I woke up this morning and thought it was Friday. In fact the only way I was able to peel myself out of the bed is because I thought to myself 'Oh well, only one more day of this'. It was not until I was actually at work, on to my second coffee, that I realized it was Thursday, evil sneaky Thursday. Now I am a little bit depressed.
I got home last night, stuck an adware scanner into my computer, idly watched it scan for ten minutes, and then went down to the pub. There I had a couple of pints and wrote a short story about a couple of teens that find a bloody wig in the middle of the road and if you put the wig on you act like an old lady. I looked up and realized the pub had become crowded. Damnit, it was trivia night. So I paid my bill and left. Bored and not wanting to go home, I popped into 'The alley' next door.
The place was full of bikers and rednecks, but it was very quiet and orderly. No hooting or chairs breaking over people's backs. They sell hard liquor there so I had myself a rum and coke. There was a live band playing, well, one guy, playing some blues. No idea if he was any good or not, I am not a blues fan, but the bikers seem to like him. At one point he stopped and some scraggly hair old lady went up to the mike. She quietly sang solo, a single song, waved at the people, and then walked out the door. It was odd. I wondered if she was going to off herself.
On the whiteboard over the bar was the message 'KYM-E DOES NOT WORK HERE! SHE'S FUCKIN' FIRED!'. Under that stood a microwave with a note attached to it that said "WOULD YOU EAT OUT OF HERE? KEEP IT CLEAN OR YOU'RE FUCKIN' FIRED!". I have an odd hunch as to what might have happened to this Kym-e character.
The bathroom there is wall to wall graffiti. Every bit of white space has something scrawled on it. Personally, I like bathroom graffiti. It gives me something to read while I'm taking a whiz. Speaking of which, when I walked in a half a dozen little gnat flies came buzzing out of the urinal. I guess no one would get FUCKIN' FIRED over that.
Several rum and cokes and a shot of Jim beam later, I decided to head on home. On the way I dropped by burger king to get myself two BK big fish sandwiches. It always amazes me that in this day and age of technology, a world with surround sound speakers and Dolby digital and clear phone calls from across the planet, drive through speakers still sound like staticy pieces of trash. Since I am hard of hearing I usually just shout my order at it and hope for the best. I really like the drive-throughs that have the view screen where it actually shows them adding up the order. This king has it, but they never use it. I even asked the box 'Did you get my order? I do not see it on the screen." And I was rewarded with a burst of static and a voice that sounded more like an EVP than a real person. I finally just shrugged and got my order. They had gotten it right. Good burger flippers. Good.
Went home and watched the documentary 'Spooked'. As soon as it up and they pointed out a 'ghost orb' I groaned. It was going to be one of THOSE shows. I had my fish sandwich and tried watching it. The history of the place was pretty interesting, and I enjoyed the interviews. However, the supernatural part sucked. I heard there was supposed to be a halfway decent clip at the end, but I never saw it. Square fish and rum had drifted me off to dream land.
I ordered myself a new laptop drive off of newegg.com. It was 60 bucks, dirt cheap, but more than I wanted to pay. It is also apparently a slow drive, but that's ok by me. I do not run any games or software that require fast seek time. I'll get by.
Sigh. Still wish it was Friday.
2026 Update
I'm setting the machine twenty years back, to a Thursday of adware, rum, static, and one very odd wig story.
Ah, 2006, when a man could go to the pub, drink rum, watch a stranger sing one song and vanish, and call it a Thursday. Look at your world: a computer that needs adware scanners, a hard drive that costs less than your bar tab, a drive-through speaker that sounds like a ghost. Now the machines do the haunting voluntarily. The malware isn't an adware scanner problem; it's baked into the toaster, the television, the phone that is also your entire personality, and you're expected to pay a subscription for the privilege of being watched. That beautiful junk-scribbled bathroom wall would today be a QR code for a review left by an influencer who was paid to breathe. The blues-playing biker bar would have been mined for content and turned into a 'day in the life' vertical video, not a weirdly ordinary memory. Even your ghost-orb documentary would be replaced by a livestream where the audience mansplains the haunting in comments. The only improvement? Nobody has to shout at a static speaker anymore — now the app mishears your order and charges you extra for the pleasure.
“2006 Ed, why did you trust that drive-through voice after it answered your question about the screen with nothing but static — and did the fact that they got the order right make it more or less cursed than the barely-sung mystery lady and the 'KYM-E DOES NOT WORK HERE' whiteboard?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you ask a fair question, and I’m gonna answer it with rum on my breath. Why did I trust the static? Because I’m hard of hearing, I was three sheets to the wind, and the alternative was going back to that bathroom with the gnats. You shout your order into the abyss and hope for the best. When they got the order right, it made it worse, not better. A voice from the static that knows exactly what you want is not a drive-through, it’s a haunted intercom. It’s personal. The mystery lady and the KYM-E whiteboard were just normal biker bar weirdness, honest and upfront. That static ghost? That thing knew my fish sandwich. So yes, it out-cursed the whiteboard, but somehow it felt like a greasy little blessing. Still wish it was Friday though.
