At work; today I am fixing a list of web app bugs. In between each I speculate about an author's recent nightsweat:
Perhaps she was watching TV. Maybe there was a Michael Keaton marathon on. And maybe "Gung Ho" was the last movie to play before her drooping eyelids fell. (Actually, maybe there was a Gedde Watanabe marathon on...)
Then she dreamt.
Perhaps she dreamt a long narrative, or perhaps, instead, she hazily encountered a montage of tech images. Maybe she saw Indian tech executives. Underpaid. Enterprising. Perfect. Saw them meticulously scaling the walls of Seattle fortresses. And maybe she saw a flag being raised as the bodies of engineers burned...not a flag - a standard being raised. And perhaps the symbols on it weren't the comfortable stars, stripes, eagles, or baseballs to which she had always been accustomed. Maybe an error code in Hindi. No matter. As the standard was raised high, I believe her heart skipped a full step off of its pace as she watched the slow-motion fall of a pair of thin-rimmed glasses, stained with blood. Watched and held her breath as they fell slowly from atop a throne, glanced off a Linux server, and landed with a jarring, bear-ish "cRasH!"
That's when she woke up. And she didn't wake up screaming. She woke up typing. And worried. Worried that "a culture of carelessness seems to have taken over in high-tech America" and that high tech's missionaries of sloppiness are setting up the U.S. software market for a big fall.
(sigh) Suddenly, the zeitgeist seems oddly familiar. Haven't we had this dream before? George Bush in the White House. The threat of foreign competition in one of the U.S.'s highest-profile markets. (see above) The hot new Christmas present for kids is one hard-to-obtain videogame console for the TV. The market slides downward and some economic forecasters predict recession. A prime-time TV game show becomes incredibly popular. A five-member "boy band" rules the teen pop roost.
The date of my post is displayed above. I keep having to look at the year for reassurance…