that was just a practice. I wanted to make sure that when I did that you all got to the side and climbed out. because it was a practice, you can all get back in, in a minute! but if it wasn’t a practice, I would be telling you that we need to go out that side door there, there, yes, that one, and straight out onto the grass. now, I know you’ll be all wet and it might be a bit cold for you, but we only need to go out there if it’s an e m e r g e n c y, ok? and I’ll tell you if it is, but right now, it isn’t, so very quietly, q u i e t l y, you can go back to whichever end you were and, use the steps, get back in.
what if someone has been sick? does we do that like she said if someone has just been sick, like, eeeeugh. well, no, that’s not really an emergency like she means, I mean, yes, you have to get out, but it’s not an e m e r g e n c y like she means. that’s just unpleasant, but you still have to promise me that you’ll get out quickly if someone does do that, ok? and then they have to take it all out and that’s why they shut it for, like, an hour or something? no, all day, they have to shut it all day to get it out. don’t they just gather it up and put it in the bin? no, no, they have to empty everything out, drain it, clean it all, fill it up again and clean all that and that takes all day. where do they put it? in the bin? no, no, they drain it, it goes down the drain. like taking the plug out. oh. do they have to do that now? no, that was just a practice. and being sick isn’t an emergency. I don’t think.
if you want to take it all the way back then you might as well be stumbling around the city with a three-quarter length mac, 15 camels and spikes in the front then grope your way along the arse end of town until you can smell the toilets and the sweat congealing on the walls. you can be sick just there. and then get him to look after your pint while you flail around like a halfwit with your eyes closed mouthing the words like you wrote them which you didn’t but you did in your head even if you can’t even hear them because they’re shouting them like, really loud, like when your ears were bleeding the other week when they did requiem. I know, just fall over and lie on the floor. it worked last week. what’s that? pardon? I dunno, what is it? it smells funny, go on, smell it. jeeeesus! I can’t breath! why’s my heart doing that?
never saw any of that stuff again but realised i dint know nuffin so got on with collapsing by the river and then tramping 2 miles without a shirt on into someone’s bedroom where they thought you, at least, would understand why visage were actually like, you know, genius. except you didn’t talk like that. in fact you didn’t say anything at all for 10 years and communicated through 4-tracks and scrabble which was a lengthy, but obviously, most profound process. no. it was rubbish. there’s the river. it’s all dark.
there’s a steady stream of them now, appearing from nowhere like the shopkeeper and scurrying up the road to the new bar and grill where the fountain used to be except it didn’t used to be there it used to be where our neighbour’s house is so really they should have called it the doctor’s surgery bar and grill or something which would have be historically much more accurate and would have made for a much more interesting illuminated sign draping over the flint wall onto earlham road. there’s one kitchen over there and one kitchen over here, but they seem to make the things that come in huge trays covered in tinfoil in the kitchen over there and then carry it out the back and 50 yards up the road to the kitchen over here for some reason. maybe they don’t have a huge oven on this side of the road, although it smells like they do when you’re walking back from the city and you hit the corner of the health centre and you get that smoked/grilled/charred/incinerated smell wafting up the road, past the back gardens and open bedroom windows of the next terrace. which is nice.
I sat on a bench outside the nat west and gave up for a while when it was still hot and people were masticating over some gregg’s pastries. they do them in the round here so you can never really see anyone else which is normally a good thing as they’re all inbred and have diabetes apparently so you do have to twist your back around to cop a look at today’s detrius. sometimes there’s some abstract kind of point to all this, but normally it degenerates into a blurred convulsion upon witnessing a family from heartsease who appear to have not seen a pie for weeks or a can of coke and so are gorging like trough-dwellers and dripping body parts onto their guts. take me to the hospital.
sticky up in the morning and all thick with vegatables and crushed beetles I stumble into the den and with a swift half of John Bull I’m gawping at Bomb Jack for 3 and a half hours until I’m round the clock and Dave is getting very grumpy sat on his spike in the corner where the others are blowing smoke rings into the night with ginsters and mccoys on tap. I don’t know what was in that stuff but it did the job, even in the rain, when it all dripped down your back like a spikey duck with nails in it’s boots and an old lumberjack shirt with the sleeves pulled off. remember theatre of hate? go on, just shake your fists out at right angles for a bit while you stomp around Pennies with a crowbar down your trousers which are halfway up your leg and then turned up for good measure. 17 rum and blacks and I never felt a thing. it was only when I wasn’t allowed to put my head on her antimacassars that it struck me as ridiculous, but now of course I’d kill for it even though I could do without the Camels and Coke.
I do have a picture of it somewhere that’s far too scary for small children which is probably festering in another life somewhere under a pile of old plastic nameplates from Watchmoor Park and business cards with japanese on the back that I never used having never been there or met any japanese on business although I was assured at the time it was really the thing to do. that’s probably when it started going, being the sedentary sloth in the call centre while British Gas were poking thier Ultra 2 with a stick and I was secretly passing it onto hardware support in CMS and running off for a 32plus.
two and a half inches of colour and almost 497 to review and critique, like it’s some tiny tots culture show on speed, I’m gauging out the eyes of urbanites with a rusty balloon and projecting life experiences onto a whitewashed lockup in Baslidon, where we’ve collected the lives of the south and kicked them into the corner by an upturned banana crate and a discharged fire extingiusher, as the detrius of the summer collects under our fingernails and we scrape it away with the end of the kitchen devil we’re about to cut the brie with.
you should allow yourself 3 and a half hours to complete at least 2 of these tasks and assume that you’ll be hanging inches from a wet cleric at some point, where the wires meet the trees and the plastic tokens are reserved for the fat ladies in heels who are trit-trotting across the car park like some jaded gibbons in drag. there’ll be a point where you inclip yourself from the earth and will scrape your ligaments on a moon crater where bill schmidt or whatever his name was collected enough rock to build a pretty nice moon rockery in the front garden where the water just floats about instead of cascading serenely over the stones. he was a scientist, you see, not an astronaut. that’s your trouble. you’re an idiot, not an astronaut.
an a clear day last week we saw Jupiter and four moons but I didn’t get any of that, so I’m sticking with the carp that gummed my fingers and the airport pole with the dead man’s hooks on. 3 hours later the props are spinning, so let’s get out of here. we left a cup of coffee on the chest of drawers and turned into bad cheese. that’ll learn me. hahaha.
nahaahah. stop ut. naahahaaeah. waas at? thaas a chair innut. waas at for? what? thaas a chair. thaas fer sittun stoopud, innut? neeehaahaha. I wanna go on the flyun chairs, dunt I. come on. aaaah, goo orn. for me. nah. I’m gonna get suffun else to drink. int they got export?
notwithstanding the mammoth packing task waiting in the upstairs bedroom and the live chat waiting in the office, in French, we troop up to chapelfield to check out the travelling fair that never seems to travel anywhere except maybe round the ring road and back to where it was last time there was some civic event which was probably last month but it feels like last week but we normally forget about them until it’s too late and we’ve taken rolls and capri sun to Waxham instead where there’s not enough wind for the peter powell stunt kite but enough to pull the windbreak out of it’s moorings even though you spent 2 hours crushing your palms against the 6 wooden stakes wondering why the hell you don’t have a mallet but you know that anyway.
we saw the usual unfolding containers that started out as badly painted boxes on wheels and unfolded into spectacularly unpleasant painted deathtraps on wheels which at least one of us thought looked like it might actually be fun all things considered while the rest of us instinctively touched our limbs, subconsciously musing on life wihout them following a tragic accident on the swirling bench ride that left us traumatized for life but never made it bigger than the local 6 o’clock news whereas if it had happened at Alton Towers there’d be questions asked in the house probably blaming video games and crack cocaine for something totally unrelated. naturally we did the rounds twice to check out the awfulness and succumbed to a couple of experiences that were about as exciting as standing on badly balanced milk crates for 2 quid each and oh joy, we also spent 2 quid each on hooking a plastic duck, brown with algae and age, and now we’re the proud owners of 2 inflatable aliens in David Beckham Manchester United shirts with purple heads that do a really annoying squeaking noise when you move their arms which someone has been doing for the last 2 hours while I’ve been trying to finish the design framework for the inernational rollout of the integated telesales program across the global sun.com sites.
we’re going to a stay in a monastery in the Dordogne on Thursday.
not sure what’s happening there. got everything done by 12 and now I have choices. take look out the window and you’ll see it’s one of those days where the tarmac outside St Peter’s has gone crumbly round the edges and sticks to the bottom of your flip flops so maybe it’s a good day to run around the ring road with a sponge. but no. it might be just about enough to stagger to the riverside and then launch into an embarrassing hill climb with arms flailing around like a demented ape followed around by a fat lothario with spiderweb tats and an uncomfortable chin. but it’s just a bit too late for that now. there’s even a chance that you could pick up where you left off up the city and scuttle around the poundstretcher shop and the bus stop catching glimpses of local dolts with their stomach sticking out and knock-off after shave wafting out the in door of chapelfield (St Stephen’s exit). jingle jangle
everybody is out. it’s thursday. I mean. you’ve got the keys but you can’t quite bring yourself to fire up the scenic and head off to neverland, even though you said you’d have a go at it when you had the chance. go on, look again. 24 degrees, blue sky, loads of real people doing things out there like having a life and talking nonsense about licensing hours and cheese and parking on the residents parking spot in their taxis with the window open and a scotch egg on the passenger seat. you should be doing that. but you’re not. you’ve got a meeting in 2 and a half hours so you’re just going to stay cemented into that box, scribbling drivel into this client and then you might go get a ginsters and read the NME in the darkness of the kitchen. at least you’ll get out the house to the shop down the road for 2 minutes. that’ll do. then you can come back upstairs and watch files uploading for another hour or so until sleep apneoa kicks in and you scrape yourself of the carpet just as the phone rings and then you can dribble in the receiver for the next 3 hours thinkng about how you never have time to get out these day
that should be on. I mean, there should be a screensaver or something, not a vsync test on input 1. wait, I guess she’s done something and just only half closed it down or something so I could probably just wiggle the laser around a bit and wake it up. oh. anyway. I’ll just press all the keys on the keyboard at the same time, that’ll do it. right. oh. I’ll just turn it off and on again then, that always works. ok, right, that looks alright, so, what should we play for the next hour or so?
hang on. UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. what the hell is that? I mean, I recognize a blue screen when I see one but that’s normally because nv_disp has blown it’s top because I tried to clock a 7900GT to 700/2000 or something, not a shouty message like this one. so, hang on, if this was Solaris, I’d, um, I dunno. think. go, on, back it the mists of time when you sat in front of a Sun Ray or an Ultra 2, or an IPX, or a Sparcstation 1+. you know, when you sat on the live call transfer desks in watchmoor park and pretended that, when British Gas phoned up and said that they were losing 10000 quid an hour because Oracle has decided to take it’s ball home, you knew what to do next and said some old rubbish about mount volumes and striping. come on, think about all those CMS tickets you picked up on the warranty support desk from cheap-but-valued support contract holders who had just got a sparc 10 and couldn’t get the floppy disk to load a cdrom. there must be something you used to say to them that is probably relevant now.
how about, er, f s c k? would that help? probably. on Solaris. you could probably run lots of other really useful things like format, partition and mount that were in that manual you got on that training course when you were that student doing that sunsolve online stuff. except this isn’t Solaris, is it? no, it’s windows XP, which you you treat with the same caution as you do the Megane Scenic – as long as it’s getting you to Tescos, you don’t look under the hood – so what are you gonna do now? look it up on google? well, you’ve still got the w2100z sat over there which you could use to do that, but it’s past midnight now and if you fire that thing up at this time, you’ll wake the whole street. right, no, you’ll just have to GUESS what to do next. so, what the hell does UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME mean then. um, my filesystem is f**ked? hell yeah! probably! is that bad? er, you work it out. only 5 years worth of family photos and your 2500 cds ripped onto that baby and now you’ve probably lost them all. is that bad? is it? did you back it up recently with that external drive you bought specifically to back it up should something like, ooh, i dunno, a filesytem error happen? mwuhahahaa.
ok. I’m guessing I have to boot this thing up some other way and then do something with a command prompt? getting warm. ok, I should have an XP cd somewhere then? very warm. boot off the cd and then do some kind of repair thing? ooh! burning now! right. ok. I’ll take a look in this drawer behind me which has all the cdroms that have been anywhere near this machine and hope that the copy of XP I find is one with a printed logo on it, not a permanent marker scrawl saying something like //|nd0//5 XP cr4ck on it. aha, Dell recovery disk. I hope that’s analagous to Dave’s recovery truck. let’s see. hmm. right. ok. not I dont want to install windows again. no. I said no. reboot. ok, right, aha! options! that one has the word ‘repair’ in it, so I’m going to select that one and see what happens. ooh, safe plus command plus headache plus sweaty palms. that sounds about right. let’s see…oh. a command prompt. er…
having done help everything about 17 times and tried to remember what each one did, I gave up caring and just ran one which sounded like it should work, although it would probably format my brain and pass my pin number onto some bloke in russia. chkdsk. ok then, chkdsk /p. oh dear, if the next 98% takes 5 minutes for each 1% I’m in trouble. aha, yes, I know it’s broken, I want to fix it. ok, chkdsk /r. I says something about ‘recovering’ data. not sure what it does with it. put it somewhere else? just let me know it’s recovered it? ah well, whatever. chkdsk /r. <return>
I woke up about an hour later just to catch the progress meter go from 50% up to 75% and then promptly back down to 50% again before sitting there for about an hour before it went to 51% just to have me think it was actually doing something. I’d had enough. I pressed the big button on front for about 3 minutes just to make sure I’d really turned it off. disaster. I’ll have my morning tomorrow on the phone to Dell support walking through the whole experience with a 23-year-old warranty support engineer who’s probably just come off the phone to British Gas and really can’t be arsed to help me out. I should be finishing off my globalization review then, dammit. right, I’ll just give it one last chance before I slope off to bed.
press. click. buzz. ping. It didn’t get to ping before. oh. I love you.
I’m guessing it was chkdsk that finally got things straight, but I really don’t know. in any case, everything is fine now and I’m spending the rest of the day copying every single byte of data on this drive onto a magnetic tape by hand with a pair of tweezers. I’m at 0.00000000001% at the moment and it’s not moving very fast.
sliding uncontrollably to the end of the year we suddenly find 173 project plans and strategy documents from 2004 that actually are still relevant because that idea was the best idea ever we just haven’t done anything about it yet and competitive analysis of other comparative platforms that might exist or look like it from the URLs I just looked at in the last 2 minutes on that thing you sent me on email and feedback documents that we put together to say we’d done something because you didn’t tell us what you wanted us to say so we presented 17 questions like ‘what do yo want us to say’ but in such a way that it’s relevant. forever.
leave it to me. there’s nothing I like better than comparing the relative design merits of how the FireFox themes deal with the network activity icon while I try and upload a 2k spreadsheet to the collabspace after midday. 17 times. and then doubling up with IE when I dig out a 400 meg openoffice presentation with screenshots of the whole internet and think that the couple of hours that that will take to eventually fail will give me time to work out whether the windows logo in the top-right corner is actually moving or not. it’s borderline exciting working out whether your upload will fail cleanly or not – meaning that after 4 mesmerizing hours staring at a spinning globe something times out and apparently there’s no resulting document uploaded, but in fact it is there, it’s just not going to let you find it right now, so why don’t you just go ahead and try for another 4 hours and by that time, I’ll have found it and you’ll have 2 copies of it in there. you gonna delete one? how do you know it’s not just a pointer to the same thing, eh? eh? dare you.
to be honest, if I’d started doing this 6 hours ago like I said I would I’d have finished by now but I do kind of like wallowing in the misery of upload stasis. its a lifestlye choice, not a chore. douglas coupland has probably written a book about it, in monotype font.
well I didn’t know about it either but apparently this is the top priority now so let’s just work on a level of effort and commit to getting this done before the end of the week even though I know that bit doesn’t exist but it doesn’t matter because if you can just mock it up then that means it exists so there’s no need to actually implement it and why on earth do you need 4 other people just to get that bit from here to go over there and it doesn’t matter if it’s only 2k, it’s the fact that it’s the milestone we’re driving to that matters, so just get someone from the office to turn it into spanish and then we’ll get back to the thing I just thought of that you haven’t designed yet because you haven’t read my mind for some reason.
I’m sorry, I just don’t understand that bit, because that’s not what I do, so i’ll let you tell me how long it will take but whatever you say won’t be soon enough and anyway even though I’ve just admitted I don’t know what I’m saying you still have to do it so you might as well drop everything on top of the stuff you’ve already dropped and we’ll work on plan v79 get make sure we can align all activities and synchronize our choreography around our timelines and everything will be ok as long as you can prove to me that what you’ve just done is making money because it’s got your name on it now which serves you right for being so good at something whatever it is that you do
can you meet yesterday to go over the things I haven’t told you about yet?
