The Workshop (a story)...
...is one allowed to post stories here? I guess I'll find out. Mods will delete it if not. Can anyone guess what this is about?
The Workshop</SPAN>
There exists somewhere a Workshop. The Workshop is not a place of what you may call Work, for in this Workshop Work can also be a joyous, pleasant thing! Sometimes, though, the Work is boring. Sometimes a Machine needs to Work for another Machine. Sometimes the Machine doesn’t even understand what its Work is or where the parts it produces fit in to the Grand Design but, on the other hand, sometimes the Work can’t really be called Work at all; sometimes it’s like surfing at dawn or feeding ducks or making tea or talking to someone about an interesting subject or going to an art gallery or a club or restaurant or coffee house or parachuting on a bright, blue, shiny day or sitting in the sun at the beach drinking cheap, cheap wine gazing at the sparkly water or camping in the rain or planting corn or drawing or driving a car really, really fast. The work is really very diverse.
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Some of the Machines are broken, they don’t function correctly. They don’t fit in. They produce odd, disfigured, slightly horrifying parts. The Grand Design rejects them... and their parts. They are isolated. There are reasons they don’t function; some lack Training, some have tried the Training but it didn’t suit their personality. Some were made incorrectly in the first place. Some of them haven’t been maintained by their Supervisors and haven’t been taught simple Self Maintenance. The faulty Machines are removed from the Functioning Machines. They are Analysed. Then they are Analysed again. And again.
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The Elect (who are Elected by the customers to run the Workshop), plan a Great, Grand Program to allow the non-functioning Machines to be functional again. It is a wonderful Program; it really is. It can work, but the non-functioning Machines need to participate willingly; they need to embrace it, with love, with all the zealous zealousness they can muster. BUT (you guessed it) there’s a Catch. The Elect know the non functioning Machines lack transport mechanisms (it’s a common Fault). But they insist the non functioning Machines transport themselves to the Grand Program. The Elect design a System of Training; to Train the non-functioning Machines to transport themselves. Of course (you guessed it) the Grand Program fails. The non-functioning Machines don’t really like the System of Training; they don’t understand it; and they hate being forced.
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One wonders why the Elect didn’t provide a bus...</SPAN>
