|
Service Lift
This is the story of a cheery little service lift. It lived a meagre existence, subsisting largely on not a lot, it being a service lift, and generally not in need of food or the like.
It just kept happily going up and down, down and up (though not in that order, especially if the first up and down took it to the bottom-most basement level, as that'd only end in disastrous results, as going lower than one is capable does of due to certain inalienable rights of Physics, sort of like your uncle Tony trying to see 'how low he could go' on the limbo at last year's family get together and him experiencing the full wrath of the transgressed Physics (and Good Taste)), sometimes going a bit faster, sometimes going a bit slower, savouring the trip.
And to be honest, it usually tended to go slower, attempting to suck every bit of pleasure possible out of it's journey, as the journeys came rather infrequently, and the service lift was left to it's own devices, devoid of company for hours and hours throughout the course of any given day.
But still, it put on a brave face, hidden at the back of the building, and occasionally, when there weren't a whole lot of people around waiting to be serviced, it would whistle to itself, or imagine what it would be like to twiddle it's thumbs, if it had any.
Once, it went so far as to actually try substituing it's cables in the thumb twiddling exercise and almost ended in tragedy. To this day that cable ached when it had to go to the first level basement.
So it didn't do that sort of active wondering any more.
It most often would whistle "Hard Day's Night" and "Kentucky Woman," though it was painful to listen to, as the service lift had picked the two tunes up off the in-house Muzak system the company had installed many years prior (and had de-installed at the urgent requests and threats of riots of the bulk of the staff (bar the service lift, who quite liked it, as it gave itself something to think about, at any rate) a few months later), and the whistling sounded a bit eery, coming from the service lift, as it were.
The one thing it could say it hated about it's job (and it had given this a great deal of thought, in case anyone ever did ask it, not wanting to blow it's big chance to give an opinion/answer after all this time of cheerily keeping silent (except for the occasional whistle)) was the guy who got in every Friday to deliver stacks and stacks of boxes to all the different floors who apparently hadn't come to learn the value of a comb and proper technique in putting on a shirt (not that he went around shirtless, he just wore them in interesting and nontraditional manners, say with the buttons done up incorrectly (including one instance in which he'd buttoned the third button from the bottom into the buttonhole for his right sleeve cuff and left him trapped in the lift for hours, as he was unable to press any buttons to get the door open, and the service lift wasn't about to be helpful in any way, not after the guy had stood chatting to some woman by the lift for almost an hour, leaving a few of the boxes rather uncouthly in the door to prevent it from closing, all the while this creepy guy with his shirt only marginally mis-buttoned (or it might have been a tshirt, to save even worrying about the buttons altogether) and hair mostly flattened against his head this day and possibly wearing cologne was chatting up this perfectly normal woman who he more likely than not had no real right to talk to). If given the opportunity it would someday try and catch the guy in the lift doors one of these days and whistle a few tunes at him.
But, other than that, it was really a cheery little service lift.
disclaimer:
You are being tickled.
Next week, (ha ha, NeXT week, hee hee, oh we're so funny) we move the bulk of our office systems back over to Apple hardware and Mac OS X and, hopefully, the rather slick Cocoa backend a bunch of people we assume are programmers have been working on for the past few weeks/months.
Or if they aren't they've drunk a hell of a lot of coffee for just plain old normal people.
And they talk using far too many acronyms for normal people, so we're relatively confident they're programmers (and not, say, real estate agents).
And they don't take kindly to being poked with sticks (in an interesting social experiment carried out by a now slightly rumpled intern at the prompting of the copy editor).
Which you think we might have learned, from the last time.
Now don't you think we're just so cool now?
|
Yer Weekly Horoscopes. Bikini wax!