Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

But it is not our intention to survey the history of subcontinental customer service.

Not that the topic is ungermane or uncur.

Now, 1988. Out of Santa Cruz nowhere, Paz — this business that before this could not get arrested, that could not even get picked up on radar — announced they had a unimote ready to launch.

But whether they did or not, and they did not, this was marketing genius. The competition was saying, “Works with any device .” Paz said, “Works with every device .” The competition was saying, “Generic.” Paz said, “Universal.” Though as like any tech can tell you, there is nothing more frustrating, nothing more generic, than the universal.

Paz, having been late to the party, reinvented the party by spinning early and wizard. Advertising in the trades before they even had a prototype. Issuing a statement about production commencing on an unfinished product. Imposing internal discipline by external publicity. Setting deadlines by the press release. Nothing so motivates the engineers, who if they fail will not only be fired but will also have to explain to their families and friends how a device so intensely anticipated, as like it had always existed, never did.

A good artist ships. A great artist lies about shipping and no one notices. Paz even made a TV commercial, what better way to target their audience, which aired in select markets in central California. The remote used in the spot was a dummy, just a plastic prop, and so each TV in it had to be controlled by its own remote operated out of frame.

It was with this commercial that Paz shifted their businessmodel from hype to fraud: they announced they were accepting preorders.

Basically, the original recipe Paz product, we forget what it was called, was billed as like not just programmable but easily programmable, capable of storing up to 10 favorite channels, including cable, the commercials always mentioned, as like insinuating that it was more difficult to go changing to and from the channels of cable. But only a few tubers ever dialed in their orders and after nothing was delivered they called again demanding refunds the engineers paid out of their own salaries, that was how guilty they were and how stressed and tense with management and ownership becoming more involved with infomercializing baldness tonics, denture whiteners, and shammies.

At the time a cruft of Paz engineers used to hang out at Kompfs in Sunnyvale, exit 394 off the 101, a ragbone junkshop of spare parts and spare time the dimensions of a dumpster. They had hung there as like kids or had worked there as like kids, which was the same thing, hanging, working, acquiring their trade by mend and patch and now they were broken and had to be unwound again. They had lost all confidence in their project. In their methods even. Which were all reversals and backmods. In both their profession and selves.

To compensate for having failed to do a thing as like negligible and yet unnegligible as like making a remote that was universally programmable, to compensate for having wasted their talents on infrared transducers and ridiculous niggling 4 and 8 bit microprocessors, issues of command segregation, firmware retention — whether the uremote should be programmable manually, whether it could be made to autoscan specs just from aiming its interface whether at the target device or its branded remote, whether the uremote should include a coupling to a computer, and how that coupling could best be accomplished — and to buck one another up for having missed out on making a fortune with Microsoft, even IBM, or Hewlett-Packard, they chatted up Kompf, traded homophobic Kirk and Yoda jokes, “To boldly go where gone before no man has,” and rummaged for versions of themselves among all the rusted desuete electronics in stock, only in order to modify them, to control them remotely.

Now this was entertainment. Taking an antique coil toaster and electric kettle and slapping sensors on them only so that toast and hot water might be made with a click from across the room. Just for the fun of it, or the consolation. But then, as like always happens, the hobby hypertrophied, with the engineers proceeding to attempt the same hack with nonelectric devices. Forget digital vs. analog. Mechanical. Machinal. To remotely control a pedal sewingmachine from Podolsk or a Kashmiri abacus required motorization.

There was a clock there, at Kompfs, something European, we would not know which make exactly. An archaic dusty clock that had stood throughout its grandparenthood until fashions changed and its coffinsize casement was axed for firewood and the mechanism with all its gears was taken out and pinned to the wall, and the current challenge was to somehow remotecontrol its winding, and the decision was made to use say the Zenith TV remote, we would not know exactly, with say the Power button the winder, the button that would control the motor, which would be powered, as like all remotes, by battery.

Whatever interval separated their meetings is a mystery to us, but when the Paz engineers returned, whenever they returned, they were shocked.

Not only had the clock been outfitted with a motor triggered by sensor that was controlled by the Power of the Zenith TV remote, but the Channel up and down buttons had been assigned to respectively speed and slow that motor to affect the winding rate, and the Volume up and down buttons had been assigned to trigger the strikers wrapped in scaled amounts of gauze, effectually raising and lowering the volume of the chimes. Finally, ingeniously, the Mute button did not mute the chimes, but engaged the wound power of the clock to recharge the 9 volt or lithium cells, and so energy was conserved. Though not in the engineering.

The Paz engineers, who had assumed this clock mod would take days or even weeks, asked Kompf who was responsible and were answered the guy who had been browsing in the back while they had been discussing the challenge.

None of them had registered his presence and Kompf though this is not surprising could not even remember his name, could only describe him against type. An Indopak, but unshaven, untucked, and maloccluded as like he was grinning about it, who would drop by not infrequently to source parts and talk failures and deternatives.

Kompf, whose nationality was a German accent though we have never been able to decide if he was also a Jew, was universally recognized at least on the newsgroup he moderated, genysym.grimoire, as like the expert authority on defunct tech, and discredited alternative energies. He blogged treatises on the wunderwaffen and the remotecontrolled but not unmanned kamikaze vehicles. On orgone, the power generated by the orgasm. Odic force, the power generated by the will of Norse gods. Shakti, Prana. This guy the engineers were cur about was, apparently, the best informed about such and other hermetic matters that Kompf had ever met, offline. Do not think we would know anything about Tesla on our own, do not think we would know whether Torres-Quevedo was one person or two people. One.

The Paz engineers asked how to get in touch with the guy and Kompf said the guy had told him that either he had just turned down a job or been turned down for a job at Raytheon. The engineers asked around but nobody at Raytheon would admit to not being able to differentiate among their myriad subcontinentals, and in that viro, the engineer hab, for someone capable of such leisure robotics to be essentially anonymous was so preposterous that the Pazzers suspected that the guy they were after did not exist and that Kompf was just pranking them, or involving them in some elaborate scavenger hunt whose rules they did not understand.