Deten Gaming

In cases where there were too many corpses to collect them whole, standard procedure was to hack a single wing off of each bird, bag and tag it, and bring it back for testing. It was only after the unpaid interns arrived back at the facility with several hundred still-bleeding-from-the-stump duck wings in tow that they realised there wasn't enough cold storage space to accommodate them all. While they were trying to figure out what to do, the wings were brought inside so at least they'd be out of the sun, and were left piled in black plastic trash bags in an infrequently travelled hallway.

As you may have guessed, they inadvertently ended up piling the wings directly in front of my office door, having apparently mistaken it for a storage closet. (To be fair, my office was in fact a repurposed storage closet.) I was used to ignoring random commotion outside my door, this being the sort of place where "random commotion" was an at-least-daily occurrence, so I didn't notice until I tried to leave my office some time later to respond to a service request, and promptly stepped knee-deep into a pile of freshly severed bird extremities which may or may not have been infected with avian flu.

This was back when free wi-fi was just beginning to be a standard amenity in fancy hotels. Wireless networking hardware was both much more expensive and much shorter-ranged than its today, which created a conundrum: each room would need its own individual access point, but the hardware couldn't be anywhere obvious or accessible, or else the guests would steal the routers. This led to some very eccentric cabling layouts, and, well, it turns out that being the only technician on call that day who's skinny enough to squeeze through a weird nonstandard access hatch doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to squeeze through it in the opposite direction!

Anyway: there was a period in the early 2000s where it was fashionable for businesses and government offices to receive Internet service via dedicated fibre-optic lines, regardless of whether their bandwidth usage warranted it or not. It was basically a prestige thing.

This was possible because, around 2000, there'd been a big, government funded push to upgrade Canada's fibre-optic infrastructure. Just as the work was kicking into high gear, wavelength-division multiplexing – a technology that can increase the throughput of a fibre-optic cable by 10–100 times – became an industry standard, leading to a massive crash in demand for fibre-optic infrastructure.

It was a whole fiasco, a bunch of telecommunications companies went bankrupt, and the end result was that there were literally thousands of miles of "dark fibre" running all over major Canadian cities: cable that wasn't currently in use, but could be lit up at a moment's notice. This meant it was possible for an office to simply pay a setup fee to light up some dark fibre, and presto: their own private fibre-optic network.

Enter City Hall. They wanted to get on fibre because all the cool kids were doing it (they absolutely did not need it), but no fibre had ever been laid near enough to building because they refused to allow the grounds to be torn up – something about historically significant statues, I think – and they were now regretting that decision.

There was, however, dark fibre running under a nearby 25-storey hotel, and because the province of Saskatchewan doesn't really have geography, that was enough to create an uninterrupted line of sight between the hotel's roof and that of the City Hall building.

The plan was to install a huge fucking laser beam with a paired optical receiver on the roof of the hotel, and point it at a matching unit on the roof of City Hall. The formal term for this is "free-space optical communication", if you haven't done enough Wikipedia bingeing today. Criticisms that Saskatchewan is exactly the sort of place where you don't want to use free-space optical because of high airborne particle counts much of the year went unheeded, and away we went.

Of course, they couldn't be arsed to pay someone actually qualified to do the work, so there's me, 22 years old and knowing fuck-all about optics, perched on a hotel roof with no railings and no safety tether (you may detect a recurring theme), prairie winds periodically gusting to gale force, delicately tapping calibration screws with a tiny hammer in a mostly failed effort to aim a laser cannon the size of my thigh at a target the size of a baseball that's nearly a kilometre away.

At this point I should remark that something they usually don't tell you about fibre optics is that when the glass strands are bundled into cables, they're surrounded by a filler medium in order to reduce rubbing and provide weather resistance. Often, this filler medium is petroleum jelly, and it gets absolutely everywhere when you cut into the cable's cladding. Thus, I need you to re-imagine whatever you got out of the preceding paragraph with me coated in petroleum jelly.

That’s not the issue at stake here. Let me tell you a little something about “minirooms.”

Minirooms are a way of television writing that is becoming more common. Basically, the studio will hire a small group of writers, 3-6 or so, and employ them for just a few weeks. In those few weeks (six weeks seem to be common), they have to hurriedly figure out as much about the show as they can – characters, plots, outlines for episodes. Then at the end of the six weeks, all the writers are fired except for the showrunner, who has to write the entire series themselves based on the outlines.

This is not a widespread practice, but it has become more common over the past couple of years. Studios like it because instead of paying for a full room for the full length of the show, they just pay a handful of writers for a fraction of the show. It’s not a huge problem now, but the WGA only gets the chance to make rules every three years – if we let this go for another three years and it becomes the norm? That would be DEVASTATING for the tv writing profession.

Do I feel like I’m mistreated? No. I LOVE my job! But in a world of minirooms, there is no place for someone like me – a mid-level writer who makes a decent living working on someone else’s show (I’d like to be a showrunner someday, but for now I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and my husband and I are trying to start a family so I like not being support rather than the leader for now). In a miniroom, there are only two levels – the handful of glorified idea people who are already scrambling to find their next show because you can’t make a decent living off of one six-week job (and since there are fewer people per room, there are fewer jobs overall, even at the six-week amount), and the overworked, stressed as fuck showrunner who is going to have to write the entire thing themselves. Besides being bad for me making a living, I also just think it’s plain bad for television as an art form – what I like about TV is how adaptable it is, how a whole group of people come together to tell a story better than what any of them could do on their own. Plus the showrunner can’t do their best work under all of that pressure, episode after episode, back to back. Minirooms just…fucking suck.

They had worked in TV for 4 years, been on 3 major TV shows, primarily in “mini rooms”, had their name listed as cowriter on one broadcast episode and had never been on set for any of their shows. Had never seen anything they wrote being filmed. They knew next to nothing about the actual process of getting TV made.

Texts From Superheroes

Texts From Superheroes