Cows on Parade

My new life started, as it often can these days, with a strip search and a forty-five minute delay. Such a delay is, of course, to be expected when dealing with United Airlines, and the strip search was the result of being “randomly” selected by TSA personnel to play sacrificial lamb to a brand new full-body scanner at O’Hare airport. I toyed with the idea of refusing and requesting a manual pat-down, but why bother? Endoscopes and curbside enemas will soon be our last line of defense against the dastardly terrorists anyway.

In San Francisco, every tired stereotype and cliche was out in force for my amusement. As I walked through the streets of the Mission district, a cow on roller blades narrowly avoided a full-body collision with me. A man in a pink tutu walked by with a giant cupcake attached to his head, and a woman with a camera mounted three feet from her chest with a wooden pole gracefully floated by with her producer. Later, I discovered that these were not the customary Sunday activities of the locals, but a perfectly ordinary auxiliary display to accompany a festival involving hundreds of naked people running several miles through the streets, for no apparent purpose.

All this was considerably more of a spectacle than my first day at Facebook, which was spent in largely meaningless sessions of nauseatingly excitable presenters and socially damaged engineers. A manic-eyed marketing executive presented a soliloquy on the meaning of “brand”, using overhead slides with stylishly rendered short phrases, while excitedly drawing abstract connections between abstract nouns. “‘Trust’ is not some vague and abstract notion,” he lectured to a room full of literal-minded engineers. “It is simply promise plus delivery.”