“Building a product isn’t just about coding,” I said. “A PM’s job is to tell the story of the product.” I was grateful to the VP of Product Marketing for having used that line earlier on the baby PMs.
“No need to be defensive,” she said. “I think the Valley needs less techno-utopianism and more sense of history anyway. It will be fun to work together. For example, since you studied myths, I figured your deadlines will at least be less mythical. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean, amirite?”
I groaned inside. Great, she thinks I don’t know what I’m doing and she can just slack off. This assignment did not bode well for my career advancement.
I opened the graph paper notepad from earlier and printed across the top of the page: Advanced Home Automation. I underlined the words three times for emphasis, and then decided to erase the final n and rewrote it as a cursive tail that trailed to the edge of the page. This seemed to be a bolder statement than the original, a symbolic gesture at thinking outside the box.
But the rest of the page, blank except for the spiral grid, seemed to be a maze that mocked me.
“Did you sign up for the seminar from the research division?”
I turned around and saw Amy behind me, leaning against the wall of my cubicle with a fresh mug of tea.
“No,” I said, trying to look busy.
“Here’s a free tip: you don’t need to sit in your cubicle to get paid. They don’t take attendance here. Take advantage of that.”
I’d had enough. “Some of us like to get work done.”
Amy sighed. “WeRobot has some of the world’s most advanced researchers working for them—cognition, computation, anthropology, linguistics, nanomaterials—you name it. These free seminars are pretty much the best part of the benefits package.”
I pointedly said nothing and started to write on the notepad.
What are some unsolved problems in home automation?
“Kiteo, his eyes closed,” said Amy as she strolled away. “The lectures are probably too technical for liberal arts majors.”
It wasn’t until I saw the smirk on Amy’s face as I settled down in my seat near the entrance of the seminar room that I realized that I might have been manipulated.
* * *
Sitting by myself in my bedroom, I stared at the notes from the seminar and the pile of AI textbooks I had bought from Bazaar—I still preferred physical books to reading on-screen. Neural networks, cascading inputs, genetic algorithms . . . How was I ever going to make sense of all this stuff?
The diagrams I had copied from Dr. Vignor’s slides stared back at me as I struggled to remember why I had thought they were so exhilarating. Right then, they looked about as interesting as chess puzzles.
. . . the long tradition of behavior-based robotics took inspiration from research on insect behavior.
But why settle for inspiration when we can go directly to the source? Instead of programming our robots with simple algorithms that imitate the behavior of a foraging ant, why not imprint them with the neural patterns extracted from foraging ants? The new prototype robotic vacuum cleaner is able to cover a room in one-third the time of the previous model, and the efficiency improves over time as the machine learns which areas are likely to accumulate dirt and prioritize these areas . . .
“Eeek!” The scream came from the bathroom. Followed by the thud of the toilet seat cover. “Comeherecomeherecomehere!”
I grabbed the nearest weaponlike thing at hand—a heavy textbook—and rushed into the bathroom, ready to do battle with whatever was threatening my roommate, Sophie.
I found her cowering in the bathtub and staring at the toilet, eyes wide with terror.
“What happened?”
“A rat! There’s a rat in the toilet!”
I put down the textbook, picked up the plunger, knelt down before the toilet, and pried open the seat cover just an inch so I could peek in. Yep, there was a rat in there all right, as big as my forearm. As I watched, it swam around the toilet leisurely, its beady eyes staring at me as though annoyed that I was interrupting its Jacuzzi session.
“How did it get in there?” Sophie asked, her voice close to a shriek.
“I’ve studied the urban legends around rats in toilets,” I said. “There’s actually some truth to the stories.”
“Obviously!” Sophie said.
“Rats are good swimmers. We live on the first floor, and there’s not a lot of water in the trap to keep it out.”
“How can you stay so calm about this? What are we going to do?”
“It’s just an animal looking for food. Go get the dishwashing detergent, and we’ll flush this guy back where it came from.”
With her back pressed against the wall, Sophie gingerly stepped out of the bathtub and shuffled out of the bathroom to run to the kitchen. When she returned with the detergent, I propped up the lid again and squirted practically the whole bottle into the bowl.
“This makes everything slick and dissolves the oil on its fur so it can’t stay afloat as well,” I explained. I could hear the rat splashing in the water and scrabbling its claws against the porcelain in protest.
I flushed the toilet, and, even though I didn’t hear any more noises after the water swooshed away, I flushed it a couple more times for insurance. When I opened the lid again, the bowl was empty and squeaky clean.
“I’m going to call the landlord,” Sophie said, finally calming down.
I waved at her to be quiet. I had caught a glimpse of an idea, and I didn’t want it to be scared away.
* * *
Oh, how the engineers laughed at me. They sent me e-mails with rat jokes, rat cartoons, and a stuffed rat even appeared in my cubicle after lunch break.
“This is why we shouldn’t have nontechnical PMs,” I heard one of them whisper to another.
In truth, I wasn’t sure they were wrong.
Amy came to visit.
“Save the rat jokes,” I said. “Not in the mood.”
“Me neither. I brought you some tea.”
Hot tea was indeed better than coffee for me in my jumpy state. We sat and chatted about her new house. She complained about having to clean the gutters as the fall deepened, and there was also all the money she had to pay to clean out the HVAC ducts and make sure the sewer pipes were free of roots. “There’s a lot of nooks and crannies in an old house,” she said. “Lots of places for critters to roam.”
“You’re the only one who’s been nice to me,” I said, feeling a bit guilty at how aloof I’d been with her earlier.
She waved it away. “The engineers have a certain way of looking at the world. They are like the city mice who think the ability to steal cheese from a dinner table is the only skill that matters.”
“And I’m the country mouse who can’t tell a table apart from a chair.”
“I happen to enjoy new perspectives,” she said. “I didn’t start out as a coder either.”
“Oh?”
“I used to work at Bazaar as a warehouse packer. I had some ideas for how to improve the layout of the place to make shipping more efficient. They liked the ideas and put me in charge of solving other problems: cable management for their server rooms, access control for secure areas in the office, that sort of thing. Turned out I had a knack for technical puzzles, and I ended up learning to code even though I never went to college. This was before they required degrees for everything.”
So she’d been an outsider once too. “I’m not sure I’ll ever fit in,” I said.
“Don’t think of it as fitting in. It’s . . . more about learning a culture, being comfortable with telling your story using their lore. The engineers will come around when you can paint them a vision they can understand. A map of the obstacle course to the new cheese outside, if you will, little country mouse.”
I laughed. “I’ve been trying. It’s hard, though; there’s so much to learn.”
“Why did you want to work in robotics anyway? I thought you liberal arts types just wanted t
o teach so you could stay in school forever.”
I thought about this. “It’s difficult to put into words. I’m fascinated by stories, the stories we tell each other and the stories we tell about ourselves. In our world, the stories that matter the most are all stories about technology. The dreams that move people today are all soldered and welded and animated by code, or they’re just spells operating in the ether. I wanted to have a part in these stories. I’m sorry, that’s probably not making much sense.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “That’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard from you. Technology is our poem, our ballad, our epic cycle. You may not be a coder, but you have a coder’s soul.”
It was possibly the oddest compliment I’d ever gotten, but I liked it. It was nice to have a friend.
After a moment, I asked, “Do you think my rat idea has a chance?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I do know that if you are afraid of looking foolish, you’ll never look like a genius, either.”
“I thought you weren’t into inspirational quotes.”
“I might make fun of the myths of our corporate overlords a lot,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy seeing a good tale play out. I’m still in the Valley, the biggest dream factory on earth, after all these years, aren’t I?”
Think impossible!
I decided to go straight to the source. Dr. Vignor listened to my presentation without saying a word, and then sat with his eyes closed for ten minutes, as though he had fallen asleep.
I couldn’t have been that boring, could I? I was miffed. I had worked hard on the slides, citing figures and papers—admittedly I didn’t understand everything I had read. And I thought the use of that animated clip-art rat was particularly inspired.
“It’s worth a try,” he said, eyes still closed. “We’ve never worked with such an advanced animal, but why not? Everything’s impossible until we try.”
* * *
The next few months were a blur. Pushing a new product through weRobot was one of those experiences that transformed you. Design specifications turned into cobbled-together proofs-of-concept turned into 3-D–printed models turned into handcrafted prototypes tethered to workstations running debug code. Engineers had to be herded and testers rallied and schedules drawn up and resources allocated. There were presentations to the sales staff and market research and the legal department and the supply chain.
I worked sixteen-hour days during the week—and only eight hours on the weekends because Amy programmed my computer to lock me out if I stayed too long on Saturdays (“You need some nonwork time to replenish your soul, kid. The River Temarc in winter. You don’t get the reference? Here, go watch these Star Trek DVDs”)—apologized to my sister and mother profusely for not being able to visit for their birthdays, and ignored texts and invitations from my nonwork friends. I had to set an example for my team. How could I demand 100 percent of them if I didn’t do the same for myself?
The Rattus norvegicus is the most successful mammal on the planet (other than us). Since the European Middle Ages, the species has learned to live wherever we live, making their homes in our sewers, basements, attics, and subsisting on our food and heat. Some estimate that there are as many rats in the world as humans.
“We can’t use any of this,” said the guy from marketing. “We’re trying to get people to buy something instead of calling exterminators. What else have you got?”
Right, the key is to tell a good story. I flipped through more slides.
An adult rat is so flexible that it is able to squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter. It can swim for kilometers, even staying afloat for days in extreme circumstances. It is capable of scaling smooth, vertical poles as well as scurrying up the insides of pipes, and it is skilled at navigating the maze of ducts and conduits in human dwellings, its natural habitat.
I admired the resiliency and resourcefulness of the common rat. If they were corporate employees, they would certainly win the race.
“Let me chew on this some more—ha-ha—and get back to you,” I told the marketing guy.
When you were working for the realization of a dream, work didn’t seem like work at all.
* * *
In the end, the official marketing literature explained that the Vegnor was named after Dr. Vignor, the world’s leading expert on nonbehavioral robotics; a good origin story was critical to a superhero.
And we sold the Vegnor as a superhero for the busy homeowner.
Imprinted with the neural patterns of R. norvegicus, the sleek little robot, a ten-inch-long segmented oblong form studded with advanced sensors and a Swiss Army knife’s worth of tools, was the modern incarnation of the hearth spirit. It could scurry up downspouts and clear accumulated leaves from gutters, saving homeowners from the dirty work and the danger of falling from ladders. It could swim through the plumbing, unclogging drains and pureeing any garbage with its swirling saw-blade teeth. The flexible body squeezed through tight turns and expanded to gain purchase against vertical tubing, allowing it to wander through ducts and conduits, cleaning away gunk and crud. It patrolled the sewer connection pipes, slicing apart tree roots and dislodging toilet-paper wads. It knocked down ice dams in winters and cleaned out chimneys in summers, saving homeowners thousands of dollars a year in professional maintenance fees. It washed itself and charged itself. Best of all, it guarded a house against unwanted pests such as the common rat by emitting an annoying ultrasonic whine—and for those pests undeterred by such warning, it was capable of fighting them with gnashing teeth and glinting claws made of stainless steel.
The Vegnors flew off the shelves. Glowing reviews filled the web, and users on OurScreen posted videos of the antics of their beloved “Vegnies”—driving away snakes in Florida, crunching over scorpions in Arizona, making “speed runs” from one toilet to another in the house (to the delight of children and the befuddlement of their parents, and so this last behavior had to be patched away via an over-the-air update).
I received an invitation from Jake and Ron to attend the annual Fall Picnic held at their house. It was understood around the company that the only attendees were the top ninety-nine employees who embodied the “weRobot way.”
I had found my niche.
* * *
“Did you see the summary I sent you?” Amy asked.
“No. Yes. No.” I was distracted. There was so much to do once you had some success. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been looking at micro-local trends generated by Centillion. Seems like there’s an uptick in searches related to exterminators around the country.”
“I’m done with rats,” I said. About thirty tabs were open in my browser, each loading a page with live sales numbers from different regions, and I clicked between them impatiently.
“Take a look at the list of zip codes with the highest increases in those searches. Do you see how they correlate with Vegnor sales?”
I hmm’d noncommittally.
“Are you even listening? You look like one of those rats addicted to pushing a button for a random food pellet.”
I looked at her, offended. “The Vegnor is selling well. I have to finish this after-action review.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s just corporate nonsense. Changing the world doesn’t stop with making a sale. There’s a mystery here. A story.”
“Customer are giving plenty of feedback online. Overwhelmingly positive.”
“Just like you can’t rely on customers to tell you what they want when they haven’t seen it, you also can’t rely on them to tell you what’s wrong when they haven’t figured it out.”
I waved away this koan. There were always more mysteries than there were hours in the day—and I didn’t have the techie disease of going down the irrelevant rabbit holes posed by random puzzles that had no relationship to the goal. I needed to summarize my experience on Vegnor into a process that could be repeated so that I could come up with something else to to
p the Vegnor. In a place like weRobot, you were only as good as your next project. PMs who rested on their laurels didn’t get invited to the next Fall Picnic.
Amy was about to speak again when an e-mail alert dinged on my computer.
“Sorry, I have to get this.” Almost compulsively, I clicked over to the tab. I was feeling irritable these days, hoping each e-mail would be from someone important in the company, inviting me to join a team with more prestige, closer to Jake and Ron.
Wait, I chided myself. I meant a team with projects that made a bigger impact on people’s lives, right? Am I more interested in climbing the corporate ladder or changing the world? Is there a difference?
The e-mail turned out to be from my sister, Emily. All her e-mails these days contained pictures of her new baby. Sure, I loved my nephew, but he couldn’t even talk, and I was sick of watching another video of him rolling around on the floor for “tummy time.” Parents were the most boring creatures on earth.
. . . Danny won’t sleep . . . I think I’m going slowly insane. I can’t even hear myself think. I’ll pay anything . . .
“. . . are you going to investigate the correlations? Aren’t you even a little bit curious?”
I looked up. Somehow Amy was still standing there, babbling about something. “Isn’t there some seminar you need to get to?” I asked pointedly.
She shook her head and threw up her hands in an I give up gesture. “Chenza at court, the court of silence,” she muttered as she moved away.
I felt bad that she was feeling rejected. But I wasn’t a cynical engineer too jaded to feel the thrill of changing the world. I had been to the Fall Picnic, damn it. I had a purpose.
* * *
There were close to forty-five million children under the age of twelve in the United States. Demographic trends and migration patterns and immigration laws and regulatory pressure added to a situation where an increasing number of parents were without access to affordable, high-quality, and trusted child care. People were working longer hours and working harder, leaving less time and energy for their children.
Big data analytics backed up my hunch. WeRobot’s web spiders crawled through parenting forums and social networks and anonymous confessplaint apps and crunched the mood and emotional content of posts by parents of young children. The dominant note was a sense of exhaustion, of guilt, of worry that they weren’t doing a good job as mothers and fathers. There was little faith in day-care centers and in-home help—parents didn’t trust strangers, and yet they simply couldn’t do everything themselves.
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