Finally - A Harold Episode

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The van rumbled to a halt at the security barrier outside Infinity Recycling. A uniformed guard emerged from the gatehouse and approached. Box nudged the barrel against the van driver's ribs and hissed at him not to try any funny business. The driver wound down the van's window as the guard approached, and held up his id.

The guard examined it briefly, checked the photo against the driver’s face, nodded and went back into the gatehouse. A few moments later, the barrier swung up and the white van rolled into the compound.

'Take us to where you'd go if your mission had been successful,' ordered Box.

The driver nodded and swung the wheel around, piloting the vehicle around to the back of the building. He drew to a halt facing what looked to be a blank wall. Box looked at him quizzically. the man shrugged and pressed a button on the van's key fob.

Ahead of them, two sections of the wall slid apart, revealing a well-lit tunnel within.

'Wow, that was certainly well disguised,' murmured India from the back of the van. The vehicle jolted into motion once more and they headed into the tunnel which curved away to the right and sharply downwards.

-0-0-0-0-0-

Prada was pacing the room once more.

“It’ll be light soon,” she said to no-one in particular.

No-one bothered to answer her. Mercury was slumped in his chair, eyes closed, while Othello stared out of the window. A few triangular sandwich packets littered the long conference table, along with a few cans of drink.

Since a silent guard had dropped off the food and drink, they had been left to themselves. Prada sighed and moved to stand next to Othello at the window. There wasn’t much to see; the window looked out into an internal courtyard which boasted a patch of grass, some planting and a few seats – presumably for the Infinity staff members to take breaks.

“I can’t help feeling we should be doing more,” she continued.

“Like what?” asked Othello. “We can’t get out, we can’t contact anyone. Best we wait it out for now and see what happens.”

Prada sighed and turned to face into the room once more. Out or boredom, she let her eyes wander where they would, although she didn’t expect to see anything she hadn’t seen before: long, polished conference table; squeaky leather conference chairs, cupboards with nothing in them. Her eyes wandered to the ceiling. It was the usual suspended affair made up of tiles interspersed with long fluorescent light fittings.

“Could we get out through there?” she wondered aloud.

Othello turned to see what she was looking at.

“Doubt it,” he said, “The space above isn’t that big and I don’t think the structure would bear any of our weight.”

“Pity,” Prada sighed. Then she drew in a quick breath, before speaking in a low voice. “What about that?”

She pointed at the centre of the ceiling where a small round smoke detector protruded from the middle of a tile.

“Interesting,” agreed Othello, also in a low voice “but unless you’ve got some boy scouts to rub together…”

“I just might have,” grinned Prada.

She grabbed her jacket from where it hung on the back of one of the chairs and began ferreting in one of the pockets.

“A-ha!” she whispered, triumphantly, holding up a small, flat square of folded cardboard.

“Who knew a hole in one’s pocket could actually be useful?”

Othello stepped over to get a better view as Prada opened out the cardboard.

“Thank you, Crazy Jake’s Bar and Grill,” she breathed.

Inside the cardboard there were two matches

-0-0-0-0-0-

They left their erstwhile chauffeur gagged and bound in the rear of the van. There was a solid-looking door set in one wall of the basement car park and Mr Teeth and Box headed over to it. A few steps behind them, Harold and India followed.

A quick swipe of the Infinity goon’s id card resulted in a most satisfying clunk as the door’s locking mechanism disengaged. Box pushed the door open to reveal an empty, brightly-lit hallway leading away into the building’s interior.

“Looks clear enough,” grunted Mr Teeth.

He went through the door, followed by the others. Behind them, the door swung closed on its spring, locking with a click. Box glanced at his watch.

“Five minutes,” he said quietly.

Mr Teeth grunted acknowledgement.

The little party made its way along the hallway, Mr Teeth and Box leading, followed by an invisible India and Harold. They soon reached an intersection of corridors. There was nothing much to indicate the best way for them to go to find Mercury and the others. The goon hadn’t known – or had pretended not to know – where they would have been taken.

“There are some stairs through those doors up ahead,” said Box, indicating a set of double doors, above which someone had helpfully placed an emergency sign.

They began trotting down the corridor towards the stairwell.

Just as Box reached out his hand to push open the double doors, the air was split by the wail of a klaxon.

“Too early!” yelled Box above the racket. “Go to plan B!”

I can do THIS with my thumb

This is the text (more or less) of a speech I gave last night at Toastmasters. 

It was an ordinary day.  I woke up late with a massive hangover, dashed to work, ducked into the ladies to tidy my hair and found my comb was missing.

Now, there are two things about that morning - one strange and one annoying.

The strange thing was that I had a hangover.  True, I had been at a works party the previous night – old Professor Farnsworth’s leaving do - but I was sure I'd only drunk lemon and lime all night.  My memories were strangely hazy though.

The annoying thing was that my comb was missing.  I was annoyed about that because I hate losing things generally and it had been a gift from an old friend.

Anyway, it couldn’t be helped, so I smoothed my hair as best I could, and got on with my day.

This was my first job.  I was a lab assistant at the prestigious Wissenschaftler Institute for Genetic Research, not far from here.

Then a few days later, my supervisor told me to take Professor Wissenshaftler his afternoon tea.  This was exciting and scary as I hadn’t met him before.
I knocked politely, entered and set down the tray.  As I did so, I noticed something sticking out from a pile of papers on his desk.

My Comb!

He’d.  Got.  My.  Comb.

I wanted to ask him about it, but I was very young, very nervous and he was a very intimating figure –a sort of dyspeptic Albert Einstein with the kind of hairstyle you get by sticking your fingers in a plug socket.

So I didn’t dare.

I decided to wait until everyone had gone home and then get it back. 
Eventually the time came. I peeped out and sure enough all was deserted, dark and silent.  I crept to the professor’s office.  Luckily, it wasn’t locked and I was soon once more in possession of my precious comb.

I turned and hurried back out.

It could have been the dark, it could have been my unfamiliarity with the place or even my giddy euphoria at getting the comb back, but I must have gone through the wrong door from the office because I now found myself in a different lab entirely.

I turned round to retrace my steps, but the door had clicked shut  behind me and for some reason didn’t open from this side.

In the dimness, I could just make out a door and window at the other end of the room.  I hurried over.  In case it was a dead end I risked a quick peep through the window to see what lay beyond.

And nearly fell over backwards when a pale face suddenly appeared on the other side of the glass.

I gasped in shock!

It wasn’t just a face it, was MY face!

Then I laughed.  The “window” was obviously a mirror, of course.  It’s your own reflection, idiot! I told myself.  Phew!

When my “reflection” started banging on the glass and shouting Get me out of here, I almost fainted.  I rushed to the door and unbolted it. 

My double emerged.

She really was just like me.  If you’re born a twin you’re probably used to seeing your double, but suddenly to become a twin is eerie to say the least.

She really was my double - even wearing the same green scrubs that we were obliged to wear in the lab. 

We had just a few moments to ponder this before all of sudden the lights came on.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” came an angry voice from the doorway behind me.  It was professor W, and he had a gun pointed at us.

“I got lost,“ I said lamely.

 “Well now you have to die!”

“What?” I cried, “I was just getting my comb back.  Can’t you just give me a written warning or something?”

“No, you have discovered my illegal secret human cloning experiment”.  He readied the gun.

“Wish I’d not bothered about that blasted comb now.” I said.

“What?” he said.

“The comb I bet you stole from me to get my DNA – I saw it on your desk and was just trying to get it back.”

“You imbecile!”  he laughed.  “I didn’t take your comb, you dropped it at Farnsworth’s leaving do, I kept meaning to give it back to you.”

“Oh”

“Besides, I needed more than a few stupid hairs.  I drugged your drinks at the leaving party, took the samples I needed then popped you back into bed at your house, none the wiser.  Now stick out your right thumbs!”

“Why?” we cried in unison.

“Because I only need the original one of you to continue the experiment and I can spot the clone by the extra thumb joint I gave it.”

“But you must know which is which,” I said, “I’m the original, the one that’s been living out in the world, she’s the clone, surely!”

“Not necessarily,” said the prof.  “I had a few drinkies at that party myself and can’t remember which of you I kept and which I took back home.  The clone has an extra thumb joint.  Now stick em out!”

We extended our trembling thumbs and he looked at them for a moment before raising the gun.

I snatched up a nearby Bunsen burner and hurled it at his head as he fired.
The shot went wild and smashed into a bunch of chemical jars which promptly exploded.  There was a blinding flash and a thunderous roar.  I felt myself flung across the room and everything went black.

I woke up in hospital with concussion and no major injuries other than a crushed right hand.  A concret beam had fallen on it apparently.  The surgeons fixed it up almost perfectly – apart from the thumb.

They said the explosion at the lab was a gas leak and even though the ruins were carefully searched, no trace of the professor or my twin was ever found.

So, am I the original me – with a broken thumb?

Or am I a clone – complete with the professor’s modification?

Even I’m not sure now.

All I can say is:

I can do THIS with my thumb.

(reveal strangely bendy thumb)

END

This is my actual thumb and it does bend back in an odd way.  It does this because as a child I used to make a kind of bridge with my hand on the table and lean my head on it when reading.  Over the years of pressing down, the joint acquired a larger range of movement.   

That's not as interesting though. 

What all this does demonstrate I think, is that you can make a story out of just about anything.

A Little Optimism

Not to try and be too diabetes-inducingly sweet or anything, but it strikes me that cats are a lot happier than people most of the time. 

Jus' sayin'.

Gob-Stopper

This came out of nowhere this morning.

Gob-Stopper

The thought of leaving here,

Leaving you,

Leaving this life,

Rolls around my head.

Like a brand-new gob-stopper.

It holds the promise of long sweetness.

It has not yet lost its bright colour.

But it’s still too big to swallow.

Maybe I’ll just suck on it for a while.

Feel it click against my teeth,

And when it’s small enough.

It’ll go down easy.

Not sure what our American friends call gob-stoppers.  They're a big ball of hard candy you suck on, they change colour as you suck.  They have a kind of aniseed-y flavour, usually.

Blessed Are the Meek

Recently, I was asked to write a short meditation on one of the Beatitudes.  This was the best I could do, cynic that I am.

Blessed Are the Meek

Blessed, you say. 

Blessed?

Blessed, because I stand aside while others get their way?

Blessed, because I put their needs first?

Blessed, because I can’t say ‘no’?

Blessed, because I don’t blow my own trumpet

Even though I do have a few good tunes?

Blessed are the doormats, for they shall be trodden on.

I just hope the Earth is worth it.

A New Home in the Sky - So THAT's why he gets the big bucks!

Le Boss sashays into the office and up to my desk.

“Can you do me a favour,” he asks. Tiny tinkling alarm bells begin to sound in the empty, echoing recesses of my mind.

“Maybe,” I say as guardedly as if I were surrounded by a 10-foot-tall barbed-wire fence, a dozen machine gun nests and a regiment of Gurkhas. “What is it?”

“Can you take my place on a conference call tomorrow morning?” 

“Probably, what’s it about?”

“It’s to do with the Honest Bob the Plumbers contract.”  Now, we do a managed service thing for HBtP: call centre, website, etc. This is not my area at all; I only know from Klueless Support; I talk to machines all day, not people.

“But I don’t know anything about that,” I point out.

“Don’t worry,” he replies, “Just go on the call and listen to what everyone’s saying. You won’t need to do or say anything or make any decisions.”

I make a “what-the-flip?” face at him.

“It’s what I always do.” He says, and wanders off to find the kettle or engage in some other similarly critical, high-flying activity..

This is why he's paid more than me, obviously.

More Magnifier Mumblings

I have written before about a software magnifier for the computer screen (you can read the piece here, if you so wish).

I thought at the time that the open source magnifier I had found was the bee’s knees, and, in fact, it was a very useful tool. As I continued to use it, however, I began to notice a few annoying quirks. Sometimes, for example, the movement of the’lens’ around the screen would become very jerky, which was very distracting. Also, the image quality degraded somewhat as the magnification increased (not hugely surprising, but not exactly desirable either).

So I more or less stopped using it.

Recently, I had occasion to buy a new mouse, as my old one kept acting like it was possessed by the devil, jumping around the screen on its own and so on.

I duly dispatched the Other Half to the local mouse emporium and he came back with a Microsoft mouse – a Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 – to be precise.

Reading though the quick-start guide that came with it, I noticed that you could configure the scroll wheel so that if you clicked it, it invoked a magnifier. Sounded good, but I was never impressed with the magnifier that comes with Windows because it just gives you a fixed window which does not move around the screen with the mouse, which was the thing I wanted.  I thought I'd try it out anyway, just in case.

Wow!

The magnifier (presumably a doctored version of the actual Windows one, but which moves around the screen with the mouse) is brilliant.

The image quality is excellent, and the movement so far has been flawlessly silky-smooth every time. You can toggle the magnifier off and on just by clicking the scroll wheel. With the open source one, you have to press CTRL-ALT-G on the keyboard to achieve the same effect.

You can also vary the size of the ‘lens’ by holding down the scroll wheel for a short time, whereupon you can drag the window border to the size you desire.  A larger 'lens' appears to give a larger magnification too (or it could just be my imagination).

This handy functionality is actually provided by the Microsoft Intellipoint mouse driver and I imagine anyone using this driver, regardless of the type of mouse, could configure their mouse to make use of it. I did try to see if I could achieve the same effect with a non-iltellipoint driver, but it did not work.

OK, I appreciate that screen magnification is probably of only tangential interest to most people but, if you’re getting on a bit and find reading the screen more of a struggle than you used to, this represents a fairly low-cost (my mouse was less than £30) visual aid.