"You know you're old, not when your knees hurt from your pounding the pavement, not when you wrists hurt from your pounding at keyboards, but when you realize that your opportunities are becoming increasingly fewer and narrower."
The opening line from a noir story I'd write if I could write.
"They say that respect has to be earned. The problem is that, unlike gold, the value of each achievement that you can put in your 'respect' bank is determined by totally arbitrary criteria. Well, tonight I'm going to rob an actual bank."
The opening line of another noir story I'd write if I knew how to write.
“Yes, we have white folks out there, about one in every ten thousand, and they don't think anything of it and neither do we. You can't hide from the universe. You're going to be tramped under with color – all the colors of the rainbow!” And he understood then that that was exactly what they feared.
In 1957's short story “All The Colors of the Rainbow”, Leigh Brackett has Earth join something like the Federation soon after entering the Space Age. Many aliens have been coming down to Earth to help us eventually reach the organization's technological level and to clean up our environment. That's how an alien couple finds itself driving thru a small American town of the South which is proud of never having had any issue with racial integration because, well, black folks had all decided they wanted to go live elsewhere so it never was an issue. But... The couple looks like white humans, except that their skin is green, and that is enough for the town to feel threatened – and inferior – to these two 'colored' people. Things do not go well for anybody involved.
It is but one of the stories in Brackett's story collection “Shannach the Last”, published by Haffner Press in 2011. It makes you remember that Brackett's storytelling ranged far beyond her tales of Eric John Stark's Mars. And even one of the last stories she wrote of that Mars in 1963 puts the lie to this year's assertion by certain people regarding this year's Hugo Award that political statements in SF are a recent thing. I highly recommend that you read this book.
Until our new system becomes fully functional ("In every way," as Data said to Tasha Yar), our old system will be kept chugging along. Now, I've been transferred to the new system's crew (bilge handler) more than one year ago, and have not been involved in the old system's support since then. When I came in today and saw an email warning everybody that the old system had gone belly up, I figured that the people in charge would take care of it. Then I was pinged by my boss. She wanted to know if I knew whether or not the issue was being addressed. I did what she could have done. I looked up the well-documented cell phone of the old system's manager and brought the situation to his attention.
I just had my midyear review. It was good. There's no rating, official or not, but the comments were positive, so I can live with that. I kind of surprised the boss when I said I want to actually work with our new system's new tech. Her reaction is a relief because it indicates that my limited responsibilities are not part of a goal to make me obsolete, but that it just hadn't occurred to her that I might want to do *more*. Oh, and I asked about flying me to the Bay Area. I was quite unsubtle about it, as I've noticed that anything less than a sledgehammer gets me no reaction.
This morning I woke up feeling like the blue bird of happiness was hanging around, instead of the usual chicken of depression, but the former flew away and it's back to fowl life.
