The Hardware Grand Prix
THE departure of about half the company workforce after the Valentine’s Day Massacre had an immediate effect on our friends in the Information Technology Dept. They found themselves in the middle of a pile of recently orphaned computers. It took approximately sixty seconds for yet another of their informal competitions to begin: the Hardware Grand Prix, where who appropriates the most hardware wins.
The Database Wizard immediately purloined the departed IT Dept Sec’s workstation, which was one of the nicest ones. This severely annoyed the Net Admin, who had been thwarted in his attempts to salvage it by the bosses’ calling him to meeting after pointless meeting in their misguided belief that he was now Project Manager instead of the (departed) Project Manager. It was on his return from just such a meeting that he discovered that it had been turned into a ‘database development node’.
Not only that, but by that time the System Admin had managed to cobble together quite a nice extra workstation for himself by ‘re-arranging’ components among the user workstations on the office floor. All that was left of the hardware liberated from slavery at the hands of the office users was all the largely unusable stuff that had been earmarked for replacement ages ago.
This was a double blow to the Net Admin. Not only were the bosses wasting his time, they had also scuppered his chances in the Hardware Grand Prix. He barely rescued his pride by grabbing the (departed) Chief Technology Officer’s portable, and the rather nice workstation that had been used by the (departed) Head of Corporate Finance, who had been sharing an office with him. These were his by right of authority and no-one could lay claim to them, or so he thought.
Returning to his office after one meeting, he caught the Sys Admin in the act of attempting to remove the extra memory from the Corp Fin workstation. Nothing needed to be said; the Sys Admin replaced the unit cover and made himself scarce, while the Net Admin pondered the various alternative forms of networking torture he would punish the transgressor with.
Single Cypriot Male
SINGLE Cypriot Male had often seen the magazines at the kiosks. They were the highly advertised titles he always heard about but never read. Their covers always featured attractive scantily clad young women, but he knew that their contents did not feature more scantily clad young women, unlike girlie mags. He couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to buy a mag with the cover of a girlie mag, but not the content.
Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, he found a whole pile of these, an opportunity to satisfy his curiosity. He selected one with the picture of an attractive, scantily clad girl’s torso on it. No face was visible. He reflected that even on girlie mags, you could see the cover girl’s face; she was never reduced to a faceless body.
He found an article that described what it referred to as the “ultimate happiness” for a woman: shopping for shoes. The procedure described involved getting a best girlfriend to go along, and have a sumptuous lunch with wine at the most expensive restaurant you could find before looting the shoe shops. From what little he knew of all this, he calculated the cost of a woman’s afternoon of “ultimate happiness”, based on the article, to be over a third of his gross wages. He wondered what jobs these women, to whom the article was addressed, did.
He found the answer in another article, titled “How to be a Star”. A star is not born, it authoritatively stated. A star is made in beauty parlours, expensive gyms and hairdressers, and on plastic surgeons’ operating tables. It costs a lot of money to be a star, and a star has to have the appropriate boyfriends: one who will finance the star-making operations and/or one who will provide the required introductions.
The realisation came to him in a flash. The magazine didn’t just have extensive advertising content. The whole magazine was an advertisement. It was designed to create and maintain the unsatisfiable needs of the perpetual consumer, and to replace every other set of values with those of the consumer. The attractive young woman on the cover is the proposed icon: she has, by herself consuming the right goods, become the ultimate consumer good for the male who can afford all the other consumer goods in the pyramid of which she is the pinnacle.
It was time to face, with welcome relief, the dentist’s drill.
Abuse, death threats, and magazines for recycling to:
