I have now been without email for four days & I am not in a good mood.* & I hope that the company/corporation/gang of thieves/festering lumps of toxic detritus responsible are all frantically selling their vintage Jaguars at nadir-approaching prices on eBay to hire mobs of SAS-trained security forces to protect them from their customers’ & increasingly ex-customers’ wrath.** Fortunately a lot of the best security forces are refusing employment from these epic bozos & indeed some are offering their services gratis as consultants to our side, suggesting the best sources of really really rotten eggs; extra-strength bubblegum that melts on contact & then adheres, still sticky, stronger than superglue; how to find out which dry cleaner & which load of customer items to add the red dye to & how to accomplish said addition; how to identify the CEO from the rest of the herd of suits dashing out the fire door & bolting for the car park—oh, & where to buy job lots of wheel clamps so if anyone gets to their car it won’t do them any good*** & other crucial guerrilla skills.
& this time next year the ex-CEO, still a trifle lumpy from extra-strength bubblegum residue, who is working as a car park valet at Monster Magniloquent Kitsch House Hotel, will one day catch the key flung by a supercilious Monster Kitsch regular & realise . . . it’s the key to what a year ago was his Jaguar.† SUCK IT HONEY BOY.
The other guys, eh, they can be graveyard shift shelf restockers at the local badly paid warehouse, I don’t care.
I’m not sure when these deranged ramblings will get posted. Blogdad did say he’d post today if I wrote something, but he does have a life, including startling complications like wife, children . . . dog. & it is Sunday. Yesterday I know he was busy†† but yesterday was a damp grey brainwipe for me anyway. It was probably partly the adrenaline from the Grand Matriarchy wearing off, but no email is a [insert language of extreme violence] & it took a day or so to sink in fully when the evil slimemoulds from the beginning of this post did NOT get their customers’ email back up again in a brisk & timely fashion & so it was yesterday I had the WHAAAAAT???, followed by collapse. Old-blog readers may remember I have ME/CFS††† & this is NOT a good personality to have ME/CFS with, which is doubtless part of why I have it, but when I crash I frelling well crash, & yesterday I crashed. Unnnh. Today is better but I’m still having some trouble with certain concepts like ‘keyboard’ & ‘language’.§
& SOME MORE CONCATENATE§§ TECHNO TRASH. My still-relatively-new iPhone, which I bought a year ago because the old one was old enough & crucially had stopped playing Audible§§§, well, they all have their little ways, don’t they? Our devices. This one has always been a trifle fey about text messages but it’s getting feyer‡. It only delivers text messages when it’s in the mood‡‡ & chances are, even if it lets them in, it won’t tell me they’ve arrived‡‡‡ Nor does it display them on the opening screen the next time I turn the phone on. This charming game can go on quite a while, so when I finally get suspicious & check the list, if there are enough new messages, including the WHY HAVEN’T YOU ANSWERED MY LAST 1,000,000?? ¥ ones, I may not plough through the bottom at all, & of course I have no idea of what or how many have been shunted off into the never-never land of Disappearing Text Space. Oh, & sometimes I can see a message on the text list . . . but it won’t open. Tra la la la.
First thing I did yesterday when I finished having my WHAAAAAAAAAT?? moment was print out all 1,000,000 ¥¥ pages of story-in-progress, & when I was working on it last night, on the laptop, which is also a diva but I’ll tell you some of those stories some other time, I was correcting the print version as I went. In, you know, handwriting & ink. Remember those? When are they going to start making IBM Selectric typewriters again???? I would sobuy one. Maybe two or three. In different colours. I could have them in different rooms. Lamps. End tables. Bookshelves (!). IBM Selectrics.
So. Yesterday. I was already out of my mind generally, or I was in a mind made of weird mushy neuron-free stuff, & I had no email & an iPhone more than usually possessed by demons. It might as well be the 1980s. ¥¥¥
It’s all the Borg, of course. But I don’t think the Borg would care about IBM Selectrics.
* * *
* You didn’t know I was capable of such gasp-provoking understatement, did you?
** I don’t stay in the understatement place very long. Too *(&^%$£”!!!! tiring.
*** You’ll have plenty of time because they’ll all be tripping over each other dashing for the wrong car, since the vintage Jags are all gone & these guys have trouble recognising a Hyundai from a tricycle
† Note that in this scenario all the bad guys are men.
†† Having that thing called a life
††† Myalgic encephalomyelitis/ chronic fatigue syndrome
§ Fortunately neither of these is necessary to walking/desperately stumbling after Genghis. Dealing with Genghis on bad ME days is . . . um. Well, I did say I was having trouble with the ‘language’ concept. Little old ladies with ME should not adopt GWHPs.^ He needed a home & I needed a dog. I do not repine. But bad days are bad.
^ & yes, Genghis’ ex owner shouldn’t have let me have him either. But I didn’t exactly tell him how old I am, & unless the light is at just the wrong angle my hair still looks more brown than grey,+ & I GUARANTEE I didn’t mention the ME to him. Nope. My responsibility.
+ When the light is at the wrong angle I look at least ninety seven
§§ I SWEAR this should be ‘concatenative’ but my dictionary disagrees. ME Eats Your Brain.
§§§ Audible? Nope. Not going there. Go ahead, delete the app & reinstall it. Ha ha ha ha ha. I’ll wait. Knock yourself out. Nope. Told you. Not going there. You’re going to reinstall it again? Jeez you’re fun to watch. How about if you reinstall a fourth time? If you’d go for a fifth I might win the betting pool down at the iPhone pub.
‡ which lives in the same bin as ‘concatenative’
‡‡ la la la la la la la la
‡‡‡ Unless it’s the middle of the night^ & it’s turned the ‘Do Not Disturb’ off again. Pre-setting do not disturb was a disaster: it didn’t turn on & then it didn’t turn off, including sometimes when I had turned it off manually. So now I do it every night [sic] before I go to bed^^. Occasionally when it’s bored it still turns it off. Sometimes only for one specific message which it clearly thinks is CRITICAL TO THE CONTINUANCE OF ORGANIC LIFE. It being an alloy of perversity & space dust its recognition function for such messages is not great. Usually they’re something like another bad LOTR joke forwarded on by someone who Knows Me Well. This could have waited till after my first cup of tea in the morning [sic].
^ Note that my definition of the middle of the night may not be yours
^^ When I remember. But my memory seems usefully & uncharacteristically to have taken in how less than optimum being woken up in the middle of my night is, so I usually do turn it on.
¥ Um. Not a good idea. 1,000,000 messages will probably just make me run away.
¥¥ Speaking of 1,000,000s of things
¥¥¥ I didn’t have ME in the 1980s