BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Allow me to quell your fears. This blog entry isn’t about what your dirty little minds think it’s about.  So there.

 Now, on with the story…

It was a weekend just like any other weekend, with the exception perhaps that it was Fourth of July weekend. However, since July 4th has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on this tale, we’ll stick with, “It was a weekend just like any other weekend.” All good? Terrific…

On this particular weekend like any other weekend I had been doing elebenty-gazillion loads of laundry just like any other weekend. However, I was finished with laundry, so I don’t guess it has any real bearing either, other than the fact that I had “specially washed” one of the O-springs garments sans fabric softener because she was on a mission to dye it a different color. Of course, what with the spring being a little to the young side for handling stuff like dye and hot water without dying the whole room, adult supervision was needed.

For the record, E K has me doing the laundry, but I don’t dye. Allowing me to dye something would be tantamount to allowing the o-spring to dye something without supervision.

Anywho… On this particular weekend we had also purchased a new computer for E K. Super fast, loaded with memory, storage, and all housed in a black case to match her shoes and leather wear. E K likes to coordinate, you see. Therefore, we were in the office. I was busily doing whatever it is that writers do when they are working on 57 projects at once. E K was playing Speed Sudoku… Or HALO 17: The Leather-Clad Bitch Edition… Or  hacking NORAD… Or maybe it was paying bills and checking her Facebook profile. I never can keep any of that straight. Either way, we were engaged in office type computer activities, and the spring was watching the toob — that is, right up until her program ended and she had a sudden, powerful desire to dye the aforementioned garment.

No… She didn’t try to do it herself. That would be way too predictable… Come on… You know me better than that…

Acquiescing to the Tween Urgency of the project, E K sent the child on a mission. That being to go into the basement and retrieve the large bucket we use for whatever sorts of things one might require a large bucket. And so, off the o-spring went to “haz a bukkit.”

Two minutes, seventeen seconds elapsed when we suddenly heard a door fly open, followed by a running child – the herd of elephants noise was then followed up by a herd of wildebeests bounding up the stairs toward the office. The louvered doors split, swinging inward with enough force to cause a sonic boom. The silence in the wake of the sound barrier being broken was quickly filled with a panting child.

Gasping for breath she yipped, “OhMyGoshIt’sHUGE!!”

I remained silent. I knew better than to get involved.

“The bucket?” E K asked.

“Nothuhbuuug!” Child-o-mine replied.

E K puzzled aloud, “The what?”

Our tween panted some more, then gulped in some air and yelped, “There’sAGiantBugDownThere!”

E K found this to be funny. So did I. But that’s not the funny part I’m here to tell you about.

So… E K says to the spring, “How big is this bug?”

“OMGIT’SHUGE!” the kid replies.

“Really?” E K says.

“YES!” the wild-eyed child tells her.

“It’s been raining,” the redhead explained. “It’s probably just a water bug.”

You see, our basement is an unfinished, leaky, storage/laundry hole in the ground. Whenever it rains, we get water, and maybe even some water bugs.

Now, as we know, for E K this isn’t a really huge issue. If it’s a bug she likes, she picks it up and moves it to a safe, out-of-the way, natural habitat sort of location, and then threatens anyone in the general vicinity with death if they even look like they might be intent on harming the insect. However, if it is a bug she doesn’t like it still really isn’t a problem – and she does, in fact, have a list of bugs she doesn’t like. It’s a short one, but it’s a list nonetheless.  Either way, in the event of the bug being on her hit list, she just puts on her patent leather cockroach killers and goes to work with a wicked gleam in her eyes and a smile on her lips. It’s pretty much the same as how she deals with men, except that as a rule, when it comes to men instead of insects, I’ve never seen her set one free, move him to safety, nor protect him from harm. Quite the opposite, actually… But I digress. This is about actual insects, not figurative ones.

The o-spring, however, hates ALL bugs. She fears ALL bugs. She would be perfectly happy for ALL bugs to be eradicated from the face of the planet. Hence the fact that she was now standing in the office hyperventilating.

But back to the dialogue…

“IT’SHuuuuuuuuuggggggeeeee!” the child repeated, not really placated by EKay’s explanation for its presence in the basement.

“Did you see it on the floor or on the stairs?” EKay asked.

“Onthefloor!” the short person replied.

The redhead shrugged and said, “Okay, well the bucket is on the shelf right at the bottom of the stairs.”

O-spring returned, “IknowIWasDownThere!”

“Well… Did you get the bucket?” E K asked.

The child thought for a second, then with the first inkling of calm she had shown since hurtling up the stairs, she delivered the punch line: “Wellllll… I SAW the bucket…”

Fifteen minutes later we held a funeral for the water bug. After we scraped him off the sole of EKay’s pump, of course. What with him being a water bug and all we flushed him. Seemed fitting.

After all that you have to wonder if he “Saw The Bucket” too… I’m thinking he probably did. Right before he kicked it.

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