M. Giant's
Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks


Saturday, July 17, 2004  

Sign of Bad Luck

I drove Trash to work Thursday morning, because she was going to a company function in the evening. From which I would also be picking her up. After I dropped her off, I headed to my own office along an unaccustomed route. That's the only reason I saw the sign in front of the Burger King:

TRY OUR NEW PREMIUM
ANUS STEAK BURGER
NOW HIRING

I really need to become one of those bloggers who take their digital cameras with them everywhere.

I figured I'd be able to get away with coming back later, because are BK managers really in the habit of proofreading their signs daily? I would be back after work, since I had to drop off Trash's computer at the local Best Buy anyway, and I would simply be sure to have my camera with me when I returned to the neighborhood.

A lengthy digression about that particular errand: Trash computer has recently gotten into the habit of shutting itself off for no reason and with no warning. The screen goes black and the LEDs on the tower go dark. It turns back on just fine, but then of course there's that insulting, accusatory, and manifestly unfair assertion that "Windows was not shut down properly," which, after a couple of hundred times in the past two weeks, has put Trash in the mindset that the only "proper" way to shut down Windows is with explosives.

Trash was ready to wipe the hard drive and re-install Windows (because she knows how to do that stuff), but I wasn't so cavalier about the value of the files on her computer. Sadly, attempting to back the files up in any way—from saving them on floppies, to burning them to CDs, to G-Mailing them to me—only resulted in the computer taking one of its petulant and increasingly frequent naps.

So I brought it to Best Buy. The technician plugged it in and booted it up, but nothing happened except the appearance of a series of error messages that, if printed out, would have rivaled a phone book in volume. She unplugged it again, then set it back on the counter in front of me. She offered to let me leave it for a few days and let them run some diagnostics. I agreed. She started entering my information into their computer.

Which crashed.

She moved to a different computer. It also crashed.

When the hell did computer viruses become airborne, anyway? The technician became increasingly confused and frustrated. Meanwhile, Trash's computer sat on the counter between the two terminals that had just frozen up. It had stopped looking simply intractable, and had now taken on the appearance of something downright malevolent.

So it took me a good twenty minutes to get out of there, which, added onto my eight-hour workday, proved to have been more than enough time for some enterprising Burger Vassal to climb the ladder and restore their sign to the correct "ANGUS STEAK BURGER" plug. Which was sad, because I had my camera with me now. I was going to snap the sign and put it up here, complete with a little story and a caption or perhaps alt-text that read, "Thanks, but I'll have the Chicken Sandwich." But even that modest plan was scuttled. I suppose I could have taken the picture anyway and PhotoShopped it, but that would have been A) dishonest, and b) way beyond my current capabilities with PhotoShop. Stupid computer, wrecking everything. I hope they exorcise it but good.

There must be some way I can make this right. Some way I can rescue this comic opportunity that was snatched from beneath my nose. Even if it means changing the sign myself. But how can I get access to it?
 
Well, it did still say "NOW HIRING."
 
* * *

Today's best search phrase: "Rusty neti pot equals danger." It'll just have to do until the hits for "Anus steak burger" start pouring in, I suppose.

posted by M. Giant 5:13 PM 0 comments

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