Matt Leibel
The best part of my job is that I sometimes get to name robots. Now, naming robots is
not quite the arbitrary exercise that you might think. You have to look at the whole
picture of the particular robot; you have to stare down the robot; you have to immerse
yourself waist-deep into the robot’s beautiful, mechanized soul. Some of you might
think robots do not have souls, but you would be sadly mistaken. There’s a subtlety
at work here; sensitivity is at an absolute premium, if you aim to be a superior
robot-namer. A robot with only one head cannot be named Triborg. A square, boxy,
diminutive and cute robot cannot be given a fearsome moniker like Wargon. If you name
robots without considering the robot’s physical makeup, not to mention what Robotic
practitioners of Zen might refer to as the robot’s inner essence, you are
going to have some disgruntled and ill-named robots on your hands.
*
She sways on by me in that brown miniskirt she wears on Wednesdays. She sticks her
tongue out and hisses like a snake. She says, "A present for you!" and drops the
first press proofs of the morning on my chair. "Hey, Lisa," I say,
"That’s a lovely shirt." I like to compliment her on pointless things: her
straight white teeth, her wavy reddish-brown hair, her green sweaters, though I guess
there are points to that, jutting seemingly right out from her chest like secrets she
makes only a half-hearted effort to keep. At Thursday morning meetings, she sits behind me
on the counter of the conference room where the doll samples pose, and as the Art Director
makes announcements to the Computer People she massages my shoulders with the rubber soles
of her Dorothy-red sandals and when I turn to grin back at her she does the tongue thing
real quick and no one seems to even notice. At that moment, we are in our own little sexy
sub-corporate world.
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