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Monday
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| The building has no number I can see but the metal detectors are a giveaway. I remove belt, place camera, wallet, and keys in grey plastic tray. They take my Swiss army knife keychain and give me a claim check (3176). I'd been expecting a large dark theater with a stage, like a casting call, but instead got a big fluorescent room with lavender puke pattern carpet and cushioned arm chairs. The room is bureaucracy incarnate, bland and rectilinear, with some publicly funded art hanging on the walls, not much different than a hotel chain except there is an earnest artist statement describing process and effect, the picture plane, and ambiguity of position of the objects placed in it--in this case a bird silhouette. It is something to read while standing in line waiting to be processed, but the art feels tacked on, lipstick on a pumpkin. The winding line moves. I grab a badge protector from a box, fill out a form, hand it in and join the wait. There's a separate room for wi-fi users, laptops in effect, it's pretty packed. It's the 21st century and people carry their offices as turtles do their shells. It serves a similar protective function--our technology is a barrier against those who might otherwise speak to us. We're tapping into a wide world of tele- communication while oblivious to those sitting right there. I wonder whose name among the 200 assembled will be called first, thinking it might as well be mine and I'm right--Robert Zevernia is called #1. Sometimes it happens that way. Once, my bag was the first down the chute at an airport baggage claim. Another time it was dead last. First and last is the sum of birth and death, everything else falls in the grey muddle between. 15 of us go up in two elevators. I don't look too closely at my peers. Down a hall to a room where the coffee smells hot and burnt and people take turns using the bathroom. We're told to turn off our phones. I think everybody has one. One woman asks, "Is silent OK?" The answer is no; no external communication is allowed. I shut down. In parting, Cingular reminds me: "Be Courteous. Be Safe." Be safe? What does that mean? An older man asks if anyone is "techy enough" to help him turn off his phone. Turns out he's an electrical engineer who worked on atom bombs. Someone helps him, explaining, "You just hold the red button down." I wish him luck turning it back on, though I suspect we're all better off off.
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