In Which Virgil Does Knowledge Work

Tonight let me report on an epistemic, or perhaps behaviourist, or perhaps silly, Discourse, one that started in a gong-flooded teahouse & also simultaneously in the cloud, i.e. in Toronto’s storied Annex neighbourhood & also distributed across our world, accompanied by an oolong, preceded by coffee.

Although first, you will probably want to hear about my morning, O Journal of Tawdry Palaver. So, to start: I woke at ten-ish, Kia was gone, there was a divot in the bed’s mattress from her bum, a divot in the couch from mine, and a scribbly thank you note on the counter with her phone number. My shoulder ached and burned, from the Doberman and raccoon, respectively, but the raccoon family had skedaddled, and the shoulder ached more than it did burn, which gave reason for hope, and anyway riding the NYC subway throughout my childhood has inoculated me to world diseases in perpetuity. Which of The Fab Four, I wondered, had even been scratched by a raccoon? Surely one of them, likely the cute one. Anyway I cast off the night with a shrug, it was a new day, “Good Day, Sunshine,” of course, the new day trumps the old.

This was to be day three of Zero Harriet. Despite my pain, I felt bright & bouncy, snugly settled into my new life in Canada. Deep in the lodging’s cupboard, I found a shortbread cookie. I made coffee, I leafed through the lodging’s book collection, there were plenty of Soviet leaflets for some reason, I resisted work for a spell, then at last donned an outdoor face and ventured out, stopping at a Second Cup to have a bran muffin & coffee and a sweet whistle of “Michelle” from Rubber Soul (& executing a quick Bloor → Palmerston → Dundas → Trinity Bellwoods → Kensington Market loop, passing election posters on the way w/ Toronto mayoral candidates’ pristine faces); then, needing tea to wash the bran away, found a well-appointed teahouse. It was full of Canadians, quiet, good for a mind like mine. With me I had brought my newly purchased 2023 almanac as well as a 5” x 8” Lawren Harris print purchased from the Art Gallery of Ontario (hereafter, AGO): “Lake and Mountains.” How many texts, emails, and voicemails did I have from Harriet? None, as a matter of fact. Still, all was well: I set my provisions on the table and took an everloving breath, then flipped open my laptop.

This being Monday, I was scheduled to work, but hadn’t told work I was in Toronto, and when I did, they said, as if they had sovereign authority over my time, no, Virgil, you may not take today off! But Charles III is the new sovereign of the Commonwealth, I told them, and so is the Queen Consort, to some extent, probably. & yet since I respect my coworker Pamela Q. and she needed my help, and since it isn’t pleasant to have conflicts at work, or anywhere, unless you want adrenaline splashing in your blood, I did my contractual duty.

(How crass, how prosaic! I don’t like to be boring, O Journal, I clock out dutifully each night at five p.m., I roam Manhattan Island and, on occasion, Western Long Island, which some would prefer to label The Outer Boroughs, I jot down only what’s worth preserving for you, e.g. the Hopper gas stations, my apologies!)

In the team chat, Pamela Q., Product Manager / stalwart colleague, relayed unease from top executives about how our soon-to-be-launched thingamajig may not be as stable or secure as The Market (by which term I understand old farmers selling strawberries from the backs of their trucks in the town square) expect it to be. Thereupon vectors of jealousy unfurled in Harriet’s direction, owing to my internal computer model. She lives in service of her Queequegs, her Songs of Myself, with only occasional interference from provosts, lucky her.

So I typed, AOK Pamela Q., what do we do? And she typed, We need to write more tests; we === me, since I am responsible for Quality Assurance. I may have sighed, a teahouse man may have scoffed, the gongs in the background music may have resounded. Pamela Q. said, Can we have a quick call? In reply, I typed, Sure, I’ll write tests; but you know that I prefer chatting, indeed, I have accommodations to that effect! Her response: There’s a lot of pressure from the higher ups today, let’s have a call.

The man in the teahouse said, Would you mind? Because, I presume, I was clicking and clacking with my tongue; and I said, Pardon! Not that I noticed right away (seldom do we notice any detail at the time, at best we register & then report it later with a false verisimilitude (finally, a chance to use that golden word!)), but I can report in retrospect that he was wearing a collarless button-down shirt of a faint tan hue, had close-cropped hair, was in his 50s or thereabouts, had a cup of peony tea before him and no reading materials, no technology of any kind, he was staring at his hands with a softly militaristic zen.

Quite suddenly a phone call noise began to radiate from my machine, so I reached (or lunged (if you must)), for my handy almanac to enjoy some facts, however I opened to a section titled Rulers of Scotland. No one cares about Scottish kings! What a useless almanac. Outside there was a blur of people on Bloor Street, the music in the teahouse was serene, but still it felt important to answer Pamela Q.’s call, she provides my income, and yet I obviously wasn’t going to answer. I said NO to the screen. & I texted Harriet to tell her about Pamela Q.’s temerity in calling, as the man in the teahouse started tapping me on the shoulder and the gongs of the teahouse music got louder, a welter of noise pricked each pockmark of my brain.

Let us pause to sip coffee in the palindromic privacy of 1:11 a.m.

The man in the teahouse asked why I was being so loud, didn’t I realize we were in a teahouse? Of course I realized that, I said. He said, And you realize people come here to feel a measure of peace? Do you care about other people? About a healthy, functioning society? I said, All of that sounds like a reach, and a mere construct, too, not a hard-boiled fact. Upon which red splotches appeared on his neck. His blood was mottling, an argument was blossoming. He said, You’re banging the table with your hands again (the way he said it, “a-gain” rhymed with “rain” (Canadian)), what exactly is the issue, sir? & I said, I’m sorry, I am different. He said, Different? I said, Yes, some people think I warrant a Diagnosis. He said, Pardon? What kind of Diagnosis? And I replied, *Apparently* that’s in the eye of the beholder, so you tell me!

This gave him some pause, which was around when I found time to study his clothes and comportment. He looked out at the street, perhaps caught sight of the Toronto mayoral posters on Bloor, and found his better angels in Olivia Chow’s smile, then he reached out a long-fingered hand, and said, My name’s A.M., with a smile, to which I said, That’ll be confusing when I write about you in my journal later. He said, Why is that? I said, Because we’re introducing ourselves five minutes before noon, 11:55 a.m., you can see the issue. He didn’t see the issue. I said, But probably you aren’t like e.e. cummings, you must capitalize your initials, it’ll be fine, because when *I* reference the morning hours, I go: lowercase a, lowercase m (sometimes with periods, though not always), since I find A.M. to be too flamboyant.

Probably I thought that, rather than saying it, since it would be pooh-poohed by Harriet.

He asked, What are you working on? And I said, Quality Assurance (hereafter, QA). & he said, Do you mean — ? But I cut him off, sensing a chance to escape genuine conversation for a good quarter-hour via some tactical blithering.

A.M., I said, it will be important to explain what QA means, not important in a grand sense, just for the purposes of this discussion, which *may* be important in a grand sense. QA means ensuring that a thingamajig does what we say it does. (And I crossed my legs in an artful fashion so he knew I was legitimate.) So if I claim that I make wet green widgets in blue boxes, then I must prove that what issues forth from my assembly line is wet, green, a widget, in a box, and that the box is blue. Rather trivial in this example. But Pamela Q. and I do not make wet green widgets in blue boxes, we make, rather, our precious thingamajigs, which is to say Software, aka Nothing. However, some Nothings are more substantive than are others; and this thingamajig of ours, coming late summer to the mobile phones of North America (!), is less substantive, closer to Pure Nothing, closer to the dampness on a page of poetry left by a frothing porter whilst you scurry to the washroom.

He attempted to interject, Yes, but you shouldn’t call it a thingamajig, and —

But what, then, is a QA test (I continued)? I will explain + will set forth the concomitant issues. If my Software thingamajig says that when I click on a button in the thingamajig, the button should disappear, then what I do, QA-wise, is this: write some Software that summons the thingamajig and checks to see that the button does in fact disappear.

Three issues arise (concomitantly (as I mentioned)):

(1) The thingamajig under test is a fake thingamajig, because who can afford to produce a real one? A real one includes the people who buy it, the people who use it, the microchips onto which all the 101011 usage gets zapped, etc. So the thingamajig is fake, the button is fake, the hand that clicks the button is fake, the disappearance is fake (although that may be a different category of fakeness; consult Gilbert Ryle et al.).

Of course, he said. (Already I was weary from talking so much, being far from home, and engaging with a stranger. Nevertheless, I blithered on.)

(2) The Software that I write in order to test the Software that comprises the thingamajig is Additional Software, often composed in a different framework, which has its own dialect and idioms and rhythms. The two frameworks are similar, but perhaps in the way that Norwegian & Swedish & Danish & Finnish are similar (but isn’t Finnish different from all of these? (and isn’t Welsh different from the Gaelic tongues? (or is that, rather, Manx?))) but then again, I haven’t personally been to Scandinavia, indeed Canada is my first foreign country! at 26-nearly-27! & so regardless, surely you wouldn’t seek to conduct any actual official Swedish government business in Norwegian, and/or vice versa, if you wanted to validate that a Swede said “hej då” to another Swede, you would never do so in Danish! & I am coming to my point, rest assured, A.M.; to test a thingamajig in some cousin dialect of the thingamajig beggars validity, especially when that thingamajig is fake (see: (1)).

And (3)? he said.

(3), I said: What if you don’t even know what your thingamajig is supposed to do? What if, worse still, nobody knows? We have acronyms in Software that promise the world, and we declare that our thingamajigs connect ever more thingamajigs, in near-zero time, but, then, can a thingamajig whose stated purpose is to interconnect thingamajigs be pinned down with any true precision? Can it be a marbled component of reality the way a turkey leg is?

This was all reasonably well articulated, I thought (even if, as I articulated it, I could hear Harriet’s pesky voice telling me I was talking FAR TOO MUCH, verily she popped into my mind much in the way that computers show you pop-ups, software updates, etc.), anyway I started to type some of this to Pamela Q., but then deleted it, & then typed it again, I said: I do not know what this product is, therefore I don’t know how to test it. And Pamela Q. typed, So what have you been working on these past few months, Virgil? So I reared back and I typed, Obviously I’m being funny! & then sipped tea and laughed, quite loudly, by accident, but it made A.M. laugh too, and Pamela Q. typed, Wait — are you joking? You haven’t written any tests? She called me again; again, I declined to answer.

A.M. was still standing before me. After all my blither, his jaw had softened, and his eyes had un-narrowed, as he took on the bearing of a man whose discipline had made him kinder, not crueler. He became, in a word, Canadian. Since I am a mimic, I pushed my accent a few hundred kilometres northward, buttered up my vowels, etc., and said ooh-kay, etc., when after a few more pleasantries, he apologized, and I said, You don’t have to apologize a-gain. Thus concluded our teahouse Discourse. I had a feeling that I might be on the on-ramp to a new friendship, A.M. was a bit old, yes, a bit cranky-adjacent, but there was likely some kinship between us to discover, and he was at least Canadian. And I am Canadian-adjacent.

As it happened, he presented this kinship in short order, saying, You know, I used to work in Software testing. That was pleasant-adjacent to hear, so I dashed off a quick button test, and closed my computer & my eyes, and dreamed of the idea of friends.

∰

When my eyes clicked open, either an hour or a few minutes had passed, A.M. was standing over me still and/or again & pointing at a woman on the street spiriting away with my computer. I told him, It’s fine, it doesn’t belong to me; it’ll be a bad day for Pamela Q., but now at least I’m free to roam about and hum my Coldplay tunes. But A.M. didn’t like that answer, doubtless because he didn’t trust in the resilience of Pamela Q. He hoisted me up by my shirt cuff and then we collaboratively stumbled onto Bloor St., by which time the thief was gone. I feel like this is my fault in a way, A.M. said as he studied me. In his eyes, I had evolved from an object of scorn to an object of pity, which is ordinarily one of my *least* favourite objects to be, at least when it’s coming from my family, especially Harriet, who tends to make such a big show of it. However, since I was no longer working and my mind was getting summer-cleaned by this trip to another country, I made a conscious choice to let A.M. view me how he wished.

I said, Do Canadians steal from one another? That’s very macho! A.M. said, So it’s your work computer? I said, Yes, but don’t worry, it’s only Software, and I’m based in New York; this is all very transient; & I added (because the thought just clambered into my mind), You remind me of me when I’m older. This sentiment appeared to puzzle A.M., and yet I hardly knew how I meant it; I was sleepy, I was tinker-toying with words, sensing that closeness between us, one neither of us would have intentionally sought out & would surely cast off once the day was over. I looked at the Lawren Harris print I’d carted along on my outing: the cloud arcing like a wave over the mountains, a Canadian Hokusai.

A.M. said, That’s my car right outside, let’s get in and we can drive around and look for her. For who? I said. The thief, he said. Ah yes, the thief. That seemed fine, A.M.’s car was well maintained, a Honda hatchback, pacific blue, except when he turned it on, some classical station was playing Shostakovich’s waltz, aka the introductory music for our friend Eyes Wide Shut, i.e. not the music you want to hear as you climb into a stranger’s car.

You’re a New Yorker? A.M. said as he turned onto Bathurst St. There were tons of people in crop-tops, cut-offs, etc., which was odd for 295 Kelvin, aka 71 Fahrenheit, and it didn’t feel all that comfortable to me to see so much skin. A.M. said, You must think you’re in a real podunk town here, but Toronto’s very cosmopolitan. I said, Well, I don’t consider myself cosmopolitan, if anything I’m monopolitan. A.M. said, Huh. He had the surety of a man who can change people with his words, I had a feeling he wanted to change me, surely our time together in his car wasn’t a 100% coincidence, which is to say the theft of my computer was a mere entrypoint for A.M, although I couldn’t articulate the ways in which he wanted to change me.

We’re not going to find her, he said with a sigh. I said, Who? He said, The thief. Instead we pulled up in front of a driving school, where A.M. explained, with a giggle, a hobby of his: tailing the juvenile driving students and giving them “challenges,” e.g. cutting them off, stopping short, honking at them. When I was very young, he said, I was a driving instructor; so many jobs, so many lives! I pointed out, not yet to him, but to myself, that he was the man who had scoffed at me in the teahouse for my harmless quirks & then I wondered how many tea drinkers, Western Buddhists, socioeconomic critics, etc. are, as in the horseshoe theory of politics, only a meter or two, as the crow flies, from a tempest of rage.

My understanding of him seemed to shift from moment to moment. He was angry, he was kind, he was odd. Gordon and Kia, my other friends, had made sense on first blush, but I felt like I lacked the C.V. to disentangle A.M. & moreover, it felt like all Canadians were taking advantage of me, constantly affixing themselves to my hip!

I checked my phone: nothing from Harriet. (And suddenly I feel lonely recounting my day with this man, let me stuff some pieces of Tim Horton’s old-fashioned plain cake donuts, which I picked up on the way home, in my gums like gauze to cauterize this wound, O Journal of Complicit Weeping, and go on, go on, go on!)

Shostakovich was playing still, a different quartet, I guess the disc jockey was making a statement, even though everyone knows Prokofiev (sometimes spelled Prokofjew, believe it or not) is the better of the two, although they’re not exactly comparable, other than, I suppose, both being Russian (are they? fact check: oh, Prokofiev was born in Ukraine, even if his quartets were inspired, I hear, by his time in the Caucasus) — anyway we switched the station & settled upon Miles Davis’s “So What,” which is reliably playing on a million radio stations at all times, thank goodness, and I looked at A.M., wondered if he was Russian or if he was Ukrainian, but then, at the risk of phrenologizing, decided he had a Norse head, and I said, taking a deep breath, in-out, Tell me about yourself, which is what Typical People say. A.M. frowned & nearly crashed into a girl learning how to navigate driving on top of the Bathurst St. streetcar rail lines (those power lines dangling down, the rectangular yellow signs with black X’s), & then said, Look, I feel bad, I feel like the computer is my fault. I’m supposed to meet my sister for a late lunch. Come along, we’ll feed you, I’ll tell you about myself.

∰

A.M.’s sister was waiting in a parkette near Ossington Ave. with Portuguese sandwiches. When she saw him, she exclaimed, Andy! and ran toward him eagerly, giving him a big squeeze. Not long after, she was whistling “Love Me Do,” which endeared her to me. Her name was Fran, an old-person name, short for Frances. I asked her, Do you always run and hug A.M.? & she said, I don’t know, but we haven’t seen each other in almost a week! To which I said, My sister, Harriet, seldom hugs me, and seldom brings me sandwiches. Fran said she was sorry for my troubles.

A.M. had grown bashful from sisterly affection, but then straightened his spine fifteen degrees and said to me, I owe you a story. & he began: Many years ago I lived in New York too, and I was employed by a Software company, like you. We worked long hours. We ate dinner at the office. We were brothers and sisters in arms. It nearly drove me crazy, that job, but I guess I should be grateful, because it’s what led me to my current job: Technology Critic. (Interrupting, I said: Is that what you are? He said, Freelance.) Well, the company didn’t know what it wanted to make. It was a healthcare company, nominally, but it wasn’t clear on its north star. There was a mission to improve patients’ lives, and yet nobody, not even the founder herself, could describe in clear terms what our products were supposed to do. This was back in boom times, when you could sell anything to anyone. You could make pitch decks about “engagement” or “insights” in healthcare, and some customer somewhere would snap it up. So I took it upon myself to define the product.

As A.M. talked, his sister leaned in, engaged, and I whispered to her that my sister, whom I had already told her was named Harriet, seldom leaned in, engaged. (What do you try to tell her? Fran whispered. I said, Oh I don’t know: Canadian airport codes, almanac trivia, that sort of thing.) I also mentioned to Fran that Harriet never called me by a nickname, as she had with her brother, e.g. “Virg” or simply “V,” not once.

But A.M. was snapping his fingers to marshal my attention: This is relevant to you and to what you’re going through, Virgil. I was the lead software engineer at this company. I told my fellow engineers to start writing a whole battery of tests. We would make the product fail if it didn’t do certain things! And see, if it failed, it couldn’t be released! That was our approach. Our tests had a positivist bent, you could say. We made sure that the product actually *did* things, and that those were the things we talked about with customers.

As a society, he went on, we give too much credence to technology, to what it’s capable of, because we are too lazy to define what a particular piece of technology does. See, if we could just say what something was, a lot of the angst might go away. Some of the discontent I sense in you is coming from the same place. You have this job, you work for this company, and you’re being asked to write tests, even though you don’t know what the product you’re working on is, ultimately. (Shh, I said, quietly.) And so you feel sad and alienated and confused. (Shh, I said again, a little less quietly.) What I’d recommend is that you use these quality tests as a chance to define the product. Fail it into existence.

Fran said, Want my chips, Andy? I got extra; and gave his leg a familial squeeze.

∰

Later, after saying goodbye to Fran; after eating dinner at a sushi place where the spicy mayo was all mayo, no spice; after watching A.M. kaleidoscope into different versions of himself, chatty & bawdy, kind & retiring, fraternal & cruel; after relocating to a small park off of Albany Ave., near which Jane Jacobs spent her final years (the houses were beautiful; I drank in the mixed-use streets), I said, May I say something candid (since often people will say this on the eve of saying something confrontational and/or to avoid a Diagnosis)? A.M. nodded. I said, You don’t seem to have a fixed centre; no, that is v. dramatic, but I mean I feel like I can’t pin you down. You show me a different side of yourself every hour. A.M. said, Is that bad? I said, Not sure; I wonder what Harriet would make of you. (I checked my phone: a text message, at long last, from Harriet, asking to meet up tomorrow. I pocketed it.) A.M. said, Do you feel like you know anybody well? I told him I knew Harriet, and Bruce more or less, and Gordon and Kia to some extent; and I knew, like the back of my hand, the people in Studs Terkel’s Working, though they lived in a time where work made some sense, even if it was awful sense. The mason, the janitor, the fireman: they knew their business. It was brutal, and there were bar fights, and there was “violence to men’s souls,” but the words they said located something in your heart. And, I said, it doesn’t feel like that with you, nor with most of the people I meet. With work, I said, one apparently has to have a whole philosophy, a “fail it into existence” credo, in order to understand the work. I don’t like your philosophy, I added, it’s only 30% true, and it feels quite reductive in its approach, akin to a Microaggression; nevertheless, I see the sense in it.

With an apology to A.M. for dragging down the mood, I got to my feet on the bench in the parkette near Albany Ave., boy do I like parkettes, and sang the final refrain of Coldplay’s “Death and All His Friends.” The leaves of the maple trees in the parkette were still green, this being August. The trees stared at me, some people glared at me, the light was nearly gone from the day. It felt impossible that my birthday could happen in this city. You know, I said, I used to think a live oak growing in Louisiana was rare, but then I looked it up, and they’re all over the state! A.M. nodded and looked away.

We got back into A.M.’s car under the pretence of searching for the laptop thief, whom A.M. thought to mention again (and I texted Pamela Q. from my personal phone to account for my silence), by now the clouds were soft pink yarn, the music was honey-ragtime from the radio, & I said, We’ll never see each other a-gain (like “rain”), eh, A.M.? Which was a tongue-twister, I rolled up my tongue like a newspaper and shoved it his way, and he said, You’re lost in your own world, Virgil; I do hope we stay in touch. I asked him, Have I changed your mind about anything today? And he said, No, not really, but was that the point of today? No, not really, I said, and we cheers’d with our empty hands, & said “No, not really” until the words dissolved like a powdery candy, and then we drove around the perimeter of Toronto searching for a long-gone thief. Yet I didn’t like how rubbery he had made my mind feel, and how inflexible simultaneously, and some central part of me wanted to exit his presence at once.

At ten p.m., I told him I always eat ice cream at night, and so I needed ice cream, so we got some rather far north, like St. Clair Ave. N.-ish, vanilla with chocolate sprinkles for me, rainbow sherbet for him, and licked it with the windows down and our feet up on the dash, and repeated the word “computer” until it dissolved too, Sonny Rollins on the stereo, almanac on my lap, and A.M. said, You’re really only 26? And I said, No, not really, echoing our favourite phrase, given that I would be 27 before long. I asked, Is there a situation where that phrase doesn’t work? E.g., What do you do for a job? No, not really. What’s your name? No, not really. When are you going back to New York? No, not really. Will you be depressed if you’re always friendless? No, not really. A.M. laughed in his tan collarless shirt, his close cropped hair, and I whispered into my own closed fist, This is no good, I’m a complete performance right now, this is no good; & I bet he heard me, but he stayed quiet.

I texted Harriet when I got back to my lodging, because she always likes to know. Once she said, It’s always important that at the end of the night I know where you are (& I could see the logic in that). Anyway I told her I had made another new friend, that’s three friends now in Toronto in only three days! But she didn’t seem to believe me, she probably thought they were mere picaresque journal entries. I said, It’s true! She said, Cool! But *I* believe me, at least, I am the sovereign of myself, not Charles III, and always shall be. I am my own quality test, surely I exist, undoubtedly, whatever the output of that test might say. Or so I told myself as I poured my coffee with shaky hands and wondered where on Earth I was.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )