The Last Ant: Elegy for a Technical Writer

By R. J. R. Rockwood

Anton, called Ant, is an English teacher turned industrial technical writer. After a long, difficult corporate career, Ant is given an ant farm for his 50th birthday by his colleagues in the publication department of the Corporation. Soon everyone but Ant and his manager are laid off in preparation for the corporations relocation overseas. Watching the ants in the ant farm, Ant determines that the only way he can do the work of 15, as now required, is to model himself on the ants and work like a human ant.

The Last Ant focuses on the plight of the highly skilled American corporate employee in the early years of the twent-first century. Ants experience is a result of corporate downsizing, overseas outsourcing, investor fraud, and lower standards in education. The Last Ant is an elegy for a technical writer whose striving for excellence is undermined by corporate and academic incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 5, 2007
• ISBN: 9781450081238

R. J. R. Rockwood

Author Bio Robert John Remington Rockwood has a B.A. in English and German and an M.A. in English and Russian from the University of Miami; a Ph.D. in English and Linguistics from the University of Florida; and he has done advanced study in historical linguistics at the University of North Carolina. For the year 1973-1974 he was a Fellow of the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University. Rockwood has studied the following languages and dialects: Latin, Greek, Gothic, Old Norse, Old English, Middle High German, Middle English, German, Russian, French, and Icelandic. Rockwood has served as a full-time faculty member at Florida Southern College, University of Florida, and Georgia Institute of Technology. From 1978 through 2001 he worked as an industrial technical writer, editor, and web designer at such companies as Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin), Unisys, and NCR. From 2002 through 2013 he taught online courses for the University of Phoenix. The Spirit of Alchemy (2017) is Rockwoods eighth book published by Xlibris. The others are: Leopardo da Gotcha (2002) The Passing of Merlin Zauber (2005) The Last Ant (2007) Dillons Rocking Bear Invisibility Chair (2013) I Dont Talk to Earthlings (2016) Too Often Beside Himself (2017) The Primrose Path (2017) Robert Rockwood lives in Roswell, Georgia, a northern suburb of Atlanta. His e-mail address is [e-mail]. For further information, visit his website at www.rjrrockwood.com.

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Dedication

I dedicate this book to the highly skilled but endangered corporate employee at a time when the American middle class is threatened and society at all levels is systematically dumbing down.

Chapter 1

Becoming a Human Ant

As a gag gift on his fiftieth birthday, Anton, whose nickname was Ant, received an ant farm from his colleagues in the publication department of the corporation. The ant farm consisted of a space-age gel in a plastic frame. Ants for the farm were available through air express by mailing the enclosed card, which read, We ship female worker ants only.

Imagine that: an ant farm—what a clever idea! said Ant.

Ant was the lead writer on a publication team maintaining documentation for a software financial system containing millions of lines of code. In its heyday, the publication department had numbered fifteen highly competent, hardworking individuals, divided into three separate teams, each team responsible for maintaining documentation for a particular series of software products. With the advent of desktop publishing, the duties of writer/analysts were expanded to include everything from initial keyboard entry to production of final camera-ready copy. The result was a reduction in force that drastically shrank the size of the publication department. Ant’s team was cut to two writers besides himself, with each individual responsible for six of the eighteen manuals that described the structure and function of the highly complex system.

Ant immediately filled out and mailed the card requesting worker ants for his ant farm. Several days later, a package containing fifteen medium-size red ants arrived in a sealed glass vial packed in a block of Styrofoam. All the ants seemed to be in good condition. Removing the lid of the farm, which he had placed on the chest of drawers in his bedroom, Ant carefully uncapped the vial and tipped it until the queue of ants slid gently onto the moist gel. Ant watched the newcomers tunnel into the bluish gel, which also served as their food supply.

After the ants had eaten into the gel, they gathered together in what looked amazingly like a business meeting, or at least an active networking session characterized by delicate, trembling antennae ever in motion, each ant interacting with first one ant and then another as though exploring and touching upon every aspect of their collective course of action. Then suddenly, the meeting broke up, and the ants began pulling and shoving in the gel, excavating their first tunnel. Ant marveled at the ants’ apparent grasp of logistics and was astonished at the superior cooperation that seemed to characterize their entire endeavor.

Ant wondered if the ants were concerned about concepts that affect humans, such as questions of individual self-worth and occupational dignity. How must these fifteen female worker ants have felt, he wondered, to be imprisoned in the mailing vial? It must have surprised them to have their familiar workaday world turned upside down. If their ability to be steadily employed was how they reckoned their happiness, then even a day or two of containment may have been hard to take. Or did the ants appreciate having a little time off for a change?

It occurred to Ant that ants might not have a clear concept of time. If that were the case, then the period of enforced inactivity may not have been bad after all and, in fact, might have been completely indistinguishable from any normal period of rest. Surely even creatures as indefatigable as worker ants must need to recharge their batteries by resting or sleeping.

The matter of whether ants slept was soon settled to Ant’s satisfaction. Before long, the ants had already created an impressive labyrinth of tunnels. As usual, Ant’s alarm clock sounded at 5:30 AM to send him leaping out of bed. Flipping on the lights in his bedroom, Ant noticed that the ants actually appeared to be asleep, heaped together in the mounds of whitish gel that they had removed from their tunnels. They had created an area above the tunnels that resembled a dormitory. So accustomed was Ant to seeing the ants always in motion, he thought it strange to see them sleeping for a change.

Since Ant’s manager expected him to meet milestones that had been established before the group was downsized, Ant not only identified with the ants in the ant farm but was actually considering that the only way to cope with his own situation was to transform himself into a human ant and by never-ending persistence work as though each minute had at least ninety seconds, each workday at least twelve hours, and each week at least eight days. On top of that, he pledged himself to compress time even further by implementing new twists on working smart. Ant resolved to dig in the way the ants had when they first arrived in the farm. It seemed to Ant that the ants worked as if what they were doing mattered more than why they were doing it—as if, for them, the endless construction of tunnels in the gel was by far the most important issue in the entire universe.

During those periods when overtime was not required, Ant was accustomed to arriving in his cubicle punctually at 7:00 AM, taking an hour for lunch at 11:30 AM, and leaving shortly after 4:00 PM. Previously, Ant prided himself on having performed as much as humanly possible during each workday. From now on, inspired to greater zeal by the ants, he planned to accomplish even more. It occurred to Ant that he was fortunate to live alone, for beginning immediately, he must work until the tasks scheduled for each particular day were accomplished, however many extra hours that might take.

On the way home from work, Ant wondered if the ants were merely programmed to work mindlessly like machines or whether they set tasks for themselves and established schedules. He wondered what kind of business they conducted at their meetings. That evening, while watching the ants, Ant had a new idea. Could it be that these meetings had a religious significance? Was it possible that the ants’ endless tunneling might be a type a spiritual exercise, an act of obedience and discipline leading to transcendence of some sort? Surely there was a quid pro quo involved—but what was it? Was there some kind of light at the end of the tunnel that conferred significance on what from a strictly human point of view could be construed as meaningless labor?

While watching the ants prior to leaving for work the next morning, it suddenly dawned on Ant what the quid pro quo might be. Perhaps the ants were serving life sentences at hard labor for spiritual transgressions committed in a previous incarnation. Maybe the reward for their having fulfilled the requirements of their present sentence was to be incarnated next time as human beings. How ironic, thought Ant, if any of these particular ants should wind up experiencing the sort of antlike human existence that had been Ant’s own fate for the greater portion of his life.

Ant wondered if his problem was that in a previous incarnation as an ant, he himself had failed to measure up and must therefore continue his sentence in the present human incarnation even though in every other respect he was no longer an insect. Ant speculated that if the path of wisdom were to take no chances in matters affecting duty, responsibility, and reliability, then the best he could do for himself in the present situation was to strive to be as perfect a human ant as possible, each day working with the same persistence and dedication as the insect ants in his ant farm, whose lives and labors would serve as an inspiration for Ant himself from that time forward.

With a grin, Ant reflected that while the ant thoughts working through his mind might not be totally sane, to be on the safe side, he would operate on the assumption that these thoughts were not only rational but technically accurate descriptions of a spiritual truth too deep for ordinary human understanding.

Chapter 2

Crawling Under

At one time, Ant was a family man with a wife and child and a job that was as high in satisfaction as it was low in pay. Although Ant had earned a PhD in English literature from an Ivy League university and had planned to become a college professor, he elected to teach language arts in an elite prep school for boys. While still single, he loved the daily interaction with his pupils and generously contributed time and effort to the many athletic, cultural, and musical activities that occupied the boys’ extracurricular time. An accomplished musician, Ant took special interest in the school’s superb choir, comprised of choirboys aged from eight to thirteen attending the school on full scholarship. Ant’s greatest joy was playing flute in a trio consisting of flute, piano, and harp that accompanied the choirboys whenever the boychoir performed in public.

A year later, Ant got married. When his child was born, this caused his involvement in the school’s extracurricular activities to decrease until it finally disappeared altogether—the result of his wife’s not unreasonable insistence that Ant’s extra time belonged to her and their young daughter rather than to his pupils and the school.

Ant and his family lived in a faculty apartment in one of the ivy-covered brick buildings nestled among squirrel- and bird-laden, bearded oaks on the beautiful, well-tended campus. When his daughter was three years old, she complained that she was sick and tired of living where there was nothing but boys, and his wife announced that she wanted to develop a career of her own now that their child was attending preschool. Ant reluctantly resigned from the prep school, moved his family to a large city, and took what he supposed would be a temporary position as an industrial technical communicator working on aerospace hardware maintenance manuals.

Ant’s new workplace was a fortresslike facility with no windows. It had a parking lot with twenty thousand slots, most of them occupied by the time the last day shift had begun. After walking half a mile from his car, Ant stood in line at the entrance, ready to show his photo ID and open his briefcase as soon as he reached the armed guard, who would peek into the briefcase and then wave him inside.

With a large crowd of usually silent figures mechanically blowing smoke through their nostrils and periodically flicking ashes from their cigarettes, Ant trudged into the long subterranean maze of tunnels. After about three-quarters of a mile, Ant reached his particular stairwell and then climbed four flights of stairs to a gigantic open mezzanine. The mezzanine overlooked a gargantuan construction area over a mile in length, where giant cargo aircraft were being assembled to a deafening roar of hisses, shrieks, and agonizing groans. As seen through the partially soundproof windows at each landing of the stairwell to the mezzanine, the construction floor far below seemed littered with enormous carcasses in various stages of decomposition, over which a huge army of ant-sized creatures crawled, assisted by cranes, lifts, ladders, and scaffolding.

Ant’s desk was in the center of an area containing more than a hundred desks, each with a telephone and an ashtray. All through the day, telephones in the mezzanine rang in a random but persistent pattern similar to the flashes of fireflies on a summer evening. A blue-gray haze of semitransparent cigarette smoke softened the edges of the area, transforming the entire mezzanine into something the likes of which Ant had previously experienced only in dreams.

By the end of the day, Ant’s skin, hair, and clothes—including his underwear—reeked of cigarette smoke. After a while, the hall closet at home, where he hung his overcoat, smelled exactly like the mezzanine. The one aspect of his job that he, a lifelong nonsmoker, could never get used to and the issue that his wife and daughter complained about most bitterly, was the rancid smell of stale cigarette smoke that hung to him always, infecting everywhere he went and everything he touched.

Despite this, Ant liked many aspects of his job. Starting out as a technical editor, Ant learned to encode his edited text in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a predecessor of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). After a few months, Ant could code the most technical items, such as complex tables, in preparation for mainframe computer printing. This was long before the advent of desktop computers and the World Wide Web.

In those days, salaried employees were not allowed by union rules to operate machinery, including typewriters; so copy from the writers’ group arrived in the editing and publishing group written out in longhand, usually pencil, with inked changes from the quality control group to which it was first submitted.

By the time copy reached Ant, technical issues had been resolved. However, the grammar, syntax, and punctuation were sometimes seriously awry, so when Ant corrected the language, he often felt as though he were back in the world of the prep school, where he had been happiest, except that his students generally wrote better than most of