Eleven fictional viewpoints
These descriptions are fictional satire, not quotations or evidence of political beliefs or affiliations.
01 Wall Street Big Money Financier
Collateral Form Rejects Cheese, Accepts Shelving
Line 3 of the repo desk's new collateral form asks what is being aged. A clerk reads that regulators once considered banning wooden shelves for ageing cheese wheels and proposes a haircut on the shelf, not the cheese. Rinds improve with time; our desk's paper only gets stamped 'seasoned.' Approved: the shelf, pending a plastic substitute that sounds more liquid.
02 Silicon Valley / San Francisco Ivy League AI Founder
Demo Day Pitch Deck Asks for Succession Documentation
At demo day, a founder squints at a slide reading "He succeeded Bernie Sanders" and asks the judge whether that was an acqui-hire or a user migration. The judge says it was a House seat, handed over after an election. The founder wants the onboarding docs, the Slack export and the API. Eventually he pitches 'Succession-as-a-Service' to a room that has stopped listening.
03 Venture Capital
Four Steps to Offering Both Milks
Step 1: Read that a bill would require cafeterias to offer whole milk as well as 2% milk. Step 2: Notice that nothing was sunset to make room. Step 3: Tell your founder to keep the old product and the new one on the tray. Step 4: Watch your own term sheet demand one carton, killed on day one, called 'focus.'
04 Institutional Investors
Should an Endowment Spend What It Hoards?
If colleges with substantial endowments were challenged to spend more of those funds on operating expenses, who challenges our contingency reserve? Why has it grown every year for a contingency the policy statement defines as 'events'? And when trustees finally ask what rainy day it awaits, will the consultant bill for checking the forecast?
05 Data Center Operators
One Opponent, One Night, Zero Hearings
He defeated Gerald Malloy: one named opponent, one election, one evening. Our cooling tower drew a ditch association, a school board, a retired heron counter and a neighbor with a clipboard, each with its own hearing. Next to that, a general election is a gentle permit. The opponent's name fits on a ballot; ours is 'Concerned Residents of Parcel 7B, et al.'
06 Frontier Lab
Footnote on Overseers Chosen by the Overseen
Voters elected him to the Vermont Senate in 1980,¹ meaning the governed picked the person governing, an architecture our red-team documents classify as 'out of distribution.'
¹ Our own research oversight board was appointed by the researchers it oversees, then declared independent after a favorable internal eval.
07 Chinese Communist Party
Congress Hall Reclassified as Longest Sit-In
The record says Welch participated in the 2016 United States House of Representatives sit-in, and our bureau discovers a terminological emergency: sitting down is supposed to be the obedient posture. Delegates have sat nine hours without protest. Auditors conclude the hall holds history's largest sit-in, demanding only adjournment, and rule that nobody may be seen requesting what everyone is already doing.
08 American Union Worker
The Empty Chair Nobody Dares Take
Our break room has one good chair. When the steward heard that a congressman said a witness "is welcome to take a seat right there," the crew decided the chair now meant testimony. Nobody sits in it. The foreman stands, the vending machine hums, and the chair, undisturbed for months, has become the safest spot on the floor.
09 White Collar Professional in an AI-Threatened Group
Memo: Appointing Eleven Deputy Whips for Adoption
MEMO — Re: Adoption Leadership. Because he also was a Chief Deputy Whip, one of several, we are naming eleven Deputy Adoption Whips. Each will count colleagues likely to support the new drafting platform. Our department has nine employees. Whips may resolve the shortfall by counting one another twice. Whips who finish the count early will be reclassified as the remaining headcount.
10 American STEM Worker Over 45
Relocation Yield: Years Per Cardboard Box
Our department's new 'Relocation Yield' divides years in one place by times asked to move again. Welch moved to Vermont in 1973, a clean single arrival, so his numerator is spotless. Mine: a 1999 job, a 2008 layoff, a 2016 'opportunity,' and a recruiter's fourth request for 'flexibility.' My yield rounds to the number of boxes in the garage, which the metric counts as institutional knowledge.
11 American STEM Graduate Five Years Out of College (Not Ivy League)
Appraisal of a Write-In: Method Unavailable
Appraisal: in one race, Republican voters were recorded writing his name in on the blank primary ballot, which made him nominee of two parties. Last month I typed my own name into the portal's blank 'Referred by' field. The system accepted it, marked it 'unverified,' and referred me to nobody. Finding: a write-in works only when other people do the writing.