Stinking, sleazing, hacking, fist bumping.

I’m in a newly cheerful mood. The pipes running out of the bathroom were blocked, meaning the shower and sink were out of commission, and try as I might to scrape myself squeaky clean with a flannel I spent the entire day stinking of BO and last night’s sex. Normally I’d happily wallow in my own shit for a week but spending nine hours in a windowless room with no air conditioning made me a bit less tolerant of it. Still, now I’ve had a good long soak I’m happy as Larry,

Work. Figure I’d better mention something about that seen as it’s where I spend the majority of my days now. Training has picked up and become a lot more intensive and worthwhile. The tools that a fortnight ago might as well have been in Arabic are now all coming together into something that I can at least partially understand. I’m learning it easily enough, and it’s good to have a sense of progression every day, but I don’t know if I’m enjoying it. It’s nothing huge, the people are sound, the canteen isn’t half bad, and the work itself doesn’t seem too stressful or complicated. It’s the little things, like the seeming rigidity of it all, the fact that every keystroke and phone call is logged and recorded, that everything you do is timed and tracked down to the second, that there’s no nipping off for a quick piss because it gets logged as “personal time.” Haven’t actually encountered any of this for real yet, as I’ve yet to head “upstairs”, but it’s only a matter of time. Another pointless thing that annoys me is that ID badges have to be worn round your neck, so that in order to get through the turnstiles in and out of the building you have to bow. Same for getting through any closed doors. To me it seems a wee bit subjugating. I understand the need for all of this of course: call times are logged so people don’t slack off, people show their ID clearly to make it less likely that people can wander in off the street, but all of it feels constricting to me. I’m not screaming inside to get out of there every day, so I can’t really complain. There’s worse jobs nicer people than me are stuck in.

Speaking of people, I’ve been sat next to the same guy for the past week, and he’s beginning to grate a little bit. While the jokes were funny to begin with, now they’re just tired. It’s the constant idiotic giggling at anything that you could wrench an innuendo out of, before going into the most predictable dirty jokes that pops into his head, along with repeating anything he thinks is witty until it’s firmly driven into the ground. Not to mention how he talks about the only decent looking girl that’s around regularly… There’s cracking jokes about wanting to shag someone, I do it plenty, but then there’s crossing the line into being a bit seedy and creepy, something he doesn’t seem to see. Most of the time he’s alright though, provided he doesn’t get the chance to take anything too far. After a couple of days I realised again how true it is that the eyes are the window into the soul, because his are fucking loco. Got treated to a tale of him being a commando, getting shot, “struggling to reintegrate into society,” being addicted to some sort of pills, and a plethora of other gobshite. I’ve learned to take anything anyone says they’ve done in any sort of military role with a fuckton of salt.

This also goes for the trainer, a self-confessed hacker, he told one particularly amazing tale the other day. Whether it’s true or not I have no idea, but nevertheless it’s interesting. Now, this guy says that he used to be part of a hacking group years upon years ago, which had amongst it’s number a few guys that were recruited not long after 9/11 by an organisation heavily associated with the US government. I won’t say what one, but suffice to say they do have a website, so it’s not the Men in Black, it’s the Geeks in Beige. One guy though wasn’t very happy at being passed over for a job, so he rang up whatever number you call for that sort of thing and asked for one. Unsurprisingly, they told him no. Upon hearing this he hacked into a US satellite and, while on IRC to all his buds in the know, proceeded to take control of a nuclear destroyer, pointing them things what makes the biggest booms on Earth straight at Disneyland, and making the gun turrets on the ship do a little dance just for good measure. After he was done and while people were no doubt going apeshit at what had happened, he called them back again, and this time he got the job. But that’s not the end of the story you see, because there was another young stud there that night, and he thought that he could get himself a nice comfy job in the sun by sticking his pinky finger up the arse of the US government. So that’s exactly what he did. And how did he do it? By slapping in every unchanged default username and password he could on his merry tour of a foreign country’s dirty washing by what the trainer said. And boy, did he get deep, deeper than balls deep, into their systems. But he didn’t get a job out of it, instead he’s had a well-publicised decade long extradition fight to stop himself getting shipped over to the US for the rest of his natural life. Apparently the only real thing that’s kept him in this country was so his face would be kept in the papers and act as a warning against anyone else who wanted to annoy their way into work. As for those passwords? Most of them still haven’t been changed, supposedly to act as a honey trap incase someone does decide to take a notion to go hunting for UFOs on Area 51’s network. The story could be true, or it could be a quick yarn thrown together for the benefit of newbies like me, who knows? The company is real, I’m sure I once heard something about a hacked ship, and the chosen scapegoat is most certainly real.

Moving on from that fable, christmas is almost here, and I haven’t been able to get anyone a single present. Being single it was only ever going to be for my parents and brothers, and they won’t be that bothered about it. I have so little money in my account I can’t even take what’s left out of it, and when I’ve bought my lunch the past couple of days I’ve carried around a fistful of change so I can pay the exact amount. Not a great deal of fun I must say. Tomorrow is Saturday anyway, so I won’t need any cash as I can just be a hermit until I (hopefully) get some money in a card on Christmas morning. Just enough to tide me over for another week until I get paid. I’ll pick up a few little things to make up for it later on.

I need reminding, did I put my foot down and say I was going to end the thing I had going with that girl before Christmas or was it whenever she decided “The Talk” was due to be had? Probably both, but as time has trundled on I’m going to assume it was the latter. I’m less worried now about breaking her poor wee hat and seeing it more as simply a friends with benefits scenario. She’s easy to talk to, we’ve got a lot in common, the sex isn’t half bad, and she’s not making any demands on time or attention, so I’m a happy laddie. I don’t feel anything for her though, there’s no yearning to be with her, no twist in the chest when I think of her, in fact she’s not on my mind all that often. Nor is she overly affectionate or hinting at a relationship for her part either. She did however, give one of the most hilarious post-coital compliments I’ve ever had the good fortune to get:

“That was so good I could fist bump you.”

I believe I'm meant to say "like a boss" at this point...