It Won't Take Too Long

When I'm not working under a tyrannical oppression (Tim Hortons), I moonlight at the local Sears doing deliveries. Main reason is because my older brother owns the place and he sometimes needs a hand. Plus there's less stress overall, and even bad deliveries are still better than obnoxious, bad customers at Timmy's.

This tale starts about a week ago. We (that being my brother and I) were supposed to drop off a stove and fridge at quarter two five in the evening. We were a bit late, but when we showed, house lights were out, no car in the driveway. Get things ready, and we wait. My brother calls the woman, gets her house number. We hear the phone ringing inside and nobody answering it. Of course. So, he calls back to Sears, asks an employee of his to get her work number to try that. Well, turns out the place she works at closes at four, so there shouldn't be any reason on why she isn't there. At ten after five, he calls it and we move on with the next delivery. When we returned to Sears, she called, asking why we weren't there. By this point, we're done for the evening and she has to reschedule.

Fast forward a week, and this bit starts to truly take shape.

Well, this time she is there. Now, in the previous week, I had accidentally dented the bottom of the fridge with the dolly. Completely unremarkable and wouldn't affect the units ability to cool things. Well, as we get the fridge off the van and my brother is pointing this out to the woman, she says that an employee says that we could switch the direction the door on the fridge opens, but with that comes an assembly fee. She'd forget about the dent (and any money that might have been taken off) in exchange for doing the door reversal. "Sure," my brother says, "no problem."

Get the fridge in through the front door, sliding it into the kitchen, which is at the front of the house. I'm thinking how this might be a fifteen, maybe twenty minute job. In and out. Even with the door reversal, shouldn't take too long. Well, inside the kitchen comes the first hiccup. "Uh," I say, "the fridge is too tall for the slot." I can hear my brother saying "what?" as he looks at the spot in question. The cupboards were too low by a half inch to get the fridge in. Oh, damn. Well, my brother has the bright idea of unscrewing the cabinet and pushing it up the wall an inch or so to make room for the taller unit. "Get the drill and socket set from the van," my brother says. Only as I'm about to head there I realize, and so does he, that we had forgotten those very tools back at the store. Damn. Got a screwdriver, though!

So, while my brother toils with a screwdriver, I call my dad up and ask him if he can't run to the store and pick up the tools for us. He says sure. We eventually get the drill, but in the meantime while we're waiting we pull the old fridge out and load it on the van, along with the old stove. Put the new stove in, which the woman is concerned about because she thinks it might not fit because the fridge didn't. Dad shows up with the drill, and things seem to be moving along again. Hurrah, cheers, drinks on the house and all that, right? Nope.

After unscrewing the cabinet, it's sticking in place due to paint, so we actually have to smash it out of place without damaging it. That was great. Slide it up the wall, hold in place while my brother screws it into the wall again. Slide the new fridge in. Now comes the fun part: the door reversal. There were more screws, clips, hooks and insertions to be made on this door in such a complicated manner I thought some military tactician had come out to say "surprise." The whole system was extremely and unnecessarily convoluted. I hoped that the engineer who designed the system was proud of himself. Just getting the door off, and the freezer door off, was a chore. Getting it back one wasn't as bad, but still.

The end result was a job that should have taken twenty minutes, max, take an hour and fifteen minutes. And yet, even for all that, it still doesn't come close to my worst delivery...

Dominion/Crossover - The Alliance Prt 2

Yeah, an excerpt from what I've been writing recently. I know, it sucks horribly. Language is bad, form is bad, description could be better, soft sci-fi at best, etc. But I thought I'd share. That and I hadn't done any real writing in a while other than rant-fests, which I'd rather not be doing in the first place.

***

Harsh breath, back and forth as lungs fought for oxygen. It shouldn't happen, some logical portion of the mind still intact reasoned. My blood is so full of machines that the feeling that I'm short of breath shouldn't be there. But the primal, the animal in him was panting, body screaming in pain as he rushed up the slope. The crest and red triangles flicked over moving objects. He was already pulling on a mental trigger, left arm coming up and moving of its own accord. Combat programs guided him like a machine designed to let him think when it was necessary. A blast of coherent energy jumped the distance in the fraction of time it took to blink. Indicators began falling, red triangles flickering away to yellow exclamation points. Other triangles refused to leave with return blasts bustling in expansiveness like an angry wasp cloud. Stinging bits flung everywhere.

He felt himself shaken. Both physically and mentally as something to a side of him exploded. Diving, he began scouring for snipers. Ranged sensors pinged the area, looking for blotches more dense than others. Disturbed air, disturbed harmonics. There, five kilometers distant in a high tower. The chatter on his COMM was alive, and then: "Jameson! The fucker got Jameson!"

Fire was concentrated on the area where sensors reported the sniper being, only something else happened.

"Incoming," was one of the two warnings, the first being a klaxon in his ear. It took that moment, that fixated second of actualized thought to percolate into realization as to what the warning was. Incoming enemy mortar fire. There was no sound, just the ping of disrupted air, the vibrant discord of a warbling quantum string. The explosive force, however, whipped out several indicators on his map. Five down. Shield overloads combined with a disruptive flechette field. The rounds penetrated the armor maybe a pico-meter, enough to upload the virus that would overload the system. Instant kill.

Information began to infiltrate the minds of the soldiers moving along the battlefield as Overwatch provided coordinates for the mortar position. Eight kilometers off, East-Northeast, relative. Already assignments were being randomized and parties were gushing over the ground to take flight on anti-grav thrusters at speeds that would put them into position within seconds. The sniper struck again as the first mortars had fallen, taking out Kregov as he flickered into the air amid a burst of his anti-grave field.

The tower exploded, a thin cloud trailing away from it. Missile strike. More red triangles began to wink out. He jumped into the air, anti-grav coils catching and thrusting him a half kilometer forward where he landed. A yellow point next to him turned red. Fake death, buying time. Whatever it was, he acted with visceral precision. The enemies bioarmor split in half as coherent energy washed up and out his hand to eviscerate the opponent in question. Warnings were screaming again. Enemy lock. Overwatch was pinpointing and assigning vectors. Friendly mortar fire.

He fed all power to shields as the enemy attack washed overhim. The HUD flickered red. Icons showed power fluctuations. He'd nearly been killed. And just as quickly as that attack had happened, Overwatch suddenly had the enemy positions locked down. Positions known, numbers known. It went from being an offensive action to merely a police-mop-up action as accurate trans-dimensional lasers from Overwatch fired through the quantum strata to disable or kill the various enemies.

Check This Out

So, a friend of mine linked me to an interesting post on The Futurist, as well as a comment that followed after the article. Worth the read. All interesting stuff.