Narrow & Madhouse

Written 56-D19 [2024-10-31], Edited 56-D19 [2024-10-31]

Image credit: Twitter Twemoji

Part 1: Narrow

An alarm sounded and Margaret rubbed her eyes. A phone running a closed-source operating system was buzzing. Of course, the phone was not Margaret’s, it was ensconced in Aishwarya’s narrow fingers.

Margaret slowly picked up her bag and gingerly stepped around the sleeping bodies in this chamber once called a living room with a connected kitchen. Three in all, none of whom had a bedroom of their own.

Aishwarya’s phone was still buzzing against a slumbering palm when Margaret opened the front door of the apartment. Her stomach rumbled, but she didn’t own any of the foods in the fridge.

While the sun creeped along the horizon, Margaret pedalled along the streets of Toronto. It was a Tuesday morning but she had no scrubs to change into, no patients to inspect, and nothing to read in any medical journal. She had no boss to report to, no cubicle sit at, no water cooler to gossip with coworkers. Margaret had no masters, no husbands either.

But in a way she had a baby, her creation, the machine.

She locked her bike outside a public library, and nodded at the security guard as she always did. She sat at a desk and opened an aging ThinkPad. After a few seconds of cryptic text, she was staring at a Debian Linux login page. And after a few seconds of waiting for the flaky library WiFi, she was starting at the face of her true calling.

The GitHub issues page for the BeanMix transpiler project had some new updates. There had already been a few hundred bugs in the backlog, but today there were more. Someone noticed that when transpiling ECMAScript 2025 into ECMAScript 2022, some essential semicolons were being removed. And another person noticed that when transpiling ECMAScript 2022 into ECMAScript 2023, BeanMix threw an error because of a null reference. “This is critical for our use case,” the comment said, implying a group or collective or corporation who needed this fixed. An employee of Deployt reported a problem with async await.

Margaret chuckled to herself. There was always something with async await, wasn’t there? But like a mother who caught her child drawing with crayons on the wall, she sometimes couldn’t help but smile at it.

She had a look at the donations page for the BeanMix project.

There was not a cent today. The only text on the page was a title, “Donations”, and a footer, “Made with LetterPost”.

Margaret’s stomach rumbled again.

Part 2: Madhouse

Deborah Freeman was confused. Yes, her raised eyebrow and tilted head indicated that she wasn’t at all impressed.

If only she was raising both eyebrows, thought Samuel Sanderson, her interviewer. Yeah, that’s when you know.

“Mr. Sanderson,” she began.

“Please, call me Sam”, said Samuel.

“Sam,” she said with hesitation. “I was under the impression that this would be a technical writing role at the LetterPost Foundation. But you just told me I’d be managing some technical writers in the LetterPost Company, the for-profit,” she said.

Samuel couldn’t stop starting at the glistening black lipstick on Deborah’s walnut coloured skin. Oh yeah he thought, I wonder what else those lips can do.

“I still don’t see what the problem is?” he said.

This time Deborah raised both eyebrows.

“Mr. Sanderson,” she said. “Are you drooling??”

Notes

Part 1 continues the story of Point.

Part 2 was written in 15 minutes in a Joy of Writing session.

Feedback from the Joy of Writing Group

• Part 1 was well-paced
• (I was visibly annoyed reading the ECMAScript paragraph)
  • “It was good, and the gobbledegook was good as well.”
• “once called a living room with a connected kitchen” says a lot about the setting
• Some people recognized Deployt from Nobody