never gonna use your starters gun

Oh boy. This is a synopsis of the past week:
Sick. Workin. Not working. Workin. Still sick. Still workin. Can't get a fucking doctor's appointment in this backwater suburb. Still workin. Read The Stars My Destination. The hype isn't hype, it's all justified. Sleeping lots and playing WoW lots. Thassit.

Music Made for Girls

So yeah I've been on an adventure the last few days. Saturday I did a shift at the Malvern NAME OF COMPANY store, then another on Sunday. I was supervisor and cash controller and I sort of intentionally 'misplaced' fifty dollars worth of two dollar coins. It's not my fault the cash float was 50 bucks higher than it should have been. Well, okay, it probably is my fault. But at least I didn't steal it.

Here, have a video: The sound's a little low on that one but fuck does it rock.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon while I'm working at Malvern I get a call from my store asking me to work at another store. Which I was cool with because otherwise I'd be at my store until nine tonight setting up the Christmas promotional shit. The caveat was I'd have to travel into the city and out again to get the codes and the keys to open the store in the morning. So after leaving home at around seven in the morning and working flat out for eight hours I finally got home at around five thirty.
Segue to this morning. Six o'clock at the Galleria store, I've worked there before but never supervised. There's people everywhere getting the Galleria ready for the day's trade. And they're all looking at me because I'm standing outside the store and the alarm is going crazy. I'd been given a code for the alarm, but it didn't do anything. Eventually Lizzie from Queen Street comes down and punches in a code for us. Apparently the alarm company called a girl who works at the store but she couldn't get through because, you know, the alarm was loud as all fuck. So she called Lizzie and Lizzie came down and punched the code in. Found out later it wasn't my damned fault.

Have another video. Submitted without comment.
Anyway I ended up having a really good day at the Galleria store. It's different working for people who realise that humans are fallible and don't do retarded shit like ask you to do more than you can manage in order to get 'results'.

Breaking and Entering

So this morning I forgot my keys. I actually remembered them, but by then the door was closed and it was too damned late. I considered knocking on the door but it was five in the morning and both the guys had to work today so I decided they probably needed an extra hour sleep. I figured I could either jimmy a window or climb up to one of the second storey floors and get in through there.
So I get home after my shift, go around to the lounge window and simply opened it and climbed in. Good thing our neighbourhood has zero crime.

Then there was the deaf dude who came in this morning right when we opened and spilled coffee halfway across the floor. Crazy old bastard.

This Week's Stupid Customer

Yesterday at work I had a strange request from one of the girls on register. We get a lot of customers who apparently are on expense accounts or some nonsense because they're always asking for receipts to record their purchases. Fair enough. But yesterday Poy asks me if she can modify the contents on one of the receipts. I'm pretty sure it can be done, but it's involved and we never have enough people on shift to actually complete our real work without me pissfarting around with the touch screens for five minutes. So I asked what the problem was.
"I accidently pressed the ten dollar button instead of the five dollar button."
"What? You gave her the right change yeah?"
Then Poy's voice drops to this tiny whisper.
"But it says the wrong amount on the receipt."
I looked at the woman, who woulda been in her forties, and just sorta dropped my jaw but didn't say anything. I asked to look at the receipt then explained to her that the slip shows the correct amount of money spent, regardless of how much she actually gave us. She looked at me like she thought I was lying to get rid of her, but left without saying anything. Seriously.
Poy giggled about it after the woman was gone though. You know, I thought if someone was smart enough and had enough responsibility to have an expense account that they'd be able to... you know... count to ten. What the hell?

Ugh. Seriously, I'm not allowed to make posts about how stupid my boss is. Or else that's all I'd talk about because she's pretty fucken stupid. So I won't. Goddamnit.

kek

Supposed to be at some shitty meeting for work tonight. But I'm not gonna be. Because I'll be asleep. Fun fun.

Defensive

Fuck you! I'm not being defensive.
Okay... okay so I am being defensive. I'll stop it.

Yeah this stuff isn't supposed to be 'good'. It's intentionally overly dramatic. I'm messing around with ideas, exercising the words, and exorcising the stuff that needs to get out of my head. Still. It does have certain something to it huh?

more fiction shut up

They faced each other, seated and glaring across the table. Danburg wore the typical clothing of a private detective, a little more expensive than it should have been, the line and cut precise and made to fit. It was all clean too, thought Gribaldi. He didn't like that. "Why did you do it?" Danburg wavered, looking down at the glass. It was full. "Most people. Before they can succeed, they gotta touch bottom, yeah?" Gribaldi gritted his teeth and listened, hoping it didn't show. He carefully unclenched his jaw muscles, thankful Danburg was focusing more on the glass than him. "What's that supposed to mean?" Gribaldi's clothes were dirty, rumpled and slept-in. Which was funny, he thought, considering how long it had been since he'd last slept. "Look at you, Officer Gribaldi..." "Detective." The reaction was instinctive. Danburg's face raised in a question before continuing. "... Detective Gribaldi. Look at you. Once we're done here, you'll go home to your wife, eat some steak, maybe get a raise and just how low you sank will be a memory. You aren't actually at the bottom, but you have a taste to remind you how good your life is." Gribaldi blinked slowly and felt a bead of sweat travel down his face, hang briefly from his cheekbone then slide down the curve of his jaw. His eyes fluttered open and he searched Danburg's face for similar effects. Was he sweating more? Was he losing? "Drink up Danburg. Or have I won? These are your rules. You have to follow them as well." "Patience, Officer." Danburg swallowed. Gribaldi thought, hoped, the movement looked painful. "Right now I am as far down as anyone can go. That's what I've been doing. I've fucked and killed my way across this state to see how far down I can get. And now I'm here. When I come back everything will be mine." Gribaldi broke, his equilibrium shattered and he swayed off the chair, corrected himself and swayed back too far. Somehow the chair slipped from under him and his breath escaped. He swung his head around trying to gauge Danburg's reaction to the poison and his eyes rolled in their sockets with the momentum. He heard Danburg's chair move as his vision faded and his last thoughts were of how desperate, how much he'd lost to come this far, to enter in such a duel.

Karras the Barbarian

Karras stood above and before the gathered tribesmen, having mounted the sacred altar, crushing the latest offering carelessly beneath his feet.
"My people! Civilisation comes to our lands. It kills us not with spear, sword or arrow, but with trade, with religion and with learning! I know that I am but a youngly, known many to you for my love of games: running down the hare in the field, tricking the pheasant into my hands and stealing honey from the bear. I say now that the time for games is over! I am a man and I will walk as a man and I will kill other men as their equal! The forces of the entire world are arrayed against me! Every skillful weapon they have crafted, every sly lie they have told will be brought here and used to bring us down. And I say to you not only shall we prevail, we shall turn the tide so stunningly that their children will wish our lands were never discovered! The name 'Karras' will be whispered in fear in the ashes will we make of their homes and places of worship! This I promise! Join me and add your name to mine for now is the time where we rise and succeed or quail and vanish from history!"

Danger Danger Danger

I think it's time to clean up. Just killed a spider in my room, not such a big deal, but I've seen rodents smaller than this thing. It was trying to climb up the bookshelf and doing a bad job of it, I guess because it was lethargic from starvation. There's not really a lot in my room for a predator of that scale to eat. Anyway, it's dead now. Fed to the bins. But it's a pretty good indication it's time to clean up.

With God-Given Hands

Let's do Ziggy Stardust. Seriously, I love how much of a good time he's having with this. He looks like a million goddamn bucks. And the song is as good now as it was thirty years ago.

Sitting here, two in the morning, drunk as hell watching standup videos on youtube. I've been watching Bill Hicks but I decide I wanna watch Lenny Bruce. I can only find one video: this one. And at the end the youtube filter cuts in on the final frame and I see Lenny, serious as God proclaiming 'Thou shalt not carve graven images' in two colours, grey and greyer. And... and I don't feel so good right now.

Nanowrimo

The carrier girls returned to their job. He had retrieved another cup of water and moved his seat so he could rest his feet on the table, the chair angled back. One of the girls walked to his desk, looked from him to the machine and back. He looked at her wordlessly, shrugged and pointed at the light. She frowned, turned. As she walked he tilted his head and watched her arse move with tired lust. She was one of the younger women in the information plant, retaining enough will to impress her own shape on the uniform. He admired that shape as she turned the corner and left his view, then swore under his breath in Egyptian, yawned and tossed the empty drinking cup at the receiving slot in the desk. It bounced clear with a hollow plastic sound and he sat considering what to do with it, scratching his head and mussing his dry hair.
When the bell rang to change shift he was still watching his light, waiting for it to turn off and tell him to start work. He was near paralysed, unable to move at first. The sudden change which should have been expected was not. His first movement was to sit up from his slouch where he had been staring into the light and to look around stretching. People were filing down the paths between the work stations, tripping or stepping deftly across the bundles of cable. He looked around, finding the clock and sighing. It was time to leave. Before standing he loosened the back of his chair so the person in the next shift to use his desk would fall if they were not expecting the prank. They were probably used to it by now and would be disappointed if he did not do it, he decided. He got his bag from the break room and headed out to Stainlees.
The bar was in the bank of small businesses that formed a thin crescent between the river and the Information District. Info labourers filtered through on their way to other places and left just enough for the restaurants, bars, newsagencies and coffee shops to survive. Stainlees was two rooms, a bar, an eatery and an outside decking where discerning patrons could experience the river’s effluent odour as an accompaniment to their meal or beverages. Gen took his beer outside, alone at a table with two seats, and watched the water and the navigation lights of the vessels travelling after dark. The lights were a unnecessarily complex language of heading, size, speed and license that Gen had begun to understand from his nights drinking in the same seat. A one man vessel was heading for berth in front of him, a series of blinking lights indicating its intended path. The number of lights flashing reduced as the distance between the boat and the marina reduced. As it docked with its destination and the lights dimmed, Digitalis took her seat across from him.
“About time you got here.” He yawned.

ik ben moe

Feeling like crap. Tired. Too damned tired. I was a zombie at work today, and the theme seemed to be rude businessman. There's too much to take care of and not enough time to get it done in. I've been thinking of moving to a different store, one where I won't be endlessly compared to people with three years experience and won't have a sociopath for a boss.
Although I'm thinking the sociopath part is gonna be difficult. Don't you have to have something wrong with your brain to wanna do that kinda thing?

There we go. That's about 900 words, which is well behind what's needed. But I'm tired. It doesn't have a title yet but there is a grand concept and all other sorts of nonsense I've been scribbling in a notebook. More tomorrow.

Nanowrimo

Chapter 1: Twenty Years of Boredom

The room was filled with the percussion of keys being pressed and metal characters striking paper. It washed over anyone entering like surf and followed those leaving like a roar of applause. The inhabitants of the room ignored the sound. To them it was as natural as traffic to a police officer or trains to a vagrant. It did not intrude on their concentration nor interrupted their work. Gen watched his device carefully, not concentrating on any one part but observed the letters as they hit the paper, listened for faults in the movement of the ream and in the internal mechanisms of the machine. To him it was a song, the typing a quick insistent beat, the other movements a melody and the flowing contents of the page synaesthetic. He hummed to himself as it progressed, monitoring his own voice as it accompanied the tune of his machine like an elderly piano tuner performing his job. The words flowed under his eyes without comprehension: ‘Vegas… operations… verified… possibility… termination…’. Later he would try and remember what he had seen during the day, consider all the communications trapped within his mind before he slept, but now he ignored them as they ran on, the paper spewing out in an endless sheet from the roll near his feet to the cutter and slot on the far side of his desk.
Then the song ended. The machine ceased and pushed the last of the communications into the slot and a small light next to it came on. Gen blinked and yawned and stretched, pushing his chair back and closing his eyes. The rest of the room continued as it had, the wash of the typists and the teleconsoles becoming apparent to him for the first time in an hour. His mouth was dry and his neck was sore. Gradually he worked up the motivation to stand and work his way to the back of the room where he could take his break, drink some coffee and some water, maybe find the apple he had brought with him.
The main work area was the size of a warehouse, each station separated by thin cardboard walls, all in various stages of deterioration and wilful destruction. Much of the equipment was placed on what looked like furniture taken from schools, with cables flowing in tangled channels stuck down with tape and snaking between the various machines. All the lighting came from overhead through panels of dirty glass in the high ceiling and from halogen globes that hung low under broad shades. Gen adjusted his glasses as he passed one of the women who hauled around the results of the room’s labour, boxes of paper, each page sliced with the same regular precisely non-square angles only achievable through bad calibration and mechanisation. In the ‘back room’, a small portable building placed at one end of the converted warehouse, Gen found his bag and sought a chair. As a teleconsole operator his breaks were irregular, as his machine allowed, and the room was empty. He fixed his eyes on space on the other side of the room and gnawed on the apple. It was old, the skin wrinkled and the flesh dry, the sort of thing he would have fed to horses as a child. The roar of the machinery was quieter but still present. His gaze slid to a newspaper on the table.
The headline was typical, he thought, a dire warning of economic uncertainty because of something or other. He paid less attention to it than the text that slipped under his gaze at his station. A smiling child took up most of the front page, the caption too small to be read. Gen would have had to reach, organise the sheets and pick it up to read what she had done to deserve such treatment. Instead he played with the idea, wondering if it was a reward for achievement or punishment for some childish transgression. She was smiling but it may have been forced, he decided. Or it might have been a grimace, he was having trouble telling at this angle. He ingested some more of the apple’s dry meat and was considering moving to examine the article when the sound of the typewriters waxed and the white light of the portable's fluorescent globes was coloured with the halogen yellow from the lamps outside. The door had opened and the carrier girls filed in, their comfortable shoes padding on the rough carpet. They murmured between each other and took up seats around the tables, some raising their voices in laughter or insult, others sitting silent, all dressed in the same grey uniforms with grey skirts cut to just below the knee. Gen waited until they were seated before standing and retreating from the presence of their acknowledged but oppressed femininity. He turned his back on them and ate a few more bites from the apple, tossed the remaining quarter in the rubbish and went back into the warehouse.
The light on his machine was still shining so he drank a cup of water at the head of the room, refilled it and returned to his station to wait. The cardboard partition that separated him from his neighbours was covered with graffiti either incised into the material or scratched on with ink stolen from the machines on improvised pens. Some of it was English, a little in Jakslang. Gen had added his own Egyptian curse-words to the litany although he knew no one would understand.

It begins

Well it's the first of November over in the States and everyone knows what that means: Nanowrimo. Time to get cracking on something. I'm gonna post here nightly what I come up with and give a running word total. Because that's what this is all about: Word's word count function.

Hoo Hoo

Such a guilty pleasure. Mick striding around with his shirt off and you know you wanna sing along.

Another Day Down on Spirit Street

My head's fucked up right now. Not enough sleep, too much caffeine and a shift at six in the morning. Plus I still got that sinus headache and I can't use the spray for fear of addiction. Not feeling as lousy as last night but still feeling down. Although when I was out before Sympathy for the Devil came on the player and that always cheers the childish teenage rebel in me.

This Week's Stupid Customer

Instead of bitching about work, which I could do forever to everyone's boredom, I'm gonna post once per week describing one encounter over the counter with an idiot. Since management loves telling us employees are 'customers' too, my fellow 'partners' as they're called at NAME OF COMPANY will be subject to these posts as well.
Having said that I can't actually think of an encounter with a stupid customer so far this week. Oh well.

Yeah so here's the new digs. I've decided to start again for a number of reasons. First: I'm not a graphic designer and I don't wanna be one. Here's a template. It has archives and a wide enough column and a large enough font to accommodate prose. Plus it looks a hundred times better than anything I could come up with. I'm gonna get some coffee and post something else.