Another Day in the Silicon Forest
by JD Adams
My eyes opened to a familiar space echoing in silence, disconnected from the place I was only moments before. There had been friends that were strangers, mouthing words that I heard in my mind. Their fading images still scurried about; completing strange tasks in the little time they had left before they disappeared completely. With a hollow feeling I bid them farewell.
Another day. I lie in my bed and let the telltale noises of the world filter in to me, footsteps and muffled voices, car doors and engines. Staring at the ceiling, I interpreted and sorted input, waiting for a revelation. There were rules to be explored with curious wanderings, but the truth remained elusive. I felt as an actor in a foreign movie, with a soundtrack mundane yet surreal, playing in my ears as I rose and prepared for work. It would be a morning of balky circuitry in appliances, but I soon found myself on my way in the surging northbound traffic of Oregon Interstate 5.
I was employed assisting an engineer with the design of a RF pulse amplifier. We ran at power levels that threatened to melt the solder in the front end, and dealt with extreme interaction of magnetic fields when we put the lid on the enclosure. This phenomenon was controlled by using orthogonal (90 degree) orientation of coils on the circuit board to decrease magnetic coupling. However, to arrive at this conclusion, many boxes of pizza and donuts were consumed.
We had scheduled 4 hours of environmental testing up in Hillsboro. In the back of my van were the prototypes, the culmination of months of work. They would be subjected to shock and vibration to isolate any mechanical issues. The data and observations recorded during testing would be crucial. I turned from I-5 onto the notorious Highway 217, merging with the metered stream of traffic, the rain coming down in sheets that reduced vision to a watery world of brake lights, past the high-tech heart of Beaverton to Hillsboro. At the environmental lab I set up the wiring harnesses and the laptop as the electrodynamic coils were being tested, humming with power.
Behind every design, there are engineering stories to be told, boldly debated in the coffeehouses and pubs in the Silicon Forest of Oregon. With schematics sketched on napkins, engineering terms for wireless and digital technology are bandied about with gusto. As the stress of the workday is dispersed, and the levels of caffeine are dissipated, the glory of engineering triumph gradually fades, and the specter rises of wife and kids waiting at home. Scribbled schematics are quietly folded into pockets, to be brought in to work and entered into the project folder. Tomorrow there would be crunching of numbers in Excel spreadsheets.
The affairs of the day melted into droning softness on the highway, a meditation moving between the white lines. Arriving home, I found only echoes and lurking shadows. Overstuffed furniture crouched in corners like lounging animals, well fed on the unsuspecting. Floating before me in my mind’s eye were the dim ghosts of the morning reborn in darkness. So nice to see you again, I thought, and drifted off to sleep.