Get your own Free Home Page
The Billings Teleportation Corporation certainly wasn't the first and certainly won't be the last company to come unstuck on the issue of industrial process cycle time. However, a good Marketer should understand that it was in fact excessive and inappropriate "user-friendliness" that did them in.
We are all aware that although teleportation seems instantaneous to the person being teleported, in fact it always takes at least an hour of real time. Furthermore it has been a constant source of irritation that it is three hours before the transmitting booth can be used again. The engineers said it was because you can only draw 3 kilowatts of power off a standard household power point.
If the engineers of BTC were prone to flights of fancy, which they weren't, they would have described their booths as "a place to survive a nuke attack". The P.R.O department described them as "Strong to withstand the titanic forces of creation they contain". The Marketing department described them as "stolid and unsexy", and requested that they be made more "user-friendly".
It was one of the strengths of BTC that their engineers were..
Thus on receiving the management instruction to make the booths more "user-friendly", they said to themselves; "How can we make the booths more user friendly? Maybe the users are bored. Let's install a scrolling L.E.D. status display."
Thus many of us in the Marketing world were puzzled why the mark II BTC booth was pronounced to have a user friendly scrolling L.E.D display. All you ever saw before your mind had been scanned was "Commencing data collecti". And "Transmission successful" on the far side.
There had always been the rumour that some people had experienced long delays trapped within in the sending booth. The engineers muttered something arcane about scanner errors, and the need to rescan. The P.R.O. department sensibly put it all down to Claustrophobia. To a Claustrophobic, five seconds in a airtight box is a lifetime.
It is a tribute to the improved scanning algorithm of the BTC mark II, that some 20 million of us saw that "user-friendly" "Commencing data collecti" before the first scanner error occurred.
Tim Fowler teleported to work at 8:00am Tuesday 8th March 2105. He, like all of us, stood boredly staring at the scrolling display.
"Commencing data collection", it said.
"Transmitting data".
"Checksum correct. Data recieved."
"Building clone."
Here Tim began to worry. He had never seen all these messages before. It seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time.
"Checking clone prior to plasmarization of original."
"Clone faulty. Possible scanning error."
Panic began to set in. 'Plasmarization of original'? He was the original, he didn't want to be 'plasmarized' whatever that was. He wanted to go to work.
"Plasmarizing Clone."
The penny dropped, and for the next two hours Tim screamed to be let out and gibbered in sheer abject terror.
No one could hear him.
"Rescanning"
"Commencing data collecti"
Tim's wife Holly was surprised when he called home from work screaming and begging her to stop the transmitter booth. Holly switched it off and pulled the plug.
Like the well engineered machine it was, the booth saved its partial state and released the door interlocks with its last gasp of power.
Holly was shocked when she opened the door to find her husband, gibbering and screaming in agony, his lower legs apparently burnt off.
At the international tribunal on "Genocide and Crimes against humanity" all the BTC engineers would say in their defense was, "Three kilowatts is all the power you can draw off a household mains supply and thats what it has been since they first installed household mains way back in the twentieth century. Its the standard. With only 3 K Watts of power, you try plasmarize a human. I mean, thats like trying to cremate someone with 2 bar domestic heater. That narrow beam plasma gun sweeping the floor was sheer bloody engineering genius. Slow, but what else could you do?"
Moral of the story.
You can be too user-friendly. If you are going to be user-friendly, keep it simple and just pipe in wall paper music.
Comments, queries and conversation.
Get your own Free Home Page