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

I Think I Killed It

I actually had a day off today.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t set my alarm, because I am a good little worker bee and always get up early in the morning.

Okay, so that was obviously a blatant lie, but still.

I set my alarm. The thing went off. Now, I hate that sound with a passion, like we all do, but when I know I can ignore it I can more or less tolerate the damned thing.

Still I must’ve rolled over this morning and decided that snooze was in order.

When next I woke up it said 13:15… that can’t be good. So I slouch off into the bathroom, blink blearily at myself in the mirror and just… try to get my bearings. The weather has been dark, wet and misty all day, so there’s no real daylight and nothing to indicate what time of day it is in the least.

I make my breakfast and turn on the TV.

I obviously killed my alarm clock this morning. I must have aimed for the snooze button, but hit the time reset button instead. It’s only twenty past ten.

I guess I started the day off in the wrong trouser leg of time this morning which just goes to show that time is indeed a relative thing. It’s like – five minutes are nothing if not put in relation to say if you’re waiting for a buss on a rainy day or if you’re waiting for you best friend in a bar.

Getting up in the morning is still a bitch, but you have to try and be a little philosophical about it I guess. And try not to kill the messenger – though technically I don’t think I did. I just fucked with it. I’m good like that.

ROL

At oh-fuck-oh-three in the morning

My brother called me at 01:03 in the morning.

Now, let’s get the back-story clear here. Whenever anyone calls you at that hour you know it can’t be good. So force of habit takes over. I have one leg in my jeans and am getting my wallet, keys and boots as I put the phone to my ear.

Unless you have the kinds of friends who drunk dial you to talk of their feelings… but I don’t as far as I know.

Generally I will be awake at that time in the morning anyway, so it’s okay, but the pure adrenaline reaction – I can’t do anything about that. I just get ready. That’s all. I mean, whatever the people closest to you need, right?

Now, my brother, he’s a pretty competent guy – he can take care of himself. So that means if he’s in the kind of trouble that makes him call me in the middle of the night things might be about to get bloody. Bonus points for that.

So what happens? Big, fat load of nothing, actually. I knew from earlier that his cell was on the blink, which might explain why it has taken to randomly dialling in the middle of the night just for fun.

I talked to him today and he explained that there had been something wrong with his cell for a couple of days. Symptoms included sluggish response to buttons being pushed, no connection and partial amnesia… You know, it forgets what it was supposed to be doing and then does the other thing instead.

Wait…What? I mean – my brother’s cell just drunk dialled me?

When you read dystopian fiction one of the things that seems to pop up a lot is how advanced technology takes on a life of it’s own and starts making decisions for us – not a good thing. Well, wake up and smell the coffee – we’re already there.

Still – at least my brother was okay and not stuck in an alley somewhere bleeding into his shoes from a knife wound to the stomach. That’s the kind of thing that flashed in you head when you phone rings at one a.m.

I can deal with the drunk dialling cell – and when I talked to him today he had already bought a new one. Currently he’s trying to get his computer to talk to it. I wish him luck. I just hope that doesn’t mean somehow his computer will start drunk dialling me too…

ROL

Cloned Cows – Yeah, you read that right…

I am getting a bit tired of coming to work in the mornings having to do damage control the first thing I do. And finding that stuff isn’t working. And feeling like I need a … shotgun? Beta blockers? something from Black & Decker? I don’t even know anymore.

But I digress. I actually had something else in mind for my rant today.

Ok, so yesterday I turned on my television and was treated to the unexpected pleasure of genetically enhanced and cloned cows. Yeah, you heard me. Cows. Cloned cows. Cow clones (gets funnier every time).

Ok, so you take a cow. Tinker with its genetic make up until it produced the equivalent of human antigens. These gorgeous little beasts (antigens, not cows) help the immune system produce all kinds of antibodies and that can more effectively battle some kinds of viral diseases. And as we get progressivley more obsessed with living forever and never, never falling ill this is of course the cat’s pyjamas.

You then milk you cow.

Sounds pretty healthy, right?

But, you see, we’re not milking it for milk. We’re milking it for blood.

Now things start getting a bit Transylvanian.

You then take your cow’s blood and run it through a hamster, for some reason (it’s got to do with genetic sequencing – complicated stuff) and then insert into sick human. Sick human all better. Full of goodness. Full of vitamins. Full of cow’s blood and hamster genes.

The cows are worth half a million dollars each. Roughly.

I don’t know about the hamsters. Man, I can’t even begin to speculate how the hamsters got in there in the first place.

I am a determinist when it comes to tech stuff. I believe in the axiom that if we can do it we will and bugger the consequence. Never mind what nature intended and what might go wrong in the not too distant future. It’s all a bit eye of newt and toe of frog, in my opinion. And there’s something just so incredibly wrong with the notion that this is the way forward. If I get rabies, or lupus, or TB I’m sure I will change my mind and happily take whatever pill, or phial, transfusion or transubstantiation modern medecine offers. But the hamsters…

Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my… Becomes Cow’s blood and hamsters and genes. Oh, my.

The chaos theoretician in Jurassic Park played by Jeff Goldblum has the best line on this topic. He says: “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” On the topic of genetics.

And things might be very different for us in the near future. Maybe the “Moo?” will be a little different. And maybe it will be like the song “Cows with guns”.

The only thing I know is that the whole debate about cloning? You can forget it. It’s here and it’s here to stay. Everyday the level of acceptance is raised a little in the name of progress and that’s just the way things are.

ROL

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

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

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