Yumping Yiminy!

Let's rehearse what we know about who we are. We are primates, very closely related to chimps and other great apes. Our ancestors speciated from the other apes about five million years ago, and evolved in parallel lines and overlapping subspecies, emerging more clearly as hominids about two million years ago.

East Africa in this period was getting drier and drier. The forest was giving way to grassland savannahs dotted with scattered groves of trees. We evolved to adapt to that landscape: the hairlessness, the upright posture, the sweat glands, and other physical features. They all made us capable of running long distances in the open sun near the equator. We ran for a living and covered broad areas. We used to run game down by following it until it tired out, sometimes days later.

In that basically stable mode of living the generations passed, and during the many millennia that followed, the size of the hominid brains evolved from about three hundred cubic millimeters to about nine hundred cubic millimeters. This is a strange fact, because everything else remained relatively stable. The implication is that the way we lived then was tremendously stimulating to the growth of the brain. Almost every aspect of hominid life has been proposed as the main driver of this growth, everything from the calculation of accurate rock throwing to the ability to dream, but certainly among the most important must have been language and social life. We talked, we got along; it's a difficult process, requiring lots of though. Because reprodution is curcial to any definition of evolutionary success, getting along with the group and with the opposite sex is fundamentally adaptive, and so it must be a big driver of increasing brain size. We grew so fast we can hardly fit through the birth canal these days. All that growth from trying to understand other people, the other sex, and look where we are.

In checking the logs from the weekend, the client was initially astonished at the length of the generated report when it was printed. Going through it, we had the usual okay (Valium Wailer) to piss-poor (The Sleeper) performance, until we got to Sunday. It took about a second for the client to detect my standard frequency, and he quickly wrote "This is YOU, Mr. Rimmy!" on it.

Clearly I have to become more erratic. Next thing you know, people will start depending on me. I'll have to discourage that. :P

I got to train my new weekly graveyard guy yesterday. Of course, the office didn't tell me that ahead of time, and when I got to work the guy had been waiting there already for an hour.

He's okay, he's a fifty-two year old Czech who's worked for us for some seven months, and never done an indoor job. And it shows, because he sometimes walks right past doors without checking them or looking inside. I'm wondering if the sheer volume of things inside the site is throwing him. He's used to walking around parking lots or building exteriors rather than having a globular awareness.

Ah well, I trained him for eight hours. We managed three patrols. Barely.

I'm also a bit alarmed that his wife called him three times, when she knew it was his first day at a new site and he was being trained.

I should probably mention that I'm not a big fan of guards even carrying personal phones when they're on duty, as if you're talking on a phone you're not paying attention to what's going on around you (no you're not, even if you think you are) and that's not a safe thing to be doing when you're the one responsible for security.

Towards the end of the shift, I had to do a more-or-less final full patrol and lock down the place after the cleaners (they were late - usually I do that much sooner), and since the new guy would have slowed me down, I gave him the checklist I'd written up and told him to wander the site and get a feel for it without me. And off I went on my patrol.

As I went around, I looked through the various windows into the atrium from different levels and directions, but never saw him. Finally when I hit the main floor, I saw him. All he'd done was wander around the cafeteria looking at the pictures on the walls. His entry on his report for that hour? "Reading post orders"

Uh, it's one page. It's a checklist. I know, I wrote it.

I hope this guy doesn't suck ass.

And, waiting for me when I got home, The Ultimate Showdown. Thanks, Fictional. ;)