|
|
|
not enough curry
Thursday, September 6 2018
I pretty much ran out of work to do early in the day after sending a Slack direct message to my supervisor, who, unbeknownst to me, would not be coming in today. Things are weird in this workplace, but when I get up to speed I think I will like the work. Without anything else to do, I busied myself by reading documentation about the product my new employer makes.
As I did so, I listened to a podcast on my headphones about Theranos, the "disruptive" Silicon-Valley medical device manufacturer that claimed to be able to do a huge number of bloodtests from a single finger prick. The whole company turned out to be a scam, funded by such horrible people as Betsy DeVos. Its board of directors was filled-out by aging establishment figures like George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, people who can't even make good decisions in their fields of expertise, let alone medical technology. How did all this happen? It all comes down to a woman named Elizabeth Holmes, who started Theranos as science fiction pipe dream in her dorm at Stanford, dropped out of college, and then managed to tap into the WASP money network, starting with a neighbor and then working the neighbor's social network all the way out to Henry Kissinger, dazzling unskeptical journalists and giving TED Talks all along the way. Along the way, she developed a deep baritone voice so as to make herself seem more credibly masculine. In addition to being born into WASPy connectivity, she came equipped with unusually large blue eyes, though to me all pictures of her look photoshopped; oddly her eyes are centered on slightly different contours of her face. She rode this and and her gift for bullshit and seamless lying all the way to being a billionaire. Now, though, she's disgraced and worth nothing, and all we can do is bask in the schadenfreude coming off Theranos' final supernova. (A nine-billion-dollar company is going to throw off a lot of radiation if it collapses in only a couple years.)
Elizabeth Holmes' con was so complete that she even showed signs of having a personal cargo cult. She was so obsessed with Steve Jobs that she wore black turtlenecks and decorated her office to look like his, as if by taking on all those trappings she would somehow obtain some of his success.
One further amusing point: the name "Theranos" comes come a mash-up of "therapy" and "diagnosis," which is very similar to another mashup from the world of situation comedy: "analrapist," which is supposedly a combination of "analysis" and "therapist."
I don't know what it is about failed or otherwise hubristic technology that fascinates me, but it does. Over the years I've been interested in cold fusion, cryonics, the Juicero, and now Theranos. I wonder what will be next?
Today I'd brought an Amy's frozen rice-and-curry dish for lunch. With hot sauce, it was pretty good, though it wasn't nearly enough food. So later in the day, I drove to a nearby Hannaford to get myself some provisions that included a large jar of peanuts, a bag of jalapeño-flavored pita chips, and a 100-count box of Red Rose tea (the only tea at the office was decaffeinated). That got me through the rest of the day, though I felt a little self conscious about all the wrapper noises and crunching sounds I was making.
At one point in the afternoon, Alex (the only guy I know in the office; he's the one who recruited me) warned me about a big storm blowing in from the west. Had I rolled up the windows of my car. It turned out I hadn't! I went outside and sure enough, the sky looked like a bad bruise to the west. When the storm hit, it was so strong that it temporarily took out the office internet and also did something requiring a hardware fix to the phone system. There's a guy named Joe who is in charge of such things.
On the way home tonight, I picked up an order of two vegan burgers from the vegan burger place (the woman there recognized me from yesterday) so I could be the one providing dinner tonight. During the drive home, I was listening to the local iHeartRadio pop station (98.5, the Cat) and heard a great song that I eventually had to look up later. As I suspected it was by Ariana Grande and it was called "No Tears Left to Cry." I should mention that, though I never liked pop music in the 1980s (mostly due to the primitive synth available then and also to some matters of production), I often like it now. So there's a real potential for me to like a pop song if it isn't too vapid or repetitive. Though I'm not usually a fan of the multi-octive diva singing style, there were enough quirks in "No Tears Left to Cry" to have me wanting to hear it over and over again. There's something about the syncopation and interplay between a rather stripped-down drum-and-bass-rich (with cowbell!) arrangement and layers of Grande's amazing voice.
Gretchen only had about an hour after I came home to eat burgers and watch teevee before going on some errand and meeting up with friends for a movie.
Tonight would normally be the night of the diaspora happy hour, but nobody showed up tonight, suggesting it had finally died nearly three months after the day three of its participants were fired from Mercy For Animals. It was sad, but perhaps inevitable. I'm starting a new chapter of my life at a new place of employment, and I kind of hate everything about Mercy For Animals anyway. I certainly don't want to hear how good things are going there these days under the new president (if, indeed, that is the case).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180906 feedback
previous | next |
