Drone rock

I was an office worker. I had my own desk, like many other desks in the long, rectangular shaped room, a room that reminded me of an over large box of steak knives. The desks were lined up alongside each wall, facing the same direction, no cubicles, no dividers. I stared at numbers on the screen and made phone calls as dictated to me off the sheet I was handed at the beginning of every week. Judging by what the numbers on the sheet told me, in correlation with what the numbers on the screen read, and what response I received from the speaker of my phone, I would report a certain number at the weekly Tuesday morning meeting to one of my bosses when he called my name.
I guess you could say I was a buyer. I would buy large amounts of pieces of machines to be delivered into the gigantic, immaculate, air-conditioned, disinfected, static-free room across the hallway from our room, where they would be put together in stages to finally form a black box about the size of a snapping tortoise.
I learned later what was to become of these boxes. Not at the beginning. At first, I did not even know what I was buying. Or from whom. I would talk to people in other parts of the country and sometimes the world, and eventually learn their first names, their kids’ first names, their hobbies, their boyfriend’s shoe size, the age of their dead goldfish. I knew more about my salespeople than I knew about my own family. There was a strange sort of intimacy, very early on, similar, I can imagine, to an online personals ad. I would never actually meet these people. They were always working 60 hour shifts in Bismarck, North Dakota, some town in Rhode Island, and Scottsdale, Arizona, with names like Georgia, Frank and Leon. We were phone friends; the routine got familiar, the talk, the hashing it out, like my back pains, no hot water in the shower this morning, boy, didn’t we have too much to drink at Chili’s last night after work?
But the components, objects, parts; they could be as mundane as a nail, or as mysterious and arcane as a dongle. Whatever they were, I'd buy a lot of them, almost always in the thousands. Sometimes one or two. Almost all the time I'd have no idea what they were or who they were for, or why we needed so many. I could guess, we did, and that was both fun and boring at the same time.
So the black boxes were sold en masse to large organizations looking to search for oil deposits the quickest and most efficient way possible. These organizations have enormous reserves of capital, and are usually pretty big, like, China. Or Russia. So they take the boxes out to the Siberian tundra and drop them all over the landscape from helicopters, like they’re planting some form of silicon based crop. A large truck drives up amidst the boxes, a truck carrying a big gun pointed down, a gun that sends seismic waves through the ground. Anyway, the gun sends a shockwave down through the earth’s crust, which then bounces off the mantle, returns to the surface and the boxes record whether there’s oil, water, buried treasure, my neighbor’s underwear, or whatever is underground to be dug up. What happens to the boxes later, who knows. Probably used again and again until they become some Mongolian shepherd’s dinner table.
After a full day of listening to numbers, watching numbers on the computer, speaking numbers into the phone, writing numbers down on paper, and typing numbers back into the computer, I would start the customary 5:00 ritual. Yawn, stretch, while stretching slip into my coat, make small steps around my desk and move little items on it (not unlike a dog kicking dirt over its own shit), then feel comfortable enough to say, “See y’all tomorra”, and walk out of the building, wink at the receptionist on the way (the most frustrating flirt in the world; married with one kid to a total deadbeat, yet lacking any initiative to do anything about it save flirt langorously with every available male in the office), get in my midsize sedan and become just another dark green, Japanese-produced blood cell on the freeway, stopping and starting to the Traffic’s relentless rhythm of action, reaction, waves, spirals of reactions, isolated incidents, accidents, creating pockets of tendrils extending ever deeper into the heart of the downtown rush hour. A flashing mosaic of brake lights extends in front of me like a river, and I float down it, a reluctant plank bobbing towards my apartment.