Sentience in a seed-pod

Hello. I have just come back from drinks with my team leader. Behold my alcohol induced blog entry.

Today I found an old website that I set up when I was working at my old company which no longer exists. It's still up because it has slipped into that part of the internet that god has forgotten. This site was more or less a protoblog. Hooray! A blast from the past free blog entry follows (dated circa September 2001). This is the Geoff of yesteryear:

There are a lot of ants in our office. No-one really knows where they came from, but the first time anybody noticed them they were farming aphids on my poor sick plant, which I'll tell you about some time. So I feel some sort of solidarity with these ants (even though I mercilessly executed them with extreme prejudice to save the life of my plant).

Ants are really cute in a chitinous, eat-your-face kind of way. They bustle around and make a mess and eat sweets - like human young. Unlike human young, they don't occasionally smell and often wake you up at two in the morning. But there are fewer humans, so they're less expendable. It's not like I'd squish a baby under my thumb. Anyway, I digress.

The fact is, I'm a pretty live and let live type of guy. I figure, if it's not hurting me, I don't have a problem. So when I accidently left the office in a hurry with a pack of sweets standing open next to the computer and an entire colony took advantage of this glut of supply and moved into the fiddly bits on top of my CPU, I was perfectly happy.

David wasn't.

You see, David is pretty anal. Stuff gets to him. He cares about little things like order, planning and his environment. Not rainforests, you understand. Just his little desk and his personal space. He likes things to operate within his parameters and has a healthy respect of the existing way of things. This is not something he's thought about - it's just the way he is. I think it's a below-the-radar technique. Anyway, it's his core of normality that allows him to operate in society, so let's leave him to it.

So David makes a huge noise not unlike the mating call of the South Seas Yak, only warped into language. And Daniel comes running with a screwdriver. What does this say about Daniel? That he likes to take stuff apart, any time, any excuse. (What were you thinking?)

Then the two of them set about taking my computer to bits. Screws come out, panels are removed. Structural integrity is compromised. The hull is breached. Suddenly, the front of the computer is removed, and the centre of the colony is discovered. Ants run like the Styx through the warm dark recesses of my tortured machine, which otherwise seemed fine at the time.

At this point, David has a panic attack not unlike the claustrophobia of John Bobbitt in bikini briefs. He grabs my computer, ripping trailing cables from the back and dashes for the door like a fireman in a burning building with a puppy under his arm and an e tv news crew outside.

Soon after this I lost track of events as a man came to sell me some choc chip muffins.

When I surfaced, bits of my computer were dumped on my desk. The proud exterminators preened themselves and awaited my eternal gratitude. I asked them to put it back together.

His sense of order restored, David merely chuckled and continued in his little world. Daniel, who cares (thanks, Dan) took a screwdriver to my computer, and after only minutes had my computer working fine as long as it lay on its side. Much later, it returned to normal functionality, with the minor proviso that a hard knock resets the machine. Yes I save often.

The moral of the story - don't trust David. If you can get a desk across the room, do it. That's all I'm saying.