Lousy nights all around
Dec. 11th, 2005 01:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matrixrefugeeGrr... I had the night from hell at work:
--Annoying customers who had to rearrange the contents of the bags I packed, (People, there are certain rules I have to follow when I'm bagging, and what you were doing completely violated everything short of putting a gallon jug of milk on top of a carton of eggs.);
--Horrid spoiled children:
Kid from hell: "Mommy, I want [this]! Mommy, I want [that]! Mommy, I want [the other thing ::Insert sugar and preservative-raddled crap of choice, up to and including "Choco-Rox (not a real sugary cereal, I made that one up)"::]!!"
MR: ::Internal:: Oh yeah? And I want a better job where I get paid to shush whiny little bints like you, who aren't using their indoor voices.
I spent the last two hours gritting my teeth to keep from screaming. I was so tired and drained that I lost my footing while I was trying to stow a bag of ice under a cart and I fell over backwards. Fortunately, I was crouching on the floor, so I didn't fall far, but I pulled something in my shoulder in the process. Unfortunately, that was the straw that broke the back of one very tired llama (I don't consider myself to be a camel, even metaphorically: I'm too polite and quiet). I ended up spazzing out horribly; since this was the end of the night, one of the supervisors named Stephanie (there's two of them and they look similar) let me go home early.
The Frenchman has me down for 20 hours next week; since That time of the month is upon me, I just might take Tuesday off as a mental health day:
Tuesday: Noon to four (TBD)
Wednesday: ditto
Thursday: ditto
Friday: ditto
Saturday: four to nine-thirty pm. (All times are EST)
And Sieges was having a lousy night running missions in the MxO. She's going to write about the miserable details in her LJ, but right now, she's too upset. I'd poke her for the short version, but she's quick with her fists and her feet... Our nickname for her is "the little girl with the big gun".
But, I did have some interesting revelations come about in my headspace. During the less crazy moments at work, I mentally ran a conversation with the Merv. I'd been puzzling over the bit that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
captstack posted in his "Matrix" timeline, regarding the Second Matrix. Stack describes it as having been a hellish landscape, just as bad for the humans as the First Matrix, since it was too hard for them to bear in a completely different way. The Merv overheard my musings on this. The conversation went something like this:
tM: "Our cher historien exaggerates those details."
Me: "Okay, how? Naturally, I was seeing the Mega-City looking like the hellish version of Los Angeles in 'Constantine' -- and it didn't help that one of the trailers for the thing that makes you gnash your teeth showed a 'Constantine' billboard on the Mega-City skyline."
tM: ::Gently derisive, closed-mouth chuckle, smirks:: "As you would say it, you clearly have been playing the MxO too much of late. No, it was not so hellish as your Dantean sense of drama would lead you to conclude. The Machines chose to draw on your kind's history and recreate one of its darkest chapters, namely, the era of the two world wars... only the outcome of the latter was far different from the historical outcome."
Me: "So... it was C.M. Kornbluth's 'Two Dooms' or Keith Roberts' 'Weihnachtsabend' come to life?" [Note: those are both classic alternate history SF stories. I leave their subject to your conjecture...]
tM: ::Nodding sagely:: "Yes, indeed, it was, only it was far more horrible than those authors could have used their creative powers to portray."
Me: ::Sniggering:: "Sorry, I was trying to imagine the Architect as Der Fuhrer. Doesn't work. All right, whose side were you on? The humans or the Machines?"
tM: "I remained neutral at the time, the better to save my skin. I had, as yet, to lay the foundations for the edifice I have since created--"
Me: ::Daring to interrupt:: "So what, precisely, happened? Were the Machines treating the humans the way the Nazis treated the Jews and the Slavs and the Gypsies and the Christians who opposed them?"
tM: ::Pausing for dramatic effect:: "You have come to that conclusion on your own, it needs no further elaboration, unless you would care to know more of the gruesome details."
I got a flash of an image, so fast I couldn't see it well, but it was enough to shake me a little.
And then, later, after I slipped on the floor, I had another flash: apparantly, something must have jogged something loose in the Merv's recall, because I had a flash of sensations I knew weren't mine, like a feeling of intense disorientation and something like paralysis, only worse, coupled with a sense of dread and resignation all at once. I got another flash of an image: a white tiled floor in a circular room and a presence nearby that I somehow knew and dreaded... I took that to mean I was glimpsing the Merv's near-deletion, something I've been trying to get him to tell me more about, since I've been jotting down things for his memoirs. Now I'm not sure if that's something I want to pursue, considering the sensations it inspired.
--Annoying customers who had to rearrange the contents of the bags I packed, (People, there are certain rules I have to follow when I'm bagging, and what you were doing completely violated everything short of putting a gallon jug of milk on top of a carton of eggs.);
--Horrid spoiled children:
Kid from hell: "Mommy, I want [this]! Mommy, I want [that]! Mommy, I want [the other thing ::Insert sugar and preservative-raddled crap of choice, up to and including "Choco-Rox (not a real sugary cereal, I made that one up)"::]!!"
MR: ::Internal:: Oh yeah? And I want a better job where I get paid to shush whiny little bints like you, who aren't using their indoor voices.
I spent the last two hours gritting my teeth to keep from screaming. I was so tired and drained that I lost my footing while I was trying to stow a bag of ice under a cart and I fell over backwards. Fortunately, I was crouching on the floor, so I didn't fall far, but I pulled something in my shoulder in the process. Unfortunately, that was the straw that broke the back of one very tired llama (I don't consider myself to be a camel, even metaphorically: I'm too polite and quiet). I ended up spazzing out horribly; since this was the end of the night, one of the supervisors named Stephanie (there's two of them and they look similar) let me go home early.
The Frenchman has me down for 20 hours next week; since That time of the month is upon me, I just might take Tuesday off as a mental health day:
Tuesday: Noon to four (TBD)
Wednesday: ditto
Thursday: ditto
Friday: ditto
Saturday: four to nine-thirty pm. (All times are EST)
And Sieges was having a lousy night running missions in the MxO. She's going to write about the miserable details in her LJ, but right now, she's too upset. I'd poke her for the short version, but she's quick with her fists and her feet... Our nickname for her is "the little girl with the big gun".
But, I did have some interesting revelations come about in my headspace. During the less crazy moments at work, I mentally ran a conversation with the Merv. I'd been puzzling over the bit that
captstack posted in his "Matrix" timeline, regarding the Second Matrix. Stack describes it as having been a hellish landscape, just as bad for the humans as the First Matrix, since it was too hard for them to bear in a completely different way. The Merv overheard my musings on this. The conversation went something like this:tM: "Our cher historien exaggerates those details."
Me: "Okay, how? Naturally, I was seeing the Mega-City looking like the hellish version of Los Angeles in 'Constantine' -- and it didn't help that one of the trailers for the thing that makes you gnash your teeth showed a 'Constantine' billboard on the Mega-City skyline."
tM: ::Gently derisive, closed-mouth chuckle, smirks:: "As you would say it, you clearly have been playing the MxO too much of late. No, it was not so hellish as your Dantean sense of drama would lead you to conclude. The Machines chose to draw on your kind's history and recreate one of its darkest chapters, namely, the era of the two world wars... only the outcome of the latter was far different from the historical outcome."
Me: "So... it was C.M. Kornbluth's 'Two Dooms' or Keith Roberts' 'Weihnachtsabend' come to life?" [Note: those are both classic alternate history SF stories. I leave their subject to your conjecture...]
tM: ::Nodding sagely:: "Yes, indeed, it was, only it was far more horrible than those authors could have used their creative powers to portray."
Me: ::Sniggering:: "Sorry, I was trying to imagine the Architect as Der Fuhrer. Doesn't work. All right, whose side were you on? The humans or the Machines?"
tM: "I remained neutral at the time, the better to save my skin. I had, as yet, to lay the foundations for the edifice I have since created--"
Me: ::Daring to interrupt:: "So what, precisely, happened? Were the Machines treating the humans the way the Nazis treated the Jews and the Slavs and the Gypsies and the Christians who opposed them?"
tM: ::Pausing for dramatic effect:: "You have come to that conclusion on your own, it needs no further elaboration, unless you would care to know more of the gruesome details."
I got a flash of an image, so fast I couldn't see it well, but it was enough to shake me a little.
And then, later, after I slipped on the floor, I had another flash: apparantly, something must have jogged something loose in the Merv's recall, because I had a flash of sensations I knew weren't mine, like a feeling of intense disorientation and something like paralysis, only worse, coupled with a sense of dread and resignation all at once. I got another flash of an image: a white tiled floor in a circular room and a presence nearby that I somehow knew and dreaded... I took that to mean I was glimpsing the Merv's near-deletion, something I've been trying to get him to tell me more about, since I've been jotting down things for his memoirs. Now I'm not sure if that's something I want to pursue, considering the sensations it inspired.