From: zowie@daedalus.stanford.edu (Craig "Powderkeg" DeForest)
Subject: My Office
Organization: Stanford Center for Space Science and Astrophysics
Distribution: alt
Date: 31 Aug 92 04:34:41

My office:

Three people `belong' in here, but in fact about six grad students come
and go.  I'm currently the only one who spends an appreciable amount of time
in here, though.  Everyone else is working in lab or whatever.

It's a room about 22 feet deep, 10 feet high, and 9 feet wide.  We
have five desks, four bookshelves, a water cooler, a low table, and a
filing cabinet.  It's a bit crowded.  The back of the room is entirely
full of Max's stuff, piles and stacks and bookshelves towering over
his desk.

  Max is one of the three of us who `own' the office.  I sit by the
door, which is left of center on a narrow wall.  Opposite the door are
two large windows that look out on a central courtyard.  Since all of
the windows into the courtyard are tinted, there is a false sense of
privacy out there.  I've seen couples making use of the `privacy'; I
wonder if they knew they were essentially on TV?

I face the wall to the right of the door.  On my right, against the
wall through which the door comes, is a 4' high bookcase covered with
my notebooks and texts.  There is a little bookshelf-width space
between the right side of my desk and the corner of the office.  It's
full of boxes of Max's stuff.

To my left, the office stretches for about 15 feet, past the other
desks, bulletin boards, and oddments on the wall, to the windows.  A
stuffed lobster hangs from the post between the windows.  A speaker
hangs from the wall by the windows; atop it is the mystical Eggman, a
small stuffed bear in a clean suit.  She watches over us and will
(hopefully) ensure that we graduate.  There is a Mac II buried
somewhere near her, but I'm afraid to look for it: avalanches have
been known to happen back there, in the forbidden depths of the
office, so I play it safe.

I stay closer to the door, sometimes venturing halfway down the office
to make tea or put a tape on the homebuilt stereo.  In case of
problems, I keep my trusty water pistol pumped up to maximum and close
at hand -- one never knows when one may need it.

Over the bookcase is a dartboard, which we got at a military garage
sale at White Sands Missile Range, by paying $5 to a military bride
straight out of `The Right Stuff', in a classic rundown-but-`nice'
neighborhood right on the navy base.  [Why is it that only
neighborhoods dominated by either religion or the military are gentle,
safe places where everyone knows each other?]  I brought it (the
dartboard) back here on my motorcycle.  The wall around the dartboard
is pocked with misses that hit the plaster.  One day, one of them will
probably hit my head.

Hanging on the dartboard is a picture of our NASA collaborator, R*****d
H*****.  

R*****d currently has no darts in him, though a near-miss is right by his
ear.  There *is* a rather large paring knife stuck between his eyes.

My desk is like the sea, and my mess is the tide:  it ebbs and flows depending
on the time of day and month.  Currently, there is a low wash covering most
of the desk, but the odor of ebb is present.  Features and interesting
shells, unseen for months, have been uncovered by an unusually low tide.  
Scissors, matchbooks, and data cables lie strewn about like dead fish and
piles of kelp on the seashore.

Rising like a rock scarpment or bluff from the waves that lap over my desk,
is my computer.  A bastion of order and neatness in a chaotic world, it rises
against the boom and crash of papers and books falling against it.  Like the
Isle of Mont St. Michele, it rises above the surrounding chaos, sometimes an
island, sometimes merely a hill.  Postits and old headlines cling like
limpets to its stolid bulk.  

Inside the computer, as inside the abbey at Mont St. Michele, is a separate
world of order.  Files are kept neatly categorized and organized.  
Daemons walk like monks through the quiet hallways of the processor;
windows and files flow by like tapestries in the nave of a Cathedral of Reason.
Few who come here (by way of the network's back door) would suspect that,
inches and worlds away, madness lurks and chaos reigns.

--zowie

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