Morning’s Humour

‘What would you say the standard measurement of milk is?’
There was a depth to the seemingly innocent question that threatened to upend the sanity of the so recently begun shift term. Seconds passed as Neil tried to internalise the question.

‘Governed by who?’ he asked, warned about engineer Cuddy’s hypotheticals and wary of an argument that could last the remaining fortnight. Life in a repeater station was too slow to be upset with the only other person living in a scratched circle of three-hundred kilometres.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cuddy coughed bluntly as they inspected their fingernails, absently wondering if they were stained with flux or with grease. ‘let’s say, governed by the standards council. SI and all that. You know, millimetres?’

Removing his glasses, Neil then closed his book slow enough that it resembled an obscene gesture concerning a solitary digit and then exhaled.
‘Well, I suppose it would depend on the context. Milk has a different role in baking than it does for wholesale. Some would say that a pallet was perfectly good measurement, others a carton.’

‘And yet we use the same measurement for a dirt road and a highway.’

There was a sigh that was emitted from the very depths of Neil’s soul. It was his first shift with Cuddy: an engineer who was described to him as being passably agreeable but suffering from bouts of a wandering-mind. Maybe they were just trying to help him relax. The first shift at a new station could always be daunting for an operator. 
‘The litre then. It is a base SI unit for liquids and you can find it in every fridge in every dairy store this side of the salt plains.’

Lolling their head from side to side, Cuddy let the word “litre” settle for a moment and then looked to the ceiling in deep though. Rasing a finger, they paused for the effect of pausing.
‘But is it good for milk?’ they said, without offering insight as to why it wasn’t.
After a moment of silence, Cuddy leaned forward and whispered with the utter manifestation of seriousness. ‘Half of a carton is five-hundred millilitres. By in rights that should mark the full carton as a datum. But what of the splash? The pint? The difference between a tea and a table. Is my cup the same as your cup? A cricket pitch may be a chain but when a chain is made from earth they tend to crumble. Ships move in knots and ropes are measured by gages. All this and we’re still yet to decide on the length of string, the height of clouds, the size of a dog.’

Neil blinked, he had never heard something so passionately stupid and was taken for a moment by the engineer’s ramble. He offhandedly remembered his grandmother in a burst of nostalgia and saw some of her in Cuddy’s manner. She was a woman who refused to name any plant beyond her garden wall as “wild things have no need for a name”. She would blue in the face argue that even after it was written, a fact should still be questioned.
‘Why should milk define itself?’ Neil asked, his generally reserved nature forgotten for a moment. He caught himself smiling and hid his laughter behind a thoughtful looking stroke of his beard. ‘If all liquids should define themselves by size, they would all share the same weight, the same composition. Are all spades, spades?’

Cuddy’s face was a joy of a smile. They stood and paced about the station office rapidly swapping between scratching their head and holding their hands behind their back in mock-contemplative march. With an extravagant twirl they pivoted and looked directly into the new operator’s eyes.
‘Are you insinuating that milk has a conscious, sir?’

Neil returned the gaze for a moment, reclined, and then returned to his book.
‘Are you not?’ He said faux-casually. His smirk so wide that it could be heard across the AM band.

There was a great amount of downtime out on the salt plains. When transmissions where steady and nothing obvious was broken, an operator and engineer could feel ancillary to the large tower of steel and copper that stood above them. Complicated panels, wired with transistors and diodes lay hidden below breadboard patches, printed repairs, and mistakes from the factory that were never tracked, never written down. You had to learn the moods of a receiving station, the broken whims of a receiving console. It took time to pick the patterns of the static that obscured the messages sent from another tower. It took time to dial in the frequency, to ensure that 502 hertz remained at 502, that no ghosting, no layering, no crossover appeared on a station that people relied upon.
Cuddy and Neil began to laugh. It was an innocent laughter, without self-conscious or worry. On the Salt plains it was easy to become lost in the distance and static that seemed to stretch infinitely out across ranges and horizons so a faraway that they could only obscure a nothingness of crackling blacks and white.
In time they let silence return.

By the terminal, an orange light blinked in and out with a rhythmic pulse, radiant static raising its pitch in the monitor speakers that had been buried underneath the stacked books of a quiet year.
Pushing the books to the side, Neil uncovered the speakers and set them upon the terminal so they could be heard, taking a moment to look out across the plain through the station’s window.
Closer to the city, most receiving stations were massive, factory-like buildings, full of combed looms of cabling and teams set to maintain them. You could become lost in those places. To be such a small cog in something so busy. Neil had been an operator in city receiving station for twenty years and had only this year requested a new placement.
It was welcoming here—as far as a government owned receiving station could ever be. It had the echoes of its previous staff, possessions that were left behind, furniture built by hand, humour left in the shift logs and written in surprising places for the next operator or engineer to discover, there was a memory of a time here built from a joyful heart.
Two floors, four walls and a roof, all brick, tile, and worn-through carpet coloured in the officially mandated brown that Neil imagined was used to subdue things like imagination and small talk. The top floor was the station, an open room filled with terminals and consoles all designed to monitor the signal and adjust it so that the next line of stations could receive it cleanly. Precise adjustments performed by unprecise machinery.
To Neil’s surprise, there was a workshop on this level too. With balanced equipment susceptible to vibration, it was odd that the main place of repair and fabrication should happen so close by. With a glance he could even see the creep of dust and metal shavings across the terminal
‘Keeps repairs quick,’ Cuddy had said when Neil had raised it as a concern, ‘very efficient, been that way for years. You can lift the drill press down the stairs if you don’t like it though.’
Otherwise, the room was filled with chairs, maps, and the exact chaos of books that Neil needed in his life. His old office was stuffy, everything neat and alphabetical, no windows, no laughter. He worried that he was beginning to turn into a number, that he was going to be remembered as a grey figure that adjusted a dial once a day, that the artificial plant stuck on his terminal by a previous operator had more life in its plastic than he did.   

Cuddy grew their own plants.
While the Salt plain was barren it appeared that with enough care the cactus could be remarkably hardy, and Neil admired the rows of oddly sized pots each sprouting a different cactaceae. The free-spirited engineer had even taken a few saltbrush cuttings which now blossomed in a spattering of small read petals that Neil never knew the haggard old bushes capable of. He thought them nice, and in a moment of daydream wondered if one would look nice on the windowsill of his kitchen.

‘When had you last climbed the tower?’ He asked, unsure from where the question had arisen from.
Cuddy, who was picking at their teeth with the end of a five-ohm resistor, scrunched up their nose with thought.
‘Two terms ago? Why, is something not working?’ there was enough hesitancy in Cuddy’s reply that Neil assumed to be an underline of pride in the tower’s continual operation.

‘No,’ he replied plainly, ‘I was just wondering what the view was like from the top. At my last station we weren’t able to go to any maintenance areas.’

‘And you didn’t!? Did they have guards?’

‘No, just a sign. The door probably wasn’t even locked. It was a very compliant place.’

Cuddy lost themselves to laughter again and Neil went back to his book while the young engineer rolled on the floor while clutching their sides.
‘Maybe not pride,’ he said to himself, correcting his earlier thought.

~

The view was astounding.
A wind filled with particles of dirt and salt, whipped and coiled around the top of the tower, forcing Neil to hold on to the frame of his glasses so that they weren’t stolen away.
He had never known such freedom. From this lonely tower he could see every cloud, every ridgeline, every scrub filled valley. He could see the comings and the goings of the wind, the patches of rainfall that fell distantly and slowly pulled across the air upon their very own whim.
Oh to be a bird, he thought while holding on to the platform’s railing as the tower gently swayed.
The air felt electric up here. Granules of harmless static wafted about like glints of spider-lace caught in sunlight and he instinctively wanted to increase the gain just to see the full form of the static, to trace if it held a stray message somewhere within its crackle.
Turning with a smile he saw Cuddy chipping a crust of salt off the tower’s identification globe; they were hanging out over the edge as if there was no distance between them and the ground at all.
‘How are you not scared?’ he yelled, hoping his voice could be heard above the wind.

Not turning, the engineer continued with one leg looped around the copper tracing wire and both their hands working the short scraper, all the while trying not to break the glass of the globe.
‘I am scared.’ They stammered.
Awkwardly they managed to push the scraper back into a loop on their belt and then clambered back on to the work platform. Hair a mess and hands shaking, Neil could see that they were trying their best to remain composed.

Something inside Neil felt very sorry and he patted the young engineer on their shoulder. How old were they, twenty-five? Still so young to be stuck out here.
‘Could have fooled me, how often do you need to climb up here?’ he asked seeing Cuddy’s tremble begin to recede.

‘Every month, but that was the first time I’ve ever tried it. I hate coming up here.’ They looked at the ground, shame still easily visible behind their storm-glasses, ‘Please don’t add that to the report.’

Neil smiled.
‘Tell me,’ he began while leading Cuddy back to the ladder, ‘what defines how long a month should be? Could someone argue that no documnet states what month or what year the maintainence should begin? Definition is the problem here.’
Taking one last look at the plains that swept away from the tower, For a moment both brief and profound, Neil concidered himself to be happy.
When he got back to the station, he decided while decending the ladder, he was going to burn the three ties he had brought. He had always hated wearing a tie.  

~

J.McCray
2024