Teleworker
I live in a laptop,
but not burned into an EPROM
or hiding behind the ESC key:
my rumoured corporeal existence is confirmed
at meetings, conferences, supermarkets and restaurants.
I exist in a vacuum tube labelled “you have mail”,
a tinny, tiny voice in your handset.
From my lighthouse, I answer distress calls;
from my signal box I route messages and clear blockages;
from my ivory tower I dispense wisdom and prescribe conduct.
On my island within an island, beyond my Chinese seawall,
I search the shore for bottled messages.
I am the genie of the laptop.
What is your command?
This is one of those writing snippets that is vaguely connected to what I once did for a living (I was managing something called the NHS Threat Assessment Centre at the time it was written, so it’s not complete fiction) but is definitely not a security blog. What it actually is I’m not sure: it doesn’t exactly feel like verse, but it looked really ugly typed out as unformatted prose.
I was prompted to dig it out when Jon Price asked on Substack “Got a job that’s hard to explain?” So here it is: the first entry on my Substack Section “Symmetrical Stories”, which are not necessarily going to be stories as other people understand them, and are certainly not likely to achieve symmetry.