Job

Sitting in front of a computer has led me to quesition the seeming decline in the quality of my eyesight. Beginning last weekend, I started my new job -- where I will spend day after day dissecting web sites, picking through page after page, column after column, looking for information that might be relevant to the mission at hand. What is this mission?, you might ask.
Here's how it works:

Company X (or y,z,a... on and on) gives Company Z (my employer) a bunch of web sites to monitor for certain keywords -- Company Z then compiles a report for Company X based on the results of this monitoring. X wants up-to-date information, and Z gives it to them. My job is to find the information that X is looking for and enter it into a nice little program. The work that I've done thus far isn't bad -- time goes fast, and I get to listen to music all day.

There is a feeling, though, that I'm like a figure in the shadows, sifting through unbelievable amounts of media and information while the rest of the world goes about its ways. Naturally, I have to wonder how many others lurk on the underbelly of information wars. Not saying the job is bad, just kind of Orwellian, kind of odd. And my eyesight isn't getting any better.
...
Then there was this:

Mr. Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.

"He laughed," Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him."

The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."

Complete story here(NY times; free registration required)