BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Some of you have been asking how the “Coffee Talk” blog went over with my “College Girlfriends.” Well, I have to say, it seems that it went over well. Mindy shall be remaining Mindy, unless we slip and call her Muffy, which could possibly happen. I mean after all, the last day of classes she did haul off and show up wearing an alligator embellished polo shirt and packing a shopping bag from Whole Foods Market. However, the bag and its contents are fodder for a different blog. The point I am trying to make here is that we don’t have to call her Miffy (yet). She actually got a good laugh out of the “Coffee Talk” entry, as did Karen.

In fact, the two of them found it even more amusing than I had imagined they would… As in Laugh Out Loud funny… To the point of calling friends, relatives, and even writing to their congressmen to tell them they should read it.

Some of them did, and I now have a senator calling for an investigation of me. Something to do with “illegally purveying satire to the humor challenged.” I’m not quite sure how that is going to pan out, but I’m not really allowed to talk about it at the moment. All I can say is that my attorneys, Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe are on the case.

At any rate, much to my delight, because of a single entry on Brainpan Leakage, my college girlfriends effectively provided me with even more blog fodder…

Mindy topped the stairs, plodded across the mezzanine, then plopped down in her chair at the C4K “Coffee Talk” table. As she leaned back and slid down in the seat she let out an exasperated sigh.

Karen looked over at me, then at Mindy. “So, did you get a gun yet?”

“No,” Mindy replied, brushing off the gun reference as old hat.

“West county people,” Karen grumbled, shaking her head.

I picked up my cell phone from the table and checked the time. Mindy was actually running a bit late. We’d expected her a good ten minutes ago. Not only that, she didn’t look to be her usual Mindyish self. By that I mean, no polo, no sweater tied around her neck, no pearls, no Star-Make-A-Bucks… Nada… As a matter of fact, she was wearing a baggy t-shirt, her hair was pulled back into a short tail and the rest was covered with a baseball cap. I  studied the uncharacteristic look for a moment, then laid the cell phone back onto the table and nodded toward my newly arrived girlfriend.

“Casual Thursday?” I asked.

She sighed again. “You just wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had.”

I expressed an appropriate modicum of concern. “Anything wrong?”

“Can’t be much,” Karen grunted. “She’s sittin’ in her chair.”

“But look at her…” I replied. “I mean, slum city here…”

“Hey!” Mindy objected.

Karen gave her head a dismissive shake. “Finally dressing normal for a change. Besides, she still doesn’t have a gun. If it was real trouble she’d have a gun.”

Mindy tapped her fingers hard on the table. “Hey! I’m right here you two. I can hear you, you know.”

I turned my attention back to our disheveled cohort. “Yeah, okay, so what gives? Why the bad day?”

She breathed heavily. “Well, you know that blog you wrote?”

“Yeah,” I said with a nod, a bit of concern now creasing my forehead. “I thought you liked it?”

“Oh, I did,” she told me with a typical, animated Mindy nod.

“She still shoulda shot that idiot who was using the expired milk,” Karen mumbled.

“So what’s the problem?” I asked Mindy, leaving Karen to complain to herself.

“Well, I told several of my friends they should read your blog.”

“Okay…” I said, waiting for the other shoe.

“So, two of them emailed me about it,” she explained.

“How many did you tell?”

“Everyone in my email address book.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Roughly how many is that? I’m assuming more than two?”

“Not many,” she told me with a shake of her head. “Only three thousand four hundred and twelve people.”

“I see.” I shrugged. “But only two responded, so that’s your issue?”

“I’m still waiting on the others. The issue is what they said.”

“Okay, so did the two that wrote back to you hate it or something?”

“If they did, just shoot ’em,” Karen offered.

“You know, Karen,  everyone who reads my blog thinks you’re that killer woman on Burn Notice,” I said, glancing over at Big K.

“You mean the hottie with the gun?” she asked.

“I dunno,” I replied. “I’ve never seen it myself.”

Karen nodded and grinned. “I saw a commercial. Yeah. I can be her. I’m good with that.”

“Can we get back to my problem?” Mindy appealed.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said with a nod. “You’re right. So what’s the deal? Whaddid they say?”

“That’s just it. Not much. One of them said, ‘ewwww, what did corporate say?‘ And the other one just said, ‘what did corporate say?‘.”

“No ewwww on the second one?” I asked.

“That’s not my point.”

“Did you…” Karen started.

Mindy cut her off, “No Karen, I didn’t shoot them.”

“You should have.”

I shrugged again. “Okay, so what’s the problem?”

“These are funny people,” she replied. “They both have a great sense of humor. But all they focused on was wanting to know what the Star-Make-A-Buck’s Corporate Office said.”

“Are you sure they’re actually funny?” I asked. “Sometimes it’s easy to mistake an attack of gas for a smile you know. They could just be digesting some serious roughage or something.”

“I was pretty sure they were funny,” Mindy told me with a shrug. “But now I just don’t know. I think maybe they just didn’t get the joke.”

“What is it with you West county people?” Karen asked. “Not getting jokes that even a three year old can understand. Is something in the water out there affecting your brains?”

“Karen!” Mindy admonished.

“Hey, I’m just sayin’,” Karen replied with a shrug. “So… You want me to shoot ’em for you?”

I still don’t know if Mindy has heard back from any more of her friends, and I haven’t seen any news reports featuring Karen barricaded in her chair with a gun, so I’m pretty sure things are okay. Still, I hope Mindy remembers to let me know if she does hear any more from her funny friends.

I suppose it all depends on that West county water.

More to come…

Murv

We have a server based LAN in our house. I suppose it stemmed from being a computer guy for so many years, but since we have several systems, both desktop and notebook, it seemed logical to keep all of the shared files in one place. Over the years of remodeling, etc, CAT-5E has been threaded through the walls, high-speed switches mounted, wireless access points added for convenience, and the whole nine yards. Because of this, the computing power and peripheral device integration in our home has increased exponentially over the years, thereby becoming an important part of our lives where household management and even personal management of my profession is concerned.

Still, no matter how much computing, printing, scanning, or communications power all these electronic devices have, they are still nothing more than machines.

Then something happened that made me question that notion…

“Dammit…” E K muttered.

Her exclamation was followed by several angry sounding beeps, all punctuated by the staccato clicking of something patently plastic in sound. Several more beeps filled the air, then came a hard, bass chord that seemed to say, “stop right there!”

A frustrated yowl – much the same as one would hear coming from an angry Siamese feline – caught in The Evil Redhead’s throat, rumbling back at the noise as if a cat fight were about to ensue. Given the sound, my guess is that possibility was only off by a single letter, that being a K instead of a C followed by an at.

“DAMMIT!” she hissed, this time with far more feeling.

All of this was occurring behind my back – literally…

I was seated at my desk, answering email and generally enjoying my five minute break from being E Kay’s personal lackey. She’s occasionally generous like that. On Christm… I mean Katsmas, she even lets me have a whole 15 minute break, though usually not all at once. There are after all her needs to be considered, and they greatly outweigh my need for a break, or so I am told.

But anyway, I was just entering minute 2 of my serendipitous 5 minute break – the first one I’d been granted since Katsmas, mind you – and her grumbling started. I considered remaining quiet in hopes that she would forget that I was even in the room, but I knew it was a lost cause. E K misses nothing.

Resigning myself to the fact that I had no choice but the forfeit the remaining 3 minutes of my break, I spoke up.

“Oh High Exalted Queen Of All that Is,” I began – that’s what she makes me call her, you see – “What seems to be the problem?”

She let out an extremely frustrated sigh, then hissed back at me, “The network won’t let me access anything. It says I’m a threat.”

It was at this moment I realized our network was more than just a bunch of machines strung together by wires and high frequency signals. It had somehow become the thing computer scientists have been striving to create since the first faint glow of UNIVAC’s vacuum tubes.

I mean, just think about it for a minute… A pile of circuitry and wiring recognized the fact that E K is… well…evil… and it considers her a threat to the network. I don’t know about you, but I’d call that some pretty sophisticated Artificial Intelligence.

More to come…

Murv