Games to Play on Transit #7

When I was about 12 or so I read a series of thirteen short stories. The stories themselves didn't stick with me, but the prologue to them did.

The author explained that he had been on a flight from Capetown to Cairo in the 1970's and the plane had stopped for refuelling in Uganda (which was under Idi Amin at the time). On the tarmack, in the hottest part of the afternoon, was a white woman and boy of about twelve. The woman was wearing an elegant evening dress and the boy was wearing a tuxedo.

It was, of course, so odd that the author wondered what brought these two people to this place at this time, dressed as they were. He wished that there was some who could explain it to him. Then he realised that it was such an unusual situation that he would have accepted any remotely reasonable explaination -- so he wrote 13 of his own.

The game then, is to pick someone out of the crowd and make up a story about why they are there. Make up lives for the people you gave names to in the last game.

Must Consult Somebody Else

Loving the doctor. The first six e-mails were just to get him to open a web page, save the source to a text file, and send it to me. The really fun part about this is that the problem is the result of the graphic rendering engine critical fix that was released last week to fix a bug with Windows metafile format (WMF) images. There are so many levels of FUBAR in this I don't even want to get into sorry chain of events. Just trust me and stay far, far away from Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server. In other work-related news, I was at the new Lignum this morning taking a couple new headshots for the latest two people that quit Tolko to work for the reincarnation of Lignum.

Seriously

That's just today. What we accomplished today was replacing one style sheet with another which finished off establishing that none of my customizations were at fault, that in fact it is the core application that is broken. This is followed by explaining several times that the application is broken. Then explaining that "it's not my code, it is the application" means "call Microsoft". In his most recent e-mail he started asking questions about basic functionality of the application. I was tempted to simply reply, "RTFM. Fuck off." While that remains the gist of my reply, I chose to word it a little more diplomatically out of deference to my old boss whom I still may want a reference from at some point. Nonetheless, while making several hundred dollars on my lunch hour has some merit, I really can't put a price on the Doctor's ability to exceed my patience and irritate the living shit out of me. I wouldn't work with this idiot again for all the tea, silk, opium, cheap factory labour, and bargain-basement hookers in China.