More longer friend see that sky?

It found you, in your office, as you were reading through your list of emails. Somehow, even though the list of things you actually do during your days has shrunk recently, the amount of emails you receive has not followed suit. If anything, it has expanded significantly, taking up more and more of your time, in an inverse proportion to things accomplished. The email found you in a state of pondering this state of things

The email found you as you were out clubbing. It was something of a dissociative moment to see those very bureaucratic words coming at you during the thumping of a bass so phat as to threaten to shake the very Tree of Life itself, the beat boosted by at least one counterfeit chemical brother. The dissociation triggered within you the realization that none of that stuff mattered, and that doing it half-assedly would get the job done just as well as acing it. The email did indeed find you well

The email found you submerged under a trio of cats, who all individually want the same thing from you, albeit with the provision that none of the others get it. It’s shaking out to be another tough round of negotiations, and this new email is relentlessly orthogonal to this series of events. It is unclear whether it actually found you

It found you by gyrating through the forgotten crawlspaces and air ducts of the many buildings of the many cities between sender and receiver. Along the way, it cleared the path for many a blocked airflow, possibly preventing a double-digit number of respiratory-related diseases. The exact path it travelled is a marvel of fractal geometry, geopolitics and edge cases of zoning laws. Alas, the email was filtered out by the spam algorithm

As the sound of a particularly large bird awoke you in the middle of the night, you decided to make the best of it by going to the loo. At some point in this process, the email was checked. An email that would ordinarily require an inordinate amount of thought had appeared. The thought apparatus being temporarily disconnected, you replied with a simple “k” and promptly forgot about it. Lawyers and literary theorists argue to this day about whether this email actually found you

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This email hit like a truck, and you hit back

The letter always arrives at its destination. Indeed, it is created at the moment of arrival. It is not a physical letter, per se. Rather, it is a sudden connection in one’s mind between all the things that brought you to this moment, and how one led to another, in what now seems an inevitable series of events. The letter, upon arrival, manifests as this sense of inevitability, foreclosing upon any thought that it might have been different. This is either a lack of regrets or the gradual disappearance of historical contingency. Either way, it’s here now

As the white whale was hauled to shore, its dead carcass a mass ever so slightly too large for the human mind to grasp in its entirety, one of the surviving sailors waved at you to come over. He’d found something lodged within the whale, somewhere; a bottle with a note in it, with what seems to be your name etched upon its rolled-up surface. The sailor, still in a haze after the ordeal, simply hands you the bottle. At some point in the future, you vow to figure out a way to get the letter out of the bottle without smashing it

The pitch

We are a cutting edge, forward looking company seeking the best of the best, the brightest of every generation. We strive to do things that have never been done before, so as to make tomorrow look like yesterday. By striding boldly into the future, we will advance the cause of science and economics alike. Nothing is too new or unexplored for us. If there is anything to be done for the first time, we will do it in a trailblazing fashion. We are not bound by tradition or convention, and will innovate at every turn. The future will remember us with reverence and awe

Qualifications

Two master’s degrees and seven years of relevant, extensively documented work experience

The actual job

You will be expected to perform tasks related to accounting, bookkeeping, gardening, sanitation, copywriting, web design, HR management, car maintenance, municipal policy wrangling, labor relations, geoengineering, email server maintenance and fashion design

The pay

Ask not what the company can do for you, but what you can do for the company. Good company is its own reward

The benefits

Our recreation rooms feature many state of the art arcade machines, some of which can not be found anywhere else. The free pizza is baked by local artisans who have meditated at length on the optimal way to prepare each individual ingredient. Just as we take great care to ensure that our employees have every creature comfort available to them whilst bringing the future to life

His job was related to big data and data extrapolation. The first two first words simply meant he worked with computers, while the second pair was a bit of clever marketing speak to indicate that he worked with forecasting whilst at the same time clearly not saying he worked with forecasting. Which, in short, meant he got invited to a lot of forecasting events, where everyone talked about different ways of predicting the future, possibly using computers in some way. For those not savvy to the distinction between extrapolation and forecasting, he was indistinguishable from those busy attempting to predict the future

The reason for insisting that he was not, in fact, in the prediction business was that his big data did not work. Trends that had looked the same for decades suddenly changed, while temporary movements became permanent fixtures of the data landscape. This was true only so long you did not apply this analytical heuristic, however; it almost seemed as if looking at the data changed it by means of some unclear causation. Given the data, it made no sense whatsoever, yet there it was. And it was his job to find something useful to do with this tangled mess of all the things. Somehow

Rather than digging in and galaxy braining the data, he had opted for another method of dealing with the pervasive random fluctuations. Whenever he needed to perform some public function relating to his job, he consulted the I Ching. Not because it worked (although it had a better success rate than most of the algorithms in use), but because it too was something depicted as a predictive tool when it explicitly and specifically was not

In his heart of heart, he suspected many of his conference peers and network buddies performed similar extracurricular activities, but that admitting this would demolish the prediction business as we know it

This was the only prediction he made with a statistically significant degree of certainty

He was, to put it politely, in a hurry. Not to worry, though, he was also very close to where he was going. All he needed to do was to find a parking spot, and then he’d be all set. There should be one somewhere around – aha, there’s one!

In fact, there was a whole row of them. An entire sidewalk’s worth. A worrying plethora in this sea of scarcity. Something had to be up. But what?

Then he saw them. The signs. They explained in extensive detail when parking was allowed, and when the full force of the municipal government would come crashing down upon those who broke its sacred commandments. Better pay attention, lest one makes a mistake

He began to read

After reaching the fifth sign – parking was allowed on even-numbered dates, but only if they were not a Sunday, but only during the summer months of the year (weeks 23-25 excluded), unless a special occasion dictated otherwise, with reservation for local variations – he gave up and moved on. Surely, somewhere, there had to be a parking spot that was not also a logic puzzle

At first glance, the trend was as inexplicable as it was unexpected. For what seemed to be no discernable reason, hiking rates had hiked. More people than ever ventured out into the countryside to explore the nooks and crannies of nature – the mountaintops, the deep forests, the long treks only possible in wilderness conditions. Something had set all these people in motion, and no one knew what

At first, it was assumed it was the ancient allure of Nature, in all its splendor. The simplest answer usually being something akin to the truth, and all that. But when asked, hikers rarely made reference to this most natural of reasons. In fact, the responses didn’t seem to indicate any particular reason at all, on either individual or collective levels. The stated reasons were all over the place, ranging from budding but enthusiastic spirituality (which somehow did not make reference to nature), to a (seemingly very sudden) interest in exercise, to vague stories of very distant relatives once having occupied these lands. The sheer variation of flimsy responses became the subject of much speculation, before the real reason finally revealed itself by means of participatory observation

It turns out that uploading photos of oneself in outdoor situations into dating apps generated more matches than indoor equivalents. Moreover, the more outdoors the photos were, the more matches it generated. Thus, it became something of a race to the most remote locations, so as to be able to return home and tell the tale

Perhaps it could be said to be the ancient allure of Nature, after all