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Thursday Morning, I'd been in Berkeley, sipping coffee with some current and ex-Geoworkers. Ron, an ex-Geoworker in Seattle, had instructed me to get up on all the company gossip before I headed up.
On the bus ride to Berkeley, I'd been reading the book Modern Meat, about some of the science going on in the modern meat industry. Specifically, I'd been reading about antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and how the resistant trait might spread from animal-resident bacteria to human-resident bacteria. On a cellular scale, the prime suspects are plasmids, little strandlets of DNA code floating free of the usual chromosomal chains. These plasmids can sometimes survive in cells of different species. While a pig-resident bacterium probably wouldn't thrive in a human, there might be plasmids which could exist in either kind of bacterium. Some plasmids might help a bacterium to resist antibiotics.
On a larger scale, one way for antibiotic-resistance to travel from animals to humans is through human contact with animal feces. (I didn't read that in Modern Meat. It might not be true. But it sure seems like an awful lot of bacteria could be living in there.)
I'd been reading about plasmids, reading about the huge amount of shit on a hog farm, reading about the hazards which went with this.
So when, on a Berkeley street that morning, a bird had pooped on my head, I didn't exactly take it in stride.
I grabbed a kleenex from my pocket, wiped at my hair. Some poop had come into contact with my fingers. I was far from a sink. I walked towards my goal, the train station, wary of my hand. I would idly raise my hand to wipe my brow, to brush back hair--only to shy away from it at the last instant. Finally I made it to a sink with soap. Finally my hands were clean. Maybe I take my reading too seriously.
That was Thursday. Friday afternoon, I hopped on a plane. Friday evening, Dave Loftesness, head of the Geoworks Berkeley office, sent me some mail, but I didn't see it. I was on a bus from the Seattle airport to Seattle downtown. I was looking at business signs going past. Loudon Real Estate amused me. I didn't want to think about Live Butcher.
Downtown, I hopped off the bus and walked along Pike to 2nd Avenue, just past the Art Bar to arrive at a building housing some of the offices of amazon.com, where my friend Ron worked. Ron was another ex-Geoworker. I'd be staying at his house while in the Seattle area. But first I got the mini-tour of the amazon.com offices.
We stopped off at Ron's office, or rather the office that Ron shared with two of his co-workers. It looked pretty cramped.
We went around a corner, and looked through a window into another office where four people worked. One of them, facing the window, looked familiar. It was Andy Chiu, a Geoworker. Now I was confused: What was he doing here?
I found out that Andy had quit just a few days after I had. He'd come to work for Amazon. In the same office was Reza Hussein, another ex-Geoworker. Ron apologized: Steve Yegge wasn't in today. I was surprised--wasn't Steve contracting for Geoworks? Not anymore. I idly wondered who was left in Geoworks' Seattle office. Was it just Simon and Jeff huddling together for moral support?
Ron, Andy, and I had dinner. Then Ron drove me to his suburb, Edmonds. We stopped off at the local supermarket. Its doors were always open. Ron told me that they had a problem with birds. Birds would fly through the open store doors and take up residence in the store's rafters. The proprietors had put up inflatable owls next to the nut and candy sections to discourage theft. In the store, I walked warily, eyes upward.