chapter one
I go to the same coffee shop every day to get coffee before work. There are coffee machines at work and the coffee that they make is okay but I like having a cup of coffee from a proper coffee shop every morning. The machine is fine for the rest of the day, but I like that first one to come in a takeaway cup with a plastic lid with USA written on it in silver pen. They write USA because I always order an Americano. I remember reading one time that if you are talking in Japanese as if you were some kind of animal you always finish the sentence with a fun word for that animal. Like if you are a cat you would finish your sentence with Nyan, and if you were pretending to be a rabbit, you finish your sentences with usa which is short for usagi which means rabbit in Japanese. So It would always make me smile that the cup had USA on it as if it thought it was a rabbit.
So anyway this morning I went to the coffee shop and for some reason it was really busy and there was a long line, maybe I was a bit later, or earlier than usual. Anyway there was a long line. Normally how the place works is you get in the line - which is usually short - and order your coffee and then everybody mills around until their order gets called out. That bit can be stressful because sometimes you see two people who ordered a cappuccino or whatever lunge for the same drink - even though I'm pretty sure all the people milling around know whose drink it is. It really annoys me because I know that those people who haven't been waiting very long know that it's not their cappuccino, they are just trying to get one over on the rest of us. When you think about it, that is where the break down of society begins.
I sometimes wonder how it works at coffee shops in China. That's not racist, everybody knows that in China they don't do lining up very well, everybody just pushes in all the time. It's cultural.
I've seen it on the the travel channel. At the train stations they all just rush into the trains and then there are men that just push people into the train-cars. I also read about how there are men who rub themselves up against girls in the train cars for sexual gratification and that this is called frottage. Actually those bits about the trains might have been Japan, but still.
So anyway there was this long line at the coffee shop which I assumed was going to be followed by a lot of milling around and I was thinking about leaving. Even as it came to be my turn to order I was thinking about leaving, there were way too may people milling around and it was already making me anxious. How would I keep track of everybody's orders and whose turn it was? It would be chaos. Then while i was stressing all of a sudden it was my turn. The woman said "An americano" and handed me a cup of coffee.
"That's not mine. I haven't ordered yet" I said it loudly so people would know I wasn't trying to get one over on them. She said
"I know, but I made your usual when I saw you come in."
I thanked her and paid. I could feel all the other people staring at me as I walked away with a cup of coffee, before it was my turn. I felt sick. I threw the coffe in a bin. I can never go back. Partly because they put me through that embarassing ordeal, but also because it makes me nervous when people get to know too much about me or know my routine or stuff like that.
Do they even drink coffee in China?
At work, without my coffee. I walk past Martha's desk. She's not there. I go and sit at my desk, strap on the headset, log in and start taking calls.
It's Monday morning so the first 10 calls I take are password resets. What is wrong with these people? Is their attention span so short that if they don't type a word for 48 hours they forget it. God forbid they should spend 3 days away from their spouse or children, they might forget their names too. Or maybe they just get so wasted on booze every weekend that they destroy the password brain cells.
There I go again being negative. I've been told in my feedback sessions with my team leader that I'm too negative. He tells me that nobody wants to hear about how the users are all idiots, or how whatever great plan the bosses have come up with already didn't work the last time. I'm trying to be more positive, to see my life as a work in progress. I'm trying to set goals. I want to visualise the outcomes as having already occurred. I want to do something every day to make the outcome a reality. I want to focus my energy on moving towards abundance. That's what Tony Robbins and Wayne Dwyer and Stephen Covey and Brian Tracy say I should do. At least I think that's what they are saying, I usually have to take those books back to the library before I finish them completely, but that seems to be the gist of what they are saying.
I remember one time the company I work for had a competition to come up with a name for the staff cafeteria. Apparently "The Cafeteria" wasn't working for them. I suggested "Beatz Workin" ironically, I didn't win. When he announced the winner my manager, Rob, said that they didn't appreciate the negativity of some responses, and he was looking at me all the time he said it. Well, maybe not all the time, but a good deal of the time.
The eventual winning name was MegaBites, which I thought was stupid because I don't even know what it means. I mean I know what a megabyte is and I know it is supposed to be a pun, but a pun needs to work both ways. Mega means big but these days a megabyte is pretty small. Maybe they mean that it sounds like the portions should be big but they are actually small. Also they spelled it bite not byte. If they were going for the pun they would have spelled it byte. Also when they did the logo with the new name they used one of the ghosts from pac man. That is about as modern as thinking a megabyte is big. Also if they are the ghost and we are presumably pac man it implies that they are going to kill us rather than that we will get huge portions. Either wayMegaBites won, and everybody still called it "the Caf". But the woman who won got a free platter of foodfor 10 people and she invited me along. I suppose she didn't actually invite me, but she did say loudly that "anybody who wants to can help themselves to the leftovers."
I don't have many friends at work. I don't have a lot of friends outside of work either. None really. Not that I have too much of a problem with that. I mean what are they for, friends, really? It seems to me that they take a whole lot of time and effort. You have to call them on the phone and go places and listen to their boring problems. Because let's face it, if they're my friends they would have boring problems. Is that negative? No. I just don't think people with interesting lives and interesting problems would want to hang out with me. Actually that is pretty negative. To put a positive view on it, I am taking the opportunity to spend this stage of my life getting to know myself better, exploring the philosophical rather than the social. I want to find out who I am before I try to find out who other people are. I want to explore the inner space. I think I got that idea from a Louise Hay book.
This kind of thing didn't seem to interest other people where I work. Maybe it is because I am older than them and understand a bit more about the world than they do. All they seem to care about are stupid bands I've never heard of, TV programs I don't watch and dumb movies. Not me I like philosophy and science.
When I say Philosophy I don’t just mean that “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, is it really there” sort of philosophy, but real stuff from famous thinkers, like Nietzsche,
“whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger.” I think that’s brilliant. What he means there is that if you get a disease, and you don't die from it, then you are immune from that disease, so you are stronger than you were before you got sick. That is once you get over all the lying around in bed. Or if you have an accident that doesn't kill you, but you lose your eyes, then your hearing and your smell get stronger. By that I mean your sense of smell, not your actual smell. I could go on, like if you lose one arm, the other arm gets stronger, but I think you probably get the point. Except to say that Stephen Hawking is in a wheelchair and has to talk with that computer and everything, but his mind got stronger and stronger. He is the ultimate proof of what Nietzsche was on about. Whatever is wrong with him didn’t kill him, it made him stronger, in the brain.
Some of the other people on the help-desk are university students who work here part time. You would think that they would be interested in talking about philosophy and stuff. Nah. Case in point, yesterday afternoon this one guy was griping about the users and their complaints and I said
"Wasn't it Sartre who said -Hell is other people-", and he said
“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.” which was stupid and pointless and killed any conversation we could have had about Sartre. I think they think only university people can be clever, so there is no point in me even trying.
The other people that work here are all just young people in their first jobs. Like I have said before they are only interested in pop music, and television, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian.
I don't know what people have got against Kim. I mean sure, she is rich because of reality TV or something, but is that any reason to hate her?
The way I see it she is friends with all those movie stars, and you know that if those movie stars didn't like somebody they wouldn't bother being their friend because they can be friends with whoever they like. This would be especially true for someone like Kim who can't even help their careers. So if all those people go to her birthday parties, then she can't be that bad of a person.
People say she is dumb, and cruel things like that, but when you look at the people saying it, they're not rich, they haven't got all the famous movie star and sports star friends, maybe there is a bit of jealousy.
People talk about the tall poppy syndrome, I'm not really sure what that is. I mean, I know it's about people being mean about people who are rich and famous, but I don't really understand how it relates to flowers, especially poppies. Maybe it's something to do with opium, maybe the taller poppies have more opium so they are picked first? Anyway I think the tall poppy syndrome is just another name for jealousy.
I think when guys say they don't like Kim Kardashian, they are really just saying that to make their girlfriends happy, or maybe to impress some girl so she will become their girlfriend.
When they say "I don't like Kim Kardashian" It's as if they are saying “If I had a choice between Kim Kardashian and you I'd choose you.“
First of all they aren't going to have that choice because if you asked Kim Kardashian if she liked Fred Smith she would say
“I don't even know who that is”, maybe Fred Smith is a bad example, because Fred and Smith are fairly common names and she might know a Fred Smith. She might say
“Do you mean Fredrick Smith from New York?" but you know what I mean. If you ask her about some random guy from nowhere who isn't rich or famous she will likely say
"Who?" So these guys are really talking rubbish because if Kim came up to them and said
“How about it?” they would probably say yes, because everybody has seen the videos of her and they might think that she will have sex with them and let them tape it. Although she probably wouldn't make that mistake again.
I say that everybody has seen the videos, But actually I for one don't think I have. Don't get me wrong I'm not a goody good or anything, but people are always saying things like "anybody can see the Kim Kardashian sex tape on the internet", so I thought one time for an experiment I would have a go and see if I could find it. I Googled "Kim Kardashian sex tape" and got 11,200,000 results, I'm not kidding there were more than 11 million, try it.
So I clicked on a few as an experiment, and there were plenty of offers to buy a DVD. I changed the search to "Kim Kardashian sex video download", and there were still millions of hits that were mostly trying to sell me a download of the DVD. When I say mostly I didn't try all 3 million obviously, but after a while I got the general flavour of the thing. I set google up tohave a hundred results per page which is much better than the default because it gives you a better meta view of what you are going to find and it means you have less ads to worry about. Not a lot of people know that trick. So when I went a few pages in and saw roughly the same sort of thing I changed the search again to be "Kim Kardashian sex tape free download". Still well over a million hits, but these ones were a bit different, when you click on the links they are ads for different porn sites some of them claiming to have "Kim Kardashian free sex video download"in exactly the wording of my search which is suspicious. Some of them weren't even pretending to have Kim on tape, they just showed pictures of naked woman offering more if you subscribe. For those ones when you try to close the window on the computer two more would pop up and when you close each one of them two more and two more and so on. It's called a porn storm. this is where pop-up blockers come in handy.
Some of the siteshave free samples which is quite a good thing, but not of Kim Kardashian. Not that I really care you understand, I'm not some crazy stalker obsessed with Kim Kardashian or anything. I wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea. It was just an experiment. I eventually did find a clip of someone who could be Kim Kardashian, it was 2 minutes long and a from a funny angle, it definitely could have been her but I don't really know too much what she looks like. In the end it was a video of a girl with dark hair and a big bottom having relations with a guy, it actually could have been anybody.