So I’m half-watching the new Star Trek Picard while I finish up some paperwork and I noticed that there was a group of people (and aliens and whatever, get off my jock, I’m not trying to be all politically correct with the proper pronouns of a science fiction show), standing around inside of a Borg cube watching an training and orientation video. This is the future, right? You have matter transporters, faster-than-light warp drive, and sentient robots and still the best we can do to get people up to speed is an orientation video? Are you seriously fucking telling me that the best the future has to offer is a PowerPoint presentation on interstellar navigation? You have holodeck technology right? Toss me in a training simulator for a few rounds. Touch this thing, you get vaporized, don’t touch that switch or a Klingon jumps out of a wall and bites off your dick. You cannot possibly tell me the best the future has to offer is a goddamn orientation video.
Even vampires have a better onboarding process than that and they’ve been around for a while. I mean, sure everybody thinks that a vampire bites you and you just know what to do to survive as a vampire, but that just can’t be possible. There’s logistical questions you just don’t think to ask ahead of time, like, if you drink a hemophiliac, is that the vampire equivalent of me drinking a Diet Coke instead of a regular one? Or, everybody knows that vampires heal, but what if you got injured before you became a vampire and had like a metal pin implanted? How does that work with the healing? Or if you had dental work done as a kid, are you allergic to silver caps on your own teeth? Clearly these are important questions and you can’t just wing it. That’s why vampires have a solid mentoring program. Sort of like internships at financial institutions or that training program from Baywatch. You get your questions answered, you get a little hands on experience as an apprentice and you get a feel for the processes, understand how the business works.
And yet, the best that the future has to offer before they let you loose in the bowels of a Borg ship with fuck knows what technology is a video that’s got an air of 80’s nostalgia but shot in HD? This is the level of effort you expect from a belligerent third grader, or a JJ Abrams Star Wars movie.
