Deja-Vu For Beginners

Imagine that you're sitting in your comfortable chair, reading a book you're sure you've never read before. The more you read this book, the more you notice certain passages are very familiar. It's getting so you can figure out what's on the next page before you finish the one you're on. You flip back to the front cover -- Am I sure I've never read this before? Nope, the book just came out yesterday. But everything is so very familiar, you know you've read it all somewhere before.

Well, that's basically how you could describe my job. As I mentioned in my bio, I'm an editor for a national computer magazine, which means I read articles all day long. The problem is, I've worked here for over a year, and I've noticed that a lot of the articles are exactly the same. Sure, they're written by different people, and come across my desk at different times, but I'm coming to the conclusion that they're all the same article, slightly rewritten and sent to me to edit.

Maybe it's all a test, and once I tell someone that I've been reading the same article since last June, the walls will fall away like cheap setpieces, and I'll find out that I've been a candidate in a secret government program to see how long normal humans can withstand the soul-crushing boredom that has been inflicted on me for the last sixteen months.

Or, you know, perhaps there isn't that much to say about motherboards.

Either way, I do like my job, believe it or not. Even when I'm fighting off the sleep demons so that I can finish working on the article I have in front of me.