Mostly Harmless

Makeovers

Disclaimer

One of the interns has hold of a large, shiny nut and bolt - which probably should be fastened through some critical component in the lab. He idly spins the nut up and down the bolt while he he sits at his desk and it makes an agreeable jingling sound to accompany his surfing industrious typing.

"Agreeable", that is, for about a minute. After that time it becomes monotonous. Then it begins to remind me of an animal in a cage too small, pacing up and down. At about this time Arnie Shepherd's leg starts up. I believe I mentioned way back that the office is earthquake proof; one consequence of this is that the floor vibrates like the skin of a drum. A good leg-twitch can transmit itself up every seatpost in a twenty metre radius. Confined to the office for a few generations we would probably acquire the ability to communicate with infrasaound, like elephants.

So I now have jingling from one direction and steady tremors from another. Output from a coredump seems to crawl around my screen and become disassociated from all meaning. What are these figures? 0xdeadbeef - what on earth does that mean?

- Thud thud thud, jingle jingle ... Brrrr thud thud, jingle jingle...

The caged animal must have a bell on it's collar. It seems to be eyeing me from behind the dense foliage of a SCSI packet structure. I try to move my mouse pointer but I have no idea what I am going to do with it when it arrives at its destination. The jingle is now as loud as the sound made by a convention of 500 chainsaw-wielding zombies on a luxury liner.

Suddenly in the corner of my eye I spot Ursula Resplandor heading purposefully towards the intern. Halleluja, I am not alone! However, I have watched this scene before. She will falter in the advance and make some angry but significantly oddball remark which will fail to move the intern. He will laugh, his fellow minions will laugh too, Ursula will retreat in disarray and the jingling will resume on a cosmic scale.

But as she passes me I am conscious of a scent of some hitherto unnoticed perfume - and around her eyes are distinct traces of makeup, applied with skill and economy. She goes right up to the intern and fixes him with a cold stare. The forehead is barely puckered, the eyes barely narrowed, but the effect is devastating. The intern's neck and head change colour from the bottom up like some funky GUI histogram warning of imminent memory exhaustion. Ursula holds out her hand and, receiving the nut and bolt without a single word, proceeds serenely labwards.

"Arnie, quit the leg!" I cry and, turning, I catch Donna watching after Ursula with an approving smile. Donna has taken to wearing rather chic glasses, the better to absorb Ursula's weighty copy of "The Compleat Cryptographer". She has also asked to take my Knuth home with her and I worry lest I will be separated from it forever.

Posted at 08:00AM Apr 24, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont  |  Comments[2]