Gladys, a crossing guard who dabbled in computer design and engineering, had taken her job to a science. She had gotten the local traffic department about adjusting the timing of the lights, so that students crossed smoothly and traffic flowed freely. Seen from above the roads were in continuous, rhythmic motion, so that the students and the cars looked like water travelling through perpendicular pipes, with Gladys the valve that shut off one pipe so that the other could flow. Yet the cars and students never backed up, and the crossing was eerily quiet, free of frustrated shouts and car horns.
Consequently, when Gladys heard that the district’s computer network was hopelessly snarled, she set about devising a plan to fix this problem, so dedicated was she to student well being. The previous week, a student at the high school had won a science prize for creating a machine that reduced anything living or non-living to atomic size, and that news gave her a novel idea for a solution to the school’s network problem. She went to the technology department to propose a solution, and the Director of Technology, impressed with Glady’s suggestion, immediately set about locating the student who had created miniaturization device.
After the device shrunk Gladys down to atomic size, she made her way to the network’s central computer processing unit, where, as expected, she saw loads of electrons crowded around the processor’s particle gates, arguing over who was to pass through the gates, and when. This, of course, caused there to be no flow of the ones and zeroes whose binary rhythms formed the foundation of network’s flow of information. Taking advantage of her almost non-existent mass, which allowed her to fly through the processor at near light speed, Gladys darted back and forth between the chip’s control unit and Arithmetic logic unit, and eventually restored the electron flow to normal...much to the relief not only of students and teachers, but the electrons, who, being negative, often had foul tempers.
Gladys enjoyed her new duties so much that she worked in the Central Processing Unit for quite some time, until she learned that the school district for student electrons had a serious problem with their computer network. Fortunately, a brilliant science student had created a device that shrunk electrons down to the size of quarks. Always one to facilitate the flow of information, Gladys once again journeyed to smaller world, relating the stories of her journeys back to the places from which she came, much to the delight of the particle physicists who were several magnitudes larger.
Consequently, when Gladys heard that the district’s computer network was hopelessly snarled, she set about devising a plan to fix this problem, so dedicated was she to student well being. The previous week, a student at the high school had won a science prize for creating a machine that reduced anything living or non-living to atomic size, and that news gave her a novel idea for a solution to the school’s network problem. She went to the technology department to propose a solution, and the Director of Technology, impressed with Glady’s suggestion, immediately set about locating the student who had created miniaturization device.
After the device shrunk Gladys down to atomic size, she made her way to the network’s central computer processing unit, where, as expected, she saw loads of electrons crowded around the processor’s particle gates, arguing over who was to pass through the gates, and when. This, of course, caused there to be no flow of the ones and zeroes whose binary rhythms formed the foundation of network’s flow of information. Taking advantage of her almost non-existent mass, which allowed her to fly through the processor at near light speed, Gladys darted back and forth between the chip’s control unit and Arithmetic logic unit, and eventually restored the electron flow to normal...much to the relief not only of students and teachers, but the electrons, who, being negative, often had foul tempers.
Gladys enjoyed her new duties so much that she worked in the Central Processing Unit for quite some time, until she learned that the school district for student electrons had a serious problem with their computer network. Fortunately, a brilliant science student had created a device that shrunk electrons down to the size of quarks. Always one to facilitate the flow of information, Gladys once again journeyed to smaller world, relating the stories of her journeys back to the places from which she came, much to the delight of the particle physicists who were several magnitudes larger.
