i love government work. there's always a crisis du jour. if it's not a woman calling and harassing anyone she can get ahold of, it's somebody coming in and offering to take the boss across the street to his house for "a beer and a shower". or, failing that, we can pretty much always count on the computer for some amusement.

the computers themselves are fine, but the software is a little bit like a magic box built by a foreign wizard who doesn't speak english and smokes a lot of dope. his face is wrinkled and pasty and he probably has ash in his beard (which is quite long and grey). he usually wears a dirty pair of spectacles and squints a lot. we don't understand him, and he doesn't understand us. the box is big and grey and you can't see anything that happens inside it. it doesn't even make noise while it works. it just sits there silently. we shove our data in one side and wait for something to pop out the other side.

when the output doesn't look like it should, we can't explain why. the box is magic. fix it? we don't know how. r2-d2 took the schematics and went off on a robot bender. the last we saw of him he was lying in a gutter, guzzling cheap motor oil and beeping incoherently. that was about 5 years ago. i heard he checked into rehab, but i bet he pawned off the schematics a long time ago. no, fixing the magic box isn't really an option. instead, our only hope is to find the problems in the output, tinker with them a bit and shove them back into the box. and when we get calls that problems with the data persist, we tinker some more and shove the problems back through the box. then lather, rinse, repeat until the calls stop.

i'm not complaining, at least not entirely. if i didn't have this to work on, i'd probably have nothing at all to do.

i love government work.