You’ve probably heard the age-old saying that in space no one can hear you scream. Well, what are you screaming about anyway, buddy? Space is the new frontier; it’s an exciting place! Aliens, you say? I haven’t seen any, pal.
Is this thing on? …Hey, Jerry? Is the transcriber on? Red light means on, OK, wow, that looks like an eye on this thing.
Hello, John Thomas is my name, taming the great and wild beyond is my game. This includes creating effective workspaces where groups of minds can synergize. Well, you’ll be doing a lot of synergizing if you land the job; we’re still working on getting oxygen on the space patio.
“Ruff!”
That’s my dog, Rufus. Well, he’s not just my dog. He’s the company spokes-dog. It’s funny actually, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. We had a group of ad-men who bandied about all kinds of possible mottos. How we ended up on “Ruff” and not an Australian or British accent I’m not sure. CGI, you know, you can have it say anything you want. It looks like a regular dog but it can say anything.
I think it’s clear, the next wave of artificially generated spokes-things are going to be back to the basics. Customers might already feel alienated by the whole outer space thing, and any talking animal is by definition alien. It’s unfortunate. That’s why we made him hyper realistic.
Your first task actually: How does it make you feel? No, he won’t bark again unless you make eye contact with him. He only has one bark, no varying tones or any of that. We got a professional voice actor to do multiple takes and that was the only one my boss liked. Or maybe it was his boss’s boss. It’s hard to tell who makes the decisions.
How do we keep food preserved? Well, we have 100 pounds of carrots. You’ll survive off of pre-julienned salad mix. We don’t have the food pills or the ones that produce things out of midair yet. You should read the news; we don’t keep any of this stuff secret. Well, carrots, these things never go bad, right? Even in space? Of course they’re refrigerated. No, actually pumpkins are technically fruit. Pumpkins are a good source of potassium; we have no bananas in space because one bad one can contaminate the whole batch.
Wow, we’re getting along so well I almost forgot to tell you what we want you to do here. We were pretty impressed with your resume, but unfortunately we will have to utilize your special skills more later on. Think of it like this, for the time being your job is to become acclimated to space. Take a deep breathe.
Night in space gets lonely, and that’s not all, things get a little surreal up here. Some of us don’t enjoy the pitch darkness and complete silence. The real secret is to listen to all of that stuff on your iPod that you downloaded and never got around to. Sure, I guess you could say like the Dan Aykroyd podcast.
Now, the bad things: It’s always pitch dark if you turn the lights off, so if you don’t look at your watch you can plum forget what time it is. This is not an excuse to be late for work. TPS reports? I’ve seen Office Space, too.
You’re not going to like the other guys in the custodial department. How can I be so sure of this? They’ve been up here for a while. Unfortunately their position lacks security clearances. So does yours. When you punch out, you’re going to have to stay in your corridor. There are camera feeds of the rest of the station you can see from your room, but there’s no sound on them. You can try to figure out the audio input if you want, although I don’t remember seeing anything about that on your resume. This does mean that if some sort of alien does get loose in the hallways and it does break the door down we won’t be able to hear your scream, technically.
The white is a little sterile, but we couldn’t exactly paint the whole place. You can paint it yourself if you want! There’s a window in your cabin, as you can see. It can be programmed. It’s got three settings. Feel free to screw around with it. Actually you probably shouldn’t, there’s a lot of buttons. I’d probably avoid touching the big red one.
You can’t turn the job down, per say, because you’re going to have to wait for us to come all the way back. If you accept the position, you’re hired. Come on, it will make this a whole lot easier on everyone.
