Watching paint dry

Offhand I can think of few things more boring than being sat in a room in the middle of the night watching computers not misbehaving themselves.

Well, actually I can. And that’s being sat in a room on your own in the middle of the night watching computers not misbehaving themselves.

Its a bit like the proverbial watching paint dry.

Yet its a sort of edgy type of boring. Cos you know, you just positively know, that the very second you depart to make a coffee or have a fag or for some other unmentionable activity those bloody infernal machines are gonna choose precisely that moment to do the very thing they’ve studiously not been doing while you’re sat there watching them… in a word, misbehave.

Its not surprising that I really do bitterly hate and despise these damn machines. I’m convinced they’ve got it in for me… every single bleeding one of them. Spawn of the devil!

“So”, thinks I, pensively drumming fingers on desktop, “what mischief can I get up to now?”, with a studied, frowning, squinty-eyed glance around.

Hmm.

Pour a coffee into one of the case vents maybe? That’d be fun… but it’d also be fairly rapidly followed by some of yer actual proper work for me. Cos who else is there around to clear up the mess? No-one, that’s who. So nope. Bad idea.

Pull a few random plugs out from somewhere? Nope. Same effect.

Play around with firewall settings a bit? That’s always good for a laugh (in a very perverse sort of way). But no. Same effect again… only prob’ly moreso.

Tempt the machines into misbehaving a bit (just to relieve the boredom) by making yet another coffee and having yet another fag?
Nope. Tried that umpteen times already but the bastard machines simply know I’m goading ‘em and are refusing to play ball. Just sitting there winking at me with all those flashing lights and stuff, pretending to be ever so nice but all the time conspiring against me when my back’s turned.

Unless of course such leaving of the room is for a genuine purpose, and not just to trick them. They know of course. And respond accordingly… cos then they’ll definitely misbehave.

Or ‘phone one or two folk up maybe, just to let them know there’s no problems, and that they can go back to sleep? Not that they’d be in the least bit interested anyway what with them being off-shift an’ all.
Well, that really would be fun, especially at three in the morning. But then, I just know they’d play the same dirty trick on me somewhen. Cos they’re evil like that. So not such a good idea after all.

But what’s this I spy in the corner?

Ah yes… the Umbrella! Earlier enquiries revealed all those who could conceivably know anything about it didn’t. Or they were denying all knowledge of it at least.
So where’d it come from? How’d it get here? Why’s it here? What’s it doing here?

No-one knows… least of all me.

A real mystery.

Bit of a tatty thing too. Clearly seen better days. But no matter. Time to haul out the camera and see what I can do.

And cos I seem to have had rather a surfeit of black and white lately… one might almost say too much black and white… seeing what the Lumix is capable of in terms of colour could be an interesting though potentially disastrous little experiment to try. Exactly the sort of thing I’m likely to mess up in fact.

Then write a blogpost about it. This one actually. Heh heh.

At least it passes an hour or so. And I now have a set on Flickr titled “The Umbrella“. Neat huh?