Category: My stories

I worked for a company that built its own vacation calendar and ticket system.
They said it was cheaper to build their own compared to contracting with an off-the-shelf system.
And they were right. It was cheap to build.
To maintain it, though, was a nightmare.
The workplace rules and regulations, all the connections with the payroll system (which they built themselves, too)…
It took an entire development staff to maintain and update.
So full of bugs. I spent so many hours getting them to fix incorrect information.
My current job uses an off-the-shelf system.
And everything works.
Including me.

The irony of the movie Free Willy is that the whale who played Willy, Keiko, wasn’t free at all.
Born and bred in captivity.
Sick a lot of the time, but still forced to perform tricks and act in television and movies.
People were outraged, and a campaign started to free Willy.
Eventually, after a few years, Keiko was freed.
And lonely.
The whale came back, playing with kids in the water.
Which scared the crap out of them.
Keiko eventually got sick again, was recaptured by veterinarians, and died.
Thankfully, Hollywood isn’t rebooting Free Willy movies anytime soon.

You won’t find Teddy in Housewares.
He’s usually sneaking a spray paint can or two back by the dumpster.
And when he comes back, yeah, he’s got that smile on his face, total blissing out.
It’s been happening for weeks, and when customers finally complained about broken seals on the cans, the manager fired Teddy.
Then he went in back and saw the wall… the mural… it was… gorgeous.
Teddy was an instant celebrity, invited to spray his masterpieces everywhere.
Then one morning, he was found dead in an alley.
That smile on his face? He’d also been shooting heroin.

Long ago, I worked in the call center for a hosting company.
They offered dialup access, webhosting, a server farm, and domain registration.
Every call needed to be verified.
If the caller didn’t know the password, we’d send them to Customer Service to verify.
Some would say they didn’t have it with them, others would say their tech person quit.
Didn’t matter. Everyone had to be verified.
Sometimes, the CEO would call, trying to get into a customer’s account to test us.
He’d scream and yell and threaten.
I’d just say “Transferring to you to Customer Service…” and hang up.

In the comics, nobody knows Pigpen’s name.
My theory is that his last name is Thigpen, but people keep mishearing him because of a speech impediment.
You don’t hear it in the television specials because they didn’t do that kind of thing back in the Sixties and Seventies.
Maybe they’ll do it now and call it a diversity and inclusion effort?
While race-swapping half the characters, including Charlie Brown’s sister Sally.
Maybe Charlie Brown’s mom had a thing for Franklin’s dad or something.
Make Snoopy trans, self-identifying as a cat, and reboot Pigpen as gay.
(Which would explain the lisp.)

Martin got himself another book deal.
It’s his fifth, and like the previous four, he’s dedicating it to vodka.
You see, Martin can only write when he’s drunk.
It’s doing a number on his liver, but there’s the numbers his publisher tells his agent, and the numbers in Martin’s bank account.
Those numbers are a factor, too.
Martin used to write in a nearby bar, but he got into way too many fights.
So he drinks alone, writes alone.
Wakes up on the floor and looks at what he’s scribbled up.
And sends it off to the publisher to decipher.

Harry was the last of Old Hollywood.
Back before television. When everyone had been in the war.
Big mansions, servants.
Parties every weekend.
The studio provided the publicists and the cars and everything else.
Harry provided the face and the box office.
And then, the studios stopped calling.
Harry’s agent told him that the times had changed.
Harry’s accountant said there was enough to last a lifetime.
So, Harry retired, fired his agent and accountant, and went traveling.
People would ask him for his autograph, and he gladly gave it and posed for photos.
And he lived happily ever after.

Billy got into a boat, pushed off from the dock, and tried to row it gently down the stream.
But the stream wasn’t deep enough, and the boat kept hitting the bottom, so Billy had to keep pushing off, and occasionally getting out and dragging the boat by a rope and then flopping back in.
After ten minutes, there was nothing merrily about Billy.
He was fuming mad, and he eventually abandoned the boat and walked to shore.
He swore that the next time he got drunk enough to steal a boat, he’d go to a river or a lake.

It used to be that I’d pay my bus fare with quarters.
Then they added a dollar slot.
You could stick in a fiver, but it wouldn’t give change.
Monthly and yearly passes were cheap… then discontinued.
You can get overpriced paper daily passes from the tram stops and regional centers.
After that came the electronic cards.
They handled transfers great, but it cost fifty bucks to replace when you lost one.
Finally, they made an app for fare passes.
It shows an animated picture of a bus pass with a timestamp.
Which is really easy to fake in Gimp.

The kids liked to build mazes for the mice to run around in.
I would tell them how would you like to be dropped in a maze and forced to roam around for dinner.
So, I bought virtual headsets, plugged them into an immersion computer, and forced the kids to solve a maze.
Win and get dessert, or lose and get Brussels Sprouts.
Bobby and Danny were good at it, but Ricky always seemed to get eaten.
They feeding him to the minotaur to distract the beast.
Ricky got a slice of cake.
And I, the minotaur, got the rest.