Questioning Everything Propaganda
Republished from March 13th, 2025
Gregory Gable, a 54-year-old IT veteran with over 30 years of experience, had battled every tech gremlin imaginable—parallel port printers that ghosted him, IBM System/360 servers that crashed mid-inventory due to actual bugs, and modems that taunted him with their initial AT dial-up connection handshake sound failures due to bad POTS lines. But his breaking point came last month in Boise, Idaho, when he spent three agonizing hours wrestling with those tiny WiFi cables—you know, the ones that connect to the M.2 WiFi modules?! “This is the most time I’ve ever spent on such a menial task,” he grumbled, his fingers trembling as he tried to align the minuscule connectors, having bent one in the process. Chad, a 23-year-old janitor, overheard his grumbling, whizzed over, and plugged them in flawlessly in under 10 seconds after bending the bad connector back to good using his Philips screwdriver. “Either you can or you can’t,” Greg proclaimed, while Chad hurled his screwdriver back to his pocket. “It’s not a learned art—it’s a goddamn genetic disposition!” Chad giggled and started sweeping as the office hours were coming to a close.
That soul-crushing defeat ignited a revelation for Greg: he was finished with terrestrial tech hurdles getting too small for his grown skills. He aimed for the stars, answering a Craigslist ad to apply to NASA to dock spaceships at the International Space Station, convinced his decades of persistence qualified him for cosmic precision, that he’d be able to revisit those big old termination dongles. “I’ve got transferable skills on a big scale,” he bragged to his dubious adult children at Thanksgiving, sporting an official astronaut jumpsuit he got off eBay and a “NASA” badge he’d painstakingly crafted with a computer-aided laser etcher with his name on it, as the NASA employer requested. “Thirty years of fighting larger cables means I can handle space, especially now that cables and connectors have gotten too small for me in the IT world!” To his amazement, NASA offered him a gig, and Greg was starry-eyed.
Last Tuesday, Greg marched into what he believed was an Above Top Secret NASA facility in Florida, with his laser-etched badge shining like a beacon of fireworks. He pictured himself guiding spacecraft to their orbital docks, a heroic upgrade from wrestling too-small-to-see-and-feel laptop innards. Even though the NASA gig paid less, it was something more meaningful to him.
Instead, he stepped into a dimly lit studio teeming with half-naked women in silver bikinis, clutching prop laser guns and coming to him with what looked like a tinfoil hat—but too small for his head. A director, then, with a megaphone shouted, “Action!”