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?
I won’t be going out again for a while anyway so what’s to say that we can’t just have a week where you just sit in a dark room – like you do all day anyway – and work out what it is you’ve been doing for the last 5 years and then just do a presentation or something so that at least you can say you’ve thought about it really hard even though you know that it’s based on an ecommerce deliverable that doesn’t even have goalposts and a posiedon-sized mandate to deploy on the partner platform so actually, what we’re saying is that we know it’ll never happen but we’re saying it will in 2007 so that we can score at least once even though we’re ending up considering that we just do what we were doing 5 years ago anyway and just let everybody else do whatever they like, as long as we’ve collaborated on that decision and that, well, it’s their decision, not ours, even though we might actually be one and the same thing these days, and you know, I might just want to do something else.
tweak that thing you did before and we can use that anyway because it’s not really changed, right? I mean that’s still valid, right? well, if we say so, it’s valid. I’m not really sure whether that means it’s desirable, sustainable, or even implementable, but it’s certainly believable and of course, it’s got loads of pictures in so it’s also undeniable so I’d suggest we park this in the repository, put a link in the email, and then we’ll get together to work out what we’re doing next year instead before we find that we’re sucked into the black hole of interoperability or tripping over the cracked pavement of platform alignment or just getting a nasty chaff on the thigh of ARPU. either way, I’d say we call this an opportunity and just deliver a load of stuff. people like that.
that’s supposed to be 470 but if you make it 488, well, what do you expect? and I know it says 685, but that really means 1350, don’t you get it? well, I only paid 200 sovereigns for this and I spend ages sticking that whizzy contraption on top with toothpaste so I’m not about to start rupturing it’s spleen all over the squeakers when they set me back a couple of ponys in the first place. I spoke to this bloke who said that is was bound to happen anyway and so I should just put it all back together and drive out to stansted or something with a packet of bran flakes and a sponge and maybe we’ll get to 1500 after that optimization thing renders me useless for 30 minutes and fries my trousers at the roadside.
I mean, I specifically shelled out on this thing so that I could break it on purpose, but I’m not quite ready to do it yet because I haven’t really actually used it yet other that that time I crept up behind a mexican in the dark and punctured his trumpet with a kitchen devil. oh, I did also clamber up a particularly greasy pole just to see if I could look up my own dress, but in the end it was only to see if we could all just stop stuttering around in the snakepit and maybe crash the truck across the border. of course, there was that time in Russia when I stepped on a truncheon and blew the gaff, but in terms of the rates I was looking for, that seemed pretty feeble, so I cranked it up to 520 and tried the 1990 final, but they still missed and so I’m back to lying down on the chair mat with my sony ericsson and blathering about component deployment when I’ve only got about an hour left to get this stupid thing sent out.
yeah, so, like, essentially its like a, well, you know, you can just go do this right? try and think about it. it can be a really useful tool to drive the concepts and describe the real scenarios and investigate the problems we have along the way, right? or maybe you could have some intellectually overbearing dissection of the whole genre in relation to what you actually do when you sit munching doritos and hacking e8s which is porbably as valid an argument as saying that we can rationalize our toolbox while we add about 3 more and then just see how the whole thing scales when we drop the bomb onto the product IA and step back while the korean xerox machine goes into overdrive with dayglo ink and clown music in the background while a sober dutchman just sits in the corner saying ‘what the hell?’ to a box of matches that might just be struck up on the big fat cigar you’ve been saving for this moment. click. pull. remember that in the end the way that things are set up right now means that we can be totally random and we’re actually headed in that direction and however polite we are about scraping the business intelligence from under your chatting fingernails then actually you’re just going to have to respect the fact that we’ve already defined your key purpose today so thanks for your question, but you’re not allowed to ask that so get back in your hole and try buying something for once you cheapskate.
it does that to you. and I’m not even in trouble, except with myself
eeuw. that looks like bits of breakfast from 3 weeks ago. here, give a poke with this stick, go on, swish it around a bit. hang on, she’s having a shower now, wait up. aah. there, you see. knackered. let me rummage about a bit and see what the policy is on this before we go diving into the big yellow book for a1 or aaa or 5star or buster or some other made up word with ‘rod’ in it. looks like, erm, hang on, oh. ok then.
65 pounds with vat. ok, so is that 65 pounds altogether? yes, with vat. you mean plus vat? yes 65 pound with vat. you mean 65 pounds not including vat. yes, that’s what I said, 65 pounds with vat – you have to add vat. right, so how much is that? 65 pounds with vat. you’re not going to tell me are you? 65 pounds with… yeah, ok, just come this morning and I’ll work it out, I mean, I’d do it myself but you’ve got all those nozzles and things and you already smell like rancid cheese probably. no offence.
spoilt the morning already anyway. got lots of things backed up but I guess I’ll just watch out the window for you and your pipes to appear and then I’ll hover around behind you like I might have something to contribute and just ask the occasional question about it, throwing in words I think that are appropriate but I don’t really have a clue about but you’ll just get on with it with the occasional trip back to the van because you’ll need a P17 grommit for this one cos nobody said it was a victorian and the standing is dropped so the ceramic floor is probably dust which will probably be another 32 pounds. with vat. or something.
of course I can see you with your wrists out like that. you must be on the way to john lewis to pick up your filials. but back on the plot it’s got her very upset about the yellow lines and the torrential halfwits who career over 5 year olds to drop theirs onto the pavement. I’m stood here waiting for miss 1983 and I count 4 of you who should be lined up in Tescos and ridiculed with wet fish by some kind of extreme conservation society. suffice to say you are your own demographic determined by the container you’re in and that when the kidprint revolution comes, ours will be plastering a4 tickets under your rain sensitives and giving you the evils. the sun is out and I know you’ve probaby got a half shift up the ozzy or you’re late for a 9 oclock with Derek but you see we care less so we’re gonna stab your radials with titanium corkscrews and watch as your withered legs talk to your withered brain and try and get 2 and 2 to make a bit less than 5. 1 ton, 1 son. it’s not an entirely level playing field. I wouldn’t mind so much if you were actually concerned rather than just plain lazyarsed scumbags but that’s what you are. you’re worse than the pesky pavement cyclists. oops, there goes mad woman with the permit. all gone, love. come back tomorrow. nice coat.
