Is Anyone Here a Widgetologist?

"I sell air."

- Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal) in City Slickers

Since my recent post regarding my retirement, many of you have asked what it is that Galactic Invertebrates does exactly.

That's a lie. Nobody asked. Nobody cares what Galactic Invertebrates does. I don't even care, and I worked there for three years.

You know what GI does? In a word, nothing.

You know how most companies make widgets or widget holders or widget accessories or anti-widget cream? Well, those companies need someone to market those widgets and widget-related products, right? And they need somebody to ship them to far-away widget-deprived (or widget-infested, as the case may be) regions of the globe. And they need someone to assist them with meeting the federal guidelines for widget calibration, of course. In short, there is a lot more to widget-related product manufacture than just making the widget-related products.

Unfortunately, GI doesn't do any of those things either.

So what do they do? Well, let's say Company A and Company C both make widgets.

"Wait," you say. "What happened to Company B?"

Exactly! That's exactly my point. What did happen to company B? Nobody really knows for sure, because the only place companies line up in alphabetical order besides the phone book is Red China, and they don't even use the same friggin' alphabet, so good luck sorting that out.

So you've got Company A and Company C, not necessarily in that order, each doing their own thing. Except they both coincidentally decide to make widgets, and not just because every fictitious company makes widgets. In this example it's very important that they are both making widgets. Why? Well, because with all those widgets you're going to need a widget holder, right? Right. But now you're screwed, because the widget holder made by Company Q only holds widgets made by Company A, but you've got both kinds of widgets. And you have to buy a special cable from Company H and an adapter from Company 7 just to get your A and C widgets to talk to each other, not to mention the fact that the anti-widget cream you just bought apparently only works on widgets made by company Epsilon, and you don't even have any of those and you lost the receipt and you don't think the store will take back a half-used tube of anti-widget cream anyway, because ewww.

Now wouldn't it be nice if all those companies could get along and talk to each other so that all your widgets and widget-related products would work together? No, because that's how things work in Red China, you big Commie. I thought we covered that.

So short of that, wouldn't it be great if these companies could get together in a friendly non-monopolistic sort of way, you know, just over coffee or whatever, and agree that all widgets and widget-related products should use the 3428b interface, so that Sally Widget Consumer (not her real name) wouldn't have to get a PhD. in Widgetology just to get her friggin' widgets to work together? Yes, that would be nice. You could call it the Widget Consortium (W.C.). And the W.C. would have big member meetings in Prague and send out press releases about how just yesterday they came really close to agreeing on something and have a website where people with nothing better to do could learn fascinating facts about the W.C.

But wait a minute. Who is going to do all this stuff? Who is going to organize the meeting in Prague and send out the press release about almost agreeing and build the scintillating website? Oh, sure, Company C would love to do it, but then the meeting would be in Trenton, New Jersey and the press release would be all about how unreasonable those bastards at Company A are, and the website would be in the shape of a giant letter C. No, you need someone who can claim with a straight face to be impartial, while at the same time kowtowing to the demands of Company C, because everybody knows that if Company C leaves, the W.C. is going straight down the toilet.

That's where Galactic Invertebrates comes in. The very name of the company heralds its commitment to going to unprecedented lengths to seek out new life forms and civilizations and bend over for them. You remember when scientists found water on Mars and there was a buzz about how Mars might once have supported life? Well, GI immediately put together an expedition which traveled to Mars, went back in time ten million years, scoured the surface of the planet until they found a small patch of primitive lichens, and bent over for them. That's how good they are.

So basically GI runs a set of fictitious companies that don't earn any profits and don't make any products. And, of course, it's very difficult to do that kind of volume of nothing without some special software that makes nothing easier to do. And that, my friends, is where I came in. Yes, I was the guy who wrote the software that was used by nonexistent companies to share vast amounts of misinformation that might some day be used in generating a specification that could conceivably be released in the distant future, at which time there would be a genuine possibility that actual companies making actual products would accuse each other of not complying with it.

Now I dig trenches.