When the chips are down

The source of my amusement was an electronic missive from Andrew, containing the following sentence:

“…I suffered a rather unpleasant mouth injury last night at the hands of Willards Corporation, who inserted a curiously shaped, razor sharp Big Korn Bite into a bag of Honey and Mustard flavoured maize crisps with the specific intention of maiming me…”

It’s worth noting that the offending carnivorous comestibles weren’t called Big Korn Snacks, or Big Korn Chips, but Big Korn Bites. Biting is to be expected.

It seems to me that Willards take truth in advertising very, very seriously. Clearly they are only interested in hardcore customers who are up to the challenge of a chip that tries to eat you back. That’s very Klingon of them.

I’m sure that Andrew, as a staunch Star Trek fan, would probably appreciate that.

Problematic

One of the lessons I’ve learned while working for Hell Inc. is that problems, like many things in the world, are fractal. Small ones can look very similar to big ones when viewed close up.

Think about a bad thing that happened to you today: maybe you couldn’t find a clean bra; maybe you stepped in something nasty on the sidewalk; or maybe you misplaced the keys to the fur-lined handcuffs. Was it the worst thing to occur this week? This year? Was it worse than poor Jim in Accounting who lost his testicles in the infamous “paper jam incident”? The weird part is that no matter how bad (or good) the situation is, we somehow adjust our viewpoint to suit the circumstances. We are relentlessly relativist about life.

This is why we can say, “Oh, there’s nothing worse than a papercut” with a straight face and no sense of irony whatsoever. There are plenty of things worse than a papercut: taxes; infamous paper jam incidents; and ex-spouses coming to visit (in order of increasing horribleness) immediately spring to mind. Of course, there are plenty more things worse than those and other things that are worse than the worse things and so on ad fundum.

It raises an interesting question, though: do you ever reach the bottom? What is the worst thing ever? I can accept the concept of such a thing as a sort of Platonic Ideal, but I suspect that it would be difficult to achieve any kind of consensus on an actual, real, hold-in-your-hand thing.

Besides, things could always get worse, couldn’t they?

Questionable questions

This isn’t the first time I’ve cracked my head against this particular wall.

I have no problem with providing supplementary information where the details are sketchy, or clarification where there is ambiguity in the wording, but that’s where I draw the line.

I get seriously irate when I have to deal with imbeciles who think that I am fooled by their shrill demands for supposedly “missing” information that through some mysterious quirk of the printing process, only becomes visible in their document after I point it out to them.

If the contractor can’t be arsed to read the specification, I’m certainly not going to read it to him.

At least it wasn’t a horse’s head

I woke up in the small hours of Monday morning with a feeling that something was wrong. The sense of wrongness was subtle, but pervasive, so I rolled over to turn on the bedside light…

…and something moved near my feet.

I leaped out of bed so quickly that I gave myself friction burns from the duvet.

“Meeeuuw?” said my uninvited guest.
“Glaaargh! Cat! Whatthefuuuuhck?” I responded. Articulate as ever.

Having satisfied myself that I had not, in fact, soiled my pyjama bottoms, I summarily ejected the ginger interloper from the flat and returned to bed, muttering darkly. Perhaps my actions seem harsh, but when I retire for the evening, I generally don’t expect to be harassed by anything larger than a mosquito.

I’m fond of cats, but I’m not prepared to share my bed with just any old pussy that shows up demanding snuggle time. I have standards.

Apply within

As much as I enjoy working with my manager’s imaginary friends, they aren’t exactly productive. Sometimes it feels as if I’m doing everything myself.

Still, I shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that they’re model employees: they work for free; they don’t waste paper; and they don’t make personal phone calls.