Time and the arrow thing…

Okay. So. Aherm.

I have ranted before about how I am one of those people who get stopped and asked for directions wherever I go. I tell you now I am not kidding.

Usually it’s all “where am I?” or “do you know this street?” or “can you spare some change?” but on my way how the other day I got a new one.

Time. Time is the theme …

I get stopped by a very well dressed lady with perfect make-up and a big smile.

-Do you know what date it is? She asks.

Now, those of you out there who have seen Terminator, I mean the first movie before the whole thing went ass-over-tits into the sillyness that later ensued will remember this: Kyle Reese lands buck nekkid in an alley. He gets his shit together, steals some clothes… He asks “What day is it? The date?” When he gets his reply his follow-up question is “No, what Year?!”

I fully expected that.
I am a little twisted, I know.
Look, it’s sufficiently weird that I get approached on the street by a random stranger asking me what date it is, okay?

I gave her the correct date and she thanked me before hurrying off. Okaaay… So my mind is now replaying random scenes from Terminator. Fine, I can live with that. I was thinking about how much better that movie had been if they had cast Lance Henriksen in the role of the Terminator as they originally planed to do, and about him thinking of playing it more like a praying mantis when I get stopped again, this time by two sixteen year old girls in way to short skirts looking for a specific store on a specific street.

I gave them directions. The good clean kind. Not the least bit Irish.

Well.

At least I know what date it is, what time it is and where I am going.

That can’t be too bad.

ROL

Time flies like an arrow – fruit flies like a banana

Time is one of those units in which we measure stuff that really does rely on what the poet Coleridge called ’the willing suspension of disbelief’. As in, we believe an hour is an hour long. Why? Because we said so.

Time can be viscous and liquid and warped and messed up.

Case in point:

My alarm went off on oh-shit-it’s-early-in-the-morning. I killed it, the way you do.
Now, this is one of those rants where the Unheimlich quality of reality comes in to play, as well as the general high-tech HAL-hell I live in.

I thought I hit the snooze button, but the buttons are really small and fiddly on that thing. I must have fallen asleep again and the next time I open my puffy eyes and blink unevenly at the digits glaring red at me I have 37 minutes left before I should be at my station, scrubbed and dressed and ready to work. It takes me twenty minutes to get there, so we’re down to 17 to get up and get ready.

It’s not pretty, but it can be done.

I do it.

36 ½ minutes later I’m at the desk. I turn my cell on. I turn the computer on. I enter all the various passwords granting me access to all the access I need to be granted. I wonder idly if it’s bad manners to go in quest of coffee before everything is online. I had to forego breakfast – and besides the cupboard was empty anyway.

I look at the screen. I look at the cell.

I’m at my desk, bright eyed and bushy tailed an hour early.

Now picture me banging my head decorously on the desk for about five minutes.

The stupid little machine with the fiddly buttons has the set-button for the hours right next to the stupid snooze button. When you hit one you can easily catch the other as well – which I obviously had done that morning.

Now, if I had my cell tuned on before I left home I might have noticed. Or if any of my other various machines had an accurate time setting I might have noticed. Or if my suspicions had been raised by the utter lack of people up and about – but working weekends is tough, because it’s mostly dead at that time on a Saturday anyway.

Just goes to show – time is untrustworthy. It lies. So do machines. Particularly the ones with fiddly buttons.

Damn it.

ROL

Strenght and weakness

Okay, so, I was giving instructions to a complete stranger the other day.

She blew through the door in all jittery and jacked-up and basically humming with tension after having spent seven hours  in the car. That’s a pretty long drive by anyone’s standards.

It would make me need a nice long walk, or maybe a short hard run, so I figured that explained the restless body language.

Having been asked a pertinent question I start explaing, giving instructions and she just stops me dead.

-Hang on. I have ADHD. I’m not good at explanations. Take it real slow.

Well, alright.

I break down my instructions to minor parts. I make sure to keep eye contact so I can see if she’s got it.

It’s got to suck to be that jittery all the time. I mean, I can fuel up pretty well on coffee before I even start to talk fast. I don’t even want to contemplate what that would be like to have that all the time. And yeah, I know it’s normal to her, she doesn’t know anything else and all that, but still.

What I think is cool in all this is that she just flat out told me straight off the bat. “I have ADHD. Take it slow.”

You know, that’s kind of cool.

Means she has come to the realisation it’s quicker and easier to just get it out there before people start thinking you’re a complete spaz.

Me? I hide my weaknessess. Seriously. Deeply. Actually, so deep you’re going to need some heavy mining quipment and a breathing aparatus to get to them.

There’s a Depeche Mode song “hide what you have to hide, tell what you have to tell” – something like that.

Works for me.

ROL

Swing and a miss

I got to work today and saw glazed expressions on several faces. I know that look.

Just this once, and I’m not saying that means I’m safe, but just this once I managed to duck the all-out shit storm they had yesterday.

I know it’s nothing personal, okay, it just sometimes feels that way when everything just contracts and then spews on the same day and well, that’s usually when I’m working.

I actually missed the veritable monsoon of trouble raining down. Which is… Good. Just good. No glee involved, I do pity the poor bastards I work with, but it’s just that the Gods were on my side for once.

Oh, I’m sure I’ll get mine this weekend. I mean, the weekend can be long and cruel as I’m sure I have commented on before.

There are definitely clouds gathering, you get to know the signs after a while.

They got it all – power outage, things springing leaks, tech stuff turning HAL, tech stuff breaking down, people acting unpredicatbe and twitchy, the whole solid long list.

Meanwhile I was at home, sipping my coffee and having a nice long slow bath. No, not at the same time… that would just be wrong. I think…

So – just to be sure this weekend maybe I shoudl wear some body armour just in case.

ROL

I’m a model citizen

Ok, so I was hanging around outside the front door of my place of business when suddenly a guy stops his car and yells at me.
“You got a phone?”
-Yes.
-Mine don’t work. There’s a guy breaking in to a car up the street. Do you see him?
I look up the street, and sure enough, there’s the guy. He’s got the window on the driver’s side popped and is climbing in to the car as we speak. I call the police.

While I’m talking to them the car thief drives past me. I get the licence plate number.

Now, I’m crap with cars. I mean normally I don’t know a chevvy from a semi. So it gives me great pleasure to actually be able to say to the nice police officer I’m talking to as he asks “Did you see what kind of car it was?” – no, but I can give you the licence plate.

They like when you do that. Seriously.

Adrenaline tends to go all spikey with shit like that going on. When I hang up the nice police man has the platenumber, the adress it was stolen from, the direction it was travling in and a general description of the thief.

They’ll probably never catch the guy, but at least the guy who had his car stolen won’t get into trouble with his insurance company, right? It’s not like the car hasn’t been repported stolen, you know.

Never a dull moment at my job. Oh, I lie. Actually it’s more like the army, it’s all hurry up and wait.

When I told my pal about it the first reaction was “what did you do?” You know, what with me being one of those “I’m on it” people. But this time I was too far away and anyway, I’m not going to be chasing any junky carthiefs any time soon. At least not if it’s not my car – but then if that happens, all bets are off.

ROL