Ghosts And The Digital Age
It is interesting but sometimes unfortunate when the spirit world overlaps with the digital world. It is however to be expected.
They both exist out there in the ether somewhere, are both subject to periodic disruptions, are both run by people or unearthly entities who seem to have very little in common with the man on the street, and who both talk in terms unfamiliar to the ordinary citizen: JavaScript and C++ and HTML in the one case, and “I am the great god Baal, look upon my works, mortal worms, and despair,” in the other.
They have both lost the common touch in other words, making communication difficult.
Up there in this ether I am talking about it is not unusual for messages between the two realms to entangle, disentangle, couple and uncouple like boxcars behind a locomotive, separate single file into their component parts to speed the swift journey to the other end where they are then reassembled at the last moment, and generally encroach on the other’s territory in ways unimagined.
This makes it hard on the man staying overnight in, say, a drafty ancient castle that has a curse associated with it, a curse that can be lifted only when the last of the line of the family that the curse is laid upon, this guy I’m talking about, the overnight stay guy, who comes upon a scene down at the end of this one corridor of a fellow holding an ax in one hand and the bloody head of this other fellow that he has just had a conversation with in the other.
There are certain rules of narrative or even simple etiquette in these cases whereby the human is prepared for this ghostly entity to speak and perhaps explain the origins of The Legend of the Banderville Curse, if that is the name of the family, or to more broadly introduce the fellow to the terrors of the unseen spheres that surround us.
What the human does not expect is for this bloody revenant to turn to him and say,
“AJAX? AJAX stands for “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.” AJAX is not a programming language but a set of web development techniques utilizing many web technologies on the client-side in order to create asynchronous web applications. In a nutshell, Ajax allows for website pages to dynamically change content without needing to reload the entire page.”
It is hard to know how to respond to this, as the human in question doesn’t recall that the topic has even been raised.
Or perhaps the visitor from the spirit world is less in a declamatory mode and more in the questioning mode herself…for this time the visitor is a beautiful wench-like gal one moment, and then, quick as that, turns into this screamy-faced individual with fangs and snakes for hair and scales for skin, who turns to the human and says:
“I am receiving a distorted image when the cable is loose or defective. I have disconnected the video cable going from the back of the computer and verified that no pins are bent, burnt or broken. Once verified I re-connected the monitor cable. I see that the refresh rate is not properly set and the monitor has a wavy look or an appearance that lines are going down or across the monitor slowly or fast, perhaps ‘flicker’ is the better word to describe it. Can a distorted image be caused by magnetic or other types of interference?”
It does not seem to the guy, this overnight in the castle guy, who by this point is surely wondering what he has gotten into, and maybe it wasn’t so bad walking around with a curse on your head after all, it does not seem to him that what this otherworldly interloper wants is for him to say, “I don’t know.”
On the other hand it’s not the kind of thing that you want to just wing, so he stands there, kind of scuffing the toe of his shoe into the dust of the castle corridor.
This is what I am talking about when I say conversation is often constrained in these circumstances where there are mixed messages.
Humans here on the non-ethereal side are not blameless in these matters themselves.
In the rush of a busy day, plowing through email, it is tempting to dispel them from the in-box and quickly as possible. This is what you are all about! Productivity and correctly allotting the right about of time to each task that you have set yourself!
Aiding you in this mania of efficiency are the automatic replies that the email program helpfully supplies.
As colleagues reach out to set a meeting time the program helpfully suggests “Sounds good. See you then!”
When HR schedules the next training session on hiring practices, the program again has a suggestion, “on my calendar!” which sounds pretty good and in truth is just about the way you would have said it yourself.
When Ken from IT asks whether it’s pizza or Korean for lunch, it is the simplest of matters to let the program reply “all good!”
The problems arise when unearthly entities from, say, the Ancient Greek Underworld, send a quick note via email:
“Yo, long time no see. Look, we got a guy down here, Prometheus, who hasn’t had a vacation in, oh, I don’t know how long, probably three thousand years now. We’re looking to get a bunch of the guys together to give him a break. Any chance that we can slot you in for say, oh, the next century or so?”
In this case the program helpfully prompts the reply:
“Sounds interesting! Send more details.”
The reply to that comes back:
“Thanks for your response! Oh, I don’t know if you know the story, but Prometheus angered the gods by defying them and stealing fire and giving it to mankind. They’ve been on his case ever since! He’s bound to a rock where each day an eagle, the emblem of Zeus, the CEO down here, feeds on his liver, which then grows back overnight and then is eaten again the next day. Not a great posting for a guy in mid-career. That’s all I know, I just told the other guys I’d ask around.”
And now the program – meant to be so helpful! – kind of gets its owner in hot water, because get this, now it says:
“Got it! Count me in!”
A stickler for nailing down the details, the correspondent on the side says:
“You’re sure now? It’s a full century and the whole getting your liver pecked out each night is no picnic. It might be good aerobically for you, come to think of it though. And it is, you know, I mean it is Hell.”
The program again replies, unprompted this time:
“See you there!”
And we have to presume that our hapless office guy really does see him there, along with Prometheus and that damn eagle, and the whole Ancient Greek Underworld gang.
The lessons are clear from these and many other examples. Take care with your correspondence, giving it the same attention that you give any other managerial tasks, especially in those cases where the email comes across somehow with the scent of sulfur and brimstone. There are all sorts of dodgy schemes out there and you have to keep your guard up so you don’t get caught by an email ‘scam,’ like pledging to be bound to a boulder for a century and have your liver —repeatedly! — pecked out.
The larger lesson is that all in all is best not to mix the digital and the spirit world, as is also said of beer and liquor.
