The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora) by Smibert Angie

Author:Smibert, Angie [Smibert, Angie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

16.0

EATING THE DOG FOOD

AIDEN

Aunt Spring met me in the lobby of Nomura’s Research and Development Division. Sans Winter.

“She’s not quite ready to work yet, Aiden,” Spring said. “She needs to settle in.”

She handed me my ID badge, which she explained was mostly for visual reassurance. Translation: the other employees would know I belonged there. All secure transactions—that is, getting into the building and most areas inside—were handled by biometric scans. She led me to the Product Testing Department but stopped with a hand on the door.

“When Winter is ready to come in—even before—would you mind keeping an eye on her?”

“Of course not.” That’s why I came home.

Aunt Spring turned me over to one of the product testing geeks, Roger Nguyen—my supposed mentor. He was maybe eighteen, if that, with fidgety, scarred hands and intense eyes. He struck me as the male version of Winter, minus the artistic genius. Roger handed me a testing protocol to read and disappeared into his cubicle.

My eyes glazed over as soon as I hit the second paragraph. The protocol was forty pages long.

Roger came back twenty minutes later with two cups of coffee and a handful of sugar packets. I was reading the product reports I’d downloaded to my mobile.

“Look, I know you’re the Big Kahuna’s son, but you gotta follow the protocols.” He slid a Nomura mug toward me.

His own well-worn cup had a faded penguin in a tuxedo on the side. The bird was the symbol of a company that promoted open source code. Once upon a time, programmers thought you should be able to share code, collaborate, and build new and wonderful things together. For free. The cup was ancient—if it was real. Roger was using it to establish his geek street cred.

I could play that game. “Dude, I’ve been eating the dog food since I was weaned.” I slapped my Nomura Chipster pre-beta on the desk.

Roger almost did a spit-take with his coffee. In the software-hardware world, dog food equaled product, whatever product the company made. There was an old saying: it’s good to eat your own dog food. That is, you consume (read: test) what you make. Dad always had me testing shit.

Roger flipped over my phone to read the Kanji on the back. “You have the beta of the model that’s being released soon.” He slapped another mobile on the table. “Want the beta of version 2.0? It was supposed to roll out this fall, but now we’ve got to release it this summer.”

“Sure.” I snatched the mobile off the table.

“We also have betas and prerelease candidates of the Soma and a few other models to test, but their chipset is based on the Chipster’s. The priority, though, is the Chipster.” Roger shook his head. “Such a kludge.”

“Bring ’em on,” I said.

And he did with a big fat grin on his face.

He left me in my own cubicle with a pile of mobiles and a bigger pile of paperwork. Not literally paper, of course. He set up the terminal so I could fill out electronic forms as I tested.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.