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Today's theme: altered states of mind.

No segues, please.

My laptop has been whisked away so that engineers can investigate another bug. Our official release date was last Thursday; the fact that I am rapidly becoming one of the two most unpopular Quality Assurance people in the company is, I think, a testament to my ability to adopt the mindset of the Average User. The most unpopular Quality Assurance person was the subject of an Intervention the other day, as engineers descended on her en masse and wrenched her laptop out of her hands over her protests.

"If you wouldn't test," scolded a Purple Monkey engineer, "there wouldn't be so many bugs."

The Average User is, like Norm, as much a figment of Silicon Valley's imagination as, I daresay, Heisenberg is of mine. Curiously corporeal for a fictional entity, loathed alike by both software engineers and support technicians, he muddles on his merry way, pushing buttons in the wrong order, ignoring help manuals, and in general doing all the things that software was most definitely not designed to do.

As an argument, protesting that a user would and should never do that is about as useful as sticking your finger in the dike crack; the Average User can, and therefore -- inevitably -- will, then turn to the enraged support tech with a bland innocence as unanswerable as any face of God, bleating foolish explanations that mingle apology with smugness. "I don't know what happened," he says, or, for variation, "I didn't do anything," as though computers are diabolical, self-willed avatars of Chaos, simply waiting for the innocent user to wander away so they can fondle their own Delete keys in an agony of masturbatory malice.

As an occasional support technician, I am to the Average User as the Orkin man is to the congregation of termites; my wrath is a mighty wrath, and smites with the vengeance of my people. More than once I have closed a bug ticket with the telltale line "PEBKAC," (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair) which passes muster as an explanation provided no doctor -- suspicious of acronyms himself, from long experience of his own use of them -- spies it. Not soon will I forget the man who complained his software wasn't letting him log in, hurling our entire company into frantic troubleshooting for a solid hour before he wondered aloud if, perhaps, the loss of power in his entire building might not be in some way related. I cherish, too, the memory of a doctor's assistant, who called with questions about our registration process and eventually required us to spell out her own last name to her, letter by letter, so she would know what to type in the field labelled, creatively, "Last Name."

Reluctant though I am to admit it, it may be that this antagonistic relationship between the Average User and me has bestowed upon me a deeper understanding of the way he functions. Certainly it seems to have endowed me with an approach towards QA that borders on genius. I find, not the bugs that the well-trained, disciplined QA specialist finds, but the one, critical show-stopper that rears its head after a user performs forty random steps, all utterly unrelated to the other.

In some ways, it is rather refreshing to discard the trappings of education and logic to frolic down the wayward paths of the Average User's mind. Freed of all constraint, armed with indifference, mischief, and a triumphant certainty in my own superior intellect, I prance willy-nilly through the labyrinth of our software, leaving a breadcrumb trail of bugs behind me. Frustrated, furious, and frazzled, the engineers flock behind me like unionized pigeons, pecking and quarreling equally with each other and the world at large.

It is a heady and fulfilling experience, not entirely unlike the application of nitrous oxide on unsuspecting squirrels.

The onset of so much stress from so many different directions has had, as I've mentioned in a previous post, a curious effect on my dreams. The night before last I found myself in a bar with two amorphous friends, an environment which my dream-self appeared to find absolutely unsurprising. The equanimity of my dream-self is admirable in many respects; she has wandered through elephant intestines, skydived off Mount Everest into a small tub of jello, and gone skinny-dipping with six-foot tall hamsters and Bob Dole in some strange ritual of purgation. I might wish that she had suffered a tiny qualm at the last, purely for dignity's sake, but that's a different subject altogether.

At any rate, my dream-self found herself in a bar with two faceless friends, and at the bartender's instigation, agreed to participate in a drinking contest. A glass of some ill-defined amber liquid was placed in front of her; she guzzled it without comment, and lowered it to find her friends regarding her in some awe, their own glasses still full.

"I can't believe you did that," they chorused.

My dream-self, who had the key to epiphany in the curious way that dream-selves do, discovered that she had been peripherally aware that the amber liquid was meant to be diluted. She promptly became stunningly, impressively drunk.

Insofar as dreams go, it is true that this is hardly one to raise eyebrows, lacking any of the attractions of nudity, flight, or talking animals. The rest of the dream was spent in the unhappy awareness of being drunk. My dream-self is not of a typically uplifted nature, so the euphoria attendent upon being intoxicated was, sadly, not available to her. Instead, she remained bitterly conscious of slurred speech, lack of coordination, over-large limbs, lethargy of thought, and a loss of visual perspective. Her head lolled for no particular reason. Her feet dragged. She fixated on random objects and stared blankly at them until distracted by something else.

Unfortunately, when I woke up, I was still drunk.

I drooped in the shower, my mouth gaped wide, and swallowed half a gallon of water. I began braiding my hair with kielbasa fingers, and ended up with frizzy dreadlocks all over my head. I rolled down to my car and drove to work, puzzled over both the dotted lines on the road, and the curious fade-in/fade-out appearance of the other cars.

I slurred and mumbled at my coworkers and slouched in my task chair, weaving confused -- and profound -- fantasies about rabbits.

I chewed on a toenail until somebody noticed and made me stop.

I wandered into the bathroom and found a woman's face in the speckling on the floor tile.

I wrote a journal entry.

Around three p.m., I sobered up and experienced my very first hangover.

I've worn glasses since I was about 7 years old, an unenviable inheritance from my father's weak-eyed bloodline. My father's side of the family was the noble one, being intimately acquainted with most of the blue-blooded families in Japan. The limited boundaries of the country, not to mention its isolationist practices before Admiral Perry dropped in to end the Tokugawa Era, guaranteed that the family trees in my paternal neighborhood resembled the spoon side of the silverware drawer, rather than the fork. Given the highly nervous state of Japanese feudal politics and the creation of alliances using convenient, incestuous marriages, it was perhaps a benefit for a scion of a noble house to have selective eyesight, at best.

My mother, coming from more hearty peasant stock, is herself blessed with a sharpness of vision guaranteed to make any child's life miserable. She held no truck with the vagarities of genetics. She preferred to blame my failing eyesight on my propensity for reading under any conditions, whether that be in the car, at night in the dark, or under the dim glare of a flashlight.

One would think that my mother, clumsy with her own English, would have been better pleased to have such an avid little scholar of the language. She, unreasonable woman, preferred instead to object to my bibliophilism, lecturing me bitterly over the stacks of reading material that joined me at every bath, meal, and family outing. More than one book disappeared into the trash after her patience had crossed some ever-moving, invisible line. At one dinner my sister and I attempted to convince her that the dead mole corpse we'd seated on the dinner table was responsible for the presence of The Wind in the Willows, the explanation being that he wanted me to read it to him before we buried him. The subsequent meal was rendered acutely uncomfortable when we reaped the whirlwind; my father, who combined myopia with a perverse sense of humor, ate his own dinner in high enjoyment while the fury of the heavens was emptied over our heads.

Arguments abounded in our house during my youth, many of them clashes of will over my reading, which my teachers were united in condemning. I was not subtle in expressing my disapproval of the Recommended Reading for my age group, which had a debilitating effect on classroom discipline. From time to time, my mother would claim that the sight of me marching blindly down the sidewalk with my nose in a book while cars whizzed by was enough to make any real mother shudder. It is worth mentioning that she never claimed to be a "real" mother by her definition of it, and all her exclamations about the danger were more notable for their clinical curiosity than their sincerity. While adamant that I not read at the dinner table or in the car, she never ordered me not to read while walking to school, and at one point was overheard to answer a neighbor's misgivings over my inattentive mode of locomotion with a bright, "Isn't it interesting?"

...which is not the point. The real point of this story, mislaid though it is, is that after 23 years of glasses, I have finally made the transition from glasses to contacts, after several years of prior attempts where desire lost painfully to apathy. The wedding was motivation enough for the change, though the addition of exercise in my life has had its own impetus. My eye doctor, a shy, birdlike creature with a habit of meticulous perfectionism, has successfully upgraded me from almost-legally-blind to better-than-perfect-vision.

Here's an interesting fact. Being able to see better than 20/20 is not all that different from being blind as a bat. Unaccustomed as they are to actually focusing on objects at a distance, my eyes have taken umbrage and gone on strike, registering everything in a dreamlike haze of colors and shapes that only gain meaning if they move.

I have mentioned before that the inability to see is, for me, approximate to being blond, or at least how I imagine being blond must be. Not being a blonde, I have to concoct a suitable fantasy of my own. A happy oblivion to my surroundings and companions seems to serve as a suitable replacement for active peroxide applications; being able to see no evil has as its corollary the ability to believe no evil, and I occasionally find myself humming to myself -- yes, even while doing QA -- snatches of Christmas songs that drive my coworkers mad.

It occurs to me that myopia is an inherently American condition, which perhaps explains so much of our foreign policy. In this state of visual oblivion, I can quite sincerely believe pretty much anything anybody tells me, up to and including my insane coolness when I don sunglasses, something that was hitherto an impossible dream.

It took me four hours to write this entry, sandwiched in between spurts of QA, upgrading software, doing more QA, reporting bugs, doing more QA, downgrading software, doing more QA, reporting bugs--

"Stop that," a Purple Monkey raged, popping up over my cube wall. "What are you typing? Are you typing a bug? Stop it. No more bugs."

Down pens. Time to do some real work. Coworker has brought in her four-month old baby. With a little application, we can ensure her first words are, "I quit."