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[...] and there it was again, the snatch of forced air-music that Sylvanshine couldn't place but made him want to leave his seat and go chase something on foot in the company of all the children in the neighborhood, all of whom come boiling out of their respective front doors and hotfooting it up the street holding currency aloft, and before he could think, Sylvanshine said, 'Bizarre as this sounds, can either of you every so often hear--?'
'Mister Squishee,' now said the agent to his right in a baritone that didn't go with his body at all. 'Fourteen Mister Squishee iterant-route frozen confection S corp out of East Peoria trucks seized together with office facilities, receivables, and equity holdings of four out of the seven members of the family who owned what the Region's counsel convinced the Seventh Circuit was de facto a privately held S corp,' Bondurant said. 'Disgruntled employee, falsified depreciation schedules for everything from freezers to trucks like this here--'
- the almost tragedy of requisitioning Mister Squishee ice cream trucks (and i believe the brand is related to Mister Squishy in the oblivion story) as IRS vehicles. something similar for the tech company? either they buy up some sort of symbol of the past (like banks, post office, manufacturing companies) or they get something seized by the IRS idk
or a reference to Square taking over the San Francisco Chronicle building, and someone seeing that as a symbol of tech eating the world (in a good way)
also the way they just call it an S corp (that's their primary way of classifying the world) is great. need to find something similar for people in MC's job. or Sean's job. classifying people he sees in the car next to him based on their customer profiles
[...] the expression in Cheryl Ann's eyes, which without ever once again thinking about it Tom Bondurant has never forgotten, was one of blank terminal sadness, not so much that of a pheasant in a dog's jaws as of a person who's about to transfer something he knows in advance he can never get sufficient return on. [...]
Bondurant reminiscing about his relationship
I like the use of the ROI metaphor for love - use something similar to describe relationship between either MC and his wife or some other character's relationship
For there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to a shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat. The worst thing was that one degree could lead to the next if he worried about it too much, if he was too afraid that a single sweat would get worse and tried too hard to control or avoid it. The fear of it could bring it on. He did not truly begin to suffer until he understood this fact, an understanding he came to slowly at first and then all of an awful sudden.
[...] He would mentally repeat this to himself over and over. Franklin Roosevelt was right, but it didn't help--knowing it was the fear that was the problem was just a fact; it didn't make the fear go away. In fact, he started to think that thinking of the speech's line so much just made him all the more afraid of the fear itself. That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird. [...]
this is so good
[...] as long as he's screaming and trying to beat himself unconscious against the wall of the room, they're going to keep him in that little room, and as long as he's in that little room, he's going to be screaming, because the whole problem is that he's a claustrophobic. He's a living example of how there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there's going to be some ridiculous foul-up and someone's going to be in living hell.
an ep of Twilight Zone (maybe). not sure how to use this but it's kinda funny
[...] Lane Dean, whose slacks have ridden up so far he'd have to go into a stall in a men's room to extract them, feels like running out into the fields in the heat and running in circles and flapping his arms.
Lane Dean's smoke break, just standing outside with two of his colleagues who are kind of ignoring him. I love this
'[...] given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going t be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday--'
'Anybody got the time? How long we been in here, three hours?'
'And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, [...]'
in the middle of the elevator convo (on politics). inspiration for a board meeting or something that has devolved into a very strange conversation + the random, ignored interruption
tech-specific distractions: webinar, apple announcement, linkedin request
[...] I'm 99 per cent sure that I took just one Intro Accounting class during all this time, and did all right in it until we hit depreciation schedules, as in the straight-line method vs. accelerated depreciation schedules, and the combination of difficulty and sheer boredom of the depreciation schedules broke my initiative, especially after i'd missed a couple of the classes and fallen behind, which with depreciation is fatal--
I love this. analogous concept in CS?
[...] I remember not getting Camus's The Fall read in time, for instance, and having to totally bullshit my way through the Literature of Alienation midterm--in other words, I was cheating, at least by implication--but not feeling much about it one way or the other, that I can recall, except a sort of cynical, disgusted relief when the prof's grader wrote something like 'Interesting in places!' under the B. Meaning a meaningless bullshit response to meaningless bullshit. [...]
amazing
[...] the CBS daytime network announcer's voice would say ,'You're watching As the World Turns,' which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time--'You're watching As the World Turns,' until the tone began to seem almost incredulous--'You're watching As the World Turns'--until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. I don't mean any sort of humanities-type ironic metaphor, but the literal thing he was saying, the simple surface level. [...] The truth is I was not even aware of the obvious double entendre of 'You're watching As the World Turns' until three days later--the show's almost terrifying pun about the passive waste of time of sitting there watching something whose reception through the hanger didn't even come in very well, while all the while real things in the world were going on and people with direction and initiative were taking care of business in a brisk, no-nonsense way [...]
similar thing with MC: video games (loading screen, "we're building the world for you"? or youtube? or it's a reference to something time-wasting they have to do at work?