A new month, but within that new month, a new day! And within that new day, 24 times in fact, a new hour!
What a deal. Constantly renewing hours, on top of that, fresh days delivered (you guessed it) daily, and if you screw up these 8760 hours, well, you get a new year to try it all again.
Makes the term "second chance" utterly meaningless in my books,
So how do I get myself into situations like this afternoons where my mobile rings -
I'm at work, in my cubicle, boss to the left of me, boss' brother to the right of me, it's a sort of constant monitoring system that Orwell probably wrote off as too outrageous - "the readers will never go for this, George. You've got to tone it down. As if people will believe that an employer would be reading every word an employee wrote, blocking their access to informational resources, plus listening in to telephone calls. Soften it up a it George, we do want to sell a copy of this book before we actually get to the year it's named after!"
(Little editor humour there for the publishers. You've gotta cover all the demographics, hey!)
Anyway, I see the call is from Number Withheld, a year ago I would have ignored it, like a firewall telling me some unknown app is trying to access the outside world - block it and see what fails! Just as in the computing world, if my Manager can no longer print her tri-colour pie charts then probably the app I banned was necessary, I unblock it. And so with unknown phone calls. Ignore them and see what emails I get, what physical mails, faxes etc come in.
But I'm trying to be Professional now, with the capital P. Offering support for small business computer owners is lucrative and beats the half dozen clients I've accrued over the last five years who all want to spend less than a hundred dollars to repair their $400 eight year old boxes. Business Owners will happily spend what it takes to get their systems working again.
And as a grimy wizard who tinkers with the magic boxes, I can charge quite outrageously to implement a series of steps I found on Google. Yes before I go on, a word from my sponsor. Or should be. I'd be a bum without Google. I mean, you know they now track disease outbreaks in the States by looking at the spread of google searches for "cough cold chest" <ok that bit was true but I'm about to drift off into bad prose here. Sorry folks>. I mean, noone believed in techniques like that until Bernard Ohlman released on YouTube his straight-to-cam-to-Youtube speech that cited Prague as the site for an outbreak of Feline flu crossing to human.
After the local SWAT team had demolished half his house and the Norwegian Forensics lab had gone through his hard drive intensively for two weeks, the Swiss government finally concluded that 14 year old Bernard was not in fact a terrorist but just a boy who could use the tools he had been using since he was three in a way noone else had yet thought of.
After that, governments around the world tried to take over Google, all met with zero success. Open source became a household word. After failing to privatise, governments became google's friend, offering the already cash-rich search gods things they could not access before. Telecommunications networks already rolled out and waiting. Google poured back, upgrading networks in countries that had no commercial viability before. But with information now being the number one resource, anywhere with a population was valuable. 56k upgraded overnight to T1 in the pacific islands, causing a meltdown in the local pirate DVD industry that had profited off local's inability to download new movie and songs. Power went to the people, for the hundredth time in the century, and as usual it had its good and bad results.
<ok end bad prose. Sorry>
Anyways, point of story was I answered a call, a voice said
"It's Phil here."
"?"
"Phil, from (where you live)"
bugger. Been avoiding him for weeks.
"I need your car keys."
Just like that. Not please, or "is it okay if...", but "I need your car keys." All i could think was
"I need a week". How pissweak. I know
"Don't you want to know how I got your number?"
"Not really/" The only half decent non-submissive thing I said in the phone call. Basically a dude has just rung up and asked me for my car keys, for a car he got out of me in non-normal circumstances. i.e. he was pissed and leering, I just wanted to get away from his creepiness.
Anyways, a deals a deal, if he wants to accrue major negative karma let him. The car is doing nil for me at present. I have thought of selling the motor in the next few days but fuggit.
It seems like the little red sports car's days are over.
I guess I could add that Phil was rude about S, called her "flighty", but when have I used that as a reason to criticise someone. In fact I have gotten so used to living in a circle where I just assume most of my friends see me as a doormat for my choice of mates, and my mate as a gold-digger, that I think I take some slights too lightly. I filter a lot of the slurs from other junkies through the "jealous because they want free gabo" filter, but when straights like Phil do it, I perhaps should be more offended. I mean, at least my choice of a date speaks English!