Dear Chuck,
Your wife has asked me to answer your request that she join you at your present size.
After considerable discussion, we have decided against it.
Please understand that this is no reflection on your marriage. She remains devoted to you and was extremely upset when the laboratory called to say you had fallen into the government’s experimental shrinking solution. Her first question was whether you were alive.
Her second was whether your pension had been affected.
Both excellent questions.
Fortunately, your accident coincided with my reading a fascinating article about computer chips. Apparently, making these things requires machinery costing hundreds of millions of dollars, mirrors so smooth they make other mirrors look like gravel, and a degree of international cooperation rarely seen outside efforts to avoid paying taxes.
Yet things still go wrong.
This is where you come in.
For years, when something failed inside a chip, the engineers had to examine it with expensive equipment and argue about the cause. Now they can send you in with a flashlight.
Your wife and I believe this represents a significant advance.
We have therefore agreed, in principle, to rent you to the United States military.
Before you become emotional, please note the word rent. We would never sell a member of the family.
There are tax advantages to retaining ownership.
The Pentagon was particularly interested in your ability to crawl through confined spaces, identify loose connections, and shout instructions to someone holding a screwdriver. I explained that you had been doing the third part from a lawn chair for thirty years.
They consider you highly qualified.
There is one small technical difficulty. You are currently the size of a tiny ant, whereas the components requiring attention are considerably smaller than that.
The laboratory believes another quick dip should take care of it.
I realize you have reservations about the solution. However, now that we know what it does, your second immersion should be much less stressful than the first.
You will have protective clothing. The article explained that chip factories are kept extraordinarily clean because a single speck of dust can ruin production. At your present size, dandruff is a workplace incident. At your proposed size, it could require congressional hearings.
Please discontinue the talcum powder.
Some of the machinery uses lasers to strike droplets of molten tin sixty thousand times a second, producing temperatures far hotter than the surface of the sun.
Your wife has packed your summer things.
The mirrors are a particular concern. They must remain almost impossibly smooth. You are not to lean your bicycle against one, drag furniture across one, or attempt to improve one with the abrasive side of a kitchen sponge.
I mentioned your habit of polishing your glasses on your shirttail. There was a long silence at the Pentagon.
We have since described you as a trainee.
You should also know that the industry depends on skills acquired over decades. One woman can identify which machine scratched a wafer simply by looking at the shape of the scratch. Another specialist has spent years perfecting a single tiny component.
This should reassure you. Nobody expects you to understand everything on your first morning.
For the first week, just sweep up and find out who knows what.
Your wife has taken a remarkably constructive view of these developments. She points out that you have always complained about being overlooked at work. You will now be indispensable, although admittedly harder to locate.
We are ordering a bell.
As for shrinking her, we feel this would complicate a promising arrangement. Someone must remain here to handle the invoices, negotiate your overseas assignments, and keep the cat away from your accommodation.
She has already converted your study into an office.
You will retain full access to the room, provided someone opens the drawer.
I hope you appreciate the larger significance of your new career. According to the article, our entire technological civilization rests on countless people cooperating to accomplish things no individual could manage alone.
You will be part of that magnificent human undertaking.
Your wife and I will handle the billing.
With affection,
jaron
P.S. You asked whether the laboratory has developed a way to make you big again. We have put that question on the agenda for the end of your lease.
The above story was inspired by this incredible article in The New Yorker.
