Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

not bowling but drowning

yes I’m still on. all those other AT&T bips are other people dropping off. they must have something else really important to do, like get coffee and stuff. as I work from home and I’m an 8 hour timezone shift from you, its 22:30 here, here I’m just popping out for a kebab and a pint of stella before I come back after the break for the development roadmap discussion, where I shall get lippy and interrupt from across the atlantic, slightly delayed by skype, so that I never quite get my point across, which I’ve forgotten now anyway.

I’ve set up my webcam so that you can see if I’m still awake at around 1:00 am when Anil is talking, so if you can see the top of my tired old bald head instead of my quizzical corporate face, then please shout through the polycom and spark me back to life. even better, call me on the other office phone, which should be right next to my head, and watch me go apoplectic and wake up the children in the next room with some insane outburst. my wife is in bed already, and so noone will be poking me with a stick for a while, so please remain vigilant. I’m sure something important will come up at 7 hours and 59 minutes into the conference, so I’d hate to miss it. even if it’s just the directions to the bowling I can’t go to. dammit, chilli sauce on my keyboard. I hate it when that happens.

spontaneous contagiousnessness

excuse me. aaaaaaaaaaaah. that’s better.

I’ve spent 9 hours looking out of this window listening to collaborative nutmegs and ganttisms and I’ve become an uncontrollable twitching avatar of a onceperson. people pass about 20 feet from my upstairs window and they’re only on view for about 10 seconds (which is normally enough round here, I can tell you), but I’ve developed a curious bodily contagion that is a kind of overexaggerated group activity with me as the only knowing participant. 3 times in a row someone has strolled past barking into their clamshell and then taken a moment for a 5:30 yawn, at which point I’m uncontrollably flapping my head open in a contorted drawl, my eyes streaming with overegging and I’m collapsing on the beech veneer like I’ve not slept for a decade.

but that’s quite normal really. group yawns are pretty common. nothing to worry about. so why am I watching this group of UEA students stutter past in their half jeans and elvis shades, laughing like hyenas about someone they don’t like in waveney terrace, and suddenly breaking into an insane cackle during the conference call on platform globalization, much to everyone’s consternation? I don’t know. why am I flapping my arms about like a deranged water mill as an overgesticulating midlife crisis from the middle management at norwich union dribbles past, conversing unappropriately about Mike in accounts with his hands juggling an imaginary flock of seagulls in the phonebox of entrapment. search me. I just seem to be randomly picking up character traits from passing strangers as they flit across my periphery, like a bad tv interlude in my subconscious dribbling.

there’s another. she’s picking at creases in her skirt as she wafts through, and suddenly my office chair is decidedly uncomfortable. look at him, he’s poking a finger in his ear and scraping away the detrius of an unfulfilled working day. ditto. oh, there’s a dude swinging his limbs in time to the foo fighters on his iRiver. stop it, dammit. Im trying to type up a manifesto.

this day will end soon.

did you see that?

that’s horrible. I didn’t mean to do it, but I just kind of forgot that I’d set up a webcam. I mean, I’ve done worse things but not captured quite like that before. I really am working, by the way. these phat headphones are for conference calls, I’m not doing a dave doubledecks down here while paul talks about globalization design docs and we check on status. I’m not really hoofing around the gulf of oman in an APC in battlefield2 while you’re talking about user-friendliness and reordering things in the authoring temaplates. look, I even sent out some kind of document or other to make it look like I was prepared. admittedly, I put it in the collaboration space so that it will time out before you can load it, but it’s there, really. it’s got knobs on

I watched 2 guys in space do some repointing on their mobile home on the internet today, which I was quite blasé about really. I mean, they’re 224 miles above the coast of france, hovering about on a giant white fork-lift truck contraption, picking out little bits of plastic from between slices of fiber cheesecake with their huge white fingers and I’m seeing this live, as it happens, because they’re got helmet-mounted (careful) cameras that are transmitting wirelessly to tracy island or something which is hooked up to some webserver or other that’s streaming stuff under the atlantic to the BT infrastructure that’s doing better for me today than chris and I’m sat here looking at a 4 inch square streaming video on my monitor in the upstairs office in norwich watching their every move. so that’s amazing, right? but am I bovvered? not really. it’s sunny outside and I’m leering out the window at 20 year olds on their way to top shop to get a new crop top for saturday cos gary’s takin her dahn Lava, innit?

so what I do on the webcam is really not very significant. unless my mum’s watching. she’d be horrified.

I’m not bothered about the noise though

do you mind if I just shut the door on you? is it my singing? no, its your whistling, ha ha. actually its the sound of the circular saw buzzing through the floor of the kids bedroom that’s vibrating me across the office floor like davros or whatever his name was from doctor who. I’ve got a bit of a bad stomach today as well, so I’m probably green too. all I need now is to get my medusa headset on and I’ll probably get a free pass to some kind of convention where I can spend my time sifting through back copies of radio times and betamax videos, occasionally looking up and nodding to a cyberman with a sea dragon mask in one hand and a cheque book in the other.

so we agree on a ‘100 mil’ panel and some beading that is apparently called ‘ocra’ or ‘ocar’ or something and then gary gets to work on the wardrobe doors. he’s going to fill in all the little gaps as well. ah. after that, he’s going to start on the shelves in the living room that I haven’t designed yet, but all I know is that they have to have one shelf about ‘800 mil’ off the ground that’s deep enough to fit a shiny new turntable on so that I can finally, after about 15 years, stack the vinyl underneath and then pull out and dust off my mono copy of piper at the gates of dawn and cue it up and sit back in the leather sofa and relax. its probably at that point I’ll realise that piper at the gates of dawn is really a horrible screechy wailing noise, especially in mono, and so I’ll whip it off, delve back into the warped back catalogue again and pull out hex education hour or 1997 wtf’s going on or something instead and then do some air posturing in front of the telly while I’m reading the sleeve notes on unknown pleasures. I might even dig out who’s next and do a spot of windmilling, if nobody’s looking

but right now, the sawing has started again. I can’t really hear it that much through the victorian walls inside this house and over the fan battle of the w2100z and the 8400 and the bionaire (which the w2100z wins quite easily, naturally) and the passing traffic through the open window because its sunny again and my south-facing office is approaching the volcano zone. but its there. just niggling away like a rat chewing your skull. so I expect to lose it completely by the end of the day and go rampaging down to M&Ms with a sawn-off bike pump or something, demanding they had over the soft rolls before anyone gets hurt. dammit. there it goes again. scuse me gary, can I just borrow that saw for a minute?

la la la I can’t hear you

oh, that’s good. I like that. yeah, do it again. lucky me, BT Business Broadband has gone down on me for the fourth time in a week. They had a run on wet conductive flanges at B&Q this week, so Dave the engineer didn’t have anything to stick the 01603 exchange back together again, did he? Well cockadoodle bloody doo. I hit the speed dial now occupied by the BT Business Broadband status line. “Welcome to your internet service status line for BT Broadband, updated at 3:05 Thursday the 28th of April. We are aware of a technical fault at the Norwich exchange, affecting dialling code 01603. Our engineers are currently working on the problem, but Steve had to go and get a Ginsters from the shop, and Darren is currently on his mobile, flogging a Celica to a hairdresser from Penge. We tried Gary, but he got a bad knee, so it doesn’t look much like that red light on your modem is going to turn green today. I’d do it myself, but I’m in a lap dancing club in Wapping”

I did make some of that up, but my red light is still on as I scratch these words into my arm with a screwdriver, and I’ve just thrown a melon out of the office window at two dogs biting their own ears off in frustration. it’s the timing you see. I mean, it’s only Norwich right? you don’t need t’interneht to be in a tractor pull or to just stand on the edge of the village green, slapping yourself in the face with a haddock and mumbling about your sister’s mum’s boyfriend’s Civic. no mate, but I’m trying to publish the globalization development kit for 37 countries you see? they wanted it last week, when your sodding service was disrupted for 3 whole mornings in a row, so now I’m still here, wondering where I go to Read More about Massively Scalable Sun UltraSPARC IV Servers, looking out the window at a recalcitrent hoofer flicking her mane over a lovebite, wondering when you might be so good as to let me get online to see what Olga in the Ukraine needs me to do for her. it’s not too much to ask. not at 100 quid a month. I’m not even losing revenue. you’re just making me look like a dolt when I have to phone people to get them to tell me the number of the conference call I need to attend where I can’t update you on your email because I can’t currently read it and the update I sent out earlier isn’t there but the stuff you want is here but, oh, I’m sorry, you can’t have it because I’ve run out of pigeons.

there is one part of the message which directs me to the helpful web site, which of course is about as useful as telling me that if I can’t start my car I should take it to the garage, but I’m not going to mention that, because it’s such a lame horse of a target. dammit! couldn’t stop meself. I know, I’ll power cycle the modem. that’ll fix the exchange. it won’t be quite as exciting as power cycling the W2110z, when I put it face down on the carpet, sit a hamster on thegrill at the back and watch it whoooosh out the window as Sun Java Workstation Über Fan kicks into life making that noise for 10 seconds that makes everybody duck. ah, I remember getting Mike’s old IPX back in 1994 and thinking that was an object of desire, but that thing couldn’t make toast like this brushed-aluminum harlot. ooh, you are awful, but I like you.

one of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces

you hum it, I’ll play it. oh, I see, it’s like that. I got 1 thing to do today which is really 18 things which I have to put in 1 place, all chopped up and ready to go. I just had that lovely designer and the very lovely program manager give me everything I could ever wish for, and so I just need to extract the semantics and identify the local business requirements and goodness me, it’ll be like a barn dance where everyone drink’s Dad’s cider and falls into a trough with a pig holding their trousers over a bucket while Charlotte writes “feck!” in her web.

twould be troo if I could get down the 01603 exchange and just stick the 2 bits of chicken wire together that have apparently fallen apart and caused an entire city to lose internet access on and off for 2 days. I work from home. I’m 3 hours from the nearest office. Great. but it’s not me I’m worried about. Noone will believe me anyway, so I’ll just have to fit my entire 2 days work into an intermittent 2 hour window while some BT engineer has accidently enabled everything by squatting over a drain and conducting electricity through his dangling tools. From his tool belt. I’ll then have to send a hilarious email describing how I fell of my roof during a meeting of the Rod Hull fan club and so I’ve been offline for a bit and everyone will forgive me as they laugh uncontrollably into my performance review. No, the people who I’m really very concerned about are the ones who might have to get the dust sheets of their X5s and actually visit Tescos in person – rather than having the online order picked out by hand by Beverley Maggots, who’s washed her hands at least once this week and *thinks* that’s a Gala Melon – mingling with the chavs and mardy local gits from east of the city as they pick out their Organic Guacamole by squeezing in between Grant and Ashley who are sticking a Star Wars sticker book into the eyes of 4 year old David Rio Michael who’s standing up in the trolley tipping Walkers crisps over the side and pooing his pants just so he can get a slap and use it as an excuse to leave home at 14 and walk up and down my street scratching his name into the offside door of our Scenic.

quick check under the desk and I have 3 green lights on the Wireless Network 1250, which I’m expecting to all suddenly go off any minute just after Jensen Button has jump started from row 6 and everything will be irrepairably broke for the rest of the day. I’ll have conference calls of course, but I’ve got no idea what number to call as all the details are kept on my Sun Java System calendar, which is on the other side of my Cisco VPN client which is installed on my Windows XP which is running on my Sun Java Workstation W2100z which has a Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet card which has a ethernet cable coming out of it which is connected to my Netgear RP614 router which has a cable coming out of it which is connected to my Wireless Network 1250 modem which has a phone wire coming out of it which is connected to the first BT box on my wall which has a hamster behind it who has won a free holiday for 2 weeks or a telly or 50 quid cash, and he’s been calling a premium rate number for 17 hours and started chewing his own foot off to escape. aah.

it’ll all fall apart

right, quick shifty at me dual timezone clocks tells me it’s about, well, 2 hours til this stupid SonicStage software imports my mp3s so I can update my shiny fingerprint magnet Sony network walkman with some Bloc Party and some one-man mad mentalism from a underneath a bucket somewhere outside Cambridgecestershire. More importantly though, its about, well, 12 hours til I get on a patched up 737 courtesy of bargain airline EasyJet and flop over to Spain to spend two and a half weeks laughing like a madman on the beach as I think about the woeful assortment of project managers I’ve left behind to do all my rubbish stuff while I’m away.

they won’t do it though. I say it’s because I’m so frighteningly efficient that my projects look after themselves while I’m away. They even make small origami models of Menlo Park for people as they pass, and compliment them on their free Sun Education laptop bags. All that effort I put in the last 4 weeks. The selfless dedication I have to the success of the project. My children think I start work at 4pm, because they never see me after that. I’m always on the dog and bone, waiting for 50 minutes quietly in the corner and then suddenly getting IM’d and blurting out some incomprehensible gibberish that I just quickly nerfed from my iBull. Sam gave me a hug today while I was washing up the tea things and I said “aaaaaaah. what’s that for Sam?” and he said “because I won’t see you. you’re going to work now” and it wasn’t even a work day. He just thinks I disappear at that time and “do my calls”.

 

the truth is, things will go on without me and I’ll come back in 2 and a half weeks and I’ll login and I’ll IM someone and say “heyyyyy. I’m back!” and try and intimate a knowing kind of sideways nod and a wink in an instant message and expect them to somehow pick up on the fact that I want then to ask me about my vacation. Except they’ll just say “did you finish that roadmap for the countries?” and I’ll sink into my office chair and my tan will just instantly fade and the camera will suddenly zoom out above me while I’m looking up from my desk in the middle of a million identical desks and my mouth will be forming the words “heeeellllp meeeeee” but noone will hear me scream.

because I’ve left myself on mute. arse.

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