BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Okay… For this one we need a little “reminder background.”

First, most – if not all – of you know what kind of books I write. If you don’t, well, then what the hell is wrong with you? I have a family to feed. Go out, buy my books, then come back and read this. I’ll wait for you…

{Insert Jeopardy Theme Here}

There… Much better. So, as you can see, in order to write dark novels about dark things – in particular serial killers and predators – one must do an enormous amount of research into same. Eventually it starts to get to you and makes you a little paranoid. This is exactly why I walk my kid to and from school. By the time I was in the second grade, I was walking myself to and from school, but that was a different time, and it wasn’t as scary – or, at the very least we didn’t know that it was scary. At any rate, the O-spring is way beyond first grade, but I still walk with her. That way, if a predator shows up, I can just kill the bastard and be done with it. ‘Nuff said.

Second – O-spring has a friend living nearby whose parents pretty much feel the same way, but don’t work from home like moi, so they don’t have the flexibility in their schedules to do same. No problem. O-spring, O-spring Friend, and I walk together. Problem solved.

Third – As I’ve noted before, O-spring is freakin’ brilliant. She’s in the Gifted program, qualifies for C4K classes and all sorts of stuff. And, on top of being brilliant she is “gifted”… What that means is that all that brainpower comes with a quirky personality, hyper-excitability, and things like that. Not ADHD, mind you. It’s just a whole different set of personality traits. Because of that, she can be a bit dramatic. Okay… A LOT dramatic. Most of the time. So, when she approaches something in a calm fashion, sans drama, it tends to take you aback…

Where is all this going? Well, I’ll tell you…

We were walking to school, and as per the age bracket, “Dad” being along is just cramping their style, so they tend to ignore the 800 pound, Bermuda shorts, ripped tee shirt, black socks with sandals, worlds greatest dad hat wearing parental unit trundling along behind them. While there is a certain sadness for me in that, I get it. It’s a phase that should end sometime around when she hits 30. All good. Hopefully I’ll still be around. However, by the same token it gives me an opportunity to observe them like a cultural anthropologist or something. They prattle on about the things that are important to their tween brains, and some of the conversations can be a bit off-the-wall.

This past Monday, for instance…

As we came within a block of the school, the overpowering scent of tater tots filled the air. Obviously, “hash brown nuggets” were on the menu for the kids who buy breakfast at school. At first, the O-spring was thinking she smelled waffles. Of course, that’s possible. I’m sure her nose is better tuned than my half-century old olfactory sense. Be that as it may, it’s where things went that took me buy surprise.

O-spring friend, we’ll call her Mary for anonymity’s sake, launched into a sudden rant. It wasn’t terribly heated, but it was definitely lively. The subject? Waffles. It seems that whenever they have “Breakfast for Lunch” at the school, the cafeteria refuses to provide them with plastic knives to cut up their waffles. Per Mary, they cite safety concerns… Howwwwwevvvveeeerrrrrr (trying to write tween here… forgive me) they have no problem at all providing them with a plastic knife whenever they have, oh… say something on the order of turkey and gravy. So, why not with waffles too?

O-spring responded to this with, “I just tear them into strips and dip them into the syrup.”

Mary went on undaunted, “But do they think we are going to do? They say we might break the knives and hurt ourselves. But we can have them with the turkey.”

“I just dip the waffles,” O-spring said again.

“And we can break anything that’s plastic. It could happen with anything, so why just the plastic knives?” Mary’s rant was still gaining steam.

As much as this diametrically opposed behavior surprised me, it was only the cake – I mean, after all, I could see the ramping up out of O-spring, but Mary is usually the calm one. The icing was about to be applied.

Mary started to launch into another litany of observations about plasticware and ridiculous school bureaucracy when my daughter stepped even further out of character. Gently placing her hand on her friend’s shoulder, in a soothing voice she said, “Calm down, Mary. You’re scaring the squirrels.”

I’m pretty sure I ruptured my spleen trying to contain the guffaw that wanted to exit my gut. After all, I didn’t want to be accused of frightening the rabbits. Apparently the wildlife was already tortured enough…

More to come…

Murv

I don’t consider myself particularly naive.

Now, this is not to say that I consider myself to be especially worldly wise either. I mean, I’ve been around the block a couple of times. Looks pretty much the same on the other side as it does here, except that their yards are a little more sloped. Unfortunately, that slope is pointed toward my yard and when it rains…

Well… We should probably address that in a different blog.

This one is actually a different story, from a different time. A time way back before I started getting paid (regularly) for splattering words across paper. In a sense it is even pre-E K. Not entirely, as E K and I were actually living together. It is just pre-E K in the sense that she was leasing me and had not yet exercised the buyout option in order to have full ownership.

Back then we both worked at a small computer and electronics repair company called MicroFix. We shared an office with our sister company, Computer Connections Technologies. I don’t know that either of them even exist anymore. I know MicroFix doesn’t because when I went to work for T&W they bought them out.

But again, I sort of digress.

You see, back in my Techie days one of the duties was phone support. It’s not that we were a phone support company, but it just kind of comes with the territory. People call with questions and you try to help them. It’s how you get paying customers who come back again and again.

Or, in some cases you can just delete the word “back” from that last sentence.

I should probably explain what I mean by that. I should also probably note that what you are about to read is true. I can make up some pretty crazy sh*t, but not this. Srsly.

I was sitting at my desk one spring day while working up a quote for a customer when the phone rang. So, being the service manager and since the phone was on my desk, I picked it up. (For the sake of the historical accounting, remember, this was pre-Windows. We’re talking about the days of MS-DOS 2.0.)

“Good afternoon, Microfix, this is Murv, how can I help you?” I said into the handset.

“Good afternoon,” a somewhat breathy woman replied. “I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about my computer. I’m having some trouble with it.”

“Sure. What sort of trouble?” I asked.

“It won’t come on.”

“I know this sounds silly,” I said. “But are you sure it’s plugged in?”

She chuckled. “Oh yes, it’s plugged in. It just blinks at me. I don’t get a prompt.”

“Do you have a hard disk or just a floppy?”

She sighed in a very odd manner, then breathed, “Hard.”

“Well, it’s possible you have a non-system disk in the floppy drive. Is it giving you any sort of error?”

“Yes,” she almost whispered between panting breaths. “That’s exactly what it says. Non-system disk.”

“Check the floppy drive and see if there is a disk in there.”

“No. There isn’t.”

“Okay,” I replied apologetically since it was looking like the problem could be a little more serious. “You might have a damaged boot record on the hard drive, but it’s hard to say without seeing it. If you have a system disk handy you could…”

“How would you fix that?” she said, interrupting me with a strange gasp filling in behind her voice.

“Well…” I replied, a shrug in my voice that even I could hear. “It really depends on how bad it is. We might be able to just Sys the volume and add the boot files back on. Or we might…”

She interrupted me again, her voice low and breathy. “More technical…”

“I’m sorry?”

“Tell me the technical stuff. How would you fix it?”

“Well… Umm… It depends. If it’s really bad we might have to do a low-level format.”

“How?” she breathed.

“It’s a process we invoke through a program built into the hard drive controller card.”

Her breathing was getting faster and shallower now and I couldn’t help but hear it.

“No… Tell me… Exactly… How…” she panted and now I could hear a faint buzz in the background.

I was beginning to think she was having a heart attack or something. Not only that, our connection seemed to be having issues, what with the buzzing noise and all.

“Well… We have to use a program called Debug which allows us to enter hardware level commands. We would tell the controller to access a particular portion of its onboard ROM and run a segment of code.”

“Yes…” she moaned. “How… more…”

“Umm… Depending on the type of controller and whether or not you have an MFM or RLL encoded hard drive we would type in g=c800:5 or g-c800:ccc, and that…”

At right about that moment she screamed and I heard a loud clattering noise that sounded like she had dropped the phone.

“Ma’am? … Ma’am?…” I said, somewhat alarmed.

I was just getting ready to yell through the door into the front office to have someone call the police, for fear that the woman actually had experienced some sort of catastrophic system failure of the human kind – be it a heart attack, seizure, or whatever. I figured I should stay on the line so they could trace the call or whatever in order to find her and dispatch paramedics.

Just as I leaned back and began rolling my chair toward the door, handset still to my ear, her breathless voice came back on the line.

With a moan and a satisfied sigh she said, “Thanks… Technical talk really gets me off… I’ll definitely be calling you again.”

When I hung up I just stared at the phone for a while. I felt so cheap and used, especially since I didn’t get her credit card number,  so I couldn’t charge her for the service.

Hand to whatever deity works for you, true story.

I am not kidding.

To this day I wonder if it ever showed up in Penthouse Letters, or whatever Playgirl Magazine equivalent there happened to be at the time…

More to come…

Murv