The X-Files and What They Can Do for You

I've been watching several episodes of The X-Files lately, and I've realized that one thing that I would have a hard time with if I were Mulder or Scully is the fact that often times, their days will end, unexpectedly, thousands of miles from where they began. I.e., there are numerous episodes wherein Scully shows up for what she assumes will be a normal work day, only to have Mulder say to her something to the effect of "Pack your skis, we're going to Montana!" or "I hope you have some spare lederhosen in your desk, because we're hitting Oktoberfest!" Alright, the latter example never really happened (I wish it had, though), but you see my point. I think that sort of uncertainty would be really unnerving--way more unnerving than disease-carrying-bees created by the government, as a matter of fact. I mean sure, Mulder and Scully have awesome jobs that are at least 1.7 times more interesting than my job, but at what price? Is it worth being able to see an alien lady's booby or getting the opportunity to fight a werefrog if you have to constantly cancel your dinner reservations? I'm not so sure.

At any rate, I'm thinking about this facet of The X-Files because of this: on Friday I had to go down to Richmond to attend a web design meeting. I was dreading this meeting, mainly because it just seemed like such a complete waste of an entire day to have to go to Richmond to discuss a web site. But then I thought, well Mulder and Scully deal with this shit all the time, and things usually seem to work out for them. So that's how I treated my day: like a really, really, really boring episode of The X-Files; i.e., I just pretended that I showed up for work and suddenly had to go to Richmond to investigate something. And you know what? It was surprisingly effective. I think from here on out, I'm going to try to treat more things like episodes of TV shows. My next experiment is to treat lunch at work like one of the classic "kitchen talk" scenes from The Golden Girls. Lunch conversations here are usually pretty effing boring, but if I picture my coworkers as the salacious Blanche Devereaux or the sassy Sophia Petrillo, things will automatically be more interesting, right? Right.

Now, here's the downside from my X-Files trick: during the meeting, because I was thinking about scifi, I realized that conceptually, science fiction is complete bullshit. Why? Because of this: we were meeting about a web site, and our meeting lasted almost six hours, and we still didn't get nearly as much accomplished as we should have. Six hours for a web site! Granted we were meeting about a rather complex site, but still. My point is: if it takes that long to get on the same page regarding a web page, how can something as large as the Death Star ever get built? Not even built--how could you ever get people to finalize the design of it before construction could even start? Can you imagine the fucking PowerPoint presentations that would be involved in something like that? And even if you could get approval to build it, what about the decision-making process during construction? It would take months just to get the person with the proper authorization to sign off on the color of the ceiling tiles on Level GX-5. Forget about it. So there you have it: scientific proof that scientific fiction is scientifically impossible. Next up: I will prove that the Conan books were historically accurate.