2008 November 09

Best session so far this year, all done at the write-in, over a two hour period. Obviously I just need to sit and write without internet or other distractions for things to happen.


With half a dozen of us helping clean things up and pack everything but the furniture we were done with almost everything by the time we used to have our evening meal. Having nothing left to eat off as I'd failed to think things through when I went and helped pack stuff in the the kitchen it was decided that we'd simply get pizza and eat on the floor. I hadn't had such a relaxing meal in a long time and being able to just sit and talk with my family helped alleviate what little stress I'd built up over the past week or so.

I wasn't sure I should bother letting them know that I'd possibly be missing things on short notice from then on in but I felt an obligation to let them know. I would have been better keeping it to myself I think, I couldn't answer anywhere near as many of their questions as I'd have liked to and the fact that Veronika knew about it and accepted the change wasn't helpful to getting my family to accept it.

After they agreed to just let it be we progressed to talking about other things, my sister's new friend getting more of the attention than he was happy about. It was obvious that he was quite interested in her and she liked him but I'm sure that he would have been less keen to help if he'd realised that he would have to deal with the familial interrogation that eventuated.

Getting back to my place that night was good, having thought over the past week that it would be good to have someone to share my home with in some way I was now glad for the solitude that was allowed me. I love my family, don't get me wrong, but there is only so much that most people are willing to take when they've moved away from their childhood home. It seems that my limit tended to be about a day's worth of interaction before I wanted time alone again.


Monday at work I found the photo-frame on a few papers that I was also needing to transcribe so I went through to my other office at lunchtime and found Dan waiting in the second chair. He handed me a small pile of other papers as I sat down and told me I should look through them that night to see what I made of them. A quick glance showed me it was a bunch of math equations and I asked if they (Kevin, etc.) were aware of how mediocre I was in that area. Of course they were, they seemed to know everything else after all, and it was simply a test to see how much help I might be later on. After all, if I couldn't even understand the simple things they were working on I wasn't going to have a chance with the in-depth issues that were going to be coming up in the next few advances.

The rest of my afternoon passed simply enough and I took the papers home with a few game rule booklets that I wanted to look at before the next game evening. I'd been finding myself performing somewhat less well than expected over the past month in the games I'd been playing and I wanted to know if I was missing rules. I also figured that there was a chance someone was failing to explain something adequately when teaching.

The rule books were nothing new to me, the explainers/teachers had done what was necessary, but actually reading them did help with me understanding the interactions of various things. The work papers were a different issue altogether, I understood what each of the equations was on it's own but the interaction of them was completely beyond me. I figured the fact I could follow how they worked everything out was going to be a positive but there would probably have been some expectation that I'd follow the transitions between sections. I'd done what I could though so I put it from my mind and concentrated on other things for the rest of the evening. Like the upcoming birthday for my girlfriend, I hoped that she'd be impressed by the gift, but wasn't sure about her reaction to the people that would be present.

Over the rest of the week I was able to keep up with the normal part of my job fairly easily, although I did wonder if there might have been someone subtly reducing my load to make the other job easier to do during work hours. Nobody else noticed anything though so I figured I was either imaging things, or it wasn't an issue for anyone else and I'd be a fool to mention it.


It was about a fortnight after that before I had any more work assigned to me and again it was easy for me to understand the individual steps and calculations but there was nothing I could see that linked it all together. I kept taking their money though, and reading up on initial research that they had done a couple of years ago hoping to understand where the current work had initially come from.

Veronikas birthday came up quicker than I'd expected it to, the new work was interesting even though I couldn't understand a lot of it. Kaleigh was also interviewed for a position and came to the conclusion it wouldn't be a bad place to work after all, I wasn't going to be around where she'd be working and the people she'd be working with didn't know me so there wouldn't be the stigma she'd expected.

Even though things went well and Veronika had a good time it was obvious I hadn't planned the birthday thing as well as I should have, a couple of people that she didn't really care about were present and I somehow missed inviting her best friend from work. Luckily I hadn't invited anyone else from her work as that would have been very problematic. I did much better with the gift I'd purchased for Veronika, it was gratifying to see the look on her face when she realised that I really had been paying attention to what she was saying about things over the past few months.

The week after that was the first time I was called on to be at work in the evening for the secret part of my job. I hadn't had to cancel any plans which was reassuring for me, I had been dreading the first time I'd have to go in in the evening as I half-expected it to happen on a night Veronika and I had scheduled a date.

Even as I arrived back at work that night I could tell something was going on, I'd never paid enough attention (before we stopped being allowed to come in to work evenings) to the fact that the car park out front still had a lot of cars in it. Getting inside there was even more obvious identifiers of the research taking place, for a little under a minute as I walked in from the main doors to the division between factory and offices the floors were vibrating. Obviously the power usage or something had changed because there was no way that any of us from the office staff could have missed that much of vibration no matter where we were or what we had been doing.

I figured the best place to go as I passed into the factory area was my office. It seemed probable that there would be more instructions on my desk and if not I could always go walking to try and find the centre of whatever was causing the vibrations. There were instructions on the desk when I got to my office but they didn't involve coming to where the researchers would be at the time. I was instead to see how much of a new lot of papers I could understand and try and time the vibrations where my office was. Of course I had no idea why they wouldn't have just set up a device to do the measuring but they were paying me so I set up a stopwatch and sketched in a rough table on a piece of paper to try and record the start and stop times as well as an indication of how big I thought the vibrations would have been.

I wasn't even finished reading the first page of text before the vibrations started again so I made note of the time and sat there trying to determine how big they felt and wondered how I should measure them. Looking around while I thought about trying to measure things I spotted some new things in the office that hadn't been there while I visited during normal hours. As I noticed the new stuff I also noticed that the vibrations were stopping so I made note of the time and moved to where the new stuff was.

There was a piece of wood about 2 feet square, with 36 indentations in a grid on the wood. There was also a small box with a bunch of different sized marbles in it. Obviously the combination of items was there for a reason, it stood to reason that they were there so I could use them and I didn't think there would be any reason other than me using them to measure the vibrations. Of course if I was wrong and Kevin or anyone else had set up a camera I might be about to look foolish.

Putting the square wood on the floor off to the side of my desk I picked up a handful of marbles and started arranging them in the indentations. It took me a moment to register that the different sizes would not all come out of the holes at the same level of vibrations though. Once I had realised that I made sure to rearrange them and ensured that there was as much of a size spread as possible.

Over the next ten minutes I went through another few pages of notes and kept looking up to try and see movement of the marbles, nothing happened. It wasn't until I'd been in the office for thirty minutes before there was a repeat of the vibrations and after noting the time I looked to the board on the ground. I noticed that it was also making some noise but I didn't see any movement of marbles. Less than a minute later everything was back to normal and I again made note of the time and a subjective opinion about how big the vibrations had been.

There was one more session that evening, another hour after the second and this time there were actually a couple of marbles displaced which made me happy. I didn't know the significance to the researchers but I figured that it would be a positive for my chances of staying around that I had, apparently, figured out the reason for the board and marbles to be in my office. Half an hour after that Kevin came to the office door, and after knocking walked in to sit in the second chair.

He obviously noticed the board upon the floor but didn't mention it initially, instead he asked about the papers I'd been reading. I explained that I hadn't been able to follow almost any of the connections, but, like the stuff I'd been asked to read at home, each individual equation had made sense to me as I went through it.

After looking through what I'd been reading that evening he looked to the floor beside me and asked about it. I explained, feeling foolish for doing so when it was obvious to me that he already knew what I was telling him, that I'd wanted to do more than measure the duration of the vibrations. Looking at what was there had made it obvious that I was expected to do a little more than asked so I'd combined the two items as best I could see how to and come up with what he could now see.