Diary of an up and coming sociopath

This morning I was woken by good news: Nikki had lost £20. I know it might not sound like good news, but last night I found £20 on the floor and I was thereby freed form the temptation-heavy moral ground of knowing I had someone else’s £20 and no-one else knew squat about it. I’m such a model citizen.

However, the good karma came my way. No sooner had I returned Nikki’s £20 than I was phoned up with the offer of more work from Aqua-Pacific, next week. That’s another £120 I can chalk up to keeping me above the breadline and swimming in new DVDs. Still waiting for those Angel discs though…

After getting up and slowly coming to terms with having agreed to do work next week, I discovered that Tom and Ian were both already awake which kind of threw off the schedule. I was planning on finishing my coursework writeup before they got up, but in the end it turned out for the best because I couldn’t think of a damn thing to write about sodding adaptive menus, so Ian hanging around meant that I could pick his brain, his rich, tasty brain, for information. We drove up to Wheatley (on the way seeing a terribly hideous Honda with a spoiler that appeared to be constructed from strip lights and tinfoil) parked in a Wheatley side road and walked up to the campus. They’ve finally painted yellow lines along the grass verge outside the campus everyone used to park on, meaning that people now use, er, other grass verges instead.

We spent a while wrestling with Delphi 4 to get our programs worked. Apparantly, the latest versions of anything are well beyond the reach of the university, let alone a programming language. I’d estimate we were using 1997’s software on 1998’s OS. We handed the stuff in, despite the network’s frequent tendancy to slow to a snail’s pace every 5 minutes, possibly due to one of those e-mail viruses the university has managed to get infested with recently.

The twist in this tale comes on the way back though - we went not to Tescos, but to the Headington Co-Op. I can tell you’re all blown away. Headington Co-Op used to be a total pit not worth entering for anyone who could buy things without foodstamps. It was pretty much totally torn down and rebuilt, and now it’s almost too good for itself. It has an intranet site to browse products and, near the terminals, some hand washing basins so people about to use the intranet can do so hygenically. And those nice self-service scanning machines destined to replace checkout operators by the year 2025. We got followed around by a nice imposing security guard who we suspect saw Ian’s rucksack and instantly took that to mean we were international drug traffickers on the FBI’s 10-most wanted list. He wasn’t even subtle, keeping roughly half a metre of distance at most. Looking back on it, he was probably a frustrated homosexual aching for male contact. Urgh.

The real incidents never occur inside supermarkets though. At least, not today. When I parked my car, I was forced to squeeze through an incredibly tiny gap due to the utterly incompetant ability of some guy who had parked diagonally across his spot and ruined the modular structure of the parking spaces. It was on a downhill slant, though, and when I got out of the car it seemed to me that either the ground was moving in some unforseen direction, or the car was. I jumped back in and hit the brakes, and reversed it a bit, and put the handbrake back on. The incline was apparantly too steep for my normal level of handbrake-age. I was slightly wary of leaving the car at this point, because, well, no-one especially wants to go into a supermarket when it’s possible their car could quite possibly be crashing through the wall of a nearby business establishment, but after careful observance it seemed to be fine. Besides, there was a bicycle nearby beeping in a suspicious manner and if TV has taught me nothing, it’s that beeping things usually explode…