My buddy Harold has recently been doing some HR work for the State Department, basically trying to clean up their filesystem and, in the process, harmonize like five different HRIS schemas. I meet him usually to give him a free joint he can parallel-smoke with me in these pandemic times, which I get from my delivery service (they are low-quality j's so I don't mind the loss, he digs the roller's technique and has asked me to relay that roller a bunch of questions but that's another remark for another time). Harold has been cleaning up a bunch of personnel records from the miscellaneous / special-contracts part of the Dept, so it's been a bit more spelunking and lore-gathering than usual in these database-cleanup gigs. So he told me about a person who he's only pieced together from some admittedly sketchy records, but it's inarguable, just from the volume of lawyers' complaints alone, that Twin does exist.
It seems Twin drove a big truck and he did not care what happened to it. He was hauling helium for the Department of Energy, and was the most dangerous man on the road. Every day was taco day.
Harold found all this because he was, technically, committing a federal crime: he was using non-sanctioned software to parse official government HR records. In his defense, the gig pretty much explicitly required oblique activity such as this – it was well-known and understood that Harold was to maintain plausible deniability after getting unlogged root access to the machines in question. And it wasn't a secret that he was trying out some handmade sketch/parser scripts he had found in an old home directory. But again, technically: federal crime to run unfudge-dirs-v3-final-v2.py in his particular situation.
Helium is pretty easy to transport, since it's a liquid in a relatively small volume of well-protected trailer space. Lots of times he would also take a load of puppies up in the front cab, running them from shelter to shelter as they reached capacity or otherwise failed to sustain the inexplicable increase in dog fertility we've seen on his route over the last 5 years. But I digress:
Things you do not want to mess with, or be seen messing with: * dogs that appear to be having fun, especially immature dogs i.e. puppies * lonely and/or discontent-looking men in command of a large, poorly-cleaned truck * Any super-cooled, energetic-release type of trailer load * the Department of Energy, in any form
He drove wildly, with a freedom and energy ordinary people would associate with mania. But people in the grip of a mania, manic people, do not generally eat tacos / access taco experiences at as high a level as the driver. The receipts were legendary, circulated among sub-branches of the GAO and, at times (times of dire need on the part of the country's energy systems, times necessitating all manner of blackbudget countermeasures) reaching even the Post Office union listserv in terms of lore and legend. No puppies were harmed in the course of his duties.
In his domain, roughly the Northeast of the US with much of Quebec and the Carolinas as well, there was no stretch of more than 70 miles or so for which he did not know the optimal navigation solution given a situation's time/velocity constraints and its demands in terms of Mexican or Tex-Mexican foods.
Not to say the exhaustiveness of the coverage of taco-knowledge was an important or laudatory point – it merits mention more to establish the length of time the driver had spent in the region, and also to subtly highlight the (in this author's opinion, startling) geographical diversity of the customer base of the Department of Energy's Hazardous-Hauling concern. In reality, there were only a few taco locations on the planet worthy of sustained attention, and they formed neat nicely-distributed Voronoi watersheds spanning the map of his domain. Someone claiming first-hand knowledge told Harold about how Twin had at times contemplated on his driving as a harmonious and altogether unequivocal “good” sign that he had chosen a wise way to spend his days. “Tally ho,” as they said in the fighter-jet bars.
Which is all to say, in part, that there was a special and indelible joy in his driving, a deeply absurd engagement with the full gamut of forces and consequence-type relationships in the universe. Swerving wildly across lanes and even down off-ramps, all the time using the superfluid properties of his load to execute superb and alarming stunts. Cornering with a 45-foot bulk-isolated trailer in tow, when modeled in commercially-available physics engines, generally ends up looking like a demolition sequence shown in either fast- or slow-motion, but in real life it was truly balletic – Twin used the sloshing of the liquid helium to smartly “scoot” the back-end around into alignment at just the right moment on the apex of what was looking to be a total disaster of a turn, niftily lining up the body with the next straight shot out of the city. Any puppies present in the cab at the time would invariably get the zoomies.
Inevitably, when you are at the height of your form, you get some critics, your “peanut gallery”. Lots of people, watching a 40-ton tractor-trailer with matte black government plates powerslide across 8 lanes of outer Worcester SPUIE interchange, will think that somehow they are witnessing an excess. An excess that is literally “remarkable,” in that they call the police and remark upon it. This approach strikes us immediately as lacking in dignity, and we deplore it.
However, it is reasonable to wonder what becomes of those complaints! The number of the payload, and an exhortation to call if “my driving” isn't sufficient, are both clearly printed on the back of the truck. Inevitably, some number of critical comments are synchronously relayed to the internal Customer Success Program at the Department of Energy: this is where my buddy Harold has been able to clock the rough dynamics of Twin's hold on the system.
Just as there are a series of associable invoice entities in the oldest of the HRIS that Harold is working with, all of them basically “twin” references like Gemini Systems and Twin Systems; there are equally as many Customer Outcome Codes that appear to grant these programs unusual levels of access to the IVR system that routes Customer Success Opportunities (complaint calls) to various Customer Success Ninjas (DoE team, unsure where budget is allocated). Billing codes run the government, and this billing-code-sinkhole around Twin was difficult to ignore. And so.
The earliest record of a “twin” pun on a government procurement sheet is back in 1932, which is as far back as queryable records go.