Day 14: Praying the internet stays live long enough to post and that I won't need IT

I seem to have a very small window of access to the internet, so I'm desperately trying to catch up on the EsNoWriMo writing I've missed.

In the interests of posting ASAP, here is an excerpt from yesterday. My characters are increasingly in tight places and I'm not entirely sure how to write them out of it. But Indigo wisely advised me at the beginning of the month that there is no need to draw out the action. Here I introduce two of my worst characters yet, who I didn't bother to name as I hope to never see them again.

Two men, obviously from the IT department, appeared in the doorway. She could tell that they were from IT because of their self-important posture, their misanthropic sneer and their general air of believing that everyone around them was intensely stupid. Rogue-ah almost injured herself from rolling her eyes. Was this who Pinto had referred to as the tech specialists?

“Are you sure that you turned the device on?” asked the smaller one, clearly fancying himself the leader.

“Is it plugged in?” said the other, more rat-faced one.

“Have you logged a ticket?” jumped in the first one.

“Have you tried turning the device off and then on again?”

“What about unplugging it? Just let it sit for at least one minute and then plug it in again?” asked rat-face.

They both seemed to be talking to the other, neither wanting to take responsibility for actually doing something, each acting as though it was the other who had called in the problem rather than the two of them who were there to fix it.

And then some good use of the WhatsApp chat:

Suddenly, Scarface moved, apparently he was the one chosen to speak. He approached the walls of the cage wearing his unlikeable sneer.

“Where is the girl?” he asked.

Dragonfly sighed, it was tiresome to have to pick one’s battles, particularly in a situation as dire as this one. But they had nothing to lose and most importantly nothing to gain from avoiding an awkward conversation about gender.

“I feel like you aren’t really listening to me,” said Dragonfly. “When you called her a girl before, I pointed out that the person I was with earlier is a woman. That is how she identifies. I simply won’t continue to answer your questions if you insist on infantalizing her. I must also ask why you find it so very important to talk about a person by reference to their gender, and using the gender binary at that.”

“Is it really that easy?” asked Security, “if I call your camp rat friend a woman than you’ll just tell me everything I want to know about her?”

“Stop trying to interpellate me,” snapped back Dragonfly.

For the first time, Scarface looked extremely offended. “How dare you! I’m not an Althusserian scholar. I don’t even know how to interpellate.” He sniffed, his pique raised.

“It’s so easy! You’re already doing it!” exclaimed Dragonfly, “Interpellation describes the process by which ideology, embodied in major social and political institutions (ISAs and RSAs respectively), constitutes the very nature of individual subjects’ identities through the process of ‘hailing’ them in social interactions. It’s exactly what you were doing when you called out the word ‘girl’ with the intention of signifying how my friend – and by extension also I – should act/look/be in particular ways.”

“Oh, so you mean that interpellation is a process, a process in which we encounter or culture’s values and internalize them?” Security slapped his forehead, “I never thought of it that way before!”

“I can see that. Glad to be of help.” It had been another successful interaction with a man.