Hey all, I'm looking for any and all criticisms I can get. I especially want to know if the tone or format works for you guys.
Quality Control
“I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free, and yet I can’t let it show… I sometimes wonder if anyone will ever understand what I mean, if anyone will ever overlook my ingratitude and not worry about whether or not I’m Jewish and merely see me as a teenager badly in need of some good plain fun.”
-The Diary of Anne Frank
December 10
Doc Smith took me outside today. It was snowing. I had never seen real snow before, and I thought it was beautiful. When I was in early post-production, the Docs used to read me books with pictures of little alpha and beta units playing in the snow. I couldn’t, though. The Doc had only been taking me outside since the summer. It was my reward for being a good Defect. Other Defects are bad, but I do everything the Company tells me. I am good, so I get more than I deserve. The Docs are so good to us even though we aren’t right. Doc Smith is my favorite.
The Doc asked me what I thought of the snow and I told him it was pretty. He laughed and agreed with me. He asked me why I thought snow was pretty. Doc Smith is the only unit who ever asks me what I think about things. I told him I thought it was pretty because everything was white far as the eye could see. Doc Smith laughed again. He told me that the white was made out of thousands and thousands of tiny snowflakes. Each one of those snowflakes is different, he told me. Doc Smith is very smart.
I told him that I couldn’t tell. All the snowflakes looked the same to me. Doc Smith smiled at me. He told me that I was exactly right. All the snowflakes are different, but the differences are so small that hardly anybody can tell. He told me to imagine the snow if there were little black snowflakes mixed in with the white ones. If some snowflakes were cold and some of them were hot. Would the snow still be pretty? Would the snow still be fun? I thought about it for a second and decided that the Doc was right. I liked the snow the way it was. Doc Smith always makes me understand.
The Doc told me that is how things used to be. Units used to be made of all different shapes, sizes, and colors. He said that they used to speak to each other using different words. Doc Smith said that units used to try and break each other because they were different. He said they used to not understand each other. Doc Smith says that back then, they did not even have standards. Any unit ever produced would go onto the market, and there was chaos. The Doc says things are much better now. Our standards are much higher. Doc says that I did not meet those standards, but I am a good Defect. He patted me on the head. Doc Smith is a very nice unit.
December 15
I had to tell on Defect K-14 at work today. K-14 is a very bad Defect. He wanted us to sign off on our project without doing our jobs. We were supposed to check each shampoo bottle that came off the line and make sure there was a whole liter inside it. It is a very important job. If a customer gets a shampoo bottle with half a liter, then the Company will get in trouble, and the Company has been so good to us. We are Defects and the Docs are nice to us, so we need to make sure that they don’t have defects. It is only fair.
K-14 said that he was bored. He said that we were wasting our time. I told him that he was wrong. We are serving the units who have given us more than we deserved. They could have just thrown us away, but they didn’t. They have decided to keep us, to make sure that everything that goes onto the market meets the standards. Standards are very important; there would be chaos without them. K-14 told me that standards could go suck a nut. I don’t know what that means, but it did not sound like something a good Defect was supposed to say. He said that maybe chaos was a good thing. That was a very bad thing to say, and I had to tell on him. Doc Smith took him away for reeducation. He told me that I did both K-14 and the Company a very valuable favor. I smiled. Chaos is a very bad thing, and I like to make sure that it doesn’t happen.
December 16
Doc Smith says that nothing is perfect. That is impossible. Things are too different to be perfect. He says that’s why we have standards. We can’t make things perfect, but we need to make them as close to perfect as we can. If the differences are very little, we don’t worry about them. If the differences are very big, though, there’s a problem. Things go out of balance. There are distractions.
He told me about something that used to happen back before the standards. It was called war, and Doc Smith says it was very disruptive. Units were so different that they could never agree with each other back in the old days. They looked different, they had different goals, and they didn’t even talk to each other the same way! Because of this, everyone was confused and they tried to break each other to decide who was right. This cost valuable time and money, and was not very efficient. Since there were no standards, no unit ever agreed on what was right and what was wrong. Each one said that it was made the right way and that it had the right goals and that it used the right words. I asked Doc Smith how they could think they were right if they did not even know what right is. Doc Smith told me I was exactly right.
We know what right is, because we have defined what right is. We know what the right way to look is because it is in our rule-book. We know our goals, because the company has a clear mission statement. We use our regulation words so that units understand each other and don’t get confused. The Doc rubbed my head. He told me that my red hair was disruptive. He says I do not meet the standards needed to go out onto the market. He says that I did not look right, and if I would distract units from their work.
I don’t want to be a distraction. I want things to be right, like they should be.
December 25
Today is a very special day. It is so special that even the Defects don’t have to work. The Doc told me that on this day over 2500 years ago, a unit was made. Doc Smith said that this unit was very disruptive, and he caused a lot of trouble. He claimed that the way he was manufactured was different from how other units were manufactured, and that he was more special than them because of it. Many units started to believe him, and they began to follow him. The other units decided that he was causing too much trouble, and they tried to make things right again by hanging him on a cross until he broke and could not disrupt things anymore.
The problem was that once he was hung up, the units who had been following him decided to disrupt things even more by spreading his words throughout the land, and he ended up getting even more followers. Those followers were so convinced that he was special and that he was right that they tried to spread the word even further. The thing is, many units did not agree and would not change the way that they had been doing things. The followers were so sure they were right that they started to break anybody who did not agree. After that, they started to disagree with each other about how they should follow the trouble-maker, and began to break each other too. They started wars all over the world for over 2000 years, and it was a big distraction that cost a lot of money.
Doc Smith said that on this day, 100 years ago, we adopted the standards. The standards made it so that all units would stop following this trouble-maker. Since then, everything has been much better. We don’t follow silly superstitions because they get in the way of our goals.
January 1
Defect K-14 never came back to work, which is fine with me. He was mean and I never liked him. K-19, his replacement, never says a word. That’s fine with me because he gets his work done, but it makes things very boring. In order to keep things from getting too quiet, I talk to him and he listens. I tell him about how nice Doc Smith is and about the snow and about the standards and how we are very lucky to work for the Company and K-19 just listens and does not say a word and sometimes he will shrug his shoulders or nod but he keeps on not talking and just listening. He works fast and always gets things done, but he never looks happy. He never smiles and I never see any expression on his face except concentration on his work.
I told K-14 we should be grateful the company took us in. He shrugged. I told K-14 that we were disruptions. He shrugged again. K-14 doesn’t say much, but I like him anyways. I would tell him everything that Doc Smith told me and he would always shrug or nod and he would never say a word.
Today he spoke for the first time since I’ve known him. If I hadn’t been paying attention I probably would have not even noticed it. I was talking to him like I normally do. I waited for him to shrug like he always does, but he didn’t. Instead he just said “you are Anne Frank.” Then he went right back to work. I asked him what he meant, and he didn’t talk again.
Who is Anne Frank?
it's not too hard and is beneficial to everyone in the end!
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