In the top corner office of an impressively modern and high tech office building, the founder and CEO and sole owner of a company called The Robot Shop sat reviewing the latest sales figures and smiling. At a knock on the door, he said, “Enter”, and in came his Chief Technical Vice President with a copy of an article in a prestigious magazine. They talked about how the author praised the company and its products for a bit. The VP called his boss’s attention to a comment in which the author referred to both of them as self-made men. They had a good laugh over that and their shared secret that they were nothing of the sort. The founder had succeeded for many years in erasing and hiding his own origin in an experiment in re-animation by a certain Dr. Frankenstein, and the existence out of his own workshop of a fully and independently sentient android indistinguishable from a human without very close examination, that being his companion and right hand man. They laughed too about their plans for the species of which they were not members. The “monster” muttered, “Damn, they are so gullible, so very gullible.”

Photo by Yuyeung Lau on Unsplash

Bob Wertzler is retired from almost twenty years in the mental health field in California and Arizona. There are times the title, “Recovering Therapist”, seems to fit. In 2006 he retired to move to Western North Carolina to help and become primary care giver for his father who had developed Dementia. Before all that, there was work at various times as a soldier (US Army 1967-70), community organizer, cab driver, welfare case worker, wooden toy maker, carpenter, warehouse worker, and other things. He relates to a line in a Grateful Dead song, “What a long, strange trip its been.”