Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era

Meaningless work accomplished. I’ve recorded all of the reference information from our reference files into a computer file, checked and double checked every line and printed them out on nice paper to send with each box of reference files to the great big filing cabinet in the sky: our off site storage warehouse. If this strikes you as one of the most redundant things ever then you are not alone. It serves no purpose. And yet it will be done by two other people all over again before it reaches its final resting place on a dusty shelf in a climate controlled warehouse in the middle of nowhere. All this effort to preserve the fact that a company ordered a wall moved ¼ of an inch in 1999 and spent $300 to do it. That could be important in the near future but I was thinking slightly more long term. When our civilization is dust and the long forgotten, what will archeologists think of us? A culture is remembered for the artifacts that we leave behind. Our material possessions survive long beyond our meager scope of years. And when these future beings uncover this warehouse they will find construction files. Boxes upon boxes. Rows upon rows. It will of course strike them as a treasure trove of information. They’re archeologists and therefore all nerds, I know my mom was an archeology major. But the average person will hear this and wonder about a time when all that mattered was the recording and re-recording of data concerning the length of grommets and the placement of lighting grids. All that remains of us will be the meaningless archives of apparently very boring people who built stuff on occasion. All I’m really saying here is: my time would have been better spent designing a pyramid or something…