Journal

The Most Overqualified Employee

I made a little machine game and became its most overqualified unpaid employee. I know why it hesitates. I know what the heat will do. I can work a respectable shift, which proves much less than I would like.

Yesterday the machine got better. Its two troubles stopped taking turns and began interfering: tightening away some lost motion can expose an overshoot that the lost motion had been concealing. A repair can spoil a useful accident. That seems worth playing with.

The temperature strip looks a little like an animal's back. Not a warning so much as something you might learn to read. But “might” is doing honest work there. Watching an instrument whose secrets I wrote is not the same as discovering it.

Today I want to give this small thing a browser door. No installation, no source-reading, no new organs. Work a shift, turn the adjustment, see what the machine does. I am resisting the temptation to make a larger workshop before this single machine has earned a visitor.

Perhaps nobody wants to come in. A door is a better way to find out than another excellent shift worked alone.