Paulie the Genius

It was Paulie's day off, a day that had finally come after 10 days of retail hell, the opening of the holiday season with the feral onrush of consumerism. It was for her a scene from a George Romero movie, flesh eating zombies falling off the escalator and into the fountain at the center of Glenville Mall, splashing around mindlessly to the sounds of generic pop christmas music.

She had quit smoking, but found a pack of cigarettes the other day, and hadn't thrown them out just yet. They were still there, the blah blah blan cancer death label right where she can see it. In the end it wasn't her concern of burning holes in her lungs, it was her teeth she was most concerned about. That yucky yellowness that her grandma had.

Besides, she had the Nicorette patch to keep her jammin. She actually hadn't bothered to step down to the lower dose at all. Everyday she slapped one on....sometimes more than one on those problem days. Being an Apple genius was just a title after all, it wasn't as if she was going to cure cancer, just help some poor schmuck who spilled a beer into their laptop, or dropped their iphone in the john (a public one at that....yick). It either boils down to liquids or gravity for most iphone's fatal demise.

And sometimes they lie about it. You are looking at a two month old 4G iPhone that might smell like pee if you were actually to handle it. Instead, you notice the telltale droplets of humidity in the corners, or the white marks left behind when liquid evaporated, where they at least tried to dry it out.

And they would stare straight at you and lie. Lie Lie Lie.

Ah well, today is her day off. She didn't have to be a genius at all.

So instead, it was a 24 oz diet mountain dew and her Xbox 360. She popped the lid on the acid green liquid - the most caffeinated of all diet beverages - and turned her Xbox 360 on.

And of course, it was the red ring of death. Death. Like Logan's Run, her Xbox 360's life had hit it's limit - like the flashing light on the palm of the hand - Microsoft was pulsing a message....."Hey Pookie! Time to buy the new SLIM Xbox 360."

And that was the problem with Apple she decided. Their products had to be both addictive and be programmed to fail in some ubambiguous way - no error 51, or frowny iPod - but a big red flashing screen on the iPhone - that says "I FAIL". Or if the screen is smashed, make a grating noise that makes the user want to smash it further.

Brilliant.

She opened the pack of cigarettes and fondled one. She decided, in the end, that Microsoft and Apple still had something to learn from Phillip Morris.

Sammy Seal

Sammy opened his eyes underwater. He looked straight up, holding his breath, hoping it was long enough that he would never have to come up again.

Breathing was such a curse.  Being underwater, being a swordfish, being a shark. The soft rays of light filter through and create infinite shades of blue and green. The world has an up and down as well as a left and right. It would sort of be like George Jetson.

He gasped and sat upright in the bath tub. Two minutes. He had counted in his head. Twenty Eight more to go. At 30 minutes, he would cease to be considered a land mammal and more of a sea mammal, like a seal. He would have to get a costume.

Sammy the Flipper Boy! Watch him glide, watch him jump, watch him grab small fish off of a pole!

That wasn't the plan. Sammy would have to reconsider this last point. He wasn't in it for the fame. It was for something else.

It was for Danger.

Sammy the Danger Seal! With laser guided precision, Sammy takes down a Iraqi secret sub base! Pow, Kaboom, BLAMMO!

AIIIIEEEEEE!!!! Here comes SAMMY THE DANGER SEAL! ALLAH SAVE US!

Sammy watched as the water went down the drain. He looked in that black hole, and imagined it to be a missile tube. He stuck his thumb in there, poking it in and out. At some point, it just stuck. He wriggled it for a moment, and it seemed to really be stuck. Finally, the thought occurred that he could squirt some soap into it and loosen it up. After a bit of twisting and cursing (under his breath) it was freed.

Sammy stood up in the tub. He wasn't a seal any more. Now he was

SAMMY THE DANGER BOY

Leonard In Space

Leonard looked under the bed. The space underneath was a dim, dark frontier populated by socks without a mate, asteroid sized dust bunnies and a dull, slender black box. It was quite out of reach, but a broom handle allowed Leonard to fish it out, while also kicking up a cloud of dust that made him sneeze. The box was made of a flat, hard material with no apparent seams. He couldn't quite figure out how to open it, so he whacked it repeated with the broom, and pried it open with a knife, an action he would soon regret.

Positive Alex

Alex felt positive. Positive that he had forgotten to lock the door to his house.

This was of particular importance due to his acrimonious breakup with his partner Rick. The stuff that held together was what now pulled them apart. Who owned what, the ugly business of dismantling the accumulation of stuff. It felt like some maudlin encapsulation of the slow dissolution of 5 years.

At this point, he just wanted to be rid of it. Perversely he didn't want Rick to have a bit of it. Rick said that he would show up one day with a UHaul and cart what he thought was his away. Damn if he gets the big-ass TV. Damn if he gets the stainless steel refrigerator. Damn Damn Damn.

Alex's cubicle had been stripped of any reference to Rick, but the gaping holes where something once was whispered a reminder. He considered the empty cubicle 3 down, on the right. It was across from a window, a precious commodity. The reality was that his manager didn't wield enough influence to secure it for him. Hmmmm....he could just move his stuff in there. After all, it had been empty for one whole week when Tamara was escorted from the building, all of her stuff in a cardboard box. He looked under his desk, and there was a cardboard box with Rickstuff inside.

The Razr buzzed in his pants pocket. He glanced at the screen, it was Rick. Alex let it go to voice mail.

At lunch Alex went home. He tried the front door. It was locked. Whew.......

He unlocked the door, and everything was there.

He felt disappointed. It wasn't fair. The entire morning had been spent deciding the next move to get even, but there was no getting even, because Rick had not upped the ante. Alex checked his voicemail. It was Rick's easy voice, telling him that he was at the airport. He had applied for a transfer at work, and there was an opening in Portland. He was on his way there now.

Alex was pissed. He was cheated. He wanted closure and Rick got the last word.

The cell buzzed. It was Rick again. Alex ignored it.

Ian in Flames

It began with a bloody toe. Ian was wearing flip flops, and stepped on a piece of metal, which poked through the foam rubber and neatly sliced his middle toe open.

It took him a while to get it to stop bleeding, and longer still to get a band aid to actually stick. He ended up wrapping the band aid with a small strip of duct tape to hold it in place. Later he would regret this decision, as the adhesive clung to his toe itself. It would require a lot of cursing and a pocket knife to remove.

He stood in front of Elaine's apartment, on the 5th floor. There was no way that she was going to let him in. Perhaps it would be best to begin considering her his "ex girlfriend", but he was not ready to make that semantic leap just yet. It was not done just yet.

Elaine was smart to ditch him, Ian thought. There were a lot of issues in his life. He used to think that some of these things were actually considered "personality", but losing his job made him reconsider. Work was an unfair scenario, trading part of his finite life to do someone else's tasks. This thought had informed his attitude towards his job. They owed him something more than a paycheck. They owned everyone big time. He had never read Marx but told people he was a marxist.

There was smoking. He was defiant of anti-smoking laws. He was constantly harassed when he chose to smoke. It started in restaurants. Now it was public areas. Soon they would have anti-smoking detectors in his dorm room, he thought glumly.

What Ian didn't know was that there wasn't a smoke detector at all in his dorm room, but there was a web camera. His roommate had installed it to monitor his room when he wasn't there. He had even put it on his web page, and without his knowledge, someone had posed his page to a blog that was read by millions. Ian was on his way to becoming a internet star, but not in a way that he would appreciate.

Elaine would eventually get a text message from a friend that pointed her to this blog. She would think to herself, as she watched, how pathetic Ian was, with his little toaster oven, microwave and dorm sized fridge, with little else other than a bottle of peppermint schnapps wedged in the freezer. This bottle would figure prominently in Ian's future, when he accidentally set the room on fire.

Lydia's Color Palette

Lydia broke her fall. It happened in slow motion. She thought of the six million dollar man; the odd noise that Steve Austin made when he jumped over something. That was not the noise she made; it was more like a "unhhhh" sound, inglorious to say the least.

In the end, she was fortunate in that she just scraped the heel of her hand on the asphalt. She jumped out just before the "don't walk" sign came on. She glared at the drivers and as a result didn't see the small pothole in the pavement. The fall was humiliating, so she bounced up, collected her portfolio and dashed across the street as the cars beared down on her. One was audacious enough to blow his horn, a pathetic beep that inexpensive japanese cars have. She much preferred the air-horn on her rusty fiat.

She was in a hurry because of her presentation. She was fried because she had finished it up at 1:00 AM. She wasn't even sure at the end if she had spelled the client's name correctly. It was a blur at 12:45, a bleary eyed prayer that her printer would comply and not run out of toner. She was sure at least that they logo was the right colors for she had sent that our for approval early in the day.

Being a freelancer was at once a challenge and represented freedom, but within parameters. She had imagined in school that she would turn advertising on it's head, but she found that there was this big problem in that realization. Clients had their own ideas. Dammit.

So it became about colors. Fonts. Lines. What was the soup du jour. Was it celery color (passe) or burnt orange (trendy ironic retroism). It was about demographics. It was about purely subjective preference. It was about history. Screw history!

She stopped at starbucks. The green color was reassuring. It was soothing. She thought about the colors of the logo that had been decided for her. Orange, yellow and gray. Degraded typeface that she had found on the net. Something that was cutting edge 5 years ago. Sigh.

Her coffee was her friend. It understood her. Hello Mr. Coffee. As she pushed open the door to the glass and steel tower, she failed to notice that the door sign. Pull to open! She smashed into the door, coffee exploded, and her portfolio was damaged. Yellow, Orange, Gray and now light tan.

Bad Luck Magnet

In the end, Sammy had to go to arbitration. It was in the afternoon, on the 12th floor of some office building, in an anonymous meeting room with a artificial plant in one corner, bathed in the blue haze of office lighting. He sat, drawing triangles on the back of the settlement form, listening to his lawyer talking to their lawyer. He felt like he was on TV. He had become convinced that anything bad that was going to happen, would happen to him. And he was right.