The Book of Jobs - what Steve is doing on The Cloud

Friday 14 September - Day 10 of 30

Steve woke up this morning dreading another day of slave labor at the iTower. He hadn’t yet thought of a way to get his new work assignment changed. Couldn’t they give him a meaningful job that made use of his genius at designing “products that generate surprise and delight?” Couldn’t they find an opportunity for him to apply his “values of innovation, ease of use, and beauty?”

Steve was quoting his favorite Apple press releases to himself.

No, they couldn’t, because he had already done these things on The Earth, and you weren’t allowed to repeat yourself on The Cloud. You had to move on, grow, change, improve, and eventually attain enlightenment. Some people, he thought to himself, including me, have a lot of work to do in that last area.

Shortly before noon, as he was shelving songbooks in the “B” section of the 786s up on the seventh floor of the iTower, he felt a brotherly nudge and looked up to see John Lennon, his BFF on The Cloud.

“I thought I’d find you here, mate. Time for lunch?” John whispered to him.

“Yes! In about 15 minutes,” Steve whispered back.

John began searching for Beatles collections while Steve put Beethoven’s songs in order.

As they took the elevator down to the ground floor and walked companionably towards the food tents, Steve remembered a question he’d always wanted to ask.

“John,” he said, “your song Because—is that urban myth true? That Yoko was playing the Moonlight Sonata and you asked her to play it backwards and then you wrote the song around those chords?”

“What on Cloud made you think of that now?” John asked.

“Well, it’s pretty obvious,” Steve said, a bit impatiently. “Up at the iTower, you were looking at the Beatles and I was working with Beethoven, and since Beethoven composed the Moonlight Sonata and you composed Because it just somehow occurred to me to ask you about it.”

John was righteously insulted. Steve was was of his best fans, but sometimes he could be a difficult friend. He was probably in a bad mood because he didn’t like his new job.

“If you want to know,” he said, in an equally arrogant tone, “let me refer you to an essay on the subject—”Strategic Intertextuality in Three of John Lennon’s Late Beatles Songs”, which I know you can find back in the iTower because that’s where I read it. It’s from somebody’s Ph.D. dissertation, something about British Pop-Rock.”

Steve got the message. He had been rude to his best friend. He would have offered to buy him lunch, but that was impossible because nobody had any money on The Cloud and all the food was free.

Later that afternoon he did try to read the essay, but he couldn’t keep his mind on the subject of harmonic syntax. Instead he was thinking that he needed to apologize to John.

But how?

 (to be continued tomorrow)