Calban Visits His Parents : Part 4 : Mother's Passions (Ch.8)

Even mother had some sensitivity towards what was appropriate. Although his mother was used to working in a team of people their dialogue was always technically related, as befitted a team of very intelligent and well trained people who shared a passion and enthusiasm for their work and a belief that it was important to the world as well as to their House, and a sense that they were rising in their professions. She was not used to talking to anyone who did not share parts of her knowledge, and if it was not possible to talk and educate them about something she knew she was normally at a loss. As Calban had long understood there were some subjects she would not discuss because she did not see anything of interest in them. Some subjects she disapproved of.

“Your father was needed this morning for an important lecture, but he has managed to get the whole afternoon off. He will be here at half past twelve,” replied Calban's mother. “We will have food together then.”

Calban was not surprised. His father had an important job. It always was difficult for him to find time to do anything outside work. Arranging dates to meet either of them had always been difficult, even though both of them made it a priority to try to see him at least once a year. It was 11.09 already so it would not be long before his father would return. He was not disappointed that his father was not here to greet him. After all the important thing was that he met his parents face to face. The length of their time together was not important. They could never find enough to say to each other to fill the time anyway. It was perhaps for the best. Still Calban had to admit to himself that illogically he could not suppress the feeling that both his parents, not just his father, did not want to spend too much time with him. It was important to them to see him occasionally but they did not want to bother with him. They did not want him to be a full part of their lives. Their careers were far more important.

“That's alright,” said Calban, not wanting his mother to know what he felt inside. “It's very good of you both to find the time for me to visit, in your busy careers.”

“Of course we must,” said his mother patronisingly, as if Calban had said something silly which she wanted him not to repeat. It was obvious they had to find time for each other. They were a family. Of course neither of them were doing anything especially good or kind by seeing Calban. It was a duty or loyalty to betaken for granted in a family. there was no price being paid for Calban's sake, but as Calban could not but help seeing it, there was no great reward or enjoyment in the visit either. He had often wished that they could betray some real joy in his presence. But Calban was used to indifference. There was no one in his whole life who found pleasure in his company, nor ever had been as far as he could remember, except for a slight cameraderie among students or at work. But he had never meant anything to anybody.

Calban's mother invited him into the house. Loyal to the laws of hospitality she instructed him to sit down while she got him a drink from the dispenser. The choice, as ever, was enormous. Mother had strong opinions on even this. “I have discovered a new drink,” she said. “You must try it.”

Calban's usual mild annoyance at being told what to do gave way to his typical acceptance of his mother's wishes. He always had to play the game. He had accepted the rules when he agreed to come here. The drink was called Star Bright, a very tasty amalgam of sparkly fruits with a touch of mild stimulants to make you feel better and enable you to concentrate at work. It was advertised variously to different markets as a health drink, a drink to encourage concentration on long space station rotas, to enable concentration in exams for students, and even to improve your love life. Calban had seen the adverts. Despite his best efforts to avoid them by swapping Vidscreen channels you couldn't miss them. He was well aware that more than ninety percent of all students over the age of eighteen were choosing it, if you believed the statistics, which had also hit the headlines on a number of occasions. He was quite sure there must be something in it which lifted one's mood, like coffee and tea and countless other alternatives, but he doubted whether it could really help concentration in an exam. He, like every other member of modern society, had been forced to take countless examinations so far in his life but he had never had a problem of concentration in his life. Exams made him so nervous they made him concentrate like nothing else in life could. You didn't need a drug, let alone a drink for that. Exams were better!

Even at work the Star Bright Company had bought advertising space on the wall which exhorted the benefits incurred by office workers where Star Bright was consumed. So far he couldn't say he had observed many people using it. It seemed there was considerable product loyalty in his firm towards older products. It hadn't even become a topic of discussion yet. Most trivial and uninteresting things like adverts did after a time. It suggested to Calban that the power of advertising was not perhaps as great as everybody thought. He also had seen adverts for it on the Network - inside the trains and on the hoardings near the track and at stations. This was the first time he had really thought much about it.

Calban ventured an opinion to his mother. “It isn't very new, Mother. It has been advertised for some weeks, maybe months now. Apparently more than ninety percent of students over eighteen choose it. I am surprised you are promoting it because it is common knowledge.”

For a moment he wondered if he had gone too far. Only with his parents would he have the nerve to criticise and it was not normally a sensible thing to do. His mother retorted with a number of convincing reasons as to why Star Bright was such a good drink. This was followed by the real "statistics" according to his mother, and a report on her own discovery of the drink many months before and how she had "persuaded" many of the people at work how good it was. It seemed she had wanted an argument. It gave her a well researched subject to lecture him on. Of course he could not refuse to try the drink, which while certainly very pleasant, seemed little different to so many which had been on offer for so long. He could not see what all the fuss was about. But the things his mother found interesting did usually mean nothing to him. Indeed he found it sad that so much human effort had been put into developing and advertising a product which was little different from the ones before. Hardly a scientific advance! It was merely another market war between rival Houses fighting to retain or enlarge their share of a market. Its development created or preserved jobs in Star Bright company and other organisations. But its success also caused a loss of jobs amongst its rivals. At the end of the day little had changed, and nothing had changed for the better.

When finally Mother had told him nearly everything she knew about the advantages of Star Bright she deemed it time to ask Calban about the state of his life. “Have you begun Level Five yet, Calban?” It was an abrupt change of subject as it always was with Mother. She never beat about the bush when she wanted to know something. It was her way of dealing quickly with a subject she did not wish to spend much time on. At least he was flattered by the fact that she remembered which level of studies he was supposed to go on now. She usually did remember many of the details of things. She had a good retentive brain which explained why she had been so successful in her career.

Calban often wondered why he was so different from her. He believed his own failure to continue on the ladder of study stemmed perhaps from his own inability to retain any details which were uninteresting. There were many such details in the Profession of Accountancy, probably more than in most professions., although all modern life contained high levels of bureaucracy, unnecessary tasks and levels of detail, rules and regulations of the most petty kind. Numbers were particularly uninteresting and of course there were many of those, particularly in accountancy and the sciences. Mother excelled in those particularly. Perhaps that accounted for her strong motivation in her chosen profession and inversely explained his own lack of motivation. He was quite sure that Mother would have succeeded in quite a few of the scientific and business operations if she had chosen differently. She might have been made for specialisation. Find any small technical subject area and set her onto it and she would have performed successfully. Due to a few quick decisions over the years she had ended up in this small corner of human endeavour. To Calban all these paths were traps but to his mother each was a gateway to a new world.

“No. I told you last time. I won't take any more levels because they are too difficult.”

“Calban,” she whined his name, making it last a long time, expressing her disappointment and chiding him as if he were a young child at the same time. It was as if she expected her most recent opinions, given to Calban on the last couple of meetings to have been understood and acted upon. She never could distinguish between mere advice and orders. She expected any advice she gave to be taken up as if there were no alternative viewpoint. She encapsulated the all encompassing view of modern society. Work hard for the system and you will be rewarded. There is no alternative to hard work and human effort. She could not perceive that there might be goals in life other than the system's goals. Life is a series of hurdles, each one greater than the last, to be surmounted as efficiently as possible with the minimum of fuss. If you behaved and worked hard you would come to terms with it and even learn to enjoy it.

“You won't get anywhere in life if you stay where you are, Calban,” she began predictably. “You have to keep studying at least until you've finished your basic qualification. That requires the completion of Level Eight. Only three or more years if you keep working. Then you will be in charge of your own team. You will have the final word on some of your own accounts.”

Calban knew all of that and a lot more besides. What did his mother really know about accountancy. She would have been good if she had chosen it as a career, but she had never worked in it and didn't know how difficult it was. Like many in the wider society she probably thought it was a lot more straightforward than it really was.

Calban knew that if he devoted every waking hour to the study and practice of accountancy he might just achieve Level Eight in five or six years, but it was definitely not possible for him to pass in four years. The subject was too complex for him to learn faster. To achieve it in six years would require a level of effort he knew he could not achieve. When he returned to his flat in the evening he was always tired. In the past he had just managed a couple of hours, at most, of study in the evening. But he knew that was no longer possible. Study was just too difficult for him. It bored him intensely, made him depressed and after a day's work or lectures, was just not possible for him.

At his level of motivation he estimated it would take him ten to twelve years to achieve Level Eight. By that time his House and most others would have passed him over as a candidate for any posts for Fully Qualifieds. He would have been effectively time barred. He was unsure but perhaps even now he was already time barred for eventual responsibility due to his slow progress so far. You just couldn't win. The rules were so tight, the exam standards were so high. There were so many others better than him competing for the same qualifications and the same posts. He could not hope to succeed.

While it was possible to stop and still retain his current post, he would stay where he was and take on no further pressures. Many men and women just had to accept that they didn't have what it takes to get to the top. Even if one got to "the top" it wasn't really the top. You were still just a small standardised cog in a big machine, bound by expected practices, conventions, regulations and laws. You still didn't own the House you worked for, which meant you could not change its methods unless you became a top director.

The old days of small accounting partnerships had long gone. There was the occasional rare small firm who hired themselves out to one client or maybe a few small businesses - but there weren't many of those left either. What appeared to be small firms usually tended to be companies controlled and set up by larger organisations for specific purposes, or kept on hand for some future use, saving the cost and effort of having to set another one up from scratch at a future date. Of course they involved time and effort by the accountants, usually the standardised, large organisations who were better trained and employed the brightest people who were favoured by the larger Houses because of their specialist staff. Small companies still had to produce accounts to be audited, forms of many types still had to be filled in. Some decades ago small companies had been taken out of the Auditing Rules and some of the other regulatory systems by legislation which was supposed to liberalise trade and reduce bureaucracy. However the government had discovered a marked increase in fraud as many organisations began to use the small company as a loophole in checks to hide profits - escape taxes and even to carry out illegal activities. After a number of years the loophole was closed by the scrapping of the original legislation, which caused the full rigour of regulatory control to return to small companies of even the smallest size. The massive cost of this bureaucracy caused millions of small companies to be closed and their businesses taken over by the "real" larger companies. The move had been a major victory by the government but accountants Houses had complained bitterly about the reduced extent of their work, a sure sign that such a supposedly bureaucratic measure as regulating small companies had actually reduced bureaucracy by forcing companies to reintigrate their constituent parts.

As usual he explained a little of this to his mother but she didn't want to hear most of it and kept cutting him short, as if she knew more about it than he did. She certainly had more experience of life and success in her career, but she didn't know what was best for him because she was not like him. Some are made to work efficiently, others are born losers because they care too much about the way they live life and are unwilling to accept the burdens which are placed upon them. Calban was one such person. Discontented with the meaningless life which had been forced upon him, he had little motivation to compete. Competition was one of the reasons for his demotivation. Any solution to his demotivation would have to begin with sympathy and understanding of his condition. There was no one willing to provide that. He had no friends and his parents could not sympathise or understand. Two years since his big decision not to continue his studies they had still not come to terms with it. They still did not take his complaint seriously, believing that he would return to study soon enough when he realised the realities of his situation, when he realised there were no alternatives, and perhaps when he realised that he did like accountancy after all.

Calban refused to acccept his parents' view of life. He had decided to resist in his own small way. It was a pointless resistance. No one out in the wider world would notice and he offered no solutions for his own life or anyone else's. But he knew his life was wrong, and that it was better to stop than to continue in a wrong direction which could only lead him to further misery and suffering. One day his parents would realise that he meant it even if they never understood.

“We'll talk about it later when your father comes home,” said his mother. He could see her yawning. She did not want to hear any more of his explanations. She was bored with the subject and wished to move on to something more interesting. She wasn't even going to get angry. That was something she only did occasionally. But this subject did not interest her enough at the moment and besides she was in a good mood today.

She began instead to talk about the projects she was involved in at the Vidscreen. How exciting it would be to have the new improved system running. It would improve the speed of selection and expand choice even further. They would be able to tap into channels from Barbarol and Ulypt, previously not linked up. Calban started to feel very tired and began to wonder why he was here at all. He could see no advantage at all to Vidscreen users in the new improvements. He should know because he was a real user. Having ended his studies he actually managed to find some time to enjoy this great culmination to the technological progress of the modern world, unlike the many, who could only fit small amounts of viewing into their hectic daily routines and study schedules. There was already far more choice on the Vidscreen than he could handle. Speed of selection had long been very adequate, and he had no desire to see programmes from either Barbarol or Ulypt, which were in foreign languages. He had little desire to watch dubbed actors open their mouths in all the wrong places or to read subtitles. As far as he knew all these places shared very much the same cultural attributes as everywhere else in the world so there was nothing new there.

Cato Technologies like all other research and development Houses were constantly trying to persuade other organisations to employ their talents in pushing forward the boundaries of science and technology. Their reason for being was to generate money. To make money they had to persuade that there were real benefits to be gained from doing the research. Over the years they had developed the art of presenting polished optimism to their clients. They had persuaded many of the Houses involved in Vidbase and the producers of the programmes to invest in their improvements to the system. Fear that other competitor Vidbase and Satellite systems based in other countries might supplant them drove these organisations to new levels of technological excess. Calban said nothing of his thoughts to his mother. Whenever he tried to suggest an alternative version he was always cut short or ignored. According to Mother the importance of scientific and technological progress was self evident. It could not be questioned. He drifted sufficiently from his mother's line of explanation and description for even her to notice that he was no longer paying attention.

“Do you see that, Calban?” she asked. He failed to reply. “Calban, are you listening?”

With a start he realised that she wanted an answer from him. “Yes, of course, Mother,” he replied, not wanting to offend her.

But she was aware now that he was not taking it in. “Did you understand about the failure of the Tetrian programme? We had to take it apart and start again from scratch to provide an ‘umbrella framework’ before we could proceed.”

Calban had never heard of the Tetrian programme but he realised she must have been talking about it for at least five minutes. He desperately searched his mind for something intelligent to say but nothing came up. “Yes, I was listening,” he said finally.