The desktop image on this public-access coputer at work is the Windows default picture of a rolling green prarie beneath a blue sky with whispy clouds. A couple distant mountains rim the right-side horizon. It seems somehow pathetic that Microsoft should choose this picture as their default, perhaps thinking that it will invite their users to connect with the coputer in a way that they cannot connect with the real landscape outside their buildings. Around this building, everything has been twisted to meet human needs. A few bushes grow in dirt patches between the parking lot and the walls, molded into brutal, low-cut rectangles. Some local birds and squirrels frequent a feeder placed outside the kitchen in the same way that residents frequent a cheap country bar. The ground itself has been formed with barricades to make flat land out of hills, and the surface is covered with straw, perhaps to save money on lawn maintenance. The sky is cut by buildings, and polluted with exhaust and flourescent lights. Could anyone possibly care to sit in this "office park" and gaze at this space like a romantic poet, trying to establish a connection with the universe? It feels more like a holding cell than "the outdoors." Without a landscape to connect with, office workers all over the country might gaze at this cheap pixellated replacement on their computer screens. Maybe they only look at it for half a minute every morning as they wait for Windows to load. Maybe some imagine themselves walking in these hills, over to the mountains to gather firewood and stream water. There could even be some among them who are inspired to believe they will take a vacation to a similar area. Who can say that there isn't at least one who wants to find the very field pictured in the default desktop image? There are a lot of people in the country. Were Bill Gates and his minions thinking about this when they chose the image? Maybe it was only on an unconscious, insidious business-sense level? Did they use focus groups? Was surveillance of Windows users involved? We want answers, Mr. Gates! Were you considering the impact of your actions on the national security? Did you stop to consider the dip in corporate productivity produced by endless office workers stuck gazing at their computer screens every morning when they could be using the time to make phone calls or respond to inter-office comminucation? Oh green field and blue sky! Come here to Columbia and save me! Take away this planned-city ugliness and squalor, this maze of suburban streets with names like "My Farts Smell Like Roses Boulevard" and "Dainty But Persuadable Milkmaid Lane"! Mountains in the distance, hurl yourselves toward the infidels! My faith commands it!