Janey the Packrat was always running out of space on her work computer.
After buying a bigger hard drive and archiving files to disks, she still kept running out of free space.
“Try compressing things,” said the office geek.
So, she did. She ran the Compression routine and it said she had plenty of free space.
“What if I compress the compressed stuff?” she asked herself.
Sure enough, she had even more free space.
Ten hours later, as she ran the compression routine for the fifteenth time, her computer imploded, collapsing into a black hole and slowly devouring the earth.
Tag: tragedy
Joe
Thank God Joe was wearing his safety helmet.
Some jackass at the site dropped a brick from ten stories up.
Instead of killing Joe, it just knocked him silly. Spent a week in the hospital.
He’s fine, except that he’s now got this imaginary friend he calls Luthor.
To Joe, Luthor’s real, and he gets really mad when you try to tell him otherwise.
Or point out that Luthor can’t hold a welding torch or the other end of a safety line.
Joe’s on permanent disability now.
But, we hired Luthor.
Guy never complains, and he never cashes his checks.
The Missing Site
When other people can’t reach their sites, they freak out and panic like it’s the end of the world. Me, I don’t worry so much. I figure that the server deserves a break every once in awhile. Let the poor thing get some rest now and then. Plus, I’ve got backups, so in a worst-case scenario, I can always start fresh and reload all of the site data. Here… let me show you… the backups are… they’re… wait a minute… and… The backups folder is empty? Maybe they got saved somewhere else… I mean… they were just here… Oh shit.
Relax
Remembering what my therapist told me to do in times of stress, I close my eyes and try to relax.
“Think positively,” she’d say. “Count your blessings and that will put things into perspective.”
So, I think of my wonderful wife, my great kids, the beautiful house we’ve got paid off, the thriving business I’ve built from the ground up…
Ground?
Up?
I open my eyes, and I see the ground is still there, approaching just as rapidly as it was before I spaced out with the happy-sappy stuff.
I tug on the cord for the reserve chute again, harder.
Stone
Remember the story of Stone Soup?
A traveling beggar puts a big stone in a cauldron, adds well water, and hoodwinks the whole village into bringing vegetables and meat for a communal soup feast.
The beggar kept this scam going until one day, he woke up to find the cauldron missing.
He managed to scrape up cauldrons for the soup in the next few villages, but his luck ran out eventually.
“Okay, you don’t have a cauldron for soup,” he said. “We can make a big stone sandwich instead.”
Three cracked teeth later, angry villagers brained him with the stone.
The Dog Days
The Ancients believed that the rise of Sirius, the dog star, would add to the summer’s heat, thus producing The Dog Days Of Summer.
Stars are too far away to influence the temperature of our world, but the flame-cannons The Crab People Of Canis Major sure raised the heat in cities their invasion forces burned to the ground.
Why they invaded and how we defeated them, I have no clue. That was many years ago, and the grandchildren of the grandchildren of those heroes tell the wildest tales as we sit around the pot, boiling blue crabs in their memory.
Fireworks
The kids found some leftover fireworks in the shed.
They’re leftover from July… or maybe New Year’s.
I guess you use white for New Year’s, red white and blue for July.
Both scare the crap out of the cows and horses and chickens.
The labels say “ADULT SUPERVISION REQUIRED” on them, so they got Billy Williams.
He’s the retarded farmhand from the Baker farm. Acts like he’s twelve, but he’s an adult, right?
The fields lit up quickly, the fires sweeping across houses and barns, leaping across roads.
The school, the church, the market: all gone.
They will inherit ashes.
The Radio
There’s something special about our song playing on the radio.
Sure, we have a record of it.
A tape of it.
A CD of it.
It’s on both of our iPods, iPhones and laptops.
But it’s not the same as it playing on the radio.
Chance. Serendipity.
It is luck or is it fate?
I don’t know, but I do know it means something.
I pick up the radio, go into the bathroom, and say “They’re playing our song.”
You look up from the tub. “What the hell do I care?”
I nod, and toss the radio into the tub.
Measured emotional response
Doctor Odd was a master of measurement, knowing every unit of measurement there was.
Except emotions.
He could not measure emotions.
There was no emotional yardstick.
There was no emotional scale.
There was no emotional multimeter.
“I must invent one,” he said.
So, over the years, he ran countless experiments.
Taking candy from babies.
Showering people with love.
Telling parents their children had died at war.
Giving gifts to orphans.
And running lunatics through a maze of unfamiliar lights and sounds.
Not that any ethical scientist would respect his results, he revealed his horrific findings:
“I have no emotions whatsoever.”
The Road To Hell
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, or at least it’s supposed to be, according to the contract I bid on.
The road’s even worse now. The job shoulda been done by now, and I’m way over budget, but how was I to know about the weather problems, the commodities market run by speculators on good intentions, and the union going on strike on me… it’s not my fault, really.
I have no time for my other contracts, my business is about to go under.
I look down… and the road’s finished.
Time for me to walk it.