One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: A Day in the Life of an Electrical Engineer

 “Bad decisions make for good stories, but nobody wants to hear the same story twice.”

I’m sure I heard the former part of this aphorism somewhere but the latter seems to be appended by Roberto VillaSenor himself, based on his turbulent life. I met him through a friend’s dad and despite being a systems specialist whose livelihood depends on constant interaction with technology, he seemed to be critical of our dependence on technology and the resulting techno-industrial society. Is he perhaps a fan of Ted Kaczynski or just a boomer who hates change? I just had to know why he punishes himself with the propagation of principles he is not a proponent of. I tried to get him to invite me to his office but since I didn’t have the necessary clearance, I settled with a coffee shop.

VillaSenor was born and raised in the Philippines near the coastal area which was very prone to flooding and as a result the people were abject to destitute poverty. After graduating high school he had the option of staying in the Philippines with his family and doing a low paying job for the rest of his life to survive or to travel to a completely different country with no money or friends and to try and make it on his own. He chose to act on the latter option and came to America. With the difficulty of not speaking the language and not knowing anybody to help him through the toils of life, he turned to art, recalling how artists like Rembrandt and Picasso helped him cope. His favorite piece at that moment was “Return of the Prodigal Son” because he put himself in the shoes of the man begging for forgiveness from his father for failing to live up to his father’s expectations of success after using up all of the family’s savings.

Since VillaSenor’s grasp on the English language was quite rudimentary and his only credentials were being a high school graduate in a foreign country, it was quite hard to find a job. Eventually, he found an opening at the department store called Alexander’s as a custodian. He recalls how easy it was getting the job and how scared he was that he would be caught for lying in the interview about how he had extensive experience in cleaning when in reality he had never even bothered cleaning up the dishes in his house. Then after enough eye contact and a firm handshake, whose importance in life he stressed -like all boomers do- he was handed the job. He lived quite frugally so he could save up enough money to attend night school at Manhattan College for a degree in the field with the most demand, which happened to be electrical engineering.

After acquiring his degree he was offered a position at the company he still currently works at which is the Orange and Rockland Utility Company in Pearl River, NY, as a systems specialist. His average day consists of monitoring the reporting system and making sure there are no errors in the logs, like alarms or preset emergency events in case of a case failure, making sure all computer systems can communicate and are doing so efficiently within a given threshold, as well as checking on the remote terminal unit to make sure there is no bad telemetry. At this point I zoned out of the interview as he went on and on about some complicated doohickey that he is charge of and when he saw the drool running down my chin he cleared his throat and changed the topic from the more technical aspect of things he is in charge of to the more universally relatable tasks that I could somewhat grasp. Since he is employed in a utility company there is an absurd amount of bureaucracy over every little project he has to do and the anger from the red tape has added about ten years to his life. “It takes more time for me to write a report on a project that I am about to do than it takes for me to actually do the project….” What frustrated him the most is that most of the report he writes are shredded routinely and there have been many times where he was tasked with writing the same report twice, and maybe even thrice because his supervisor was too occupied with other work that his report got shredded in queue. I asked him why didn’t he back up his reports and he said that the supervisor needed the second draft and not the latest one and he sometimes used to overwrite over his old drafts, but since then he has learned.

While we were on the topic of reports I inquired on the other types of writing he is in charge of. His eyes glazed over mine and he responded, almost in a single syllable, “I-dunno [sic],” while shrugging his shoulders. Writing to him had always been rather trivial and was at most an annoyance and at least just a part and parcel of any job in a large corporation. Reports, presentations, conference slides, diagram instructions, procedure write ups are only as long as you want them to be, with a heuristic for exposition that you develop from your colleagues critique. You are tasked with explaining a concept such as the diagram instruction for a remote terminal unit, you first introduce the subject which can take as short as two lines to about three pages, and then you transcribe your thought process and answer any claims and see if any faults can be found in your reasoning and then do the write up. The writing he does depends on the number of projects he has, which currently is 5 so he is writing on average seven pages a day. It is never a topic he gave much thought to. He claims that his exposition is vastly improved by reading magazines and books on topics on fields he has no relation to, for instance reading an article on how an inversion of a bridge makes it look futuristic and how this was implemented in Star Trek as well as reading Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” which is a critique on the excess of punitive justice and lack of reformative justice in the Western penal system.

His knowledge on Foucault piqued my interest and I asked him if he had ever read Kant or Wittgenstein and his affirmation led to a torrent of questions from me. One of them being, if he loved art so much in his formative years, which as a culture naturally allows other thoughts to flourish as opposed to a hard science like engineering which is much more a discipline with no gray areas, why did he choose engineering? He recalled a joke from one of Woody Allen’s films, “A man goes to his doctor and says ‘Doc, my brother is a total basket case, he thinks he is a chicken.’ When the doctor inquires why doesn’t the man turn his brother in to a psychiatric ward the man replies ‘Well Doc, I kind of need the eggs he lays.’ That’s what engineering is for me I suppose, even though it is crazy, irrational, and absurd and sometimes feels like it sucks the life out of me, I still need the eggs.” I think that is why his love of art never really burgeoned into anything more than mere love, never actively pursuing his passion and instead carrying on with his relentless toil with engineering. This is why he also allows himself to stay in a company that makes it easy for people to rely on technology, for it is principle that should lead you to abstain from vices not circumstances. For the struggle in and of itself is enough to fill a man’s heart, perhaps there is some wisdom in that.