Letter To New Employee

It makes it hard to remember things. But, even if we could write it down, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

Have you ever gone to read a sentence only to realize it’s in another language? Even though you know the letters you have absolutely no idea what they mean in this context. That’s probably what you think it’s like for us now. But we don’t even know what letters are. It’s like hieroglyphs in a sense; strange shapes combined to form a symbol that has no meaning anymore it might as well be abstract art. At least when looking at hieroglyphs you can understand that the set of horizontal squiggly lines means the sea, and the man shaped picture is, well, a man.

But we look at a piece of paper filled with words our great grandparents could’ve read, understood, analyzed, enjoyed, with the same comprehension you would look at a banana duct taped to a blank white canvas behind a velvet rope in the MoMA.

Words aren’t really spelled anymore. Letters are spoken of only in terms of pronunciation, letting you know if you’re pronouncing something right. A difference between the deeper sounding b and the level ground p. Think of it as; “Wait, is it brada, or Prada?” “Prada, with a p.”

But that’s all letters are anymore. Ways to say things.

Of course, a few of us still have to know what they look like. There are a lot of things we had to take; clocks, books, timers, papers, pencils/pens, signs (you don’t realize how many signs there are). There are so many things you can write with, so when we started we had to make sure they forgot how. A few things inevitably slipped through the cracks, but that’s why we’re here.

Some families have kept the written word discreetly in their family, a relic of the past to guarded with everything. Of course, every family is bound to have a little avant garde rule breaker eventually. My job is to find out where they learned it and eradicate the source, but we won’t get into all that now. We’ll save all the boring work stuff for later.

Before I let you go, let me tell you a few things you won’t go over again, but you might want to keep in mind.

We had to get get rid of technology for a while. This was a very laborious and time consuming task for everyone involved. We’ve only had the internet for so many years, but the amount of material we produced… They had to wipe everything clean in order to reintroduce technology, to make sure none of the old web could somehow surface. You couldn’t even imagine all the things. Educational videos, closed captions, keyboards, speech to text, every art program had to be dragged up from the depths of the web, and they removed the text boxes. The instructions, introductions, how tos, and tutorials. Every last bit of everything had to be found, so of course it can’t all be gone. Yet. But the new web is done, and that’s the biggest and most important step. The internet will be safe for generations to come.

The real issues now are the postal service and publishing industry, but you’ll be diving head first into that pool of molasses soon enough so I’ll let you breathe one last time.

Good luck during your first day, and remember to burn this after reading. Sentimentality will destroy everything, we can’t leave anything behind. I’m sorry they pulled you out of everything to be here and do this. I know it’s hard to give it all up so abruptly, but it has to be done.

Bye for now,

Rosemarie