Sage.

That is immediately clear.

It absolutely is one of those jump-off-the-page, slam-bam-intuitive-man slices of Experience.

The kind of experience that happens all the time, if you can manage to pay attention.

As you stare down the word, you recall your first job out of college, and the first sage you met.

Jon S______ was his name.

He was an older guy, pushing 60 at the time. Well-fed and well-learned, the type of engineer as much at ease tuning a carburetor or finessing the fit of a rocking chair as designing a microprocessor. Indeed, he was the Chief of the electrical engineering team you joined, but more than that, he was the person you asked for guidance in solving your own design problems. And if he didn’t know how to help you, he would tell you directly; however, you could never quite be certain if he was testing you, inspiring you to muddle through the void of uncertainty, like the professors you endured just one year ago, like the path you have learned to walk in the decades since.

Journeying to Jon’s cubicle was itself a pilgrimage. Past the ever-closed doors of the suits who pretended at ruling Reality. Past the large auditorium - swiftly plundered on Wednesdays for deli sandwiches and plastic water bottles by your young, hungry cohort. Past the exit to the parking lot, richly glazed in that irrepressible California sunshine, and its call to freedom. Past the burnout hippie technicians, the wistful photographers, the sharp-as-nails women who got the work done and were widely respected - but underpaid nevertheless.

The slate grey walls and dull beige carpet slowly brighten as you approach your destination, lit by the western sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows next to which he has the privilege of sitting. The din of cubicle chatter and keyboard clatter give way to the gentle hum of a power supply, interlaced with the sporadic beeps of an insulin pump under testing. You enter his cubicle.

Jon isn’t there.

You remain anyways, near his guest chair. (These were the days when waiting was not yet a crime.)

The black laminate desk is neatly kept. It features a thoughtfully arranged computer station, with writing accessories at hand, yellow Post-its and pencils from the office supply cabinet. White corporate stationery with blue pens (for signing off on key decisions) and red pens (for shredding your work in design review). An arm of the L-shaped desk is appropriately messy for an engineer at work, two layers deep in electronic schematics, annotated by hand in red with numbers both mathematical and bureaucratic. A second desk sits nearby, a gray folding table with two insulin pumps flayed open, a mess of wires creeping out of their guts, connected to an oscilloscope and multimeter, whose numbers and lines dance along to the pulsing lights and beeps of the devices under test. About a half dozen design textbooks - including, of course, The Art of Electronics - sit in a single gray bookshelf above a gray paper filing cabinet.

Five minutes pass.

It would be easy to continue waiting in Jon’s cubicle, daydreaming out the window - but with your manager in the cubicle next door, with an unpredictable temperament, the cost of being found idling is well above average. And since smartphones haven’t been invented yet, there is no way for you to know if you’ve missed one of his critically stupid emails without returning to your own dreary cubicle, far from the blessings of natural sunlight.

Still, this day is different.

Because through divine intuitive processes you don’t yet understand, you move to sit in Jon’s chair.

It’s one of those premium chairs the suits keep in their caves, but with additional contoured support for the lower spine. You lean back into the firm, supple mesh, and the chair leans back with you with just the right resistance. The back of your head makes gentle contact with the neck support of the chair. The cradle is a bit wide for your skinny frame; despite this, it delivers that quiet Zen when one’s skull base is properly caressed. Instinctively you bring your elbows to the arm rests and your fingertips together at heart height. One ankle comes to rest across the other knee, completing a picture of perfect poise and balance.

“Jon! You’re looking different today!”

A typical office greaser line from your manager’s voice, delivered with a light Farsi accent and unjustifiable cool, as he swaggers into view. Some woman must have found this demeanor beguiling at some point - he is (in this time) an expectant parent, but who such a woman could be you cannot fathom.

And yet, cradled in the energy of the Sage, you are entirely untroubled at being caught out of pocket.

“I feel quite the same, thank you.”

The words aren’t yours but they come through you. Now you are squarely in his crosshairs.

During your interview, the manager asked you where you see yourself in five years. It was a withering session; you grew to feel you had no chance. So you responded without thinking.

“In your position.”

Surprised at your audacity, he recovered quickly and laughed. At you, dismissively, mockingly.

Those same eyes glare at you now, obscured by the sunlight refracting through his horn-rimmed glasses.

“What are you doing here anyways? Get back to the lab and finish the ESD tests.”

“We failed 30kV.”

“And get out of Jon’s chair. How discourteous.”

The chair, however, demands you stay. “We should implement a Faraday cage -”

Now a standard practice for protecting electronic devices, at the time it wasn’t common knowledge why Faraday cages work. Most electrical engineers dismissed the concept as a brutish mechanical solution. That is, until their products failed safety testing, and the real PhDs came in to save the day. You just happened to start here at a time where this was the critical issue facing the new insulin pumps, and it became your problem to solve. To research, discover, and understand the intricacies of static discharge events. Unfair really, for this field requires knowledge of the dark arts, unsuitable for a fresh graduate with little intuition and practice with the electromagnetic energies. Yet here, in this chair, all other possibilities melt away. Doubt eats everything but the Faraday cage. The solution is at hand.

But you’ve already been cut off, as your manager waves at someone out of view, and gestures towards you with the other hand. This fucking guy it says.

“Someone in your chair wants to waste time and money talking about Faraday cages.”

“Did we fail again?” Jon comes into view.

“Yes. Tell him it’s too expensive. And to get out of your chair.”

Jon turns to look at you, perched in his chair. He can’t help but let a chuckle escape.

“We’ve tried everything else -” you begin.

“We haven’t,” Jon gently corrects, “but it is the solution most likely to work.”

The manager snorts with disgust. “We need other options, else the mechanical guys will butt in on our design process.” Pure parochialism.

“There are other options,” Jon continues impassively, “but they’re not worth our time.”

A brief pause. “Whatever, just get it to pass.” The manager powerwalks away to his next meeting.

Jon returns his gaze to you, still grinning at the sight of your lanky body struggling to fill his chair.

“Good idea kid. Now, let’s go try it in the lab.”