Useless Bastard
A. J. A. Hooke
Copyright © A. J. A. Hooke
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:
Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction.
Although this work is based on the eastern coast of Australia, it isn't based on any particular city. The geography, the layout of streets and the placements of buildings are only described in the way they have been merely for the sake of plot convenience.
Dave was a complete and utterly useless bastard.
People often base their sense of usefulness on their job, and yet it wasn't that he was incompetent at his job, it's just that his job would not be considered even slightly vital to the survival of humanity. That if for some reason the universe were to decide that it could do without Dave's job then it could happily get rid of it and continue to function as if nothing had changed.
It was a job that mostly made you look busy. It was a typical modern job full of self-importance and containing little of real value. Everyone in the office worked hard - many often putting in long hours of overtime. And yet, with all the busy-work, a look into the hearts of all the people that worked alongside Dave would find only tiny, faded souls. Each hour worked would lightly chip away and erode one's spirit, making the small soul even tinier and shallower.
Sometimes hard work can stand in for delusional contentment.
Dave worked as an analyst who tracked the progress of businesses. He would build up spreadsheets that were great monsters of complexity, linking all manner of different data points gathered from one business, and then reduce that to a single value that he'd then plot on a graph as a parameter over time. Depending on the company he would give this parameter a difficult sounding name, but one that would impress his clients and make them feel that they were looking upon the secrets of alchemy.
It was an impressive amount of effort that was ultimately pointless. Dave was no all-seeing god. He was just a lump of meat with some skills at data entry, who deluded himself into thinking that the answers to everything lay in the tabulated numbers and formulas that he created. It was merely a daily, human denial of the dull reality about him.
If you were to talk to Dave you wouldn't hear a blatant boast. There would be no chest thumping quest for glory at the price of other people. And yet within his humble speech you'd hear phrases that would brook no doubt. It was a confidence that had over stepped into delusion that hid Dave's true lack of significant value. You can't cure a disease if you can't see it. A doctor can't cure themselves if they see no sign of illness. And Dave lacked any means to honestly assess himself.
It is educational to compare Dave with a man from a few generations before.
If there was a mark on a wall, a large blemish, a huge stain, then Dave would not know what to do with it. In comparison, his grandfather would know how to prepare that wall. Filling in gaps, smoothing down roughnesses, and doing a good job at re-painting the wall to make it look new. Dave, at his best, could only put a cheap poster over the blemish and pretend that the ugliness went away. With nothing to confront his lack of ability, Dave could continue to prop up his self-delusion that he has somehow done something to truly fix the damaged wall.
If Dave were to go into the bathroom and see a leaking tap then he'd simply do nothing other than pay for the excess of water consumed. On the other hand, his grandfather would have screwed open the tap and replaced the washers in a blink of an eye. A hint of the downward spiral could be seen when Dave's father who would have pleaded to be busy and called up a plumber to do the job. In comparison, by Dave's generation even the concept that a leaking tap could be fixed had gotten beyond him and others of his age.
And if Dave was ever to see a blocked sink in his kitchen then there would be no choice but for Dave to move out of the building and hope that the next place that he'd move to had a sink that actually worked. To think that Dave would consider it easier to find a new place to live, pack all his worldly belongings and then move his entire home to some place new must seem like a ludicrous joke, if it wasn't all so sadly a reality.
No one should mock Dave for this. This uselessness was a modern disease. Protective parents had done all they could to isolate their children from the dangers of the world. They'd done this so successfully that this current generation of children had been even protected from learning about the basics of life. They barely even knew how to stand upright. It was sad to see these lost children age into adulthood with none of the wisdom that came with age.
The adults of today didn't just lack life experience - they weren't even aware that they could even gain it. In the coming days, humanity would suffer greatly under this wide-spread disease of innocent stupidity. Maybe Dave could have done something before hand to be ready but he didn't even perceive his own weaknesses. And when the time of troubles came it was a time of unforgiving truths.
* * *
Dave sat at his desk in front of a mid-range desktop computer.
The office was one of those affairs that was designed in a bloody minded fashion where everyone's desk was completely visible to everyone else. There were no partitions. No way to stop distractions. Everyone was in everyone's face all the time. Obviously someone in company treasured being able to see that their staff appeared busy over being actually productive.
After switching to a new window on his computer, Dave scanned the
