There Go Another Five Days of the Only Life I Have

NOTE: It's taken me about 2 hours to write this entry, since I'm using Dirk's laptop and I don't know what I'm doing. Please excuse primative typing skills. I'll have to continue tomorrow. But two things: 1) While Phaye sat there crying she kept saying, "Bright!' like a toddler (since she was crying it was more like "Brr-rh-h-hiite-t-t!). She meant the image that she had seen; and 2) I may get to know every electrician and computer person in a twenty-mile radius, since they are all dealing with the office's ancient electrical set up and the various bits of blown-out equipment.

Five days ago employees, nutball amature philosophers and paperwork pulled me under. To solve these problems I left town, although I did not go to Reno and squander a slush fund I have stashed from B&NC Project grant at the roulette table. Damn. I love the idea--someone else's money, free drinks, big weirdo-smelling room with a red carpet; a timeless, disorienting, semi-reality. Trapped in hell except for the free drinks.

Last Thursday afternoon Phaye was alone on Being & Nothingness Cam watch. I originally hired her as a sort of intern/gofer, but I've rotated her into the watch schedule since she is an astute student of philosophy and may make brilliant connections between the Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable while she's sitting at that bank of monitors. Still, she's doesn't have the killer philosopher instincts and fast reaction time of Tom and Sia, and there was a sudden tick of an image on what we think is the Being Cam 3 monitor. She missed getting a real time image capture, and in her frantic diving around to check for the image on the camera recordings, she fell through the hole in the floor and ripped loose some sort of Serious Bundle of Cables that runs under the floor and everything went...thunk.

This is Phaye's sitcom-like world. I don't know how or what happened, except that Dirk had removed the panel that covered the hole in the floor and gone into the office crawl space and hammered a panel under the hole. Phaye didn't just trip on the edge of the hole, but stepped on the panel, broke it, and with her full weight on her left leg, fell a good two feet until she hit the foundation. I had been in the storage room looking for the source of the moths that have shown up in the office when I heard the crunchy-crash, Phaye yell, and all things electrical pop or wind down to a sad-sounding stop. There wasn't even a chorus of beeping that should have been coming from all the UPS's.

I felt my way through the real gloom office gloom, helped Phaye out of the hole, and sat on the floor crying right along with her. This was the first time I've cried at this job and it was about danged time. Phaye only had some scrapes down her shin and thigh. The office was silent and nothing was functioning.

As to watching the B&N Cams, I don't know. For the time being you may want to direct your attention to the duck cam and the guinea pig cam. I don't have their URL's, but they are some serious entertainment.