Haeccitas
He was a software engineer in some... ah, it didn't matter. He was a software engineer, his type was a dime-a-dozen, crawling in the walls of virtually every single business he could think of, and probably several others he had no hope of identifying if they came up to him on the street and offered him a pamphlet.
And every single time he thought of himself as a software engineer, he had no idea why, he started singing it, to the tune of "Lola", by Barry Manilow. He had no idea if that was the actual name of the song, or if Barry was the original author, but he knew the tune, and it went: "Her name was Lo-la, blah blah blah blah, blah... doo doo doo doo doo, doo do doo." Or something. At any rate, it got him singing Barry Manilow, mentally, was his point. If life were a television show, he wouldn't necessarily have been picked out of a lineup by some TV exec to play a software engineer/computer geek. He had a normal, on some days quite Beatles-esque haircut (or so he thought - not Abbey Road Beatles, more... "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" Beatles), didn't wear glasses, had green contacts, though he had no particular vision troubles, regular teeth, the front two slightly smaller than they are in most people, giving him a slightly mousey appearance. But he didn't exude the sexless (in many ways) stink of a computer geek. No pocket protector, no tape on glasses, no blatant disregard for the small creatures living in his hair. He was mostly well groomed, or at least as well groomed as a single male of a certain age could be, and was a polite, sociable sort of person.
And thus far, this Tuesday, he'd spent the entire afternoon looking inward, contemplating his belly button lint. Literally. He'd begun thinking about it after receiving a link to a news story about some new gadget for wireless home automation, which had a comment from some poster on their TiVO, for some reason, which got him thinking about YouTube, so off he went, where he caught a disturbingly bad parody of a Microsoft ad. Microsoft got him thinking, as it often did, of belly button lint. And so he was half curled around himself in his less than comfortable blue, static-generating chair, thinking about belly button lint.
Not so much its origins, but more musing about whether or not complications ever arose from too much belly button lint, and not just in larger people, the ones on the television who are shown being foisted out of their houses with cranes. He was thinking f normal, thinnish sort of people who simply tested the limits and left their belly button lint as long as humanly possible, until it became a problem. It didn't seem likely, as he never actively did much about his belly button lint, and it never seemed to pile up in any sort of way. But these, he thought, were the sorts of things he was paid to think of. He thought this because his boss gave him a similar question when he was applying for this job. The question was: There is a mountain of belly lint, opposed by a hill of prime numbers. If you were given one day to move the entire collection of prime numbers from the hill to evenly displaced locations on the belly lint mountain, how long would it take you, would you be able to complete it in a day, and what algorithm would you use to automate this, should the number of prime numbers grow at double the rate of the belly lint mountain (which was, he got clarification on, indeed growing daily).
He futzed around for about half an hour on this problem while the boss watched him, scribbling on paper and writing 2's and 3's occasionally, to show he was thinking about prime numbers, and, in the end, confessed he didn't know. At which point the boss confessed he didn't know, either, and told him that he was hired, with a chuckle.
It was the chuckle that should have warned him.
disclaimer:
You out there, I just want to say, "Umm. Hello."
Sorry, built it up too much in my head, then got distracted. At any rate, happy third or so week of 2007!
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