gtaylor@astroatc.UUCP (Greg Taylor) (02/26/86)
Okay, so the nice people down the hall decided to let *me*
write the job postings for a while. The motive for this was
simple: It seems that what those of us who are into French
textual theory call "the conventions of discourse" found in
net.jobs are such that you tend to n-key right through
unbelievably interesting jobs unless you're bored or
desparate. Your glance flicks right over the "Wanted:
Designer for Alternate Universe" line before it even regis-
ters. So I get to pen a few humourous little antidotes to
the normal stuff, and watch all the responses roll in. It's
worked really well. Maybe too well.
Let me explain: As I started to warm to the task of writing
skewed job postings (I'm treating it as a new category of
PostModern Utilitarian Fiction), my managers began to
express some doubts as to the sort of people who would
respond to these job listings. "What if the only sort of
people who answer the postings are like the person who wrote
them?" they asked politely. I countered that the people who
had responded were not only the kind of people we *were*
interested in, but that we perhaps communicated a sense of
what a nice place this is to work in the process.
Well, maybe I'm in beeg trouble now.
We have this interesting job open here at Astronautics Cor-
poration of America's Advanced Technology Center for I/O
Design Engineers. We're located in the old Queen of the
Apostles High School on a ridge east of Madison, Wisconsin
(At this point, I could add the usual good things about what
a great place this is to live. But let's put it this way:
We've had a lot of replies to these postings from people who
have either lived here or passed through who are *dying* to
move here. That should tell you something.).
We're looking for a person or persons to design a high-speed
multiplexor which will interface intelligent peripheral pro-
cessors to a high-speed memory system and support the design
with software to test the functionality and performance of
the unit. An applicant should have 2 to 5 years of digital
design experience, a working knowledge of industry-standard
peripherals, and be familiar with I/O architectures and
high-performance computer architectures (pipelining, cache
design, etc.). Familiarity with C, UNIX and the UNIX
environment and VALID's CAE design tools is also important.
So I wrote out this little piece and posted it and the trou-
ble started. Seems like a really interesting job, right?
Well, only *one* reply straggled in, and it even scared the
daylights out of *me.*
When the reply to mail came up on Mary Burnett's screen,
stuff started flashing and popping in and out of reverse
video all over the place. Right, right...really clever
(chuckle chuckle). Then came the actual reply.
It was a copy of one of the applicant's last papers for a
Systems Analysis and design course at a major American
research University. It was actually a single paper that the
person had submitted for two courses--Systems Analysis and
Comparative Literature (all those little hairs on the back
of my neck started to prickle).
The applicant had done an I/O analysis of Hell and Purgatory
as found in Dante's "Divine Comedy." They started out point-
ing out the relationship between the nested rings and tiers
found in Dante's cosmology to kernel protection and hierar-
chial systems, and then went on to point out the big I/O
bottlenecks (Note that only Dante and Virgil can travel
through Hell and out the other side. There's usually only
one way to descend from circle to circle in Hell, and some
of the passageways Dante and Virgil try to take are "not
only corrupted, but undocumented" (as they put it). The
thing ended with a carefully drawn node analysis of the key
problems, and a neat patch by which one could move bidirec-
tionally between the sacred grove on Mount Purgatory and any
of the first three circles of Hell....
What am I going to do with this person? What do we say if
they actually *call* us? You can imagine what my bosses will
think of wombats like this coming out of the woodwork every
time I post? So help me out, huh? If you're interested in
the job, send your resume in confidence to Mary Burnett at
Astronautics Technology Center
5800 Cottage Grove Road
Madison, Wisconsin 53716
608-221-9001
or via E-mail to
{ihnp4,seismo,harvard}!uwvax!astroatc!maryb
An Equal Opportunity Employer, Astronautics Corporation of
America offers a comprehensive benefit package including
relocation.
Help keep the net safe for future non-boring postings from
here, OK?