The Haunted Refrigerator

There was simply too much, said Moby (definite oxymoron!) to deal with: the inevitable fate of anyone who dared confront “everything.” In August 1990, Henderson still imagined briny coils, a smothering octopod threatening to reach Critical Mass and explode black slime all over R&D. And yet he could not help himself. On the last of several sleepless nights, sitting in a luxuriously appointed bathroom of a high-end East Bay condominium in order to avoid disturbing the sleeping woman in the bedroom outside, he doodled on the next available page of a spiral notebook—and invented what eventually became known throughout the industry, under the savvy packaging and marketing of Jay Null, as “The Fourth Box.” Here’s how he did it. He didn’t like clutter in his head. He called his head, at least, his own. Also, his preference was to decide in advance how to react to things before it was necessary to react. In other words, he tried to avoid situations where off-the-cuff responses were expected. He did not think well in those situations. He disliked being forced into hasty decisions. What transpired that night, in the sleeping woman’s bathroom, was a rare result combining these traits. We’ll get back to the sleeping woman. He studied what he’d done. On the notebook page he’d sketched a festival of tinker toys, a spaghetti factory, a maze of lines crossing hither and yon, among and between a shanty-town of squares, rectangles, trapezoids, diamonds, circles, ovals, barrels and cones representing a “thirty thousand foot” overview of Null Data processing: input, throughput, output; decision points: transformations, conversions, formulae; and data stores: files, tables, archives, tapes, rules, and dictionaries: a corporate “flow chart.” His first thought was a series of color-coded transparencies, additional dimensions to provide discreet functional overlays while preserving the whole, incomprehensible as it might be. But he changed his mind. Color and layers were not simplifications. They introduced yet more variables, more distraction and complication—the bane of his existence—of (we speak of Henderson here)—Life Itself. More was not needed. The answer was Less. He reviewed the sketch again. To inject realism, his shanks were losing feeling on the eggplant-colored toilet seat. On the bed outside the woman’s pale rump was bare—he’d pulled back the sheet in an offering to the gods. He was a lonely man, perhaps the loneliest on earth, with a mission to find and fulfill—but that was all he knew. Part of the deal he’d struck (dimly remembered) was that this be so. He did not wonder at it—what was the use? Given his bargain, it was an accident that he had a career. At this point in it, his assignment was to write and present hard copy: Overviews, User Guides, White Papers and Vision Statements. The users requiring guidance were elsewhere, unproven even to exist. No one read the Papers or Statements. Engineers and programmers judged the worth of his product by their own metrics and found them incomprehensible, exacerbating his loneliness. He didn’t mind, as such—it was part of his cover, no one knew from what. It was yet another accident that benefits had accrued—e.g., the naked woman in the bed. Speaking of Death (hold on, were we?), it was clear to him that its alias was Complication to Understanding, a mortal clottage to such questions as Why He Was Him (in later years he would live in fear of blood clots)—but also that getting rid of the world’s complexities would never be easy, because the polar opposite, the comparable defect at the other end of the teeter-totter, was the Incomplete. That was the nub of the problem right there: how to make everything simple, to promote an initial understanding of the whole—so that, afterwards, the inevitable mind-numbing complexities would appear not as un-untieable Gordian knots, but would bloom, and be gently harvested, and assembled in vases on dining room tables in proper order and place, as naturally as wildflowers in a field. His job, as he saw it, was to create, through documentation, sufficient enthusiasm to induce a minimum attention span—long enough to introduce, by means of seemingly innocuous “blow-ups” and “drill-downs,” additional strata: both up and down, and down and down again, to finally turn over the last rock and reveal the crucial minutiae (swarming, let’s face it, with ordure and decay) of “logic.” Boring, certainly, but he had to make a living. And it wasn’t just “logic,” but “computer logic,” tiny amoebas valued as ‘0’ or ‘1.’ He knew instinctively that human-kind neither could nor should deal with this—that, later if not sooner, disaster would occur. But the thrust of the times (and the canny business plan of Jay Null) had rendered his argument—not to mention Henderson himself, or as near as you could get without disappearing in a puff of smoke—obsolete. So be it. The Fates had been careless. They’d placed a conundrum in a sere bailiwick—isolated, wind-blown, and grim—but his. In his wheel-house. Up his alley. To be played from the Henderson tees. It was in this spirit, sitting on an eggplant toilet in the bathroom of a naked woman, that his Number 2 pencil wavered from oval to circle, from box to line ... Data. Data about Data: i.e., Metadata. “I never meta data I didn’t like,” thank you Groucho. Tables. Definitions. Commonality, assemblage, repeatable. Yon and here, thither and there. His pencil drew an X. Another. XXXXXX. What’s left? What are these shapes and wisps? Work, it seems. Processing with application to one or both of the input and output spheres. Bother! He anoints them with the magic X. Garbage in, garbage out: “GIGO.” What you see is what you get: “WYSIWYG.” And here at the beginning, shoveling shit into a furnace, and again at the end, consuming output? Why, it’s his old mysterious tormentor: the “User.” The whole thing boils down to: In. Execute. Out. But not in a vacuum. Oxygen is required.