The Noble Art of Parody #
23 November 1998
Monday morning, then. Back off up the motorway for another week of… well, sitting around doing very little, in all honesty. I’m stumbling across tactics in Solitaire that I’d never noticed before, and reading through all bulletins I can get my hands on, no matter how irrelevant. Sometimes, just sometimes, I resort to browsing through code as if it were books in a geeky library - the older and more convoluted the code, the better. sigh, things are pretty dull round here right now, and yet this will be ‘crunch week’, when the sales team come up to persuade the client to entend our contract for another twelve months. One side of me doesn’t mind hanging around for another year; if I’m still up here in September I’m rewarded for my endurance with a pleasant bonus. That should help relieve my student debts in the same manner that a “Junior Disprin” would’ve helped relieve Leon Trotsky.
The most interesting thing to happen today was the receipt of this:
From: S—– B—–
Sent: 23 November 1998 1:27 pm
To: Nelson, Ian
Subject: Mock JournalJournal Entry 1 - Monday.
“Ian appears to be more familiar and confident in his use of verbal slang, as shown in his use of the word ‘skank’. Over lunch today he profused: “innit?”. A rather strange occurance for one who is usually verbally correct, even when attempting to be abusive. Was this an attempt at acceptance? An attempt to be at one with the others who used such terminology? I’m not sure as of yet. But, when a colleague pointed out his use of ‘innit’, Ian quickly retreated from this fascade and clearly repeats (to himself): “isn’t it.” This strange behaviour coupled with the almost religious admiration for an artist called Morrisey, the purchase of a Sylvester/Tweetie bow-tie and a persuit for math makes him a very complex and unusual character. At the moment he remains very calm and restrained, but for how long can he hide his disturbed and emotionally wrecked true persona. I’m just waiting for the day when he ‘flips-out’ and slits S—– L—–’s throat with a dinner knife. I’m just waiting for the whole thing to explode. Sometime soon? Who knows.”
This made me laugh. I’ve published it word for word, bar the occasional censoring of names, as shown by the red lines. This strange email is, I guess, one of the side-effects of having your journal open to anyone. Most of the people reading this will be strangers living in other continents, and quite a few will be my friends. The one readership demographic I hadn’t quite thought about were colleagues, or those who know of me to some extent. But I guess that’s natural, and fair enough. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t long since searched Hotbot, Altavista and Ahoy for the names of various acquaintances.