TheBanyanTree: On Seeing Portable Toilets

[Monique Young]

I sat in a meeting yesterday and watched portable toilets float by the
window. It was a meeting much like many others, but smaller. Only four of us
were present; the CEO, the co-founder and VP, the newest computer
consultant, and me. (True, I have not the qualifications of any of the
others, but I am decorative, so they let me attend meetings anyway.) There
was much drawing on the whiteboard, and talk of pipes and colocation
facilities and servers and a myriad of technical jargon that sounded very
impressive, as if we are building an empire of technology, when instead
we're just trying to get our system to work for us the way we want it to.
(Personally, I'd be happy if I could print from within Citrix to the printer
that's connected to the laptop, or if I could email out of QB without having
to move the file to my local drive and take it off the network . . . earlier
that day I'd developed an ingenious method for sending our manufacturing
facility an invoice that they needed immediately for a Canadian shipment.
Since I couldn't email it to them, since email from my accounting program
wasn't cooperating, and since I couldn't pdf an invoice and then email it,
since my pdf doesn't work within the network, and since I couldn't fax it
because they have not figured out how to make their fax machine receive
faxes, if it can do such a thing, I printed the invoice from within QB in
Citrix (not to my local printer, obviously, but to another in the office),
stuck the invoice into the fax machine, faxed it to my efax, which then came
in on my computer, but outside the network, opened the fax, pdf'd it from
there, and then emailed it to manufacturing.  Labor intensive? Just a bit.)

My contributions to the meeting were minimal. Mostly I just want to know
what needs to be done to get what we need. The how and why of it are
unimportant to me, I just want results. This is, I suppose, rather
self-centered of me, but be that as it may, I am rather self-centered.
Anyway, much of it was over my head. So I sat, I listened, I interjected
when necessary, and I let the boys iron out the details. This is usually the
best course of action when dealing with technology and boys, I've found. 

Across the street from our building used to the old city hall, where the old
city kept its headquarters. The old city turned into the new city, complete
with a new city hall elsewhere in the city, and for awhile the old city hall
was vacant. Several months ago that changed, and the old city hall was
demolished to make way for something new. We wondered what would take its
place. Perhaps a monument to capitalism? An art museum? A public park? Our
first guess would have been closer to the truth. It is a giant Lexus
dealership which will sell, I'm presuming, giant Lexuses. (Lexi?) Or maybe
just the average size Lexus vehicles. The construction activity has at times
been noisy and annoying, but mostly it's just entertaining. There are giant
cranes over there, after all, which are always good for a laugh.

Especially when they're swinging portable toilets through the air like they
were yesterday. This is an amazing crane, for not only can it swing one
portable toilet at a time, but two! Two green outhouses, bound together and
swinging through the air in search of a proper resting place, that was the
scene out the window which distracted me from technology. Hopefully these
are temporary facilities, and not intended for the buyers of the Lexi. Or
did the architect, when designing the giant Lexus dealership, forget to put
in restrooms? One would hope not.  

If I'd been in a philosophical frame of mind I might have wanted to
philosophize about the meaning of random toilets swinging through the air,
but since I was not, all I could do was sit there, watch the toilets, and
think, "How peculiar. I'm watching portable toilets swing through the air."

Life is never without drama, is it not?