Saturday, September 26, 2009

Crisis of faith

At the space station.
Monday morning I woke up early as usual. I "showered" with that brush thing, etc., because the plumbing still wasn't fixed, then went down to breakfast.
I found nobody in the break room. Figuring they were working, I got my breakfast and went up to start working myself. For the first part of my shift, I got a bunch of Onstar type calls.
I didn't mention it before, but having a "video phone" is both enlightening and distracting. For one thing, you can see everything within the window of the "camera". Everything. This is helpful when they want to tell you about something that words cannot adequately describe. However, there were also some unpleasant visuals I wished I hadn't seen, and at times I saw fascinating things in the background that made me lose focus on the task at hand. There were pets, babies and odd alien lifeforms that totally threw me off the topic of conversation when I saw them. And a couple times I almost screamed when I saw something creeping up behind the "caller." Another distraction was their manner of dress, or undress. Some people dressed up for the "camera". Others didn't seem to care about anything and wore slovenly, shabby clothes, dirty clothes, or next to nothing or literally nothing. But later I learned how to shut off the picture.
Anyways, I had a call about failing air equipment, a couple calls about malfunctioning alarm systems, and some others, then I had another guy asking for a supervisor. Something about broken refrigeration units. I tried the escalation line, but nobody answered, so I got up, looking around the ship to find help.
Minda was gone, and so was Sigma. I checked the conference room, the break rooms, the garden, I even shouted in the bathroom to see if I could get someone.
I eventually found them in the crew quarters, sitting on a bed and talking in their language. When I came in, they gave me a worried look, and they started asking me religious questions. I told them I had a supervisor call and would be happy to answer them later, but Minda said this couldn't wait and that nothing else is more important than this discussion.
Sigma clicked something on a computer she had and said the phones were shut down. Then the two asked me the questions again. I told them what I knew about my religion, but said that anything related to aliens was just guessing. They didn't care, so we had a long theological discussion. I found out that Minda had been having night terrors for some time and hadn't been telling anyone, and the night before, when I was asleep, she'd been crying out, enough to wake up Sigma. (I don't know what Sigma was doing sleeping in the crew quarters when she had a nicer bedroom up top, but whatever). It had woken her up, and she'd gotten worried for her friend. She seemed a little worried herself, but she seemed intent on trying to convince Minda that their god grades on a curve and that my religion is fine for my people but not for hers.
I found myself getting angry, despite the fact there wasn't any clear moral stance to take in this situation. They are space aliens, after all.
I fumed silently in frustration, my emotionally charged opinions thwarted by an absolute lack of concrete textual support.
So then Minda wants to pray and they wanted me to pray with them. I told them I wouldn't be doing that because my God gets angry when I pray in the names of other gods. She said Ponai is just another name of God, but I said people used that same line to argue for the worship of Buddha and Allah, and since those arguments are wrong, there was no reason for me to believe that hers was right. I said I needed to research her religion and check with my God to see if this were acceptable. But I said I'd watch them pray. So I did that.
They touched their fingers together in a funny way and voiced their concerns to Ponai in their own language, basically asking for guidance for them, and, oddly enough, for me, and they asked Ponai to use me for communicating his message, and provide guidance. Once done, they told me they'd check with some guy named "Wodov" and that I should go back to the phones. So I did.
I called the fire department for one caller, requested a repair of a hologram system for another, then contacted "animal control" for some guy that had bugs filling the ship from ceiling to floor.
I was waiting for (or perhaps dreading) some calls about that...whatever they were telling me about, but I didn't get any.
I took more calls and went to lunch.
I went down to the lunch room and saw Minda looking at me expectantly. I got my food, sitting down across from her, and she says she wants to be saved. As in what Christian groups mean by the expression. So I led her through the prayer and everything. I've never converted anyone, so it made me kind of happy. However, I kept wondering if it were the same as preaching the gospel to the Labrador retriever in my basement. Pistol doesn't talk, but I wasn't sure if God wanted me converting space aliens.
I told her some more about the Christian faith walk, then finished my lunch and went back to the phones.
After doing a name change on account for a customer, I had my first dealing with the call center Paparazzi. This Abreya guy, surrounded with weird equipment, asked me to smile, then started asking me all these questions unrelated to the job, like my romantic life. I didn't take too kindly to this and replied with ridiculous answers. The calls I had after that were relatively normal. A misdirected call about mechanical defects in a popular brand name spaceship, amperage issues on an electrified burglar trap, questions about food built in processing units.
I had one last call about payroll and then I was able to clock out for the day.

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