FFXIAH Linkshell Ni

In the glorious world of evil corporate business you learn to deal with a great many obstacles and perplexing intangibilities....

Have you seen the carpeted fields?... vast cubicle farms sprawled out across endless concrete and steel landscapes where workers toil their meaningless lives away surrounded by pictures of cats hanging from clotheslines with the captions reading "hang in there baby"

You can tell when you reach the different sections as they are separated by their trade's cliches "engineers do it with precision"... and so on and on and on and.... you get the gist....

far below on the factory floor an alarm bell sounds, one of the diabolical machines in sector three has failed to achieve maximum evil... phones ring and emails fly and minions fret. what is the terrible meaning of the alarm and who will suffer the consequences?....

Eventually they call me, the last evil machine repairman to survive the purges of the evil middlemen from middle earth. Once we were great throngs of well styled geeks, but our numbers were culled in the great wars of the nineties. Perhaps you are too young to recall and we don't have time to go into it now, so I'll skip to the end, where I stood alone a top a smoking pile of ruin, smoldering bodies too numerous for counting

and then eventually I brushed off the ashes and got back to work...

your problem is a very simple one, your machine is so old the men who made it are all dead, the company they built from their sweat and blood was sold into receivership after a nasty divorce, their lives were all ruined by drink and everyone they ever met all died with their balls on fire from colon cancer... the equipment was all sold to the chinese for scrap and all that remains is a scorched patch of concrete where a proud factory once stood.. here and there tiny weeds are poking up through the cracks as mother earth begins to reclaim the lands...

you need to buy a new machine.

years pass as solutions are debated, brochures and samples are requested and a never ending parade of salesmen pound against their shoreline hawking their wares.

when do they need the machine? a year ago
when will they buy it? a year from now
when will they want it delivered? a year before they needed it...
will anyone remember what it's for when it arrives?

no...

and SO we finally get to yesterday when I deliver the new machine they ordered after years of debate and quotes and samples and brochures and budgets and proposals and requirements and threats and crying and swearing and tears and emails and phone calls and faxes and text messages and coffee and doughnuts and misery and mechanical drawings and flow charts and schematics ...

and here is your new machine!!! <fanfare>

and then someone emerges from the foggy pits of IT dungeons and demands I sell it to them all over again.... and they demand it do things they never asked for and it have options they never considered and they cry and *** and whine and call their supervisors...

and then the supervisor comes down and I tell them all the same things, this machine was ordered to replace one that is broken, it works exactly the same way as the other one used to. It doesn't have wireless network connectivity or a psychic link to the group mind on the cloud because you DIDN'T ORDER IT THAT WAY you don't need it and it's not ever going to have it unless you spend sixty bucks on a converter and NO we aren't going to start the process all over again!

this is the machine you requested on a purchase order written in stone that took me two years to climb up the cursed mountain to retrieve. So *** you, go set up the PC like we told you two weeks ago and get the hell out of my face!

I call upon the dark powers to rise from the depths of hell and pull you back.... BACK TO THE PITS WITH YOU FOWL CREATURE!!!

BE GONE!!!

and eventually they run out of stupid things to say, get hungry for lunch and wander away

and then I can install the machine and test it out and run into problems and work sixteen hours and then drive home half asleep through construction traffic...

my hands are swollen and I feel like killing something...