vr

a novel

Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss

October 1999

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

From: Laurent
Date: 1 October 1999
Subject: Re: Sporadic Lagoons

> Su memoria sol[i]a meterlo en esporadicas lagunas.

i think it should be 'the mere memory of him', or farther from the original 'just thinking of him'

my interpretation of the sentence would be 'just thinking of him threw him into sporadic lagoons' i have no idea what lagoons are supposed to mean there

> in Alsace, I'm thinking about Bordeaux. Perhaps, Laurent, you could advise
> me. I'd like to go somewhere where there's some high-tech industry and

Bordeaux is a crappy bourgeois city.
Disney Europe is building a second theme park in the parisian suburb, which is meant to bring massive international crowds, and paris is headquarters of many american companies in europe who have to train their local workforce, i.e. teach them english. I guess as far as jobs go Paris would be the best choice.

You could go to Brussels too. It is the administrative capital of Europe and as such has a big international (i.e. english speaking) population.

If you are really insisting on provincial towns with hi-tech and tourism you have three choices:
-Toulouse, where they build airbus planes and ariane space rockets, and which is one hour from the pyrenees mountains.
-Grenoble has a lot of computer stuff and is a ski resort
-Sophia-Antipolis on the french riviera has some high tech industry, and is on the french riviera

France has a 12% unemployment rate..job hunting IS tough here, and I have no idea how you could get a working visa.

> gap, usually in knowledge. Thus I think we can now translate the entire
> sentence as something like: "His memory was only made of sporadic holes,"
> or: "His memory was full of only sporadic holes," which shifts the adverb

well i do not speak spanish either but i understand the sentence as:

'just thinking of it threw him into phases of emptiness'

From: John
Date: 2 October 1999
Subject: a day in the life of a geek

fucking hell, i've hit the snooze bar too many times and have to be at work in twenty minutes. shower, dress, and out the door with five minutes to make a twenty minute walk. i light a cigarette and take my time. i feel like shit. i'm fifteen minutes late, not bad considering. i've got about ten minutes before all hell breaks loose.

one of the clerks comes to my desk. something's gone wrong and she's worried that she's lost her file. i go to her desk to check it out, and a couple of minutes later there's a crowd forming with similar complaints. i've got a sure-fire troubleshooting technique, first blame the nearest microsoft software, then blame my idiot coworker.

i check the fileserver, and it hasn't bluescreened, so i search out the idiot. he's in the meeting room where we're setting up a bunch of computers for training. before i even walk in the room i know what's wrong, he's broken the network loop. i tell him it has to be looped, put it back together, and head back to the clerk's desk. still doesn't seem to be working, so i go back to the meeting room where the idiot's got the network wiring fucked up in a cleverly wrong way. fix it again, tell him not to touch it again. problem solved, except now i have to finish it because i can't trust him not to fuck it up.

waste about an hour installing quark xpress on a mac and performing the half dozen upgrades needed to get it to the latest version.

talk to my idiot coworker about why something needs to be set up a certain way on the fileserver. he seems to go along with it, so i leave it alone. a couple of hours later i find out he only pretended to agree and didn't do it, so it's another stupid fucking argument, this time involving my other coworker and our boss. i'm right of course, so i get my way and the idiot sulks. i've never known anyone who manages to do the wrong thing so consistently and with such great confidence, and who gets so defensive when criticised. most of the time it's easier just to keep my mouth shut and quietly clean up his messes, but it really pisses me off some days, especially because i'm just a contract slave and he's a permanent employee with a better title.

on monday we start to convert the office from macs to windows machines. i can't wait.

From: SAGReiss
Date: 2 October 1999
Subject: Ca n'existe pas les petits blancs

Laurent kindly wrote me back immediately with his own weird translations of Miel's sentence and advice on France. He is sceptical of my obtaining a work permit, which is of course a problem, but all I can do is ask for one. He warns about unemployment, but I have never really had any trouble finding work, even here where I can't even speak the language enough to take a lunch order. He seems to suggest Paris, but lodging in such a big city is a nightmare. I would be staying in a hotel and trying to find an apartment fast. He also suggested three other places, Toulouse (I hate the accent.), Grenoble (There's nothing except nuts.) and Sophia-Antipolis, which I've never even heard of. My reasons for thinking about Bordeaux are gastronomic. It's near the Atlantic, so there's fish and seafood and lots of fine hotels and restaurants. It's about the right size, 200,000 inhabitants with a university. I've just checked the Sud-Ouest newspaper website, and there's lots of "Help Wanted" ads for waiters. The site is pretty cool, though one has to sign up for access to certain things. They will send "Help Wanted" ads by e-mail. I've checked the yellow pages, and there are about four dozen language schools. A two-room flat seems to run about FF 2,500, which is fine, if I can earn FF10,000. I got that five years ago teaching English.

From: Joy
Date: 4 October 1999
Subject: Re: a day in the life of a geek

He's ALIVE!!!

From: SAGReiss
Date: 14 October 1999
Subject: The Webmaster will see you now

By a perversely absurd twist of fate I have become Minister of the Internet at ortra.com. My main qualification seems to be that no one else wanted to do it, and I didn't refuse. Our website is basically impossible to find. If one types something like "convention israel" on Yahoo, it works, but none of the other search engines seem to. With what we'll kindly call my limited expertise I have verified that the meta-tags (or whatever they're called) seem to be set right. Besides it's not really my fault. Some idiot was paid two thousand dollars to do this. Well, payment has been stopped, and a brawl has ensued. If anyone has any creative thoughts about how to improve our site, or make it visible to someone who doesn't work at Ortra, I'd appreciate the help. I have entered us on go-events (You have to look at Israel and set the dates to two thousand, which no one would ever do, unless he specifically wanted to find our site. Besides it's some site in Thailand, not a big market for Israeli tourism, I reckon.) and inter-resa (I think it's under Israel excursions.) and some site called NonWeb keeps sending me e-mail requests from potential customers, who never buy anything, of course. I haven't yet told them that the only way to make money on the 'net is to sell free pornography, and no one has figured out yet how to make money selling free shit. I guess I'll have to figure out how to write HTML or something, so I can update the site, if I ever get the password. I tried to enter the URL to Lycos and Altavista, but I'm not sure how successful I was.

RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss

From: Joy
Date: 24 October 1999
Subject: Re: Ca n'existe pas les petits blancs

losing my current email addy, can be reached at bellsouth
webpage will move too but im not sure where yet

-Uns

From: SAGReiss
Date: 29 October 1999
Subject: Minister of Communications

Perhaps he is just a Deputy Vice Assistant Adjunct Minister, or some guy who sells sandwiches at the Ministry canteen, but his secretary was abroad so I had to type his abstract, a propaganda piece for Israeli telecommunications policy, as he sat making phone calls in the big boss's office. That wasn't my idea, but I couldn't stop him. There were very precise specifications for the form of the abstract, title in Arial 20 bold with 24 pt line spacing, text in Times 11 with 13 pt spacing, notes in Times 9 with 11 pt spacing, margins all set to 2.0, which is fine except that my 'puter at work is fucked up, so it didn't look right. Anyway I typed it out, resolved not to say anything despite the fallacious claim about reasonable rates. Is NIS 0.243 reasonable for five minutes online during the day? That is until he asked my if he was supposed to pay me for the job. I was obviously on the clock, not even a member of parliament could have mistaken that fact. With regard to tipping, either you quietly hand someone cash in gratitude for services rendered, or you shut the fuck up. You don't ask: "Am I supposed to pay you for this?" I smiled with my arms crossed behind my back. Later on, when he asked me again what I thought about the article, I said: "I'm not sure about the 'reasonable rates'. In the United States there's unlimited local calling, so I never used to get off line. If the government wishes to promote internet use..." Of course there's no such thing as a trick question to a politician. He recited a five-minute policy blurb about price structure and flat rates in the year 2002. I wonder if this has anything to do with my phone getting cut off. I kind of forgot to pay the bill, not that I had received one. I thought maybe it's free for the first four months. Anyway it wasn't too bad, a hundred and fifty dollars. It was a weird day. The cat massacred a pigeon. So much for my stepmother's assurances that he really likes dog food. To add humiliation to poverty I've been given a raise, as the official Webman of ortra.com. I'm not sure how much it is. I haven't actually done anything online yet. I've been too busy and don't know how to do anything. I guess the procedure is for me to e-mail stuff to the real Webmaster, and he can update the site. That's no more strange than our system for printing the Book of Abstracts. We threaten and cajole the scholars (anyone who can type and pay the thousand dollars or so to attend the conference) to give us electronic copies of their text. Then we reformat them, so that the margins look nice and the title is in the right font, and we send hard (paper) copies to the printer.

RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss

September 1999

November 1999

vr: 1999