A small little facility for geeks
Last night, I dreamt that I was the leader of a small group of engineers and scientists working at a small think tank during 1950s America. The atmosphere of the dream was fun, geeky, and collegial, so I had the feeling that this environment was probably similar to the early days of the RAND Corporation. About six of us (all male) shared a small office (sans cubes) and spent the day brainstorming solutions to the world’s problems.
At some point, we decided to hire a new employee in order to increase the team’s overall brainpower and decided upon a young, beautiful woman that happened to have a monstrous IQ. I forget her first name, but her last name was something like ‘Dorkin’, so on the surface she fit right in to our nerdy bunch.
As soon as she started, however, she began to question everything that we were doing. She found our processes, our informal methods, and our solutions all wanting. Although we hired her for the sole purpose of improving our capacity to think, none of us were prepared for her critical onslaught. It wasn’t that she was wrong; it was just that we didn’t know how to change as drastically as her suggestions warranted.
One night, at the end of a particularly grueling week, the men in the group decided to go out for a well deserved trip to the local bar while Ms. Dorkin stayed behind, yet again, for the nth night in a row of solo work. While at the bar, the camaraderie and the alcohol began to stimulate our collective imaginations and the lot of us decided to return to work to finish off the brilliant strategies that we were concocting.
When we returned to our small, freestanding office, the lights were out and we assumed that our female colleague had finally reached her limit. When I put my keys in the lock, however, the lights suddenly turned on and Ms. Dorkin came hurriedly to the door to greet me. “Hello. What brings you here?” she blurted out as I opened the door.
“We’re fine.” I answered. “We’re just here to work on a new solution we came up with.”
Making sure the couch was safe
As the group filed into the small room, it immediately became clear why the lights had been off. Another female was sitting on the sofa in the corner of the office, looking disheveled and slightly flummoxed at our sudden arrival. The look on Ms. Dorkin’s face, although more anxious and somewhat annoyed, told the rest of the story: she and the woman on the couch had obviously been fooling around.
As all of us quickly realized what was happening, the easy jokes and minor outrage that raced to the front of my mind found no path to my mouth. I was genuinely confused as to what the next step should be. At one end of the spectrum, I could have cheered her palpable sexuality and earned some hoots and hollers from the men; at the other was a sound scolding for snogging on company premises while the rest of us ostensibly believed that she was working.
Both answers, however, seemed inappropriate. A scolding would have been dishonest, since the other members of the group, to a person, would have loved to have been on that couch with either woman. The thought of cheering her would probably have been even more destructive, since Ms. Dorkin might have taken the mocking comments as a fairly negative indicator of future teamwork.
In the end, I allowed her natural embarrassment to control the situation. She and the other woman got up and left in short order. Although a few grins were evident, the other men took their cues from my sober response and refrained from any comments or catcalls. The dream more or less ended at that point, but the feeling I was left with was that my actions were probably sound and that the work
ing relationship had been salvaged.
The dream wasn’t terribly insightful, but it left me with a sense of enjoyment and envy as to what working at RAND in the 1950s must have been like. It’s possible that this dream was inspired, at least in part, by the the book: Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire
