In those moments, surrounded by the tinderbox of paper that seemed to make up the very structure of the walls in the office, she thought of her grandparents. They had been children in a time that was not that long ago. They had always known electricity, at least, as soon as they had moved out of their farming village and into the burgeoning immigrant city that they settled in after a journey in a boat, over the Earth's seas.
Now, the only thing that traveled over the seas was cargo. Not people. Everything else went under the sea, through the myriad network of submarine cables that interconnected the land masses of the planet Earth.
The cables let people communicate now at a pace far more rapid than her grand parents could ever fathom. What little that they could read, they would do by candlelight, until the overhead bulbs illuminated their night stands. Now, smaller, more rapidly flickering lights were the medium of information. The same flickering light that communicated demand to construct more night stands in a bulk furniture factory somewhere, unlike those crafted by artisans who used manual tools, precise measurements, and skill. The drawers were a little rickety, but they still stored undergarments.
Her eyes flicked back up to the hand written notes lathering the walls like a foam.Her face furrowed when she remembered the beautiful, elaborate writing desk in the lounge room. Her grandparents had existed in a time before telecommunications, before advanced electronics were implemented into almost every appliance. She remembered the stack of letters, the dark liquid of the ink texturing the leather inset into the surface of the table.
A time when paper was thicker and yet the pigment still stained it clearly. A time before the inkwell was replaced by the typewriter and the once ink wet ribbon stamped against the advancing paper in an irregular rhythm, unfamiliar to the once quiet environment of the office.
Her office, on the other hand had only the noise of the rustling papers . It almost sounded like the crackle of fire. It was warm enough outside. What would her grandparents make of this computational mess ? She thought it absurd. Continued abstraction of process that functioned previously, uninterrupted without constant supervision by a machine intelligence.
Even still, the constant supervision drove constant alerts,the price to pay for infrastructure that was not updated to scale with growing demands. Alarms rang in rooms no longer filled with technicians, the digital telemetry of all that could be measured bound by a few simple rules.
If it was within defined tolerance levels, a simple "ok" code. If it went outside of tolerance, "not ok". Ok was green. Not ok was red. Ok was silent. Not ok was beep. Not ok was an email, a phone buzzing somewhere. Not ok was something for people to look at, until the tolerance defined to be "ok" was decided to be too narrow, and made to accept a wider level of divergence. Then the cycle continued.
The "not ok" alarms became rarer, but the "ok" state more often became failure. Her grandparents had been stoic. They were not afraid of the technology that developed through their life time, but even they would not accept being bothered every few moments with an indication that something was not ok. They'd do something about it.
Now, in this time were she mused over the symptoms sprawled out before her, a vibration from her device, sat on the table beside her indicated that another alarm somewhere was telling her that yet another thing was "not ok".
