Good Things Can Happen…

The movie Office Space certainly is a biting and hilarious indictment of the soullessness, absurdity, and mind-numbing nature of modern office life. 

One of the movie’s best and lifelike characters is Tom Smykowski.  Smykowski is a middle-age, middle manager (“I take the specifications from the customers and bring them down to the software engineers! I’m a people person! What the hell’s wrong with you!“) who is edging closer to retirement, lives in constant fear of losing his job, and as a result is perpetually stressed.

Smykowski, generally a negative person, is ecstatically happy only after having just been in a horrible, crippling car accident – because it means he doesn’t have to go back to his office job.  Bandaged and incapacitated, he tells his coworkers that “if you hang in long enough, good things can happen in this life!”

Next Generation Robotic Trucks in “Maximum Overdrive”

Add to the list of the indignities of age the fact that your pop-culture references become so ancient and obscure that no one knows what in the hell you are talking about anymore.

As happened this week, when I commented on the AP story “Driverless Truck Lurches out of Lab” being eerily similar to the effect of the radiation storm in the Steven King movie “Maximum Overdrive.” 

In the movie a radiation storm caused by a meteor or alien spaceship or some such nonsense causes all of the machines to go insane and start killing the non-mechanized.  Sure, it starts out innocuous enough, ATM machines giving people the finger, Coke machines ejecting cans into people’s groins, but then the semi trucks get into the fray and things really go nuts. 

You may be starting to see why some have voted this one of the worst movies of the 1980’s – hardly an obscure reference at all.  But regardless, did this movie teach us nothing about the dangers of having self-aware trucks?  Sounds like we better get those 3 Laws of Robots passed through Congress real soon.  And quickly, before an insane, driverless truck comes crashing through a diner near you.