From tcranny@csu.edu.au Tue Dec 1 22:48:34 PST 1998 Article: 106774 of alt.peeves Message-ID: <3658E4DF.5BAC@csu.edu.au> Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 13:58:48 +1100 From: Tim Cranny Reply-To: tcranny@csu.edu.au Organization: CSU X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (Macintosh; I; PPC) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.peeves Subject: Moving (long) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: bmax1-12.mit.csu.edu.au Lines: 155 Path: news1.meer.net!news3.best.com!news2.best.com!news1.best.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!sunqbc.risq.qc.ca!news.uow.edu.au!news.usyd.edu.au!tanias.syd.csu.edu.au!bmax1-12.mit.csu.edu.au Xref: news1.meer.net alt.peeves:106774 Apologies for the length here, folks; it got away from me... My wife just scored a great job back in the city we left 10 months ago, so after some soul-searching we've decided to turn into a two-household couple, with me living in the smaller country town during the week and joining her in the city on weekends. This involves moving. Again. It cost us (or rather, the uni) a fortune to move our shit here in the first place, and there wasn't anyone picking up the tab this time. We decided to do it ourselves. Peeve: Do-it-yourself moving. My last experience with this was a few years ago, when a couple of very close friends moved from their smallish unit to a larger house on the other side of the same suburb. I knew they only had a few items of furniture in their unit, most of which were flimsy things made from cane that weighed practically nothing, and so, like a fool, I volunteered to help. Hey, I thought, nothing wrong with a few hours light exercise, followed by a cold drink and a virtuous glow. I drove to their unit, and saw the first warning sign: the Fucking Enormous Truck. But this was back in the distant past-when I was but a carefree youth-and I did not know enough to tremble. Second warning sign: he had *another* mate with him. Even a naive fool such as my youthful self heard the faint warning bells. As I expected, it took us a grand total of about an hour to move all their assorted crap from the unit to the truck, where it huddled in the corner and looked pathetic. There was still enough room in the truck for a game of squash. 'Now for the garage!' David cried. 'Garage?' I said. 'What garage? You always park on the str-' Oh, fuck. A *double* garage. In which every cubic angstrom was filled with furniture. This fucking garage had been packed by Mauritz Esher, and when he did it he didn't leave sufficiently many gaps for superfluid helium to make it from one side of the room to the other. And was it more cane furniture? Was it, fuck. These bastards had been hiding Old Furniture; heavy mahogony and oak stuff a century old, lovingly made by skilled craftsmen using secret techniques passed down >from father to son, each of whom lived and died by the guild motto: "Try lifting THIS, you son of a bitch!" Question: what is the difference between mahogony and lapsed uranium? No, it isn't a riddle; I honestly can't tell the fucking difference. Lapsed uranium is probably softer and hotter, but in terms of density I doubt there's any goddamn difference. This stuff weighs a metric fuckload per cubic centimetre, and a double garage full of the stuff bends passing lightbeams into amusing shapes before spitting them back out in the direction whence they came. It took the three of us about six hours of backbreaking work to get it all into the truck, and another six hours to move it from the truck to the house. By the end of the day I was past mere exhaustion, I had reached that liquid stage where every single muscle ached and whined, and I didn't really care if I lived or died. Had a fire broken out in the house I wouldn't have been able to roll over and crawl to the door to save my life. I was too exhausted to drive home (a 200km drive, mind you. I really had to go looking for this shitty job), so I slept on one of their enormously heavy beds, and arose the next morning a bundle of aching muscles held together by aching ligaments. I was ready to head off home when David said, 'Hey! I've got to return this rental truck. Can you follow me and give me a lift home afterwards?' I stared longingly at his jugular for a few seconds, then figured, Hey, in for a penny... Among his many other failings, David has absolutely NO sense of direction. I've seen this bastard get lost and drive about aimlessly for an hour without ever getting more than a kilometre from his home. He could get lost in a fucking toilet cubicle. He assured me we would be fine so long as we stayed off the highway, then with that awesome inevitability you normally only get with the very best avalanches, *immediately* drove onto the highway. I followed him in my car, about 100 metres back, and when he slowed down and signalled to pull off to the side of the highway, slowed down as well. There happened to be a motorcycle between us, and as this monstrous truck signalled, then slowed to a crawl, the bike rider somehow managed not to see a godamn thing. He failed to overtake, and just stayed behind the truck and slowed with it, even following it off the road. When truck and bike had slowed sufficiently, the bike simply toppled over. This guy obviously had no fucking clue how to ride, and the SAQ of a goddamn turnip. If there were ever an award for Most Likely To Have Organs Available For Donation, this would be the guy to bet on. (Side note: real bikies are traditionally heavily tattooed, partly as a way of signalling their toughness and rabidity to the larger community. If I were ever to become a bikie, I'd get all the major organ's labelled and the basic organ-harvesting instructions tattooed in the appropriate places. Sort of like the "cuts of beef" diagram one sees in butcher's shops. What better way to signal one's toughness, nonchalance, and actuarial acumen all at once?) Anyway, the bike toppled over at extremely low speed. I immediately pulled in behind him, partly to shelter him from any following traffic, and put my hazard lights on before getting out and helping him out from beneath his bike. He was unhurt, and he, David and I stopped by the side of the road near the truck to basically say, "Hey, what happened?" to one another. It was at this point that some youth drove into the back of my parked car at about 80kph, punching it forty metres up the road and putting the passenger's side rear seat into the glovebox (literally). I stood there and gaped at it, completely lost for words. It was a beautiful, beautiful car, uncomplicated and unpretty but absolutely reliable and a joy to drive, and I had what seemed like an eternity to watch windscreen glass spray across the highway as its carcase lurched to a halt. The cretinous youth had been talking on a carphone, and looked down to dial a number only to look up only metres from my stationary car, its hazard lights blinking merrily right in his face. He tried at the last instant to swerve to miss my car, but still hit one corner very emphatically. !Peeve: this cocksucking little choad tried to swerve *off* the road to avoid my car. The cops pointed out that the rubber he left on the road before the impact pointed in a perfectly straight line towards where David, I and the Temporary Organ User were standing. Had Captain Carphone reacted a tenth of a second earlier, he would have missed my car and killed me. It was a good car, but that's a trade I'll make every time, even though it also means extending the lives of David and the TOU. !Peeve: Captain Carphone had a far more expensive car than mine which was also destroyed in the collision. It turned out he'd put an ad in the paper that very morning to sell it. Minimal consolation, but it was something. Anyway, that introduced its own suite of insurance and car hire peeves which took many weeks to clear up . But suffice it to say the weekend was nasty, brutish and long, long, long. UtterlyTranscendentPeeve: Barely two months later we visited these same friends in their new home. David greeted me at the door with a guileless smile and said, 'Let me show you around. You haven't been here before, have you?' Had I torn his head off there and then and shat down his throat no jury in the world would have convicted me. !Peeve: This current move was remarkably painless. I will never again even contemplate moving anything even moderately heavy without three things: the use of a truck with a hydraulic lift, a stair-climbing trolley, and a court order on David Matthews requiring that he stay at least 100 kilometres away. Tim Cranny Dislcaimer: All my own opinions.... From Tim.Cranny@csu.edu.au Tue Dec 1 22:48:54 PST 1998 Article: 106794 of alt.peeves Message-ID: <3659DB16.297@csu.edu.au> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 09:00:54 +1100 From: Tim Cranny Organization: Charles Sturt University, Australia X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.04Gold (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4u) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.peeves Subject: Re: Moving (long) References: <3658E4DF.5BAC@csu.edu.au> <73cc6e$h3j$1@news.ycc.yale.edu> <3659D8FA.1B4E@csu.edu.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: clio.mit.csu.edu.au Lines: 21 Path: news1.meer.net!news3.best.com!news2.best.com!news1.best.com!feed1.news.rcn.net!rcn!howland.erols.net!sunqbc.risq.qc.ca!news.uow.edu.au!news.usyd.edu.au!tanias.syd.csu.edu.au!clio.mit.csu.edu.au Xref: news1.meer.net alt.peeves:106794 Tim Cranny wrote: > Putting things back in the furniture context momentarily, I think it was > a mistake on my part to bring the periodic table into the discussion. > This stuff > could have been made from any element, so long as one had previously > applied sufficient pressure to push the electron shell into the nucleus > and then press all the neurons up against each other. There should be a word for that class of typo which so clearly enriches the original sentence. Suffice it to say that I mean *neutrons*. But there's a good science fiction short story in there somewhere. Mr Stross? >I also have a mental picture of Chandrasakar (sp?) looking at >it with a thoughtful expression on his face. > Tim Cranny tcranny@csu.edu.au Disclaimer: All my own opinions.