 |
| The sounds of silence are everywhere. In buildings, subways, and in your own soul. |
Today, I went to the Bothell Business Park, in Bothell, Washington. It was a science experiment to see if I had seen a mirage in this quiet hamlet north of Seattle. Maybe it was the Starbucks coffee that had made me think I'd seen Southern California. The lack of palms and palmetto's should have been sufficient to deter me, but I am a glutton for punishment. I suspect it was the lack of Dave's Killer Bread or Stonyfield Whole Milk Vanilla Yogurt that made me so euphorically optimistic. Or too many smoked oysters.
I went to Bothell to inquire at Google about part time work opportunities. It was one of those gray days when God's colors are limited, and peoples' expressions convey the limited palette of morose and gloomy. It was like an Addams Family movie without the jokes. It was raining when I woke, and when my friend Floyd and I arrived in Bothell. Rainwater filled and overran empty Starbucks coffee cups lying in dumpsters in the backs of the Southern California look-alike offices. God was at Ace Hardware buying a sunlamp and an umbrella.
The GPS computer with the female voice had guided us fine, but we discovered the address was not Google's but a management firm in the complex. Floyd, being shy, did not want to go in. I was the ambassador of good will. I didn't think I looked bad. I was wearing my Don Johnson beige jacket, dress slacks, and Italian shoes. I had shaved; I looked normal. The plump receptionist at the management firm with the beady ice cold blue eyes said coolly, "What do you want with Google? You can't get in their building without a card, mister.” I explained that I was simply trying to drop off a resume, as I had learned they were hiring. She said, "They won't let you in. You should go online. Besides, I won't tell you where their building is."
I showed her my red hot branding iron, my Guantanamo Bay detention camp torturer's assistant's badge, and my paint ball weaponry, and still she would not budge. I slid a 48 oz. Starbucks triple latte caramel mocha, with cinnamon sprinkles, across the black labradorite surfaced countertop, but her eyes narrowed and she said with an icy tone that left frostbite on my fingers, "It think it's time for you to go, buster."
Such is the mistrust in America. Gone are the days when you could trust the milk man, and leave your door unlocked. Even people in Antarctica bolt their doors at night. I met an alley cat carrying handcuffs and a stun gun. People are so fearful of what tomorrow will bring they send themselves black roses. The French are eating toads for breakfast, certain that nothing worse can happen the rest of the day. Me, I am doing fifty pushups a day just because I figure I'll be jumped one of these days by a pack of hoodlums. I even make myself write myself an I.O.U. when I splurge on an organic product from Newmans' Own. I used Super Glue the other day to affix my fingers to my grocery bags.
Floyd and I drove a hundred feet to a deli, and the owner, a middle-aged smiling Asian man who mistook my handshake for a Master Mason, told me exactly where the Google building was. "You are very close," he said, "It is right over there. You will recognize it by the invisible Google sign on its side." "Ah," I said, "thank you very much."
We arrived in two minutes. According to legend, the Google building was built overnight and dropped from outer space by a UFO. No one heard or saw anything, no cows were dissected in the affair, and if they were they were never seen again. The building was built using the Rococo color palette, aka: the California style of the late 1980s, which is a cookie cutter style that conveys Spanish California without embellishments or personality. This version of California, set in the land where the sun is thought to be an apparition from Norse mythology, attempted to reconcile the weather differences between the two states, much as Schwarzenegger had sought to reconcile with Shriver. Goodbye whimsy, hello 1984. The front door, wherever that was, had no markings to identify that Google owned it. People who came out of the building had only blurry places where their faces once were. Men on the roof in black business suits, wearing sunglasses, eyed Floyd's car with suspicion and rifles with scopes. This was a building with all the personality of Lurch in the Addams Family.
The doors and windows were dark; there were no signs of a front desk, only shadowy figures in the upstairs speaking on cell phones about a suspicious Chinese-American driver and a lean White Male passenger, who - it was believed - had an athletic walk. We drove around the parking lot one time, and a security cart with a rocket launcher followed us to the exit. A long bony finger came from the window of the cart pointing to the exit like a remake of a Dickens classic. And so we left, tails between our muffler.
We drove around the business park looking for names we might recognize. I only knew of one, and that was Brooks Sports. There the eternal sunshine of the marathon mind shone brightly. There all that was happy in the Bothell Business Park beckoned. I had seen Nirvana, but Nirvana had looked the other way and took off running in Brooks apparel.
I was having déjà vu in this pale replica of every business park in Southern California. The companies’ logo’s were occasionally visible. I would learn later that many of them were aerospace oriented companies, or engineering firms. Read: CIA. One of the offices had a guard dog that lunged at the door as I entered. I like dogs, but this one wanted to eat my leg. An unsmiling woman with all the charm of cold war Russia said everything that could be learned about their firm could be learned online, and then she pulled the zipper shut on her mouth. The only part she left out was, “Don’t come back.” I grabbed a cracker of caviar and out the door I flew.
The last building I went in had the inviting title, “Northwest Naturals.” They are owned by Tree Top, who are like the Rockefeller's of juice concentrates. Big juice business people, with no juice in their veins. When I went in I saw no one but a three foot long slit of Plexiglas set into a beige partition, where part of a heavyset man’s rosy face could be seen. I immediately launched into a Seinfeld comedy shtick I'd memorized in the 1990s, to no avail. The man said I could take a business card if I promised to leave.
Then a tall trim black man came from behind a partition and said, “Sorry, we can’t help you. You’ll have to leave now.” I tried to hang a bit longer by extending my hand. I introduced myself, and said “Hello, my name is John D. Rockefeller. I sure like the name of your business. I have a background in writing and design, and international banking. I’ve designed packaging for….” The man interrupted me and said, “We’re not interested.”
I’ve had better receptions in ice coolers in the Bering Sea. When we got back to our point of origin, which I cannot tell you because I fear the Bothell Business Park people will track me down, I fixed Floyd pancakes for his trouble. A man named Robert stopped by on his way to the mental institution. He said he had been in a Starbucks working on a film. He had given me an offer of $101 a day salary while we do preproduction on a film I had no interest in. I did read the script, which was perhaps the most mediocre script in the Western Hemisphere.
Robert said he is the sole actor on preproduction for the new James Bond film, which he could not tell me the working title of because he is sworn to secrecy to parties unknown even to the federal government, though according to Robert they are wiretapping everything he does. He said he is using the in-store camera's of the Starbucks to film the Facebook trailer about the film., which would be announced soon, but only to Robert's contacts, (not the rest of the ticket buying public). Robert said the film is going 24/7 (he meant to add: “In my brain”), and then he asked me for money though he told me he was to receive ten million dollars yesterday for another film about a space lift that Microsoft is nuts about, though they haven't read the script yet because there is no script. I said, "No." Floyd also refused Robert. Google almost hired Robert three months ago, and Floyd said this part was actually true. But apparently, Google found out Robert had shared a room with Jack Nicholson in a real life version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
If this is the sort of people Google considers hiring, then I don't suppose they would look twice at me. I cannot find a shred of evidence that I even exist online. No, that's not true. I found five pages worth. Most of the pages are simply propaganda I spewed about myself. Well, so now you know it: we are in a world of trouble for 2012. I hope I didn't offend my buddies at Google by this blog. In closing, I would like to share an appropriate song. It goes: "And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls. And whisper'd in the sounds of silence."
No comments:
Post a Comment