Tag Archives: Real Life

Short Stories

Real life has tech support

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Report # 01 for user 0790475020B: Dear big programmer person, my mommy says you can fix anything, so I should report any bugs in my life to you. I didn’t get enough presents for Christmas. All my other friends got exactly what I want. There must be a queueing problem with the Christmas.exe program. Please look into it, user 0790475020B.

Report # 16 for user 0790475020B: Hey programmer dude, things have been good, just got a little tweak for ya’. The prom.2.0.doc file is shaping up pretty sweet, there’s just one problem. My prom proposal bombed and the girl turned me down. I know you probably don’t deal a lot with these small instance problems, but if you could just go press a few buttons to make that not happen it would be sweet, user 0790475020B.

Report # 023 for user 0790475020B: Hello once again programmer person, somebody pointed out to me that my user number is automatically included in the report so I don’t need to mention it. Sorry for the redundancy, now let’s get down to brass tax. The college.lifetutorial.exe program worked great and my bachelor’s degree appears functional, but I’ve been looking for jobs for like nine months now, and my parents are really putting the pressure on me to move out. I’m sure it’s a problem with the search engines, so if you could look at the code for me I’d appreciate it.

Report # 026 for user 0790475020B: Greetings programmer person. I don’t know why I’m even writing this. You never seem to patch my problems. Now I’m having to write this during my fifteen minute break from the call center. I know you probably have an awesome job troubleshooting life, but some of us have to scrape by on the worst sort of job. You know how rude people are to cold callers? It’s pretty horrible. I can’t imagine ever doing this willingly. This can’t be right, please patch soon.

Report # 027 for user 0790475020B: Oh, and not that you care, but the girlfriend update never came through for me. So thanks for that.

Report # 029 for user 0790475020B: Programmer, more of a question than a report. Can you patch someone back into the system if they log out? If that’s true can you request to not be included in the patch? Just curious.

Report # 030: for user 0790475020B: I should probably send this to a different tech support group, but I’m sure you can just forward this to them. This is an actual software report, the spell check on my word processor is broken. It keeps autocorrecting words that aren’t meant to be corrected. It’s not a huge deal. The book that I’m writing doesn’t use the words it doesn’t like very often so I can work around it, but it’s just kind of annoying.

Report # 032: for user 0790475020B: What up programmer! Girlfriend patch finally came through! I can see you guys have been working on polishing this one up for quite some time ;). Please disregard previous complaints on this matter.

Report # 033: for user 0790475020B: Hey programmer, I know it’s been a while, I’ve been busy with my girlfriend and signing tours. Such are the struggles of life. My girl pointed out that I should probably say thanks for all the stuff you’ve put together for me recently. I can kind of see how you put me in a place where I could grow as a user into someone my girl liked, and how you gave me enough free time and motivation to start writing. I’m right where I want to be in life so I just wanted to say thanks. Seriously, thank you.

Short Stories

One Last Request

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“I wish to see myself at fourteen to convince myself to ask out Francine Walker.” I asked the mysterious ghost who has appeared before me.

“But first I will show you what will change.” Th ghost tells me. That’s fair of him. It’s his powers I’m taking advantage of, so I’ll gladly abide by his rules.

We arrive at the honeymoon with my current with Margarett. “Gone.” The ghost says.

That’s alright. I’ll get married to Francine. We’ll have another honeymoon.

I’m standing at my wife’s side as she gives birth to my first son. “Gone.” The ghost says. I’m watching my first daughter being born. “Gone.” The ghost says. Those two hurt, and hurt bad. I’m sure I’ll have more children, but it was hard to tell that to myself as I saw them take their first breaths.

I’m at my dad’s funeral. Oh good, I won’t mind losing this. “Keep.” The ghost says. I look at him questioningly, and before I can voice my question he points to my wife comforting me as I sob like a little girl. “Gone.” He says. Then I know I can’t change my past. I can’t betray this woman who means so much to me.

“I wish to see myself at nineteen when I’m picking majors so I can go with something more lucrative than creative writing.” The ghost nods. I suspect I am about to view the changes to my life, and I am right when I find myself at my first book publishing event. “Gone.” The ghost says. That stupid book had only made 5,000$ and had started me on a very poor artist lifestyle, but I remembered the stories my readers had told me about how my book had changed them.

I’m in my room reading one of my books to my wife and children as they go to sleep. “Gone.” The ghost says. These two memories aren’t as powerful as the ones from my wife, and I am still thinking about making more money when I show up in the room of a teenage girl. She’s bawling her eyes out, and has a lot of pills around her on the bed. She’s got my book on her lap. I ask what’s going on when she finishes the book and runs bawling to her mom to tell her that she loves her. The ghost points to the girl. “Gone.”

“I can’t change this either.” I tell the ghost. He nods and we return to my room where we started.

“You know.” I tell the ghost. “I can sense a pattern. Everything in my life happened for a reason, and I didn’t appreciate those reasons. Ghost, I wish to end this charade.” The ghost nods and points to himself.

“Gone.”

Real Life

Inspiring Medical Weekend

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I wasn’t planning on doing any real life stories, but I figured this was better than anything I could possibly make up.

I was witness to two inspiring moments of humanity this weekend. One was from the accident seen above, the other was from a good friend who had a fairly horrific accident of her own.

The first inspiring moment, that accident was not the first medical incident of the weekend. Saturday morning I hear that a good friend is in the hospital because ‘her foot is facing the wrong way’. Long story short she tripped on a treadmill and landed in such a way that she dislocated her ankle, and broke one of her shin bones in half. The X-ray photos were like something out of ER or House(wish I had the photos to post). The two bones in her left leg that normally form parallel lines were now forming a 20 degree angle around her ankle, and one of them was snapped in half. So naturally when I drove down to see her I expected her to be in a lot of pain. Someone once told me the worst pain you can experience is the thigh bone breaking. My own experience with broken bones tells me the bigger they are, the worse the pain. Both of these facts led me to believe she would be practically incomprehensible when I arrived. To my surprise, when I see her she smiles and gives me a hug, despite having just undergone surgery. Just thinking about it kind of makes me feel like wimp for taking a sick day the last time I had a cold.

The second moment was when I was driving back from seeing her, and ran into the accident showed above. My car is just visible in the bottom right of the photo. I’m fine, one of the persons in the accident was not so lucky. Near as I can tell, the red mustang pulled out of a side street, and knocked the other red car into the woods. Both cars are very obviously totaled. The four people in the mustang are fine(he was at fault for the accident, but I didn’t see it to know this). The person in the car in the woods(who is being extracted by paramedics), was not so lucky. She was awake, and relatively lucid, but judging from the brief description of pain she gave me, and the equipment being used to extract her, she has likely some spinal damage(hopefully minor, and prayers are appreciated). The inspiring moment comes in from when I showed up on the scene. I see the two cars(no EMS yet), some debris, and a lady walking toward the car in the woods. I figure something is wrong so I get out. A couple of passing joggers were responding at the same time I was. One of them was calling 911 the other helped me work with the lady in the car. A few more passersby show up from cars driving either way. One is a combat medic and takes over with the lady in the woods car. The other helps me try and get the mustang out of the road(unsuccessfully), along with the driver. The car was too wrecked to move by our strength. I didn’t put 2 and 2 together until afterwards, but all five people who first saw this scene, stopped to help out. All of us had places to be and could have driven on. I know I at least was made late for a service, and several others were stopped for almost an hour, yet all of us took the time to help these people out. There was a 100% response rate among the first people to see the accident, the driver took responsibility, 911 was called immediately, and everyone got out of the way and let the professionals take over as soon as they arrived.

In a lot of movies people seem to crumble under stress, and only the protagonist is gifted with any meaningful intelligence and tenacity. Yet this weekend, I saw a substantial number of people put through the ringer, and every single one of them did so in an inspiring and responsible way that anyone would be proud of.

I don’t intend to do many of these, but this boosted my hope for humanity, and I wanted to pass it on.