So, I’ve been kinda busy here again. Here’s the story....
Regarding WorstPacific: this is just...expected....
Monday, on which I'd planned to get started in earnest on all this, I didn't. Because the headache which began sometime on Saturday hadn't ended yet. So that was a day wasted.
Tuesday, though, things got started. Kinda. Which went like this.
Tuesday 3rd August 2004; 8.01AM: the office here officially open, according to the sign on the door.
Tuesday 3rd August 2004; 9.05AM: I give up on waiting for anyone at the damned office to answer the phone, and instead call Neighbourhood Liaisons, who, being of use on this planet, answer on the first ring.
I explain to them that, starting within about seventeen seconds after the last time I'd called Neighbourhood Liaisons, back in the middle of May, the suck had started up again. Or still. As the case may be. That, as evidenced by WorstPacific.com, the ceilings had started leaking again almost instantly, given that these morons had only replaced the pipes they'd been ordered to replace, leaving the rest of the forty-year-old substandard pipes to inherit the pressure of thousands of gallons of scalding water, which, shockingly enough, managed to escape again, this time through other parts of my ceilings, back onto the deplorable carpeting I wasn't allowed to get rid of since that would have done me inestimable amounts of personal good back in the middle of May when I spent two and a half days--that's sixty hours--Six Zero Hours--on my damned feet, fighting fifty to a hundred gallons of scalding water saturating and travelling along this horrid carpet with a damned spongemop, which was only slightly less feckless a tool for the job than the hairdryer I burned out by focusing it on the deluge and leaving it running for the same span of time.
Anyway, that entertaining anecdote conveyed, I asked Neighbourhood Liaisons to lean on these plebeians, again, in the whimsical hopes that it might effect some sort of action, like getting this place up to code by the end of the millennium. Which is to say by 1st January 3001. Which I seriously doubt is enough time, given the idiocy of WorstPacific, and the extent of the suck. But that's not particularly my problem. Or, it is, but it won't be for quite that long.
3rd August 2004; 9.11AM: Neighbourhood Liaisons, having heard enough, agree to call WorstPacific and get this all straightened out, and to call me back within the hour with an update.
3rd August 2004; 10.01AM: my phone rings. But it turns out to be Mike from CircuitPity. Which is a simplification. He's actually from PityAssure. Which appear to be a warranty-fulfilment company devoted to, and probably owned by, CircuitPity. Making it the same thing, in essence.
Mike wants to know whether I've got the laptop back from them for the fourth time out of three. Which, at that point, I have; it had showed up late on Monday, during the last of my headache, and remained in its shipping box. Mike also wants to know whether the laptop had been fixed, this fourth time out of three. So, we turn the thing on, and it overheats and pukes. As usual. So that's a No.
Mike thinks quickly, and comes up with a few neat ideas. I can A) send the laptop back for the fifth time out of three, to see what they can fail to fix this time, B) take it to CompUSA [since I bought it at CircuitPity and all], have them fix it, pay for that, and send Mike the bill in the hopes that someone at CircuitPity might pay me back for having got people with brains to have fixed my laptop, or C) send it back for the fifth time out of three, but send it back to Mike, who's never actually met the laptop, and who really can't work out why it would keep coming back broken enough to overheat and puke when I turn it on, since CircuitPity have had it four times out of three already, each time simply taking it apart and testing each little bit of the laptop, without ever turning the goddamned thing on, because that would be, you know, SMART.
That is to say that--and I'm conveying their exact statements here--the laptop appears, to date, to be failing due to User Error, which equates to ACTUALLY TURNING THE LAPTOP ON.
I ran with Option C, since Option A has failed four times out of three, and Option B sounds way too much like throwing good money after bad.
Mike puts me on hold, so he can find out whether he can actually give me Option C, since he'd just kinda thrown that out while hoping I'd go with A or B.
Tuesday 3rd August 2004; 10.20AM: Still playing CircuitPity's horrid muzak, my phone beeps; it's the other line. If I have to sit on hold, then Mike has to sit on hold; I kick over to answer the incoming call. Which is, of course, Mark, over at Neighbourhood Liaisons.
Mark has some good news for me: now that he's called WorstPacific to lean on them, WorstPacific have finally been told about this new problem and will definitely take action to consider coming up with a plan for plotting out a way to schedule some sort of brainstorming session sometime in the--
At this point, I interrupt with a bit of my own news. WorstPacific have now lied to the very organisation with the power to repatriate them to Antarctica for sucking at the criminal level. Which is to say that, as it happens to happen, I've got a website full of evidence to the contrary of their claim that they've just now learned of this issue since Mark had only just called them. That website, as you may have guessed, is WorstPacific.com. Which URL I hand expertly to Mark: Worst, as in the opposite of Best, Pacific, as in the opposite of Atlantic, DotCom, as in, uh, as in DotCom, I guess. Mark, terribly interested to learn not only that WorstPacific had knowledge of this suck for several weeks now, but that, by implication, they therefore just very much lied to him about their knowledge of the suck to date, goes off to A) look at WorstPacific.com, and, B), to get WorstPacific back on the phone to ask which Antarctic shore they happen to prefer.
Tuesday 3rd August 2004; 10.25AM: I switch back over to the horrid muzak so I can find out whether I've already found anything out about my laptop.
Tuesday 3rd August 2004; 10.26AM: KnockKnockKnock! Libby the Landlord is at my door, terribly interested in having a quick look at my ceilings; apparently, it just so happened that today at 10.26 in the morning happened to sound like the perfect time to not be deported to Antarctica.
She looks at the ceilings, notes that they're not actually there, and mentions that, in fact, they've set it up to have outsourced contractors here on Friday [which, it happens, is today, here in realtime] to replace my ceilings. Also, and contrarily, she'd been told by someone at some point that they'd already replaced my ceilings, so she'd had no idea that they were still missing; so it was lucky that she'd happened to have set it up to have outsourced contractors stop by here on Friday 6th August 2004 for no actual reason at all, since, now that it turns out that my ceilings haven't been replaced yet, they'll have something to do when they come in here by pure coincidence. Of course, contrary to all that, she'd never really known that there had ever been a problem with the ceilings and pipes and things here, and she's really amazed that Neighbourhood Liaisons would call her to tell her to fix them, buy that story, then call back a few minutes later as though they'd hit some website full of gigabytes of evidence that she'd just lied to them, or some such thing. What a kooky twist of events she'd just experienced. Wow.
This whole time, I'm listening to CircuitPity's idiotic muzak, of course.
Libby the Landlord leaves. I remain at home and on hold.
Tuesday 3rd August 2004; 10.41AM: Mike finally returns to let me know that I can just have the laptop sent to him for the fifth time out of three; then he'll be able to turn it on while calling me and let me know what amazingly-surprising things the laptop does when he turns it on. Which will be amazingly surprising. Just like it was amazingly surprising when it failed to work when I turned it on all four times I'd got it back from them, and like it was amazingly surprising when I turned it on at CircuitPity, to prove to the very idiots I'd bought it from that it overheats and shuts down, when it overheated and shut down.
So Mike arranged to have a box sent out to me to put the laptop into and tape up and send back. For the fifth time, I got to hear all about the proper way to put a laptop into a box, once it shows up, and tape it up, and send it off again. Since I've only got an IQ of lots, and could never have divined the engineering principles of folding the final two of six cardboard surfaces inward and taping them there, having first somehow got a laptop computer within the four preexisting walls of the eventual cube.
Tuesday 3rd August 2004; 10.49AM: I finally got off the damned phone.
Little else happened with either of those issues after that.
Later that day, I happened to glance over at the television, which happened to be displaying CourtTV at the time, which itself happened to be displaying a domain name. Which had something to do with some story I'd missed most of. Which I didn't exactly care about, but...ever got in late on something, like an infomercial, and, rather than sit there waiting for them to return to anything like a point, you just went ahead and hit whatever website they were advertising while failing to tell you why they were advertising it? That's what I did. I went ahead and hit Katie.com. And here's where everything suddenly catches up and makes an odd sort of sense again.
In order to fully appreciate the weirdness of all this, you first have to understand the backstory of gremlin.net, including the regrettable existence of BangBang.
BangBang was, of course, a mentally-unstable stalker; he claimed to have been an alien, visiting our planet with the galaxian power to suck, or something; in reality, he was a twenty-six-year-old LARPer 'tard who got NoKnocked by the FBI while he was wearing Pokemon pajamas because he'd threatened to kill me, Hunter, you [being visitors to gremlin.net], various agents of the FBI, President Junior, and, of all people, Perry Aftab, attorney at law, specialising in internet stalking and other cybercrimes, and, as it would simply have to happen, representing the imbecile who wrote and released a novel entitled Katie .Com, while having fuckall to do with the preexisting domain of katie.com.
Which you'll get at a glance, just for hitting katie.com and reading through it. Although Katie Jones, who owns and runs katie.com, is far more forgiving about this particular suck than I'd ever be.
Where Katie Jones retains some sympathy for Katie Tarbox, who wrote Katie .Com and who can be found at KatieT.com, which happens to include a couple of sample chapters of her remedial little autobiography, which happens to impress me as precisely what BangBang would have written, had he had a spellcheck. Which, we presume, he never had.
That said, and as you'd get from katie.com for reading the whole thing, the funniest bit about all this is that, in working out what to call Katie .Com, Tarbox had admittedly used the working title of Girl .Com, which would have advertised girl.com instead of katie.com. I wonder why she changed her mind about that. Perhaps I'll click on the link to girl.com and find out.
Now, here comes the true irony of this whole thing. BangBang, who stalked and threatened to kill me [and others, but that's not precisely my problem], had, as it happened, the domain of SciFiStarSystem.com pointing to his criminally-retarded geocities.com site, back when he was allowed to touch a computer. Suppose I were to write and release an autobiographical novel about my reaction to the suck of Banger, which, incidentally, I've considered doing; then, suppose I were to call it, oh, I dunno, SciFiStarSystem .Com. You think SciFiStarSystem.com's owner would hold it against me? Neither do I.
I mean, excuse me for paying attention, but I happened to notice what happened to ruthless.com after Tom Clancy released ruthless.com without bothering to have any control over or affiliation with the existing ruthless.com. For that, anytime I drop a 'fictional' domain name into a novel, it's a pretty safe bet that I already own the damned thing, in fact.
Which happens to explain my ownership of such interesting domains as PayPpl.com, ConspiracyFacts.com, and ZombiesAteMyBrains.com. You can probably guess which novel that latter will appear in, fictionally enough.
Which I'll get to in a moment. I just wanted to mention how impressed I really am with the arrogance and idiocy of this miserable fatchick who actually complained that one guy out of three-odd billion was weird enough to wanna fuck her.
One thing I really must mention, as little as it has to do with anything else on your screen, is the funniest thing I've ever seen online. And that's saying a lot. The Story of Dick, Jane, and Sally.
There's really no setup to that. It's just the funniest thing I've ever actually seen online. If memory serves. Which it might not. If I've seen something funnier, it probably shorted something out in my brain and erased my shortterm memory of it. Which is always a danger.
Okay. Pandemic.
It's not done yet. Because I've kinda spent the year to date dealing with various species of suck. But, I have got it all worked out now. Which is to say that I've got a working zombiebug [by which I mean that I have enough information on this thing to go into a lab and actually create it, which is tempting on its own], and a fairly comprehensive fifteen-act outline of the story itself. Which, of course, is not how I write novels. But, since I can't be allowed to write the novel itself while the suck remains extant at me, it's the next best thing. It's also looking like a pretty good idea. By more or less working out each little bit in a simple, four-page outline, I've got a pretty good idea of exactly how many pages the actual book will be. Which kinda takes some of the fun out of writing it. But not all of it.
That much figured out, I've just got two things left to do: to write a book with a fear factor no one has an immunity to [I say this in relation to myself, since nothing ever really scares me--particularly in written form--so my intention is to write a book I can personally be frightened by], and to write a book which, in the event anyone ever thought it should be made into a film, would require a shooting budget of half a billion dollars to do the story any justice at all.
Hopefully, I can meet those two basic goals.
Also, I'm still working on getting this book written and released by my deadline. Which is, of course, my deadline. It's not like I get fired if I miss it; I just get angry about it. Which, given the sources of the suck which have got me all the way into August without having finished the book yet, would really only lead to more aggression on my part, regarding their punishment.
About which, since the news about this place getting all fixed up once and for all today kinda blindsided me on Tuesday, and since I wasn't actually able to find the lawyer I'm supposed to be using for this case [I've got his number, but the people at his number are certain that he's not there, even though they've got the same firm he has], I'm just spending today sitting here waiting to see whether they really get this whole place fixed up by midnight, as promised, tomorrow and Sunday doing whatever you're allowed to do on the weekend, and, then, Monday I'm spending either dealing with the lawyer I'm supposed to be dealing with for this, or getting hold of some other lawyer who can actually exist at me before it starts snowing.
So, that should prove entertaining. Especially if no one shows up here today. Which will be, like, amazingly surprising, of course.
More later....
--Gremlin

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.