The Drinking Bird

Mark sat in his cubicle just watching it. The “it” was a little drinking bird bobbing up and down into a water-filled coffee mug. Both the bird and the mug were a gift in honor of some holiday, whose name escaped Mark. The holiday was one of those new holidays that had been invented in recent years to make the drones feel better about being drones. National Employee Appreciation Day? National Worker’s Day? No, that one sounded like something that came out of the Soviet Union during the height of communism. 

Just a few minutes ago Mark’s boss, Stan, walked out of his office donning one of a dozen suits he owned. A beaming smile was splashed across his face as he carried five small, neatly wrapped packages.

Stan’s suit was nice—not Armani level, but certainly on the nicer end. It was off the rack at Nordstrom’s or maybe Sacks, but not a discount rack. His was off one of the racks that holds suits expensive enough for the store to offer tailoring services gratis after you’ve bought one.

Mark, on the other hand, wore the same utilitarian outfit every day--a short sleeved, white, button-down shirt and a navy-blue tie, though he sometimes wore a red tie on Fridays. To him it was a uniform—it met the requirements for dress set forth in the employee handbook. It was practical. It was comfortable.

When he first started, Stan objected to the short sleeves, but Mark rightfully pointed out that the employee handbook only called for the shirt to be “of the button-down variety.” There was no language governing sleeve length, and since the office tended to run hot, Mark made the case that the short sleeves would make him more comfortable, and thus more productive.

Mark could tell that Stan was less than thrilled to be outmaneuvered on a technicality, but ever the pragmatist, he acquiesced citing “discretion as the better part of valor.” 

“What?” Mark asked Stan.

“It’s a saying. It means—”

Mark interjected, “Yes, I’m familiar with it. It’s Shakespeare. Henry IV, Part 1, said by the knight, Sir John Falstaff, though the actual line is ‘The better part of valor is discretion, in which the better part I have saved my life.’”

“Oh. I didn’t know that. I always assumed it was said by a famous general,” said Stan.

“I’m sure it has been cited by many famous generals throughout time.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about Shakespeare. Didn’t you graduate college with a computer science degree?” asked Stan.

“I try not to pigeonhole myself. Life has a way of doing that all on its own.”

Stan let out an awkward laugh. “Yes, well I suppose that’s true. Well, if you are such a student of life why did you ask me about the quote?”

“I was just surprised that you’d use it in this circumstance. It’s just a shirt, it didn’t seem like something to equate to a battle, especially if it’s within the rules. If it makes you uncomfortable, though, I can start wearing long sleeved ones.”

“No, no. It was just a saying. I appreciate the offer, but that won’t be necessary. The short sleeves are fine if the shirt looks nice. No cruise shirts or anything like that.”

“The shirts I own all look like this,” Mark said with two hands gesturing to the one he was wearing.

“Great, it’s settled then. Now, I have some paperwork to get back to, and it looks like you do too,” said Stan pointing to a stack of customer files on Mark’s desk.

“I’ll get right on it.”

With that, Stan trundled back to his office and shut the door.

“Discretion—the better part of valor,” Mark whispered to himself.

That was his first week on the job. Little did Stan know, Mark had already written a computer program in Python that automated nearly 90% of his work. Mark knew a variety of programming languages but chose Python because of its simplicity and ease of use, especially when it comes to manipulating data.

And that was his job after all—glorified data entry and analysis. He still had to enter the data from the files they delivered, a few dozen at a time, to his desk. However, once that was done his program would analyze the results of the batch and spit out a report complete with all the tables and pretty, multi-colored graphs, just like the ones they were supposed to prepare by hand. 

Once, he put some logging in his program to measure its speed. It took just under four milliseconds for it to run from start to finish. Four milliseconds! More than twenty times faster than it takes a person to blink, and yet, agonizingly slow for a computer. 

Mark knew he could speed it up with some careful reworking of his code and a little more deliberate memory management. He’d get to it in the next week or two, but for now the speed was acceptable.

The real question was, how a company in the modern computer age could be so antiquated. Stan managed five employees—Mark included. They all sat in a row of cubicles outside of Stan’s office which had slim panes of glass on each side of a door that was rarely open. In fact, it was only open when Stan left his office to fill up his oversized mug with coffee or to take a dump, both of which happened with astonishing frequency. Mark thought he should cut down on the coffee or see a doctor or maybe both.

The door was solid oak—the kind that suppressed even the loudest office din to a low murmur. Mark suspected the glass panes on either side of the closed door were a way to let the drones know that Stan was watching, even if he couldn’t see much out of them or hear much through his door.

What could he possibly do in there all day long? Mark would often wonder.

He was sure that whatever he was doing in his office was less work than what Mark was doing during his first week on the job. Even now that Mark automated his job and was doing very little, he figured it was 50/50 that Stan was still doing less.

On this floor there were eight Stans. Each Stan had five data drones for a total of forty people just like Mark. Maybe there were other floors with other Stans watching over another army of drones.  Mark was making $21 per hour, but he suspected some of the more senior drones were making $25 per hour—this wasn’t a job that oozed career or pay advancement. So, say an average of $23 per hour. Mark did the math:

40 drones (that he knew about)

x 2000 hours per year each

x an average of $23 per hour

An astounding $1,840,000 spent on mindless work. That’s not even including the eight Stans the company could jettison.

By the second week, Mark realized he could save the company over two million dollars per year just with some simple efficiency if they used his program instead of all these drones and Stans. Someone would still need to enter the data like he did now, but you didn’t need an entire floor of people for that. Plus, Mark was certain that could be automated too. The files arrived on his desk in paper form, but they were computer printouts—so they must have started in a computer somewhere. How silly to have someone print out a paper copy of a customer file from a database, when he could just simply skip the paper and access the database directly. 

How many trees was the company responsible for cutting down unnecessarily over the course of a year? Mark shook his head and snapped out of it. He was bored, but he didn’t want to go down that particular rabbit hole.

Instead, Mark watched the little bobbing bird on his desk dutifully dip its head in the mug of water Stan had set in front of it, then pop back up again. 

Stan was so excited to deliver the neatly wrapped presents to his drones. In each box were two items. The first was the mug that read “#1 Employee” in big lettering on the side, which made no sense since all five of them received the same one and it was not mathematically possible for them to all be number one. 

“They all got a mug, but you’re my secret weapon,” Stan whispered to Mark, his teeth beaming white with pride. “I don’t know how you turn around these files so quickly. It takes the other analysts days to do what you can do in hours.”

Mark snickered to himself. Analyst--what a name for what they do. Flashy enough to give the drones some sense of worth, but banal enough to put a ceiling on just how high that worth can be. 

Stan’s head would spin if only he knew how quickly Mark’s program completed his reports, and that the “hours” Mark spent on the reports were actually spent plotting his escape from this Sisyphean existence.

No, this isn’t what Mark had envisioned when he graduated from college, but life has a way of pigeonholing you if you let it. 

He graduated just in time to enter a bad job market--the worst in over twenty years.

A rescinded job offer from a glamorous tech company. Sorry kid, we know we promised you a job here, but it’s the economy, and we have to make cuts like everyone else.

A diagnosis from his mother’s doctor—Insurance doesn’t cover the treatments. It’s highly effective, but it’s new, you see. It just hasn’t made it through all the various layers to be on the list of approved treatments yet. In a few more years it will be, just not right now.

Life comes at you quickly and sometimes it forces you to just hang on and weather the storm.

So, Mark didn’t get mad when Stan stood over him as he unwrapped the little package. He didn’t get mad when Stan helped him open it, so proud of its contents. He didn’t get mad when Stan eagerly demonstrated the little drinking bird’s single unique talent and described it as a “perpetual motion machine”—as if there was really such a thing. 

The little bird would dip its red beak in the water then bounce up and remain upright for a moment before its top hat would seem to grow too heavy for its thin neck, which would eventually succumb to the weight via a series of bobs successively increasing in amplitude. Then its beak would touch the water and the whole process would begin anew. 

It was clear to Mark after only a few iterations that its “perpetual motion” must be a function of the liquid inside the bird. Mark wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but he surmised that the water on the beak would cool the top bulb, which was disguised as the bird’s head, forcing the liquid back to the bottom bulb, which was dressed up like the body. Then, as the water evaporated from the felt beak, the liquid in the belly of the bird would be forced back to the head weighing it down until it dipped its beak in the water again. 

Had to be. No other explanation. Nothing perpetual about it; when the water was gone or too low for the beak to reach it, the bird would inevitably go still.

The one rule of managing drones, is that you don’t tell them they are drones. In fact, you go to great lengths to conceal it by giving them titles like “analyst.” You certainly don’t give them a little drone of their own to stare at all day. You don’t put it on their desk to act as a constant reminder of the state of their own existence.

None of this made Mark mad, though. In fact, his reaction was quite the opposite. Mark felt empowered by Stan’s gift.

For a moment, Mark wondered if it was a ruse. He contemplated the notion that Stan was secretly mocking them with the gift. Mark was sure that even if the other drones couldn’t yet appreciate the irony of the drinking bird, they would one day. In their hearts, drones always know what they are even if they have trouble admitting it. Escape from the life of a drone only requires the desire to stop suppressing the knowledge that he is a drone.

After careful consideration, though, he decided there was no ruse, rather it was a gaffe by Stan. Mark considered that the irony may be lost on the other drones temporarily like a ship huddling in a cove riding out a storm, but for Stan that irony was lost at sea, not likely ever to return to port.

So, Mark smiled and simply said, “Thank you, it’s very nice.”

“No problem, number one,” Stand said with a wink and a point. “Now, I have a rush job on a batch coming up from downstairs. Do you think you could…”

“I can have it done by the end of the day,” said Mark.

“That’s my guy. I knew I could count on you. I’m going to grab a coffee and finish up some paperwork in my office. Let me know when you have finished those reports.”

As Stan left his cubicle, Mark leaned back in his chair and began to wonder. Would the company pay him for his program? Certainly not as an employee. They might give him a meager bonus and a brass plaque with his name on it espousing some commitment to the company. How much would they pay him for the cost savings if he were a consultant? Over five years at two million dollars per year they would save ten million dollars. Would they give him one year’s worth of those savings? Two years? It would be justifiably worth it.

Mark stood up and looked out at row after row of cubicles. Who knew that three carpeted walls could be so effective at keeping people trapped in the same spot day after day? He listened to the click-clacking of the mechanical keyboards, then thought of the factory where they make replacement keys for when these ones would inevitably wear out and wondered what kind of drone makes those. Maybe the drone that makes the replacement keys wears gloves while he works, but what drone made the gloves? He fathomed layer upon layer of drones whose sole purpose in life is the twelve inches in front of their faces. Never flinching, never looking up, just plodding on because there is nothing to stop it. 

Simple physics. An object in motion stays in motion.

Mark sat back down, opened a blank Microsoft Word document on his computer then typed a few sentences. He hit the print key, then waited patiently as the laser jet next to him whined to life and spit out a warm sheet of paper. He grabbed it and folded it crisply one time down the middle. Then he reached underneath his desk, and pulled the thumb drive that held his program from the USB port on his computer and slipped it into his shirt pocket. 

Just as he did that, Stan stopped by the opening to his cubicle, rested his arm on the wall and said, “Hey buddy, just got word that batch of files for the rush job is on the way up.”

“Give them to someone else,” Mark said.

“What do you mean? We need those double time.”

“Sorry Stan, someone else is going to have to handle it,” Mark said handing Stan the folded sheet of paper.

“What’s this?”

“It’s my resignation, and it’s effective immediately,” said Mark.

“But…but…but,” Stan stammered. “You’re doing so well here and I just gave you a gift showing my appreciation for all your hard work.”

“I love the bird,” Mark said, plucking it off the desk. “It means more to me than you’ll ever know.”

“And the mug,” said Stan.

“You can keep the mug. I know you like coffee.”

Mark started towards the elevator with Stan in tow.

“Is it about the money? I can get you more money,” Stan pleaded. “I might have to let one of the other four go. We can split the pay; you get half, and the company keeps half. Win-win right?”

Mark approached the elevator and pressed the call button.

“It’s not about the money,” he said.

“Why then?” Stan asked.

“There has been a burning question on my mind since the first day we met.”

“I’ll answer whatever you want if it means you’ll stay. You’re my best analyst.”

That word again, Mark thought.

“I was wondering if the warden of a prison understands that he’s an inmate too,” said Mark.

A quiet fell as Stan contorted his face trying to make sense of the question.

The elevator let off a chime piercing the silence, and Mark stepped on it. “I have to go upstairs now. I’m starting my own business, and I have a meeting with my first client.”

Stan looked at the resignation in his hand then looked back at Mark standing in the elevator.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I know, Stan, but you will.”

Then the elevator doors closed.