roboshark

There's currently 5 parts to this one. I'll start with the first one, see how it gets on....

I realize it might be too long for some people with limited attention spans. I apologize in advance.

There's a website with more of this, but since TFP rules prohibit site plugging, PM if you want to read more. Or if you want to call me an asshole....

There's swearing in here, probably some pornography, I'm sure you can all handle it....



9:00 AM. Arriving late, the parking lot's already full. I circle
around, but all the employee spots are taken. I drive casually by the
managers' section. There's a spot there alright. It must be my lucky
day. I jam the car in and get out. Pretty nice spot, just feet from
the front door. And to think that I never noticed it before. I rub my
hands; the day is starting out good.

For good measure, I rip off the plastic "Management Only" sign from the
wall above the parking spot, break it in two and chuck the pieces behind
some bushes. Apparently someone has vandalized the parking lot
overnight. To make matters more convincing, I rip off two more signs.
Their remains end up behind the bushes too. Well, it's a bad
neighborhood. The company should really have fences installed or
something. Guards with dogs. Machine gun nests and claymore mines.
That should liven up the place.

9:07 AM My mood significantly improved, I run up the stairs and take the
elevator to my floor. I stop at the water cooler and gulp down two
beakerfulls. I know the desired effect has been achieved when I manage
to let out a loud burp. A secretary in a sexy outfit across the hall
gives me an indignant look. I smile back. "Morning," I say while
scratching the crack of my butt. She looks away in shocked incredulity,
back to the familiar safety of her computer screen.

9:10 AM I saunter down the hallway to my office. I stop off at the
small kitchen/pantry to get some coffee. The coffeepot contains a
see-through preparation that tastes like silt. None of the silly brats
that while their lifes away at this company know how to make a pot of
good strong coffee. I decide to set thing straight and lump three
measures of coffee into the percolator. Yes, I know the instructions
say maximum two measures per pot. But it's a slow day. And I'm bored.

I leave the machine burbling and gurgling cheerfully and go into my
office. I fire up the computer, then spend five minutes inspecting the
handywork of a black bulbous spider that has weaved a giant web right
outside my window. I play a quick game of backgammon against the
computer while waiting for the coffee. I lose, as usual! "No," the
help file says, "xgammon _never_ cheats with the dice." Like I'm buying
that!

Irked, I go and get a mug of coffee.

Back at my desk, I browse alt.abduckted.by.lezbian-vampires to releave
the anger. Eventually, reluctantly, I am compelled to fire up the email
client. After all I'm supposed to work here. Outlook crashes twice
while trying to pull in a message with a large attachment. Probably
some stupid marketing or financial ape distributing unzipped fact sheets
or quarterly reports again. The third time around, I watch the progress
bar with geniune trepidation. The tension mounts as it reaches all the
way up to 95%, an unprecedented event. I hold my breath waiting for
Outlook to crash.

Outlook doesn't crash. I'm surprisingly relieved. All in vain, because
the attachment turns out to be a ten-page self-evaluation document I'm
supposed to fill in and send back to my manager in preparation for a
performance evaluation session he's planned for me later on in the week.

I delete the message, attachment and all, then play with Outlook's
settings and I point it to a non-existent mail server. Now, when it
tries to fetch mail, it hangs.

9:30 AM Having managed to kill twenty minutes already, I go back to get
a mug of coffee. My heart fills with joy at the sight of one of the
other "employees" whom I find leaning against the counter clutching a
mug of the black magic potion I've concocted and spitting and drooling
into the sink.

I ignore him, pour a mugful of the oily liquid and head back to my
office, determined to beat the computer this time.

I get a good game going: I manage to move all my checkers into my home
board in about five minutes and start bearing them off while the
computer still has a checker on the bar. Yeah, baby, I got you know!

The phone rings, breaking my concentration. I let it ring, but it
doesn't relent. Annoyed, I pick it up.

"Yes!"

"Hello, Travis? This is Linda, from Reception."

"Yes?" I say curtly, feigning impatience. After all, I'm a busy man.

"Are you the owner of the black Honda with license plate ------?" she
inquires.

Ah! Apparently someone's broken the parking code. The nerve.
Somewhere out there, a poor manager has been forced to park with the
plebs.

"No," I say, and roll the dice. Double six!

She pauses for a second. "But,...I,...I have it here that this is your
car."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Linda. I don't even own a car.
I commute by train," I tell her while bearing off four checkers. I'm on
a roll!

"By train?" she says, a hint of suspicion in her voice. To her travel
by train probably sounds like an urban legend.

Xgammon throws a double six which is (surprise, surprise!), exactly what
it needs to get back in the game. How convenient! "Doesn't cheat", my
ass! My annoyance rises another couple of notches as I watch xgammon
make a handsome move that turns me green with jealousy, and then starts
bearing off its checkers! Damn it!

Suddenly I hate Linda.

"Would that be all?" I say icily.

"Eh, yeah, I..."

I hang up before she can continue. Poor girl. Wrong place, wrong time.

Infuriated, I kill off the game before xgammon gets yet another chance
to humiliate me. The day is turning for the worse.

10:00 AM Time for more coffee. Solitaire in the morning always makes me
sleepy. I prepare another batch of drain-cleaner strength brew and take
the steaming mug to my room. I decide to do some work and open a
terminal to the source code server. I open a file and place the cursor
in the middle of a line. There, perfect camouflage.

I open a second terminal and spend a couple of minutes trying to think
of a way to waste the couple of hours left before lunch break. Finally,
I decide to remove all useless drivers from my kernel and do a
recompile.

10:30 AM The recompile is done, and the new kernel boots fine. I swear
I can _sense_ the increase in performance! Proud, I lean back in my
chair.

The phone rings again. It's my manager. He wants to know why I haven't
completed the self-evaluation form and sent it back to him yet.

"What form?" I say innocently.

"I sent you a form by email this morning", he says.

"Oh, email. Sorry, I haven't been able to receive email lately."

"What? What do you mean you can't receive email lately?"

"Well, Outlook hangs when I try to fetch my email. I have no idea how
to get it to work," I lie. It comes off pretty convincingly too.

"Oh. Well, have you called the systems adminstrator?"

"Yes. Tried a few times already." This lying business is so easy once
you start off well. "He's not picking up. I suspect he might be
ignoring me."

"Ignoring you? What do you mean?"

Again? For a manager, this guy's pretty thick.

"Well," I start patiently, "I suspect he might still be annoyed at me
for making him spend half a day fixing up my Windows machine which
crashed the other week."

Oh, it "crashed" alright. After I removed the registry. And deleted
half of the C:\Windows directory for good meeasure. Still, fortunately,
I needed an afternoon off. Christmas shopping can't wait forever.

"I see," my manager says.

"Yeah," I offer.

A pause.

"Well, keep trying to reach him. I need that form by the end of the
day."

I think not. I have better things to do.

"You know," I start, "maybe it'd be better if you talked to him. I'm
not his, you know, favorite person here. He'll probably just tell me
he'll be right over and then not show up for the rest of the day."

The manager sighs audibly over the line. He sounds tired. I wonder if
it's his parking spot I've taken today.

"All right," he says finally. "I'll talk to him."

Why do something when you can have other people do it for you?

He hangs up. I launch Morpheus and fire off a query for Jenna Jameson
clips then go and get some more coffee. By the time I'm back, Morpheus
has returned over 300 results. I scan the list for stuff I don't yet
have, but it's hard work. Finally, I find two that I don't recognize
and start the downloads. Soon they're pumping away nicely. I love the
corporate Internet connection!

10:40 AM With more than thirty minutes left on the downloads, I find
myself becoming restless. Well, I might as well do some work.
Reluctantly, I start the corporate task management program and log in.

Bug. Bug. Bug. Feature request. Bug. Bug. Bug. Bug.

Mmh. First step is to enter estimates for the time required to resolve
each bug or implement each feature.

Bug number one. Some user has a problem with the font on some button on
some screen. It's too large or something. I run the app. Fine, the
font _is_ too big. I find the offending code, adjust the font size,
recompile the binary, run it again. It looks bootilicous, even if I do
say so myself. Bug closed, I enter the time estimates: half a day
coding, half a day testing. There, I now have enough work for the rest
of the day.

10:50 AM Enough bugs for now. One can only do so much work in a single
day.

I check on my downloads. Shit, speed's dropped down, ETA is now over
one hour! Oh well, I guess I'll have to watch them this afternoon.

10:55 AM I stroll down to the men's room with the intention of taking a
short nap in one of the stalls. Unfortunately, somebody's beat me to it
and there's an awful stench about the place. Mildly irritated, I am
forced to retreat back to my office.

11:05 AM I'm still bored. So bored in fact that I decide to open the
feature request just to kill some more time before lunch. Who knows, it
might even be a laugh.

My efforts are rewarded. The feature request is a laugh. Apparently my
product has no extended description string in its entry in the Windows'
services dialog. Personally, I don't see why anyone should lose sleep
over this, but then that's just me. Bob from Seattle here is obviously
concerned enough about this issue to demand that I (quote) "provide some
sort of informative description string for [name of product]" (unquote).

Very well, _Bob_. I fire up Outlook, change the settings so that I can
send and receive mail again, then type up a quick one to
bob.whatshisname@megacorp.com:

Dear Bob Whatshisname,

Regarding Feature Request #54665: great suggestion! Please feel free to
provide me with the exact wording of the informative description you
have in mind and I will be happy to hook it up into the product.

Thanks!

Kind regards,

Travis

(Yeah, I really can be a nice guy if I want to.)

I click the Send/Receive button. Outlook dispatches the mail to Bobby,
and then pulls in a new email message. It's from Linda at Reception.

Dear all,

Will the owner of the black Honda with license plate ------ please call
down to reception asap?

Kind regards,

Linda Trujillo

Hey, it seems I've generated enough work for Linda today too. Well, fat
chance, _Wi_nda!

I change the status of Bob's "feature" request to "rejected" and update
the database. It's all in a day's work.

11:20 AM All this work is making me tired. I decide to relax by
exacting revenge on xgammon. I feel angry enough to be able to finally
kick his ass now. Plus, I have about an hour to kill before lunch
break.

12:10 AM I lean back in my seat, exhausted. This xgammon is one tough
opponent. It certainly was an exciting match. I must say, hacking the
program to allow me to specify what the outcome of each throw of the
dice is, has significantly evened out the odds. Two can play that game,
xgammon!

The phone rings again. I let it ring, while I check up on my downloads.
Great: the first one is already in, the second one will be ready in five
minutes. There's hope for some excitement after lunch. I just hope I
didn't pull in one of those fake vids where some pimple faced kid posts
a clip of hairy German men groping each other and shitting in one
another's mouths under a misleading name in the hope to get more
exposure for his sicko upload. I really hate it when that happens. I'm
a fragile individual; German men freak me out, naked or otherwise.

Finally the phone stops. I guess I'm out. Maybe I just went to the
bathroom. Maybe I'm sick. Who's to know?

12:15 AM Why look at the time! All this excitement almost made me
forget about lunch.

01:15 PM Back from lunch. I rub my hands in excitement. Nothing like a
Jenna Jameson facial clip to top off a sumptious meal of ham on rye
sandwitches with a side order of salad and some OJ. Comfortably
ensconced in my filty little corner, I start up the first clip, the one
called _Jenna_Jamesom_Titty_Fuck_and_Awesome_Cumshot.avi, hand quivering
in drooling expectation.

To my horror and disbelief, mplayer spews back some crap about a missing
video decoder! What? Panic-stricken, I scroll through the vast array
of video decoders I have installed on my office PC (all during working
hours of course), some of them official, some gathered from that
undepletable source of junk, the Internet, hacked and self-compiled as
part of my unrelenting quest to give birth to the most comprehensive
porno-watching utility program in the world. To no avail. This
particular codec is unknown to me!

To tease me in my misery even more, mplayer is playing the soundtrack.
I hearken to the raucous voice of a woman yelping lewdly while a
hard-working dude is pointedly grunting in the background. But what is
that? Wait a cum-shootin' minute! This doesn't sound like Jenna. The
hollow, cheap quality of the soundtrack betrays an uninspiring backroom
or garage romp, with a raspy amateur chick whose pale, skinny,
pimple-spotted ass is being pounded listlessly by an unshaven chubby man
with a blubbering, hairy belly. I smell a fake! And to think I spent
hours donwloading this. Annoyance rears its ugly head again. This
is definitely _not_ the kind of early afternoon activity I had in mind
when I came back from lunch. My soaring spirit stalls.

01:40 PM I lean back in my chair in frustration. Twenty minutes on the
web, and I just can't seem to find the proper decoder plugin to play the
fake file. This is turning to be one of those days.

I stare at the file. It's taunting me, an ugly smile across its face, I
swear I can see it!

I decide to play the other file, just to cool off a bit and get my act
together before the company meeting at 2pm. Thank God this one's
genuine Jenna all right. It's the one involving Jenna, Jill Kelly,
Chasey Lain and a couple of neon-colored double-dildos. In this
particular scene, Chasey is sitting on Jill's face and using a long
purple dildo to ...

The phone rings. Fuck! Startled, I take off my headphones, pause the
vid.

The phone rings again.

I give it a hard, icy look. I hope it'll cringe in horror and give up.

Unfazed by the display of vicious hatred on my part, the phone r-rings
cheerfully again. I snatch the handset in anger. Why can't people just
leave me alone?

"Yes!" I half-yell into the speaker.

It's the boss. If I would care to join the rest of the staff at the
meeting downstairs in the conference room. I stare ruefully at the
video on my screen. It's paused just at the point where the dildo is
about to be...

"Travis?"

"Yes, yes," I sigh. "I'm coming."

No pun intended, naturally.

03:15 PM Back from an invigorating nap at the back of the conference
room while my boss flapped about some marketing issue or other involving
"major" decisions on part of "the management". Sure thing, boss, a
major salary increase for you and your ilk, is what it's all about.

Feeling restless, I decide to join a Quake server and slap some newbies
about. I fire up Quake and join my favorite gib-fest. I log in as
Ghandi and soon wreak unspeakable havoc and horror amongst the
population, turning most of my hapless opponents into chunky kibble and
blood spray. I am on a roll, as usual. I divide and conquer, I kill or
be killed, I am merciless and vindictive, violent and just, and ye and
verily, I do become the one true Taker of Lives and Dealer of Pain!

I know old Mahatma would be proud of how his name and heritage is being
carried on.

04:00 PM Satiated, I log off the server, leaving the lesser men to fight
it out among themselves. I've had enough. Even the Gods need a break.

04:05 PM Having wasted enough of my life today already, I get up and hit the
OFF switch on both computers without properly shutting them down first.
I sure hope this will cause at least one of them to break come boot time
tomorrow morning.

One has little else to cling to.

I make an inconspicuous exit.

__________________
I want no escape.