I have a nice job, you see, working for a company I won't bother to name at this point. We have what can only be called a painfully odd piece of software that does a certain useful thing for the real estate industry, namely, everything they could possibly want.
Well, it would if we could just get the thrice-accursed database to work consistently.
Anyway, a number of amusing things have come up. Among them is the fact that one of the groups contracting with us for the product has a lawyer who is completely mad. This woman is well beyond the insanity event horizon and rapidly accellerating towards complete gibbering madness. I begin to wonder if she actually took any courses in law, or just got a degree from Bob's Bar Certification Mill.
Anyway, things seem to be going as follows. We get sent a contract that's complete crap. It contains things like "In this agreement between A and B, we constrain C" (who, it should be noted, is not a signer of this contract) "to do certain things". Um. Yeah... Our lawyers apparently laughed long and hard and sent it back along with a note attempting to hand this woman a clue. She sent it back. We sent it back. Lather, rinse, repeat.
We also get periodic rants from our customers about how the software isn't working, and the many errors they quote rarely turn out to be real issues. We were recently sent a voluminous thirteen-page fax (along with a note demanding that we hire people with actual working brains), which contained, out of a zillion gripes, only two or three actual verifiable problems.
It's a good thing the programmers don't deal directly with the customers.
Other amusement is that the design of the appearance of the software is effectively done by committee on the customers' end, so we'll get two or three people telling us to make a change to the same thing -- often contradictory to each other -- and each one insists that this change is What The Customers Really Want. And then, naturally, we get bitched at after we make a change because they liked it better the way it was.
This has created an environment where we hate and fear change, because it causes much surling and we end up undoing it anyway. Generally we've learned to sit on any requested changes for a week or so, and only make them after the customers have shown they aren't going to change their minds in the interim. We've thought about charging them $50 for each change... Mmm... Maybe that'll shut the ungrateful whelps up. They demanded this piece of software back when it was just a gleam in R&D's eyes, and we're letting them use it for free until it's actually done. For free, mind you.
And I thought I could get surly. Man alive...
Transmetropolitan #23: Everyone's favorite surly bastard reporter, Spider Jerusalem, gets to interview the second of two presidential candidates this time around. Last time it was the Beast, who was an asshole, but who was at least an honest asshole. This time it's the Smiler, who's completely and utterly mad. And it's not an interview, the Smiler just wanted to inform Jerusalem that when he's the President (which he intends to be), he's going to exact fiendish and surly revenge upon Our Anti-Hero.
The Smiler, you see, made a deal with the neo-Nazi political leader of Florida to get votes, which pissed Spider off, so Spider dug up some fun dirt on the Smiler's Vice Presidential candidate (namely that said candidate was in fact a vat-grown made-to-order veep, much like Dan Quayle; this being the only way to create a guy with a totally spotless record) and torpedoes the Smiler's campaign... at least until the Smiler had his own (popular) political director killed, at which point he got a big 'Sympathy Boost'(tm).
The murdered political director was a friend of Spider's. This made Our Anti-Hero rather surly. It apparently also drove the Smiler completely around the bend, since he was at least moderately together in most of his previous appearances, but this time around he's scaring even his henchmen.
All this and a gang of people, all of whom dress and look exactly like Richard Nixon. What more could you ask for?
Heart of Empire #2: An alternate-history British Empire with a very odd flavor to it... All glass and clockwork and propellors driving a Victorian fantasy of London, ruled by an immortal sorceress of a Queen who feeds her own undying spirit off the life-force of others. Yowza!
Think 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' only with original characters and good art. It's got everything; hedonism (well, sort of) in a violent rejection of Puritan repression; a world-dominating British Empire... who this time REALLY dominates most of the world; dark sorcery; projectile-vomiting princesses... what more could you want?
I finished up 'The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy', which has a lot of really oddball tales, riffs on classic fantasy authors, riffs on classic cliches, riffs on riffs of... well, you get the picture. Mmm. Anthologies. It's pretty good, although the quality varies, and a lot of the "riffs for riffings sake" stories can become nigh-unreadable if you don't get what they're riffing, it has its moments.
Such as:
"Cute?" said the dangling eye, "Honey, he's absolutely horrible! He's the epitome of evil! Cold and cruel without a shred of human decency! Of course he's cute."
It's all that and a bag of chips.
The standoff is broken when the ship (which, for no apparent reason, looks like a sodding huge balloon) runs into one of those darn meteor clusters that always seem to pop up about this time in any science fiction show. Darn 'em. Krillan and Gohan free Bulma and head for their ship, only to turn right back around when stuff starts falling apart inside the ship of the midget aliens. Bulma's in a mind to just leave (such a nice girl) but Our Heroes stay to heroicly save people.
No destructo discs are thrown by Krillan, which shows he's not a complete idiot. Throwing an attack that keeps going effectively forever, obliterating everything in its path, would be a bad idea on a space ship. So bad that even the DBZ characters can realize it!
Bulma eventually grudgingly helps out by going up to the cockpit and smacking the pilots around until they let her fly, at which point she maneuvers the ship out of the asteroid... er... meteor... er... oh, whatever. And is promptly taken hostage again when the crisis is over. Such gratitude!
A little sweet-talking from Our Heroes, however, saves the day, and it's revealed that the Space Midgets were driven from their home by the minions of the evil Freeza, and they were convinced Our Heroes were part of that group. Problem solved, Our Heroes wave goodbye and flee onwards towards Namek.
Meanwhile, Vegita returns... home? Ut oh. There's not just one or two people with a prolicivity for whup-ass where Vegita comes from, but a whole army of the buggers. And Freeza works there, too? Apparently as Vegita's equal, no less. Egads. Freeza's minions scrape Vegita out of his re-entry pod, and plop him in the Regeneratron, a device so complex it only has seven buttons to control it! ("On", "Off", "Heal", "Kill", "Cause Accident", "Brew Coffee" and "Play Dramatic Music"). I predict surling in Vegita's future... when his bones knit, anyway.
Now Freeza's minions are proper aliens, darn it. None of this midget humans or guys with a third eye stuff. We've got beaks and tentacles and purple skin and fish eyes and all kinds of good stuff. And all working together in lock-step unity that would make any force of good drool openly in envy. Isn't it wonderful what evil can accomplish, bringing such disparate people together?
Meanwhile, Our Heroes arrive at planet Namek and promptly injure themselves severely by crashing their space-ship in an embarassing manner. Only to be rescued by two doddering old Namek (Nameks are the guys with the green skin and the antenna, as opposed to the guy with the blue skin and the antenna, which is King Kein or something like that) fellows. Bulma discovers with her handy Plot Device Sensor that this planet is just loaded with wish-granting Dragon Balls, and the team sets out to gather some, guided by one of the old guys as a guard against giant monster attack.
Wow, that's easy. They find two of the darn things in the last five minutes of the show. Resistance better stiffen soon, or we might have to do some other stuff like, oh, I don't know, character development or something.