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visually anthropologetic
Wednesday, August 8 2001
Back in the salad days of dotcom excess, when infantile new CEOs of freshly-minted internet startups couldn't figure out what to do with their millions of investor dollars, many ingenious methods were developed for squandering it irretrievably. Perhaps the most effective of these methods (since none of this money was ever recovered) was CollegeClub.com's classic "RAM System" - which doled out insane bonuses to people contributing to projects "objectively" deemed "successful." More prosaic were the many expensive chairs bought to support the rumps of the dotcom workers up and down the corporate ladder. In my current dotcom (which is in the process of being bought by Yahoo), the excessive investor dough ended up in lots of interesting places, but the most surprising of these is the tricking-out given to the bathrooms. All the features in the bathrooms both in New York and in Santa Monica are completely automatic. Unseen robots hide in the pipes and behind the walls, turning lights on and off, flushing toilets, and activating the sinks. The only thing a guy has to touch when he pisses is his fly, his dick, and (unfortunately, they didn't automate this one too) the door handle. The only problem is that none of this technology really works very well. The motion detectors in the toilet stalls are notoriously bad, necessitating the following sign in both stalls of the New York office's men's room:
PLEASE FLUSH THE TOILET;
MANUALLY IF NECESSARY!!!
Remember to double check to see if your
work in here is truly done. It's far more
courteous to your office-mates, and far
less revolting than the all-too-common
alternative.
There is, you see, a manual flush button beneath a hard rubber lump at the apex of the pipe which arches into the top rear of the toilet, but unlike conventional flushing handles it cannot be easily activated by a switch. The fancy cyber toilet ends up being even less sanitary than the cheap standard-issue model.
My left heel is sore from stepping on something sharp the other day in Prospect Park. I've been going there barefoot to walk Sally, but now it doesn't seem like such a good idea, especially when you look in detail at all the nasty detritus accumulated along the many "condom trails."
Tonight Gretchen was off watching a women's basketball game with her friends while I stayed home soaking my foot in salt water and watching videotaped movies such as Grief. Seeing movies set in Los Angeles doesn't make me miss the place, not even the slightest bit.
In other news, Gretchen had one of her poems accepted for publication in the Paris Review, which is sort of the poetry equivalent of having one of your paintings hung in the Louvre. She's ecstatic of course and I'm very proud of her.
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