My employer however, had other ideas. Within four minutes of my newly found affinity for the ground, I had paramedics by my side, and a fantastic little portable machine for telling them that my heart was still beating. Being wheeled out of work on a squeaky chair will forever be one of the most embarrassing moments of my working career to date, right up with addressing a young lady who turned out to in fact, be a young man. 

In the ambulance, they took an ECG, and concluded that my heart was 1) still beating, and 2) not subject to a heart attack. For this privilege, my legs and chest were shaved in odd spots, so as to get the little Skintact pads to stick and get a reading. After that, we took a trip to St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. While there, two further ECGs were performed, and 15ml of blood drawn for miscellaneous testing via a clumsily applied cannula. Near six hours later, after being given the all clear, I stumbled back to work, picked up my things, and then dragged myself home.

Four days later, I’ve done nothing but sleep most of the day and be irritable. The visit this morning to the doctor revealed a pretty boring diagnoses. Mono, Lyme’s or “something viral”. We’ll find out Friday about the “something viral” and mono, and a little later for Lyme. Now until then will be spent at home, catching up on all the things I’ve meant to do for months, and never quite got around to. The man on AA99 still has a story to finish.

As I type this entry, happily eating what must be said, a very tasty slice of Ham and Pineapple pizza, one thing springs to mind; I have greasy fingers. Usually, I’d be having kittens at this point, but not now. My fingertips dart over the keys, and I have one over-riding thought in my mind. This computer is no longer mine.

It’s happened; two days ago, I was contacted by Executive Relations at Apple UK. My 12″ PowerBook has had it’s warrant signed, by me, and by a Higher Up at Apple. My MacBook has finally been ordered. A Core Duo 2GHz and a Gb of RAM, and a light up keyboard. I’m as happy as anything. They’ve even decided to throw in a new case for me. Really, the speed boost should be the most exciting thing for me, but no. It’s a light-up keyboard. Something I could have had two years ago, in fact, were it available on the 12″ PowerBook range. Never was, and really, never will be. Jacqui has a review up at Ars on the 1.83 Core Duo, and it’s excellent; despite the utter bullshite Slashdot and the News thread generated, it’s well rounded and an actual review of the hardware by a real user, not a regurgitation of the press release.
Either way, I’ve now got to wait until I get a fucking tracking number, and then the agonising weeks until it goes from Pending, Packing, Shipping, Shipped, and then all aboard the Mystery Bus to the middle of the fucking airport, a plane ride to the Netherlands, then to the UK, and handing it over to TNT for lord only knows how long until some under-paid driver hands over my Precious.

I’m in for one fuck of a long wait.

I crave chicken soup, and oddly, red wine. The soup would be a good idea, the red wine, less so. The soup however means I need to get moving and cook as I cannot stand the thought of soup from a can. The wine means I just have to open the bottle, pour, and enjoy.

And once again, tonight I’m at Wimbledon, Platform 9. I’ve come back from Sloane Square, hopped off the Tube, and down the platform, up the concourse, along, and down to 9. And there, on the board, blinking at me in taunting day-glow orange LED, **SERVICE CANCELLED**

I should have stayed in bed, this morning. Lord knows I was tempted. In a toss-up between warm soft sheets and a the prospect of a late breakfast, and the cold pavement, a shave and commuting, then bed wins. Every time. Apart from this morning, when I got up, had a shave, and braved the District line yet another time.

Which reminds me. Most commuters, you know, the kid that zip in and out of the Xity? Fine. These people I can happily deal with. But now and then you get the odd person who honestly has no concept of who, what, where, or when they are. Seriously. And they also always seem to be the ones with basic hygiene problems. Getting off one of the trains today I could hardly contain my breakfast; the carriage stank of this one chap and what seemed to be the smell of stale cocoa butter, curry, and dirty hair. Utterly vile. I’m quite certain that these people have no idea of the stench they produce. If they knew, surely they would make some effort to clean themselves… non?

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It’s under my bed, it’s never been read.
It’s in with my school stuff and my mom never cleans in there.
From my first little fib, when I still wore a bib
To my latest attempt at pretending I’m someone
Who’s not seventeen, doesn’t know what you mean
When talk turns to single malts, or stilton, or

While not seventeen, there is a shoe-box under my bed. It used to contain a pair of dark blue Vans; now it’s filled with notes and letters, an armband from the National Trust, a box of crayons, postcards, receipts, some old photographs, too. The sort of thing one keeps in a shoe-box under the bed.

There is so much in that shoe-box that I would love to keep. But there’s also a lot of pain attached to it. Things best forgotten, things I’d rather not remember. It’s like being force-fed tales of a Geo-centric universe, wooden spoon down the throat, as if my liver were being fattened up for some cannibalistic Foie Gras treat.

All that ever was good about the shoe-box I still have elsewhere.

Today, the shoe-box burns.

Bollocks.

At least I’m reading my books. It can’t all be bad.

OK, new method. Fire up the cell phone. Connect via GPRS. SSH in, ‚”Remote host not found.”

Today is not going to go well. The sky is dark, and there’s ice on the roads. My toast got burnt, and I couldn’t find my fucking glasses. But this was just the start. Yesterday, around 9.30 am, Eclipse UK, a major UK ADSL provider, started to experience glitches. Disconnects, the odd DNS glitch. They spent the day up and down. The odd irate call from clients, but nothing a power cycle on the router didn’t fix. As such, I went to bed not worried about it.

And this morning, it’s all gone to shit. Eclipse put the problem as a “platform failure‚” and say that the issue is fixable with just a router restart. But it’s not true. Four times, Eclipse have issued press releases saying the issue was under control. It’s not. All restarting the router achieves is pushes any one connection to a different part of Cloud and Colossus – if you’re lucky, you’ll get a slot, connect, and then all you’ve got to worry about is fucked DNS. Because don’t forget, the DNS shat itself, too. Joy of joys.

It’s now been almost 36 hours since the fucking platform went down. You’d expect that in a few hours, you could rollback software changed. You can rebuild configurations. You’d have redundant hardware. Hell, you could replace most of the racks in that time. But no. No one has a fucking clue there. The support number is just on voicemail. My direct dial numbers are answering to total utter silence. Wait a minute on the line, it hangs up. Faxes go un-answered. It’s not a power issue, either. They’ve got diesel backup. The offices haven’t burned down. The staff are there, they’ve been seen in and out of the building. The dial-up accounts still work. But ADSL is dead. DNS works for dial-up but not on anything else.

In the time wasted on this fucking adventure, I could have re-written the DNS and MX settings for my clients, have them propagate, and sent them elsewhere for at least things like email. Did I mention the spam? Thousands of mis-delivered messages. One site gets on average, a hundred a day. Right now, it’s getting 2,400 mis-delivered messages each minute. We’ve left it running, and we’re taking bets on what happens first; the 120Gb HD filling up, or Outlook shitting itself.

So much time wasted. So much stress, so much anger. It’s fucking plain that no one there has any fucking clue what the fuck is going on. They have no idea how to fix whatever the issue is. They may as well just rip the ATM core to fucking pieces, piss on it, and build a new one. There is nothing left to do. Right now, I’m still getting irate calls from people bitching about lack of email. I’m just going to turn my phone off and forward everything to Eclipse’ support number. I’m that fucked off.

And wait, there’s more! At home there is no ADSL, it’s a cable connection. This morning, it went down for about 20 minutes for a service upgrade. It came back, twice as fast. I go out, deal with fucking morons and then come back to the receive and status lights on the modem blinking at me. A phone call later, and Telewest kindly inform me that the upgrade to the network has gone tits up. The connectivity in the area is screwed for an undetermined length of time. Great. No ADSL. No cable. I need to send a fucking email. Connect via GPRS. The phone won’t keep a connection for more than 30 seconds.

I’ve fucking had it. Lord only knows when this gets posted. Right now, I don’t even fucking care anymore. Fuck this shit. I’m leaving

[12:43am] [Asshat] There’s a reason that I keep an unregistered revolver with the handle and trigger covered in tape, in my dwelling.
[12:43am] [Asshat] I intend to, if there’s ever any doubt, plant the weapon in the hand of whomever I shoot.
[12:44am] ¬FirstGuy logs
[12:44am] [SecondGuy] Asshat, that will never work.
[12:44am] [Asshat] Sure it will.
[12:44am] [Asshat] It’s my word versus a dead man’s.
[12:45am] [Asshat] The only qualm I have with killing people, is getting caught and doing time for it.

Meanwhile, In AIM, a voice of reason:

[12:45am] [M] guy needs to stop watching assassin movies.

And people wonder why I weep for mankind.

Picture, if you will, lush green lawns trimmed twice a day; strawberries and cream, players jumping the nets, and Ball Boys with bulges in their shorts. One cannot but help to think of SW19, and the England All Green Tennis Club. All but one. Me.

All I picture at Wimbledon are tourists in June, going to school at the top of Edge Hill in the midsts of my ill-spent youth, and the train station. I’m quite certain I’ve spent literally weeks on one platform or another. Lord knows I’ve caught multiple services from each of the ten that sit there, and at all hours of the day and night. And not once in the decade I’ve been using it do I ever recall a single service being on time. Not once. Every train that passes is a minute late at the least; most are on a region of eight or more. And most days, I can deal with this. Most days, I ruffle the pages of the Telegraph in slight annoyance and continue with my day.

But today was not that day.

Nothing good has ever come of a Monday. One pictures people happy at the weekend, freed from the slavery of a hot phone and a desk layered with papers so as to resemble some bizarre archaeological dig; layers denoting the last time lunch was eaten over the keyboard, and the last quarterly figures, about ten weeks deep in memos and inter-departmental faxes. The weekend provides a brief reprise, lulling one into a false sense of security. You can almost believe as you drown that third glass of Merlot that it’s all okay and you’ve no need to fear the new week. Beelzebub may ride on the back of a Natonal Rail Service, but he’ll pass over you this time. This time, you’ll be spared. This time, it’ll be different.

Except it’s not different. And it ever is. Especially on a Monday.

Today, I’m on the District Line to Sloane Square. But, for reason that are not quite pertinent to this story, I had to go to Chelmsford, Essex first. Scary stuff before one even discovers the ‚Äúdelights‚Äù of the Essex Girl. I’ve met some, and to be honest, they are as bad as everyone makes out. But anyway, to Chelmsford I had to go.

Wimbledon to Sloane Square is a single Tube all the way there. I can lose myself in my paper, or if truly antisocial, my PowerBook and ecto-kungfoo. Wimbledon to Chelmsford is a more involved route. Wimbledon to Waterloo on the train (the important bit) and from Waterloo to Liverpool St on the Tube (the easy bit) and then Liverpool St on the train to Chelmsford. And to make London rail links easier, the train to Waterloo runs about the same frequency as the Tube services in The City; one every three minutes. But not today.

No, today, there had not been a Waterloo service for 18 minutes by the time I got there. Not an issue, I think. And I wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. After an hour and twenty-four minutes of broken promises, I give in. That’s one hundred and two minutes. Thirty-four cancelled services. In an hour and a half.

By now, I’m ready to throttle someone. And it only gets better. You’d think that by not using the train, you could get away with a refund for said ticket; of course, to National Rail, that’s not reasonable at all. So what your service was delayed? Go later! Ha-ha! We don’t care!

—

Half an hour later, after trying English, Italian and French (then resorting to anger and mime;) to try to communicate with the money at the ticket booth, I get a refund. That half hour was of course worth more to me than the price of the ticket, but the point stands; I’m not traveling, so I refuse to pay for the bloody thing. The first chap I spoke to refused flat out to refund it, and then refused to hand back my Visa card as he said my signatures didn’t match. Despite me producing another three cards and my passport and some London Transport ID, he still was iffy about it. Bastard. Of course, because of the signatures, he refused to sell me a Travel Card, (never mind Oyster Card) and wanted to put it on my other Visa (Barclaycard) – he couldn’t understand that I didn’t want it on my CC and have to pay interest for it. Again, I wonder if he could even read and write English, let alone anything else.

And of course, the Automated Ticket machines. No train station would be complete without the ticket machine that refuses to read ANY of your cards, or take any of your paper money. I tried three of the fuckers before I got one that swallowed my card like the bitch should. Got my receipt, went through the barrier to Platform 4, District Line. Seven minutes later the Tube had arrived, I’d found a seat, gotten comfortable and I was two stops down the line.

Public and Private companies. Public runs on time, Private makes billions for the Fat Cat Cunts at the top who provide no service worth mentioning and want to charge me extra on top of my Oyster for the so-called privilege of using their shitty network.

All I have to say is if there are any Thameslink, Railtrack, National Rail, etc shareholders or Board Memebers, then do you part to make this a better world for all Mankind.

Put a gun in your mouth, and eat hot lead.