I Robot. You nuts.

Wandering to the bus-stop the other morning I was contemplating the new warm, sunshine lit day and what I would be getting up to in the office later. With the birds twittering out of sight, the old man from down the street strolled by with his morning paper and 4 floury rolls in a white bag. I noticed that there was someone standing at the bus-stop. I recognised the face. It was a face I had not seen since school. I deemed him to be a bit of an odd-ball at school, having had dealings with him over a week in the Greenhouse Club. I had always felt that by now he would be a bona fide weirdo. However, there he was. At the bus shelter.

I decided to do the decent thing: keep my head down and avoid eye contact in the hope he would not remember me or not sense my lie that I did not remember him.
“Greville, how are you?”
Damn it.

As I talked to him two things struck me. One: he wore Velcro polish-able shoes and an anorak a size too small with the hood normally zipped into the collar out and flaccid down the back but, yet, Two: he was not acting like the eccentric I had concluded he would have become all those years ago.

He was, in fact, articulate and fairly engaging for someone talking at a bus-stop, telling me about their life. He had for a number of years been in an institute, but not the sort I had thought. He had recently moved back to the area having been replaced at his laboratory job by a robot. I'm no detective but it didn't give me doubt as to the skill of his job, I mean it wasn’t as if I felt that the robot was a Tomy kids toy one with a audio tape player in its chest and stickers for actual LCD read-outs. I just believed it perfectly reasonable that it was a proper, expensive thing with pneumatic arms which replaced him. It's about time robots were starting to be employed and we were getting more opportunity to relax, so my spidey-senses were not tingling.

[Actually, in a digression, how do you find out there is a robot going to replace you in your job? I would love it to have been the case that on a Monday morning his boss went across to his desk:
“Good morning. Did you have a good weekend?”
“It was quiet, y’know, what with the weather. Glad to get back in the lab to fire up the old Bunsen burner, really.”
“Sure. Here, what’s that beside those old boxes at the back of your desk?”
“I don’t… er… I don’t know what you’re... where?”
“Next to your bin. It’s some kind of robot – it’s got this robotic arm and stuff.”
“Does it? Oh… er…”
“Yeah, and it has a plug. Have you ever plugged it in? I’ll plug it in.”
“Aw… don’t… er… don’t…don’t plug it...”
“Look at that, it is like it is trying to copy what you are doing!”
“Is it?”
“I tell you what – it’s pretty good! Hey! And you can put a cassette tape in its chest! I’ve got a Genesis mix tape in a drawer somewhere!”
“Really?”
“Poor Lobos, I bet he ‘can’t dance’, ha, ha!”
“Who?”
“Oh, I’m calling the robot Lobos now.”
“I see.”
]

He was now re-training and hopeful of getting back into work, possibly in a different science.

This was almost pleasant and my fears of being seen conversing with him by the extending queue for the bus behind us had dissipated. He had turned out OK. Who would have thought?

A little down the quiet road a bus appeared round the corner. It was not the bus which stopped at our stop. He continued to talk as he nonchalantly watched it approaching, getting larger on the road. He checked a Velcro shoe. Then, as it continued past he followed the bus with his head turning and fists clenched, almost winding himself round the bus stop-pole, all in one motion, and shouted: “F***ERS!”

Oh right. He is a loony.

Absolutely yelled it out. At 8:20 in the morning on a quiet street with a queue of people waiting to go to their potted plant office jobs behind him and me. All of them now thinking I am his friend having watched us chat for 10 minutes. I felt them take a collective intake of breath. And then watching on with renewed apprehension as he returned to talk about his family with me as if nothing had gone slightly mental just there.

I wanted to tell them it wasn’t what they thought, I didn’t want to talk to him, I thought he was lunatic years before they did. But I figured any sharp move made by me now would only result in queue turning into mob: The abusive mad scientist and his chum he probably experimented on.