Magic Door

The door is working…

Everything else is fucked.

OK, slight exaggeration there. Still, work just hasn’t been at its most smooth and operational lately. Partly because we are upgrading, messing about with servers and stuff and partly because the support is somehow less than supporting. It doesn’t carry the weight of … well, it doesn’t, lets just leave it at that.

I am no technical genius, far from it. This much I do know: If you begin a project involving all of the computers all at once and finish at 20:49 in the evening the first person to arrive in the morning is likely to make that face. You know the one I mean – incredulous, annoyed, disheartened and a bit wrinkled around the edges. This was me. That’s what I looked like this morning. Especially the wrinkly bit.

It’s not that nothing works. It’s just that everything I need doesn’t work. And out of the four separate profiles created mine is the only one that doesn’t do anything it’s supposed to and quite a few things it should not be able to as well as a few we didn’t tell it to do. I think that’s a rather good symbol of something or other…

Most of the morning was therefore spent with me on the phone, emailing, texting and after a while using my thunder-of-god voice at people and machinery. Mostly, luckily, at the machinery. Vile, unholy, piece of… dog stuff. That’s what I called it. Or maybe that was what I called the tech? Well, it was either that or yabitch.

Never start something you can’t double check before the morning staff arrives. And if you think you’ve done everything right, good luck to you, but don’t turn your cell off because you are likely to be awakened in the morning, bright and early, by my dulcet tone. The conversation runs along the line of: what have you done? Fix it. Now. No, I said now. I tried that already. It still doesn’t work. Yes, I’ve tried that too, I’m not a complete idiot. Then I get angry.

Do that for four hours – break for lunch – go back and do it for another couple of hours and that was pretty much my day so far.

I just really hope that some day soon I can at least have a change in venue of the stuff that annoys me early in the morning. I know, I know, that is pretty much asking for it. Fuck that – I pull on Trouble’s braids and scamper away laughing!

ROL

Mind like a sieve

Not, not me. I have a mind like a steel ball – smooth, shiny and dangerous at high velocity. My colleague though, has obviously forgotten to eat his oatmeal this morning.

On answering questions: I get asked and so answer the question. Three minutes later he asks again. So I politely tell him “well, if you just listen when I speak instead of thinking about what you’re going to say next…” When we’re down to thirty seconds between the repeats I get a bit exasperated.

He’s bouncing off the walls, and this without even having had any coffee yet. So I tell him to piss off, go and have breakfast. We sometimes have breakfast at this local bakery – it’s a five minute walk and they always have amazing bread. I ask my colleague to bring back a bun for me… but I’m not holding my breath, or anything.

Thirty minutes later he zips through the door, runs about like a headless chicken and is halfway out the door (late for a meeting) when I quietly ask him if he perhaps remembered to get me a humble piece of bread. The sheepish look was totally worth my lack of lunch.

When we discuss stress management, you know, he always claims to excel at multi tasking, and he is good at it, I’ll give him that much. Problem is just the little details always seem to fall right through the cognitive process. Separating the wheat from the chaff can be an important ingredient in multi tasking, but if that means your co-workers go hungry – you’re probably not all the way there yet.

ROL

Kipplestein

In Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the characters J.R. Isidore describes the useless junk that’s always lying around like this: “Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself … the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

So if Frankenstein stitches together brand new human beings from spare parts, an arm here, a brain there, Kipplestein uses gaffer tape, rubber bands, chewing gum, two screws and a length of old string to make new stuff out of old .. kipple.

That’s what I’ve been doing today. Oh, I have been involved in some shiny new stuff as well, but mostly it’s kipple. I am Kipplestein! Door not working? Hand me a screwdriver – once I’ve drunk that – give me tools! And some gaffer tape. And some chewing gum. I’ll just need a little piece of paper that I can fold into a square and stick under the thingamabob that’s broken loose and is poking the dohickey in the spring area of the whatchamacallit…

Now – Electricity!

Live!

Live!

Live!

Mwoa-ha-ha… It’s aliiiive!

Did I mention it is hot as hell out there today? You’re at the stage where you’ve undressed as far as decency allows and actually contemplating taking off your pants too. Surely no-one will mind if you walk around at work in your underpants? I can sing a little song at this point if it helps? And I might even have my Captain America underpants on.

Not allowed.

Damn. Oh, by the way, the heat also explains the really bad screwdriver joke in the last paragraph… Sorry about that.

ROL

Vade retro satana…

Ok, that’s it – I’m doing the exorcism.

First off – going to work in the early morning hours on a Saturday is like stepping out onto the set of an expensive zombie movie. Nothing moving except the few late night revellers who still haven’t found their way home. They look like zombies, act like zombies, drool like zombies. They probably smell like zombies too, but I don’t plan on getting close enough to find out. If they have brain-breath I just don’t want to know.

I get to work. Now we move from the zombie genre to the twilight zone. We’ve got one of those automated doors, you know – insert key card, door opens. Modern magic. Except … not so much today.

I’ve had a couple of days off and as far as I’ve been able to tell everything has been running smoothly in my absence. So of course the first thing that happens when I get back is that the door stops working. Did someone light a black candle for me? Am I cursed? Have I developed some kind of freaky superpower that makes everything mechanical and technical fuck up as soon as I am within spitting distance? Do we  have a ghost in the machine?

You can open the door manually as well, luckily. And once the initial anger died down this provided me with endless entertainment today. You see, people are basically sheep. If the door opens automatically for you every time you enter or exit this creates the assumption that the door will always open for you. As we all know assumption is the mother of all fuck ups. What I didn’t realise is that this kind of technology robs people of their natural intelligence. People lose the ability to understand the advanced technology of THE DOOR. Today, typically, people have walked up to the door … and stopped. Looked at the door, not inquisitively, not angrily, not accusingly, but with the bewildered look of a sheep. There’s a sense of “Duh? Bah? Eh?” and then slowly little cogs and wheels come alive and start spinning. “Door? Door not opening? Eh, there’s something I can do here…What was that again?”

I’m not kidding. I’ve even heard a couple of “how do you get the door to open?”-type comments. And I want to say “Come on people, it’s not rocket science, open the door and the door shall be opened”. But I can’t – because I am not allowed to snark. I want to, but I am not allowed. Turn handle. Open door. Step through door. Presto – you are on the other side of the door. Mission accomplished. Should you feel the need to enter – repeat process until you have acquired the Mastery of the Opening of the Door.

I am not even going to get in to how the internet connection kept crapping out on me, because you never know – it might be raining in the attic or something. But I do feel it is time for me to bring my rosary and holy water. One exorcism coming up.

Zombies, and demons and ghosts.

Oh, my.

ROL

What do these people eat?

For me there’s a kind of hierarchy to food. At the very top you’ll find fresh fruit and veg and then you slowly trickle down the list until you wind up with canned goods like those odd whole cobs of corn in a tin – I never did understand the point in them. They taste like … well, they don’t really taste of anything. And the texture is almost, but not completely, unlike corn. It’s backwoods survivalist food. The kind of stuff you buy and stick in your bomb shelter in case you have to duck and cover. Not that that’s going to work, but you get the idea. It’s not really for eating, it’s there simply to give you a last resort in case you really have nothing else.

Taking care of someone else’s pets, staying at their house, you get a more in-depth sense of how people live. Show me your fridge and I’ll tell you who you are… That kind of thing.

So there I am, looking for something to eat. These people are mostly vegetarians, that ought to be some kind of guarantee for there being fresh fruit and vegetables in there somewhere. You’d think so wouldn’t you? Nope. Five thousand little jars and cans and Tupperware containers full of assorted condiments. Every kind of salad dressing and hamburger sauce you could possibly imagine. But no actual food. The only fresh vegetable I could find was potatoes, and those were looking a little sad, frankly. Not sprouting yet, but clearly working their way there.

Abandoning the cold storage I move to the cabinets thinking there should be some pasta or something. And there they are. Rows upon rows of tinned goods. Everything from olives (mmm olives…) to the dreaded tinned corncobs (the hell?). And enough Ramen to keep a small Asian army going for at least a month. Ok, so there are the basics to make some kind of food, but there’s really nothing I want to eat. I actually like noodles, but noodles with noodle-topping covered in hamburger sauce just doesn’t do it for me. Moving along I find another cabinet filled to gills with cookies, cheese puffs, potatoes chips, crackers and every other kind of cheap unhealthy snack you can possibly imagine. All of them non-brand names.

The thing that really sunk the boat for me, though, was the ice cream. When my brother asked if there was anything special they should buy for me my answer was, as it invariably is in these circumstance, ice cream. Love ice cream. Don’t have an icebox. You’d think there is hardly any way you can go wrong with ice cream, right? Delving into frozen depths where sad prefabricated pirogues have gone to colonize the frozen tundra I find the ice cream. And then realisation hits – it is violet flavoured. Now, I have never met an ice cream I didn’t like, but violets? Really? I put the ice cream back. It might be good. It might not. I’m not in the mood to try something an unhealthy hue of purple reminiscent of a fading bruise.

So the question on my mind as I nibble a biscuit is “what do these people eat?” Inquiring minds want to know.

ROL

The Zoo

Trapped with pets.

That’s me.

I am currently looking after an entire menagerie – my brother’s family has a whole lot of animals. Makes it kind of difficult to go on vacation unless some kind soul takes care of all the little furry things, and slimy things and swimming things.

For some reason most people who like cats rarely stop at one. And my brother’s clan is no different. They’ve had up to four at one time, but they’re down to two right now… only because the third one suffered some kind of cat heart attack. They also have a chinchilla, a couple of rabbits, an aquarium… they used to have phasmatodea – walking sticks, stick bugs, whatever you want to call them, and some kind of freaky-assed centipede the size of a respectable cigar. I’m not sure that was even legal. It was poisonous too, and just down right weird. They used to have three aquariums with frogs and shit, but I guess those things have all died off.

My brother, kind misguided soul that he is, manages to refer to this zoo keeper duty as a nice vacation for me. I mean I get out of the inner city, right? And the grass is green and the birds are singing… Riiight.

Couple of minor details: I’m allergic to the little furry things, so I spend an inordinate amount of time alternately hacking up a lung or trying to rid myself of a great deal of superfluous mucus. Also there’s the whole sleeping-on-the-couch thing. Most of the animal cages are on the second floor so I’m not even going to try and contemplate sleeping there. Plus – the more animals you have, the more weird noises you get. I don’t even know what a chinchilla sounds like, or what it’s good for unless you make a pelt out of it, but I do know that at three thirty in the morning it’s bound to go bonkers in its cage. ‘Cause that’s just the way things are. And cats being cats always make a lot more noise than you’d think. And they like to jump on you while you sleep… it’s a cat thing. And, you know, despite what my brother likes to think this house ain’t in the country. There’s a busy road in spitting distance from where I am uncomfortably pretzelled on the couch.

So why am I being so kind?

I’ve done this before and my brother always says that it’s only because of my inordinate kindness that they can go on vacation. Sword of Damocles? A little. It amounts to a rather sizeable favour I can cash in pretty much any time I like. Not that I’m the kind of calculating, cold hearted sociopath that would ever do that. I love the little animals. And I would never take advantage of the law of reciprocity like that …

ROL

Long week

I’ve just finished a seven day shift working ten hour days. Long week. And I’m an insomniac, so just because I work doesn’t mean I sleep. We’ve got staff and bosses away on vacation, problems arise – as they do – and those are all on me. Fine. I like problems. Problems have solutions. You fix it and move on. But then there is always the other kind of problem. The “that can’t happen” kind. And I have been having quite a few of those this week…

There I am, by my computer, quietly working away, keyboard going tagata tagata and suddenly I’m in Amish country. Internet connection gone. All dark.

There’s swearing. Bad words in many languages. There’s me looking at my computer with a decidedly frosty gaze. Had we been in an interrogation room I would have been leaning over the desk by then, directing the harsh light of my desk lamp in its eyes and demanding answers. So of course I try to get a hold of the guy in charge, but all he can say is “it does that sometimes” and I really don’t find that very helpful.

Come Saturday still no internet. Server not found. After having stared at that message for two days you really begin to have personal feelings about it of the “oh, really, asshole – well it’s right over THERE” variety. Saturday afternoon rolls around and the guy who can maybe fix things finally shows up. He goes up into the attic where all the hardware is stacked and comes back down with a sheepish grin. All the equipment – router, switch, modem, thinga-ma-bob and stuff – are stacked neatly directly under a leaking pipe. The attic is fucking huge and the pipe has sprung a leak in the only place it really shouldn’t have, causing the modem to short out. Hence – no internet. Hence – me not being able to do any of the real important stuff for two days. I make lots of helpful suggestions right about that time. Maybe we should buy one of those little pink kid’s umbrellas and rig it above the hardware? Or perhaps throw a tarp over the whole thing? Or maybe move the whole thing about a metre to the left? Or right? Or anywhere but where it was? Stuff of that nature.

Saturday night I’m down at the pub, drinking with the boys, giving them a short recount of my week and the three computer nerds at the table find this all very amusing, of course. I make a big joke of the whole thing, saying “well, now one of two things could make my week complete, either the power goes out, or the fire alarm goes off”.  

You see where all this is heading, don’t you?  

Sunday morning. 08.14. Power goes out.

Sunday morning 08.15 I am too busy laughing to go find the fuse box to see if I can fix it. Sunday morning 08.19 I have pulled myself together just enough to find the right switch to turn the power back on.

There’s more swearing later when both printers stop working because of the power outage but I could fix that so that wasn’t that bad.

Should you find me in the hallway with my arms outstretched in the form of a cross reading verses in Latin while sprinkling holy water – don’t be surprised. Technology is a beautiful thing when it works. When it doesn’t I no longer only rant, I become just a little bit angry. I feel the need to kick things, which is probably the most dissatisfying aspect of the cyberspace experience. There’s noting to kick. Except the technician. But I keep telling myself it’s not his fault.

ROL

Up River

It’s not that I’m an angry person per se.

It’s just that sometimes you feel a rant coming on and there’s really nothing you can really do about it.

It starts like this:

I was watching TV. I about four seconds flat I went from postprandial coma to full on blazing working class hero indignation. The show was one of those innocuous lifestyle programs following a day in the life of some duchess or other as she traipsed around her house (i.e. big assed manor) and grounds ordering the servants about. In my heart of hearts I know this is all good and fine and she is probably a nice lady and all that – but WHAT THE ???

And, because I have the kind of mind that likes to poke things with a stick, I suddenly become aware of my own red hot anger and the distinct feeling that had this been in revolutionary times I would have been up there with torch and pitchfork ready to loot, pillage and behead – and I ask myself: “Now, why is that?”

The reasons are actually quite simple.

Why do we spend so much time watching programs about food we will never cook, clothes we cannot wear and lifestyles we can never afford?

Why is our wanton desire for more than we need the subject of prime time TV?

And like the stupid asses we are we watch the duchess clip-clop about on gleaming parquet floors complaining that there are scuff marks on the newly painted walls from where the movers bumped the furniture the last time they had to shift it to accommodate the two hundred or so guests at the last dinner party.

This passes for entertainment? All things considered I’d rather watch rednecks wrestling in Jell-O to win money.

That, in short is the reason Ranting Out Loud exists. Be warned: Here be Dragons. And I will sit at the end of the river like Kurtz, just waiting for Marlow. And while I do that I intend to play with the bunnies. If you have any clue as to what I am on about please come visit and don’t be afraid to let your voice be heard.

ROL