A couple people help me set up the hardware. The speaker setup is freakin' BOSS. It makes me want to start the marathon with a Star Wars movie just for the surprise grandeur of opening fanfare. (In real life, fuck that fucking hack John Williams.)
I need to go score all the video content. In the past I've had a confederate providing some sort of download key. But I have a key of my own now (a new thing) so I really don't need Michael Martin to help me this time, as he has for the last I dunno how many 'thons.
On pulling up my code, however—on the public-use billboard across the street over the stand of palms—I realize my new wireless doohickey has a wheel but no button—a new fucking Apple product, no doubt: simplifying things for the simple user. So I can scroll but I have no idea how to select my download key or copy it to my clipboard. The doohickey is about the size and shape of a rubber or composite grip at the end of a bicycle handlebar. Maybe a little smaller. It is, notoriously, the color of a Mac Plus or any Apple computer circa 1990.
Never mind, says Séain, you can use mine. But when he produces his own wireless doohickey—which has a button as well as a wheel—it turns out his wireless key is locked. He needs a key to get the key, and for some reason his key isn't working.
Yes, an annoyance dream about a technolabyrinth. Hooray!
Anyway, he manages to get his key and we head to the library (ish) to grab the content. Séain is handling the downloads now, so I have time to email, and it occurs to me I have not even sent Michael Martin an invitation to the marathon. And now that it's, like, today, I am afraid he will think I'm inviting him only for his techspertise, so I open with a disclaimer and tell him I would be ecstatic if he could make it to the 'thon. Email in this case is composed, seemingly by thought, on an oversized book frame with text that lights up on the page as you compose it. Each line of text is a good inch tall and trompe-l'œil: is it designed to look like a glowing blue light is shining from inside deep-recessed chiseled text. Or maybe it really is recessed and it just resets once the email sends. Who knows these days.
Over in the corner, someone has set up food for anyone to take, Sterno and chafing dishes on a folding table sort of affair, with a sign that says, Please help yourself to this chifferobe". No, the word is not chifferobe, but it might as well be, because whatever these two foodstuffs are, they are not as described. The one on the left appears to be a conglomeration of flatbreads, stacked one upon the other in a cylindrical dish and covered with...raisins? and some kind of sauce. Yet the implication of the signage is that there's meat in it. I investigate half-heartedly and finally peel a flatbread off the stack and put it on my plate.
At this point a colleague walks up to the table and asks me, with no small talk, where I got that radar we used in the last job we won. Of course, I didn't "get that radar" at all, but I know what she means, and it's accusatory: maybe she is asking why I get all the jobs with the fun toys; or maybe it's that my team has no business with access to a cutting-edge high-tech thingummy that, for all I know, may still be classified. My response is, naturally, that I am merely the proposal side of things; I don't do project work. So whatever tech toys the team uses are not my bailiwick, not my concern. For reasons unclear, though, I sing this response to her: two ABCB quartrains in loose iambic trimeter, to a familiar tune, something like Bowie's "Song for Bob Dylan". The response ends with:
We source a lot of radars"Which" is a badly stretched rhyme (on "flips"?) and I am mortified by my improvisation. But the response seems to satisfy my colleague, and she leaves me alone.
And I don't know which is which.
No comments:
Post a Comment