Nerds and Geeks. They're pretty much the same except for one important quality". Michael draws two circles above the wavy lines, one slightly higher than the other. "Ah good, nerds," she says. "Weren't geeks circus side-show performers of some kind?" "Geeks were the drunks they hired to do disgusting things, like bite the heads off of live chickens. They were paid by the bottle", he draws a liquor bottle inside the higher circle. "Yuk". "Its a living of sorts", Michael puts arrows pointing to the circle that contains the bottle. "Both Nerds and Geeks are fairly tightly focused on some, usually technological, subject, to the point that they often can't talk about anything else. Of course you can have Philosophy Nerds and Home Econonmics Nerds just the same as Computer Geeks", he draws a book sitting in a frying pan in the other circle. But lets stick to things I know about." "So, there're lots of Geeks and Nerds. How do you tell them apart?" Sally is a bit worried that he will smash the tip of her pen. "The difference is that the Nerd thinks he actually enjoys doing what he's doing". Michael puts a happy face on the book in the frying pan. He is getting ink on his hands from holding the napkin flat. "The Geek knows better". "The Geek is more self aware?", Sally asks. "Exactly. Most Geeks wish they could be Nerds, because their lives would be infinitly more pleasant". Michael draws a happy face on the bottle and then puts three X's over it. "So why don't they switch?" "It would be too embarassing, like a cat pretending its a dog. I've had to work with Nerds on occasion. They drive me nuts." He starts filling in the frying pan circle with rapid strokes. "They're exicitable. They're always trying to show you something or other they think is cool that has nothing to do with what you're doing at the time." The napkin tears. "Sometimes I want to smash their fingers." He stabs at the napkin a few times with the pen. "Careful, you're drawing on the counter top". "Geeks are much easier to get along with". He draws another circle around the bottle. "I suspose they're more subdued. You don't like exuberance much, do you?" "Not when I have to get something done and they are exubering about something else." Michael starts drawing a toilet bowl around the wavy lines. Sally spreads out another napkin and motions that Michael should put it underneath his canvas. "Then there are the Yahoos", he draws a baseball diamond above the, mostly destroyed, circles. "They're usually out in left field, but sometimes the ball goes out there". He draws an arc from home plate to left field. "They get things get done." "But how are they different from Geeks for instance. Don't they get things done too?" Sally is British and doesn't understand baseball terminology. "Sure, but Yahoos do it however they please." He starts drawing a football play diagram on the diamond. "And they make unreasonalble demands. Even though you hate to give in you usually don't have any choice." "I get it, you can't just go out and get another Yahoo". She tries to make sense of the drawing. "I thought only the pitcher stood there in the middle?" "At the top of the heap are Gurus". Michael ignores the sports trivia question and draws a triangle above the toilet. "Do they have fleets of Rolls Royces like the Bhagwan?" "No usually they ride a bicycle or drive some rat trap VW they had in college. Sometimes they buy a new car or something". He puts the bicycle from the Prisoner inside the triangle. "You are Number 6", Sally says criptically. "Gurus can be truculent and unpredictable. They amuse themselves by solving obscure problems and, if you are lucky, one of those problems will be yours". Michael trys to draw an eye at the apex of the triangle. The pen tip has pretty much had it by now, so the result is a blotch with lines coming out of it. "What is that?" Sally says. "The pyramids have eyes", Michael tries to up the criptic ante. "And George Washington was a Mason". Sally wins. "Gurus tend to wander off and leave most of the work as an exercise for the reader". Michael draws an arm coming from the triangle and flushing the toilet. "Unfortunately, you can't live without them". He looks at the mess he has made of the pen and his hands. "I'll get you another pen, OK." XXX (c) 1991 M. I. Smith