I don’t want to be a creepy voyeur. I want to be an actor in my own drama. And there are reasons to believe that I could be, although listing them involves dangerous immodesty, because although I always preferred math to English, I know what hubris is and where it gets you. So I will now transcribe the list of my assets compiled by my sister, Alison, to give me hope on a down day, accompanied by parenthetical commentary of my own:
—Handsome （To those who favor these dimensions: six-one, dark blond hair and beard, gangly muscular build）
—Good athlete （Baseball, soccer, basketball）
—Popular （A vexed assertion, given the vagueness of that term. In this case it means two male friends, one of whom is my boss and team leader, O’Brien, plus the usual thousands of “friends” who I don’t know and never see.）
—Kind （Love parents and sister, and they love me）
—Sexy （How can a sister say such a thing, you may ask! Well, she is basing her statement on nine shows of interest and affection from colleagues as reported by me during the two-year period I have worked at Harvest, including an invitation to drink schnapps, a small bouquet of daisies on my birthday, a bag of carrots at lunchtime [I love carrots] and, most intriguingly, a note left anonymously on my desk that read, “You have a great ass and a great personality.”）
—Amazing at your job （This is not something Alison is equipped to evaluate. She is an impressionist: a typical who tends toward the romantic. She is the opposite of an empiricist, in other words, which has led our parents to jocularly speculate on whether Alison and I are one person split into two parts. But whereas Alison is a complete human all on her own, I have a feeling I would be a more complete human in combination with Alison. She is basing “Amazing at your job” on two data points, advancement and rewards, both of which have come to me faster than to my colleagues. There is even a plan afoot among my unit and team leaders, Avery and O’Brien, to move me to an individual office. I have resisted this move because it will take me physically away from M and create a difference of rank between us. Alison insists this will be a good thing, or at least not a bad thing—but, being Alison, she has no data to back up her assertion other than a vague claim that “people always have crushes on their superiors,” and a single data point to back that up: herself. And yet, despite Alison’s impressionism, her predictions have a perplexingly high success rate.）
I have left till last Alison’s most vexatious assertion:
—You’re funny.
Humor is the bugbear of those in my business and therefore the thing that obsesses us. Humor is impossible to quantify. For that reason, it is one of our chief tools in spotting proxies: vacant online identities maintained by a third party in order to conceal the fact that their human occupants have eluded. Lucrative “brand” identities are often sold （the first documented instance being a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson）， and a squatter will occasionally take possession of an abandoned identity chassis. But most proxies are animated by “hermit crab programs” that maintain the established patterns of an individual’s online activity—communication, commerce, and social media—as a way of hiding the reality that the original occupant of that identity has vacated it. Most proxying is orchestrated by Mondrian, a not-for-profit based in San Francisco. Mondrian’s most sophisticated proxies are live professionals—usually fiction writers, I’m told—who impersonate multiple identities at once. Humor is our best tool for identifying them; it’s very hard even for a human proxy, much less a hermit crab program, to successfully mimic an eluder’s sense of humor. Unfortunately for us counters, it is equally hard for a program to detect failed humor mimicry, making proxy identification both time-consuming and labor-intensive. It can be done, but it is work for typicals. In fact, spotting proxies and eliminating them from our count is the only realm of our business where typicals have an advantage.
But how is it possible that humor can’t be quantified? Simple: Because we lack a basic set of definitional terms for what is funny. And yet some people are funny and others are not. Some of those who are funny may be funny in ways they didn’t intend. I am certainly in this category, as are many of us counters. We are quantifiers. As children, we were perceived as off-putting. To this day, I can tell you the exact length of the pause in any piece of pop music you’d care to name, beginning at Elvis. This fixation did not endear me to anyone except my family, and only because I was already dear to them. My fixation was social poison—as were, I’m told by fellow counters, their habits of measuring neighbors’ fences, cataloging Arthurian suits of armor, mapping and reporting on solar storms, or—in M’s case—tending 268 houseplants in her childhood bedroom, not counting the grass with which she seeded her wall-to-wall carpet, and which forced its roots into the （it turned out） decayed floorboards underneath said carpet until, after a vigorous watering, a large chunk of the ceiling in the room below M’s （the kitchen, as it happened） broke free and fell into the middle of the dinner table.