Saturday 15th May 2004
I know: I haven't written one of these in a while, even though I've got a laptop again. Longish story, most of which is covered within the events of the last twenty-five hours.
14th May 2004. 19.30. Ish.
20.00. Ish.
20.17
22.15
So, being colourblind, I get a shot of it, since Hunter thinks it looks like blood. Based on the hexadecimals, it's possible. Or, it could be rust. Or whatever. In any case, it's not a good thing.
22.20
22.31
22.57
15th May 2004. 1.01
4.47
7.45
10.01
10.27
10.31
10.39
10.47
10.53
Noonish
20.34
23.15.09
Warning: the general idiocy all compressed into the last twenty-five hours actually beats all the idiocy from four months of dealing with JestBuy over 2,475 hours. Which is pretty impressive, really.
It begins, obviously enough, last night.
So, I was asleep. Then I wasn't. Because Hunter rushed in and woke me up to let me know that it was raining in the hallway again. Which is always bothersome.
See, the imbeciles who used to live upstairs...that's damned near the whole sentence. There were imbeciles upstairs. So some of you will see where this is going. For the rest of you, I'll explain.
So. The imbeciles who were upstairs, were not light, not quiet, and not smart. In other words, when it wasn't raining in my hallway, I was getting asbestos fallout from the ceiling as the behemoths waddled about, crashing heavily enough to shake things on my desk. And that was just a matter of simple physics. Obese morons are heavy, and don't know how to be heavy in any tasteful capacity.
Meanwhile, when their corpulence wasn't the immediate issue, they'd actually dribble a fucking basketball up there. Which leads to the same basic effect, but with an added poink every time something crashed. Also, basketballs move faster and more precisely than obese morons. So that was somewhat worse.
In addition to all that, these dumb fucking schizophrenics would blast that one gospel cacophony over and over. You know the one. It's got Jeepers in it. They're all the same fucking song anyway: Jesus, you are dead...and so we must be large...we're fucked up in the head...just say the word; we're set to charge....
Although there was the occasional, like, banjo song out of them. Basically that Beverly Hillbillies theme. Best I could make out, the lyrics were something like....
Now listen to a story bout a man named Job
The most perfect guy who ever lived upon the globe
The devil asked Jehovah 'will he like you without stuff?'
So Jehovah took Job's things away to call the devil's bluff.
Bet, that is; wager placed; marker called.
So the next thing you know, old Job's a mendicant
His wife told him to curse the lord, but Job would not recant
Jehovah took his house away and murdered all his kids
And he killed off all his animals and sent him to the skids.
Row, that is; down and out; no pot to piss.
So Job met with Godzilla and he said many a thing.
Jehovah gave him all new stuff and even new offspring
And Job lived for fourteen decades before he finally fell
But since Jesus hadn't died by then, he spent all time in hell.
So. Having these creatures on my planet was unpleasant.
Now, here's the funny part. They were evicted. Primarily because they, in a burst of creative thought, turned on all their faucets and left. So all the sinks and the tub overflowed, met with the good Mister Gravity, and...and so it started raining in my hallway. Since that was the act of a moron--actually a whole pod of obese morons--they got evicted. Problem solved.
That was several months ago. Then, they got replaced by a pod of fucking clones.
So. The clones got evicted on Tuesday. Which is good. Bad is that, being clones, they did the same fucking thing: left the water running. Though, in a burst of additional creative thought, they also turned on the air conditioner.
What's impressing me about all this is that their air conditioner actually froze all the fucking water. I hadn't known that was possible. But I'm getting ahead of the story a bit.
The office, of course, are closed. If I'm awake, they're closed. The actual time and day are immaterial. In the event that I try to find them at noon on Tuesday, they're closed. Though, more officially, they'll Be Back Soon. Which I should have known in the first place, since they weren't even there back in the summer of 2002 when I moved in here. I had to wait for an hour until someone finally showed up. But that's old news.
So I call the Emergency Number. Which is a joke. It's a pager. You call it, punch in your phone number, and wait for the rest of eternity. I did.
I get a call, from PRIVATE. It turns out to be Libby--the manager of this disaster. I tell her that it's raining in here again; she says she'll have someone over here instantly to deal with it. Good.
I get hold of Libby again, since it's still raining, and no one's doing anything to stop it. And that's terribly odd, because she'd thought that someone had mentioned something about coming over here to stop it. They should be on the way though; once they're here, inside my house, she'll call me to let me know that. She says.
Of course, at this point, I also mention that, whatever is raining in on this place isn't purely water. In fact, it looks like this.
But, now that Libby knows that whatever's leaking into this place isn't water, it becomes a real priority. I guess that's good news. After a fashion.
Hunter answers the door. It's Libby. Apparently dropping in to see whether this shit is blood or not. Also, she stopped off upstairs first, where there wasn't any blood, but where there was all this ice all over everything.
The problem now is that there's nothing she can do about it. Because, being ice, it's locked itself to all the pipes up there; trying to get it off somehow would break some thirty-year-old pipes.
It's far more cost-effective to wait it out, letting it rain in here, destroying my stuff. Various comicbooks, cinematic posters, Star Wars toys from 1977 still in their boxes. Without exaggerating, I've got millions in stuff in this place. But: I'd hate to see any pipes get broken over this. So I'll wait, and simply invoke Colorado Law regarding Criminal Negligence to have these idiots reimburse me for whatever they allowed to be destroyed by their own idiocy. Works for me.
Oh, and to answer the next question in advance: because I can't. Because I've got a bedroom devoted to boxes stacked up to the ceiling, each of which is worth more than this building. There's no other place to put them all, and the deluge is spreading across the carpet toward the room.
Although, it begins to occur to me that I could move all this stuff. Across town. To a new place. Having escaped this one. Given that nothing in the lease suggests that I have to stay here while I'm being rained on.
Which is noteworthy. And Libby notes it. According to her records, I, having been here for twenty-three months, have set a record. No one else has ever lasted this long in this place without being evicted. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing, really.
Meanwhile, due largely [I assume] to the frozen pipes we can't risk breaking having broken, all of my faucets are fucked. The kitchen sink is producing gallons of boiling water per hour; the bathtub, while streaming out a mixture of hot and cold water, fails to produce any larger volume of water by turning it on. So, from the kitchen, I now have a cloud of hot fog rushing out to warp things and make it feel like Atlanta in August in here. What I haven't got, for whatever possibly-related reason, is a fridge. The thing works, in that it makes noise; but the thermometer I put in the freezer drops all the way down to seventy. Which, granted, is cooler than the ninety-one degrees with a million percent relative humidity outside the freezer.
So, Libby notes that as well. And I, waiting for Lenny the Alleged Labourer to show up and do something about parting the Reed Sea in my hallway, but having no food, elect to walk over to the supermarket to grab something we can eat without having to refrigerate anything.
I get back home, with various stuff. I've just missed Lenny, it turns out, who ran off to find Libby to ask whether he was allowed to fix something. At this point, I'm getting all this from Hunter, who got it all from him. So no one's sure what in hell is going on. So, I wait.
Oddly, it's still raining in here. So I call the emergency number again, trying to get some answers and--better yet--solutions.
Then I play around with a couple of things. Including Site of the Living Dead and gremlin.net. At this point, I'm seriously thinking about writing these things as ActiveServer sites. Mostly because the hypertext with the CSI JavaScript inclusions just isn't working very well. That, of course, sets me back a bit on things, since I'd already got a lot of the hypertext versions coded out. The good news is that, once I've got the basic layout making sense to me--mostly in Photoshop--it's not a big deal to convert it all. Except that it's raining in here, so I'm not really focussing on the websites.
Libby calls. The pager has been buzzing once a minute for the last three or four hours. What do I want now.
I relay that Hunter had relayed that Lenny had relayed that he was gonna find out what he could do back at eleven or so; then, he disappeared from our planet.
Someone had got something wrong, it seems. Since the pipes are frozen, there's nothing Lenny can do. He'd just gone off to get the key to the place upstairs, and then disappeared. So, that's that.
I go back to working on websites.
The last time it wound up raining in here, someone at least came round to get the water out of the carpet as it happened. Which is to say that they set up a ten-megawatt industrial hairdryer to dry the carpet while more water came in. And that did some good.
This time, that's not happening. And now, as Hunter wakes up and starts screaming about it, I learn that the stream is dodging the room with all the important stuff in it, and heading into the bedroom instead. Which is also bad. Partly because I've got this forty-two-square-foot waterbed which, theoretically, could warp, collapse, and add whatever 6*7*1cubic feet of water is to the water already coming in here. So that's bad.
I get hold of Libby again, now that it's daytime. Her excuse is that, since Lenny has left the planet, she'll have to get someone in from a carpetcleaning joint to remove all the water. Which, she'd thought, had already happened. He should be here soon.
Still thinking about websites but unable to think with all this shit going on, I get all covered up and launch out into the growing sunlight to get the mail.
On the way there, I casually notice a lot of mail strewn about. But who cares.
I get to my mailbox, which is essentially the same as my POBox, except that it's outside. I insert the key, turn the lock, pull it open, grab Hunter's Victoria's Secret catalogues, grab various creditcards in envelopes, casually notice various bits of metal, close the door, turn the key, and remove the entire locking cyllindre.
Someone has actually taken apart my mailbox. It's not broken; it's dismantled. Also, it's just mine.
At this point, I start thinking back to my days in law school. Not because it's helpful in this situation, but because this shit didn't happen back then. Anyway: I look around again. Wearing gloves, I pick up a billford laying on the ground nearby. I'll call this a suspect.
I get back here and hit usps.gov to find the number of the Postal Inspector. I'll explain this real quick.
There are, on Earth, a number of supercommando teams. The SAS, the SeALs, et cetera. Including, of course, the Postal Inspector. Here's how this works. You, as a citisen, buy a mailbox. Then you instal it, because you otherwise go to prison. Once it's installed, it's not yours anymore. Now, it's federal property. If someone breaks into it, they're breaking into federal property. So: telling the cops about it is useless, since it's federal property. Telling the FBI about it is useless, because it's a fucking mailbox. So, you have to tell the Postal Inspector about it. And these guys are scary little people.
So I get that reported. Which is actually kinda fun, since it's Saturday and they're closed, so I got bounced to a guy with a sense of humour. After discusing the use of papershredders to make tacos, I get off the phone and have the raining hallway to deal with.
The office open at ten. I know, because the recording said so. So, I walk over to them--mostly to learn that they actually open at nine, and that they'll be back at ten thirty.
I return to the office. They're still closed, of course.
While I'm waiting, a guy shows up in a carpetcleaning lorry. We get to talking. Turns out I'm the guy whose place is getting rained into. He goes off to deal with that--and with Hunter--while I wait here to tell someone about my mailbox problem.
I do, in fact, have a suspect in mind. Along with circumstantial evidence. Although, so far, I can't connect the two.
I have a suspect in mind because, the other night, A bunch of morons nearby started screaming at Hunter, complaining about the fact that she's jewish.
Now...given that Hunter is not, in fact, jewish...my larger question in why in the living hell a group of...I don't know what word to use here. I hesitate to call them blacks, because that insults the black people who actually have an education and are willing to do more than complain about white guys who died a hundred years ago. Whatever these anomalies were, though, it's odd that they'd have a problem with jews. At the very least, they could complain about, say, indians; at least they met some of those. Atavistically speaking.
Anyway: Hunter had called the office to mention that she'd been threatened for not being jewish; Libby had been ecstatic about that, since lots of other people have also complained, and they're mounting enough reasons to evict these twits. Meanwhile, Hunter, now concerned about them being out there, thinks it might be fun to have me go outside instead. Which, it turns out, it was.
They'd scream at her when she went outside. Which is to say that, when she wasn't outside, they merely blathered loudly about nothing--essentially the zompires from I Am Legend, I suppose. Then, when she did go outside, they got excited--kinda like the zombies beyond the fence in Day of the Dead. When I went outside, the blathering stopped instantly, and the entire murder of them scattered back inside.
I don't fully get that. So I'm six and a half feet tall and generally unpleasant-looking. But...okay, maybe I get it now.
In any case, given that they know where we live, but are too terrified to do anything I'd see--even going near my car, apparently--it's entirely possible that they ran off and killed the mailbox, since they had a better chance of surviving that.
So, now, waiting for someone to get to the office, I'm thinking that, if the name on the ID in the billfold I found happens to match up with the name on the lease of the morons, I'll know a little more about this.
Someone shows up. Not Libby; someone new. When I say that she shows up, I mean it, too. In a car. From home. Just getting to the office ninety-nine minutes after it didn't open.
Now that she's here, and I'm waiting, she gets the door unlocked so this massive fucking monster can lurch in past me and spend the next five minutes complaining that someone had promised it that it could put a $350 deposit on credit, paying it off monthly over the next year, because no one has that kind of money all at once.
I decline to bum the creature three hundred and fifty bucks.
I finally get it out that my mailbox has been destroyed. Since I have no idea who this new chick is, I don't bother mentioning the billfold I found. Libby's off today; turns out some rat bastard kept her up all night with phonecalls.
We go look at the damage, so the new chick can believe me about it. And here's where everything starts to work out.
The carpetguy is back at my place, fixing the problem; I'm at the mailbox, proving the problem; the mailman is there, agreeing with me about the problem. He hands me my new mail; the new chick promises that this'll be fixed before the mailman returns in forty-eight hours; I go home.
Now, realise that I never go outside during the day. I've never even seen most of my neighbours. I assume they've never seen me. Now, they can see me. Remember that murder of morons who fled inside upon seeing me? Everyone else here does the same thing. It's surreal. I walk along, and all the little blacks and mexicans and mutts [I'm certainly the only Englih guy here, and damned near the only white one; just as a matter of fact] gasp and hurry inside, chittering at each other in languages I'll never understand: Kaa! Kaa! Tall English Superpredator! Kaa! Run like the wind would run if it were darkish and chittering! Kaa!
Unfortunately, there's no possible way to moan fire bad at these people while still being at all urbane. It just never works. You can't effectively pull off the Frankenstein's Monster motif with I say: that measure of fire you appear to control impresses upon me the need to infer malevolence. Truly hopeless.
Thinking about the water situation, I wander round to my backyard, which I haven't even seen since last summer when I discovered that FedEx had dumped a package there in Jaunary and fled without telling me anything about it. The door to the boiler room is broken open and nearly off its hinges. And, in the shadowy pitch of MDT midmorning, I can hear something slithering about within. A serpentine sort of hiss; the occasional bump in the light.
Slowly I turn. Setp by step, inch by inch, centimetre by centimetre, halving the distance to the door, and halving it again, and again, and again still, until I stop keeping track of all that because I'll otherwise never actually get there. The doorknob is too dull and rusty to produce that Sixth Sense reflexion, so I let it go and just open the door.
The horror: I'm staring at a boiler which actually predates water.
But there's a recent inspection sticker. It expired merely ten fucking years ago.
I back away from the hissing, vibrating boiler before it can explode at me. Then I go inside.
I get inside as the carpetguy is leaving. He'd ShopVacced the carpet real quick, and split. No ten-megawatt hairdryer this time. Just a damp carpet which is still getting rained on. Because I'm surrounded by idiots.
Which leads to a fun revelation.
It's 15th May. The dealine to get the evidence of JestBuy's fraud to Bank of America. Because they could never just hit JestBuy.com and read what I've already uploaded.
I've got a new laptop now, but I'm still trying to get my $378.71 back for a $120 harddrive which probably never existed, and which I obviously haven't got. The deal there was that I'd pay them the money, according to recorded oral contract with Anna the Moron Posing As a Manager of JestBuy, in the event that I got A) a new laptop drive, B) the old laptop drive, and C) proof that the old drive had been destroyed, and that it was my fault. Since, to date, I've got zero of those three things, I'm fronting evidence to Bank of America for the fraud case.
So I get that all thrown together and go to the UPS Store to fax it off. Mostly because eFax.com failed to impress me much before I got rid of them.
Everything I can do, short of moving out of this dump, is done. And I'm too tired to move out just now. I go to sleep.
I wake up because a group of morons are out in the carpark using a carhorn to morsecode out W-E-A-R-E-R-E-T-A-R-D-E-D-C-O-M-E-A-N-D-S-E-E-Y-O-U-H-A-V-E-S-L-E-P-T-L-O-N-G-E-N-O-U-G-H-W-E-M-U-S-T-N-O-W-B-E-K-I-L-L-E-D. I may have got that wrong, of course; it' been a while since I had any need for morse.
So I get up to kill these morons, and step into a fucking lake. It's still raining; the Reed Sea has grown. My mailbox is still destroyed. Nothing is fixed.
Having written all this out, I come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to move out of this hellhole. I've got the kitchen fog moving in and making my screen all wet; I've got a lake between me and the bedroom; I've got imbeciles honking and breaking my mailbox; I've got just cause to escape and think about suing these people for Criminal Inanity. First, I've just got to wander about with my DigiCam getting bits of evidence that I have no need to be here, let alone to pay for it.
More later....
--Gremlin