As time goes by…

So, let’s say for a moment that you woke up late Thanksgiving morning, not until about 11:30AM when they called to see why you hadn’t showed up for supper. Fine, no problem, get awake, get ready, drive across town… yadda yadda, and then that night, instead of going to bed, take your brother to the closest 24-hour Wal*Mart a little after midnight. (For future “Black Friday” sales, midnight might actually be too late to arrive for the 5AM sale – Heath and I were 22nd and 23rd in line at about 00:40, and until almost 2AM we didn’t know for sure whether they had 20 or 35 of the $378 HP Pavilion laptops we were there for – and the rest of the people through the 35th person were there before we knew it was 35…) And then sit there. Until shortly before 5AM, when you stand up, spend some money you … well, maybe you can’t exactly afford it, but you’re a consumer whore and the industry (the consumer whore industry, that is) has given you more than enough credit (not to mention finally getting approval for overtime to try to catch up on all the work the department has fallen behind on by being at less than half staff since summer – and to earn quite a chunk of money in the next month or two, since the other person or two in the department the overtime will be offered to have no interest in coming in on their days off) … anyway, since you’ve checked all the ads ahead of time (not to mention had the last four plus hours to wander the store and alternately hold your place in line with your brother) and know the only other things you might want to buy (which can be afforded after the $400 for the laptop) are the 40+ $3.44 DVDs whose titles were not listed in any ads and maybe a 2-cup “chopper” (ie: off-brand quisinart) you get what you need (just the one DVD, then the computer), you pay, and you’re out of the parking lot and done with ‘Black Friday’ before 5:15AM. And then let’s say you have to leave for work by 7AM…


…on one of your normal days off. For the overtime, remember? So, let’s say you work your ten hours, no problem, but then you’re supposed to meet someone for coffee after work, so you drive across town to meet in person this person you met online. (That’s a fun phrase, ‘to meet in person this person you met online,’ it’s like poetry.) And then let’s say you get to talking and notice the coffee shop is closing, so you go outside, but then you’re talking in the parkng lot. You know the routine, you’re both holding your keys, standing next to your cars, it’s getting colder and later and colder and later… and you get so hungry that you suggest getting something to eat. And you do, and by the time you finally get home it’s about 3AM, and you have to be up again at about 6:30AM at the latest to get showered and ready for work, and let’s just say for a moment that you happen to be the sort of person who can set down at a computer to check your email and lose an hour without noticing it, and that’s just about what you do… but you lay down for a couple hour’s nap anyway. You happen to be good at it, so getting up on time after less than three hours’ sleep since waking up about 43 hours earlier and heading to work. For another 10 hours. Fine, fine, no problem, and you fully intend to go home and go to sleep because you know you can’t just keep staying up like this and expect yourself to get over this cold/flu/whatever you’ve had for the last couple of weeks. Except then that thing, that one where you can lose an hour to the internet checking your email? Yeah. Turns out that sometimes you get struck by something you see and end up on a sort of an information quest and then your brother comes home and you look up to say hello and when you look back at your computer screen your eyes happen to slip over the clock in the corner, and you realise that it hasn’t been just an hour or two, it’s been over seven hours, and you can either go for that two or three hours’ sleep or finish researching a “small” company who “inherited” a technology I’d been following since about 1998 but which disappeared in 2002 and didn’t reappear until this year… and which could have kept both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray off the market had they received the second round of funding they needed in 1999 to get their large-scale manufacturing started, but… you know how funding for actual tech companies suffered from the losses of the ones the didn’t bother with silly things like “business plans” or “products”? Well, this company couldn’t get funding even though they demonstrated functional re-writable media that could be produced in existing manufacturing facilities, used red lasers and discs the same size and shape and cost as CDs and DVDs and is backwards-compatible with same and which had an actual capacity of over 40Gb in 1999 and theoretical maximums around 1.4Tb per disc by now… and then further advances with the development of blue laser systems in the next year or two… but none of that happened, until… (back to that “small” company) this year they basically worked out deals to go with the tech that puts their tech in the bulk of the theatres in the largest cinema market in the world(India, btw) within the next few years, plus they’re the new home theatre systems standard for HD for all of China, rolling out their 20Gb ETV-backwards-compatible players in time for Christmas (in China) this year, their 40Gb players next year, and with a tech road map leading to 300Gb+ capacities by the time Blu-Ray manufacturing reaches 50Gb capacities… see how that goes? That’s a summary, it didn’t even touch on how you, let’s say, spent over an hour actually reading the full text of several years’ worth of SEC filings to try to figure out what happened at the end? Yeah. So you finish enough research to see that even though they’re offerring their HD-IPTVs with VDM drives at a price the Chinese economy can afford, there’s no way I …I mean you… could import one so you’ll just have to wait a while and see if they make it to this side of teh pond. The fact that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are fighting primarily over the American and European markets, VMD has it’s foot in the two largest markets in the world. Anyway, you decide not to nap, but instead to work on your own website, watch Million Dollar Baby for the first time, take a shower, and head to work. And then, say you work the normal 9 hours and then ask special permission and work an additional several hours… you know, for the money. If all these things have come to pass, and you get home and you’re practically falling asleep on the drive home, don’t like … spend hours watching DVDs, working on your website, and then writing a nonsensical post until almost two in the morning, when you KNOW you have work again tomorrow. That would be silly. Also, it would mean you’d had about … six hours sleep in the last 86+ hours. Which, for those of you who put stock in such thngs, 4 out of 5 dentists agree isn’t enough sleep for good health.

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Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.