Designed in California/Made in China

Designed in California
Herbert Wood was not an exceedingly good or bad man. When he got up after hitting the “Snooze” button once, he ate a breakfast that was neither too large or too small, overly wholesome or immoderately unhealthy. His toothpaste was of a cinnamon variety; the translucent red gel pleased him because it was the same color as the strawberry syrup he ate with pancakes. His apartment walls did not ring with the sounds of children or pets. Wood had none, and, if he did, the rooms would not ring. His apartment was rendered anti-echoic with clutter: half-read books, pieces of projects yet to be finished, and a broken yellow umbrella that Wood had picked up last winter with the sincere intention of fixing it. In the corner of his living room was a desk with a laptop. On the underside of the computer, beneath the manufacturer’s name, were the words “Designed in California,” and, in nearly illegible print, “Made in China.”

At 7:55 he was out of the building. One of his neighbors, an elderly Chinese woman who was easily irritated by all noise aside from the babble of her seven cockatiels, was startled awake by the door slamming shut. Her curses in incomprehensible Mandarin trailed Wood as he jogged two blocks to the corner bus stop, where someone tried to sell him a newspaper outside the liquor store. Avoiding eye-contact, Wood boarded the limited-stop bus that would teleport him to work and back. At stoplights, Wood admired the other bus-riders looking out the grand picture windows, sitting placidly in their private Victorian living rooms. Hands were crossed, books were read, coffee was sipped from cardboard cups; it was all very civilized.

After long negotiation with the transit gods on his way back from work, Wood arrived home at 6:00 PM. His body, wilted from eight hours under buzzing incandescents, was little rejuvenated by the thought of more activity, but at 6:45, after eating a baked potato covered in chili, he approached the laptop in the corner of the living room. The chair, as was its custom, squeaked in protest when he sat down and reclined, waiting for the operating system to load. Illuminated by blue glow, the room’s silence was only punctuated by the staccato clicks of the mouse, a lulling white-noise of activity. With the word processor open, Wood created a new file. Wood adored beginnings. Beginnings implied endings, the possibilities of ingenuity and the satisfaction of work well done. He could smell an office supply store from a block away, the manila scent of fresh notebooks and printer paper beckoning him towards the inevitable purchase of a new journal or sketchbook. He couldn’t resist the odor of 25% post-consumer recycled paper and 75% South American wood-pulp, old cardboard mixed with Amazonia, a celebration of America the newfound land.

Wood spent twenty minutes scratching skin flakes from his scalp as he wrote, then stopped. Unconsciously flicking his fingers [ctrl-s] he saved the file. Two hours of watching sitcoms, forty years of excellent service to the firm, and one life-time later, Wood’s file was still in the laptop’s hard drive when it was disassembled by an elderly Chinese woman. Her curses at a stripped screw, subdued by fatigue and factory cacophony, lacked the spirit of garbled vehemence that Wood’s neighbor had so carefully cultivated through years of bat-shit insanity. Having worked at parsing through e-waste since she left the village, her skin was covered with continent-shaped spots, Rorschach blots that would have been birthmarks had she been born with them. Like her skin, her eyes too had degraded with exposure to age. Thus she made no attempt to read the blurred Latinate-lettering on the drive’s underside.
Made in China