First strange dream

[fbhjr]

I always have more dreams than normal this time of year. This year it hasn’t been as prevalent as some others. But, last night my brain tried to catch up with two weird ones.


The first was like I was watching a documentary about the robot freezers I design at my day job.
The narrator was going on about the war crimes that people committed using my equipment.
I watched myself being interview on the documentary.
"I designed something that holds racks of test tubes in a freezer," the TV me said. "I can’t control how people use that. All we did was keep things cold. That shouldn’t be a war crime."
As I talked, the camera played over the storage racks for our robot. It spent most of the time on the new versions that were based on my design, but designed by someone else. Then, it cut back to me.
"There are people who sell refrigerators," I continued. "Do you arrest if people store bad things in those refrigerators?"
"Not normally," the narrator said.
"This is the same thing. We made freezers. Our target customers were people doing medical research to help people. But, once we’ve sold them, we can’t control what they really put in the freezer."
"But, your freezers let people do things they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise," the unseen narrator said.
"And, when the first ice maker was put on a refrigerator door, was the maker of the refrigerator held responsible for what people did with that ice?"
The screen cut back to showing my freezer racks while the narrator went on about my claims of innocence.
Dream ends


I do watch a lot of documentaries. And, my wife likes crime shows where they do interviews with the different people.
At work my boss has been going on about what good our products can do for people as well. We’re chasing new markets right now. If they work out, they could have positive impact on people.
We had dinner with my aunt last night and she was asking about that stuff.
I was reluctant to talk with her about it as she had been telling me how living in an old age home is difficult as people she likes are dying around her all the time.
So, I don’t want to say "my customers are working on a cure for cancer, but it will come too late and cost too much for your friends."
One of the people in my department died of cancer less than a year ago. So, what good did our robot do him?
I’ve been listening to customers talk about how they’re going to cure cancer for almost 10 years now. And, I know folks have been working on it much longer than that.

My last day of high school I was saying goodbye to all my teachers.
As I said goodbye to one of my science teachers he looked me in the eye.
"Don’t design weapons," he said.
I have no idea why he said it. We had never discussed my future plans. I didn’t even know he knew I was going to be an engineer. (He was my advanced biology teacher.)
He didn’t say anything like that to anyone else in our very small class.
"Yes, sir," I replied.

When I got out of engineering school, Ronald Regan was president. I’d say about 3/4 of my graduating class went into some form of designing weapons.
My first job was ice cream makers. And, it paid a good $10k or more less a year than those weapons.
One of my classmates went on to design nuclear submarines. He made enough money off of that to fully retire at 35 years old.
I used to work for a company where our biggest customer had founded his company on the money he made designing reentry shells for nukes as they drop from space on the top of ICBMs.
My biggest customer now is a company that considers killing 1 person to only be a medium level risk. To hit big risk on their scale you have to kill hundreds of thousands.

There have been times it has been difficult to avoid designing weapons.
I thought I was OK with medical freezers.
Maybe my dreams don’t agree.