GOOD MORNING. OUTLOOK IS DOWN. KILL THE PIG.

Today is Monday, which marks at my office the weekly viral email crash. Once again the Superhighway of Industry offramps onto Sabotage Drive. The inbox and its numerous subfolders are locked away, and the few who gain access find their correspondence maddeningly and mysteriously missing. Suddenly the pace of work slows from supersonic to syrupy. Anxiety crystallizes. When our computers eat our emails we turn back the clock and start communicating by semaphore. When the semantics of semaphore are exhausted (by which I mean our arms) we gather up reams of paper and office furniture and pile it up into a pyre in the accounting lounge with the ostensible purpose of making smoke signals, but no one�s worked out an alphabet and soon we�re just in it for the destruction. Eventually the work experience student is trussed up and tossed onto the blaze and we bequeath his soul to the lord and his fat to our palms. Man, what are we going to tell his teacher? Who�s going to order the pizza, and do we want the Thai barbecue chicken again? Or do we just slaughter the horses and apply tape to the doorjambs in preparation for the long winter? I so prefer the road.

It turns out the new work experience student is named Sergei. To the fire with you, then, and may the gods be well pleased with our offering and bless us with a solid license from a US broadcaster (Tonight on the Neo-Pagan Sacrifice Network! A Canadian production company reverts to their Paleolithic origins and turns job security into a life or death propitiation! Film at Beltain!)

I just got news of my upcoming trips. Next week � Nova Scotia. Next month: Australia and the Philippines. Which reminds me of a funny story about the last production company I worked for, a squadron of egomaniacs with varying degrees of competency in the production business (some to none). About a year ago, give or take, Discovery Channel was offering a license (money) to whatever company could come up with the best proposal for a documentary on Martian exploration. One of the executives at the company, whom I will call Dumbdumb for the purposes of this story, waxed gung-ho on the notion, even though the money offered by Discovery Channel wasn�t really sufficient for a documentary on matters extraterrestrial. For weeks Dumbdumb pushed fellow executive and husband Shill to get a proposal together, and Shill in turn pushed their head producer, since neither Dumbdumb nor Shill knew how to put a proposal together, pitch a program, ask for oatmeal etc. One day the head producer noticed that Shill hadn�t mentioned the Discovery proposal for a few days. When she asked Shill about it, he turned a veiny burgundy colour and muttered �She doesn�t want to bother with it anymore�. Dumbdumb had thought that Discovery would actually send her to Mars to shoot a little footage. Of course, that would only work out if they were filming a documentary on the Capricorn One mission.

parode - exode