Macenstein

8 Cores as a metaphor for life

We’ve all met people like core #6 before… the one over-achieving douche who feels the need to make the rest of us feel like worthless pieces of crap with his awesomeness. You’ll find him at school, on the field, and in the workplace. And while I currently feel like core #8 – maybe a core #1, TOPS – there was a time when I too was a core #6.

Right after high school I took a job at a local microfilming company. My coworkers at the time were three, overweight, 50-somethingish women who would spend the day complaining about how much their bunions hurt and how little they were getting paid. Our jobs basically consisted of opening box after box of paper receipts and forms from various companies, and placing them one sheet at a time under a microfilming camera, pressing a foot pedal to snap a picture, then repeating as many times an hour as we could.

It quickly became apparent that I was born to microfilm. My hourly totals were pretty much off the chart. Where one of these grizzled pros could maybe hit a 500 or so (depending on the number of staples and double-sided pieces) I was regularly hitting in the mid 1100’s, and as high as 1350 at times. Oh, I had all the tricks of the trade down, from the little pink dish of SortKwik Fingertip Moistener to … well actually that was the only trick of the trade, I think. My 17 year-old hands just flew through the boxes of papers, immune to the debilitating effects that that repetitive motion would surely have brought on had I stayed there much longer.

My numbers continued to increase daily during those first few weeks – that was until one day when the ladies took me aside and told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to slow my shit down. I was making them look bad, they said, and while this was a summer job to me, it was their full-time gig. I was the #6 core of the microfilming world. So I did the only thing I could do – I picked up the pace, hit 1500, and got them all fired.

No, I didn’t. Of course I took the high road, backed off a bit and cruised through the summer at around 700 pages per hour. Besides, snapping the pictures was only part of the job. I actually needed those ladies on my side. You see, the tricky part for me was taking the film I had shot over to a giant, antique, coal-burning developing machine and properly threading it through that beast of a contraption. I’m 90% sure that not ONE roll of film I shot and put through that machine myself came out useable on the other end, so Lord help the company who needs to go back to their mid-90’s tax receipts.

Those women, as slow, lumbering, and decrepit as they were, were my only hope when it came to mixing the chemicals correctly and producing a useable roll.

So I think we can all learn a thing or two from this seemingly lop-sided display of my 8-Core Mac Pro. Sure, Core #6 appears to be the only one pulling his weight, and perhaps even the weight of the other seven cores. But upon closer look, you’ll see cores 1 and 8 are also glowing, ever so slightly, perhaps mixing the chemicals that core #6 needs to make sense of all that data he’s crunching. Remember – life isn’t multi-threaded.

Deep.