BLEVINS: Not that General Frink is suggesting there’s anything inappropriate about politicians having that dependency.
FRINK: Yeah, that’s right. Thank you for clarifying that, Dr. Blevins.
BLEVINS: So to get back to the point, you’re asking us to create two things. First, a personnel profile of our most desired hires. We’re happy to do that. I can create a template as soon as this hearing is adjourned. Colonel Lyons and Dr. Stokes can help me out as their schedules allow. Second, a template for recording how we determine who to approach as a potential KCW.
HATCHER: That works for me. I yield the floor to my colleagues for further questions.
FROM LIEUTENANT GENERAL OCTAVIAN K. FRINK
TO ALL DODO DEPARTMENT HEADS
DAY 581 (MARCH, YEAR 2)
After several grueling days of congressional hearings, I am pleased to announce that DODO’s budget has been approved and sent on to POTUS for signature. All DODO staff are to be thanked for their hard work over the difficult months since the tragic and heroic demise of our friend and colleague Les Holgate. During that span of time DODO has been stripped down to the bare metal, as it were, and rebuilt into a new kind of organization that we can all be proud of.
New resources and responsibilities naturally bring organizational changes in their wake. Effective immediately, Dr. Roger Blevins is the overall head of the Department of Diachronic Operations, reporting directly to me, with a dotted line to Dr. Constantine Rudge at IARPA. To him will be reporting the heads of various subdepartments, as bulleted below:
- Dr. Melisande Stokes, acting head of the Diachronic Operative Resource Center.
- Macy Stoll, head of C/COD (Conventional/Contemporary Operations Department).
- Dr. Frank Oda, head of Research.
- Lieutenant Colonel Tristan Lyons, head of Diachronic Operations, which for obvious reasons will be organized and run along the lines of a military unit.
With Dr. Blevins’s change in status, the Advisory Board is reduced, at least temporarily, to one member, that being Dr. Constantine Rudge.
I hope that the rest of you will join me in welcoming Ms. Stoll to the organization. Her long experience managing operational matters in various civilian and military environments will no doubt prove of enormous value to DODO during the coming era of rapid expansion.
Top-level direction on DODO’s mission will be supplied during a meeting within the next few days at the Trapezoid.
Best wishes to all of you and may God bless America.
Gen. Octavian Frink
ABOUT ME
NAME: Mortimer Shore
OFFICIAL TITLE: Systems Administrator
UNOFFICIAL TITLES: What’s-his-name, the Tall Guy with the Beard, the Sword Geek, the IT Guy, Hey, What the F*** Happened to my Email?
BIO: Hey all, as DODO keeps expanding there seems to be a lot of colorful rumor floating around about how I came to work here and so I thought I would tell the whole story.
TL;DR: I got recruited out of a park to prevent Tristan from getting his ass kicked in a swordfight and they found out I was a CS major.
EDIT: This is mostly about computers. If you are visiting this page because you are a DOer and you think you might be about to get into a swordfight, scroll to the end.
So, as you can probably tell from my appearance and mannerisms, I am California born and bred, my father and his father before him (heh) worked in commercial building construction in SoCal, punching out Home Depots and parking garages and making enough money to put me in a private school when I turned out to be kind of a screw-up academically. Turned out I was just bored and over-medicated LOL so they cut off my Adderall and put me on the robotics team where I made the mistake of telling them I knew how to weld (because of my dad’s company) and so then I was just the welding slave for a long time until they finally let me start writing code. Long story short, I ended up at MIT doing both, which is to say, metal and code. The code part of it is pretty self explanatory: an MIT CS major can pretty much always get a job, a fact that was important to my dad who was paying a lot of money to put me through school.
As you have probably noticed if you work at DODO, I hang out near the server room. During my first six months at DODO I spent most of my time setting up ODIN, the Operational DODO Intranet. If that sounds like a long time, let me just say that getting a full-featured wiki to run under Shiny Hat is no picnic! I still put out IT fires and help people with their email, etc. when not working with Dr. Oda on the Chronotron. We’re recruiting more IT staff to keep our systems stable and secure, so pretty soon I’ll hopefully be a full-time Chronotron geek.
A word about metal. The substance, not the genre of music (though I like both!):
This is the part of my story that seems to cause the maximum amount of confusion and rumor among new hires at DODO and so this is the part you’ll want to read if you are having trouble understanding why a newly minted MIT CS major is helping people with their email for a small gov’t agency instead of making a zillion dollars in a start-up LOL.
My dad was a civil engineering major with a minor in metallurgy and so this runs in the family—a lot of commercial buildings are made out of steel, and in California where earthquakes are a problem there are a lot of rules around what kinds of steel to use, how to weld it properly, etc. I picked a lot of this up through osmosis when I was a kid, and when I was doing robotics in high school, and the smart kids wouldn’t let me write code, I ended up doing a lot of industrial art: robots with flame throwers, rotating blades, etc. So, I ended up doing a double major in Comp Sci and metallurgy.
At this point I could say a lot about steel. A LOT. But I’m not going to. If you want to talk about steel FOR A LONG TIME, come by my desk with some beers LOL. Point is, I am a steel geek.
When you are a steel geek you inevitably end up talking about swords. Sort of like when you are a climber you end up talking about Mt. Everest.
I got interested in swords when I put some crappy homemade blades on one of my robots and they kept breaking/bending and I couldn’t understand why.
My interest in swords led to an interest in swordfighting. Not modern fencing, which is cool and everything but totally different. I mean historical swordfighting with actual things that look like swords.