"
"So what's going on just to the northeast of center?"
Alan paid attention to the patch of screen indicated. Three access
points were playing musical chairs, dropping signal and reacquiring it,
dropping it again.
Kurt shrugged. "Bum hardware, I think. We've got volunteers assembling
those boxes, from parts."
"Parts?"
Kurt's grin widened. "Yeah. From the trash, mostly. I dumpster-dive for
'em."
They grinned back. "That's very hot," Lyman said.
"We're looking at normalizing the parts for the next revision," Alan
said. "We want to be able to use a single distro that works on all of
them."
"Oh, sure," Lyman said, but he looked a little disappointed, and so did
Kurt.
"Okay, it works," Lyman said. "It works?" he said, nodding the question
at his posse. They nodded back. "So what can we do for you?"
Alan chewed his lip, caught himself at it, stopped. He'd anticipated a
slugfest, now he was getting strokes.
"How come you're being so nice to us?" Kurt said. "You guys are The
Man." He shrugged at Alan. "Someone had to say it."
Lyman smiled. "Yeah, we're the phone company. Big lumbering dinosaur
that is thrashing in the tarpit. The spazz dinosaur that's so
embarrassed all the other dinosaurs that none of them want to rescue
us."
"Heh, spazz dinosaur," the East Indian woman said, and they all laughed.
"Heh," Kurt said.
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