Executive lifestyle
Somehow spending an evening poring over my innermost thoughts led me to something like a nightmare involving an art dealer I saw on the telly the other week. The following events are utterly fictional and bear no relation to any persons living or dead and dear boy, if you are reading this, go back to perving over your Gauguin books. Creep.
Anyway, he's a fidgety, dead quiet, upper-class sort of guy in his mid-forties who likes windsurfing and has a leonine hairdo with a full beard and glasses. I've never once heard him raise his voice, even after the finance director left an empty can of Guinness standing on his desk. He's kind of like the guy in yakuza film fight-scenes who stands at the back in a white suit whilst everyone else is getting stabbed and mutilated. Except that this guy has all the smack-fu of a petri dish of degenerated rennet.
But he does have a laptop, and like most businessmen who have laptops, he doesn't really understand it. This gives us something in common, as I don't understand laptops very well either. True, my real-world job is IT engineering, so I'm intimately acquainted with most forms of computer-based misery and suffering, but I hate dealing with laptops, because my customers either buy the slim poncy Powerbook wannabes that don't work, or the heavy, clunky cheap-ass ones that don't work either. So realistically, it was only a matter of time before I had a nightmare about one. Bloody hell.
Thus: it is a warm autumn day in London. I am waddling amiably along Piccadilly. It is quite beautiful outside, being briskly cold, sunny, and about noon. I take a left at the Ritz, and in due course, wind up at the front door of this gaff in Berkeley Square. There's a bag slung over my arm with a bunch of cardboard boxes inside with a couple of painfully stylish personal organisers inside.
(I hate these things even more than I hate laptops.)
Now I'm up in this guy's own office. Being an art dealer, it's decked out in horrible Edwardian chintz, with floral carpets and big old teak furnishings and probably an elephant's-foot umbrella stand. Crouching over this laptop and trying to make the Crappié talk nicely to his laptop.
This is made more interesting by the fact that all the while I'm trying to do this, he's packing to leave on a seven PM flight to somewhere like the Cayman Islands. So I'm stooping over this desk rather than sitting down so he can get to the cupboards behind me, which contain front-loading washer/dryer machines. From these he is retrieving great musty bales of clean-but-badly-in-need-of-airing laundry and stuffing them into big Samsonite suitcases. And then swarming around the desk and pulling out drawers to retrieve stacks of blank bank-drafts and they go in his carry-on. It's really quite freaky, and I'm having one of the bad afternoons I occasionally have where I literally can't think about what I'm doing. It's like a physical impossibility.
...the slightly underwhelming long-and-short of it was that in making the organisers talk to his computer, I completely fucked his email storage, corrupting four years worth of un-backed-up messages forever; my *family* turned up, deposited themselves into armchairs, and started arguing and cursing at each other; I somehow made his computer look like it hadn't just been raped by an incompetent blubbering halfwit; and got the hell out of there just before the building blew up.
Somehow, the fact that all of this took place in bright sunlight only made everything worse.
Anyway, he's a fidgety, dead quiet, upper-class sort of guy in his mid-forties who likes windsurfing and has a leonine hairdo with a full beard and glasses. I've never once heard him raise his voice, even after the finance director left an empty can of Guinness standing on his desk. He's kind of like the guy in yakuza film fight-scenes who stands at the back in a white suit whilst everyone else is getting stabbed and mutilated. Except that this guy has all the smack-fu of a petri dish of degenerated rennet.
But he does have a laptop, and like most businessmen who have laptops, he doesn't really understand it. This gives us something in common, as I don't understand laptops very well either. True, my real-world job is IT engineering, so I'm intimately acquainted with most forms of computer-based misery and suffering, but I hate dealing with laptops, because my customers either buy the slim poncy Powerbook wannabes that don't work, or the heavy, clunky cheap-ass ones that don't work either. So realistically, it was only a matter of time before I had a nightmare about one. Bloody hell.
Thus: it is a warm autumn day in London. I am waddling amiably along Piccadilly. It is quite beautiful outside, being briskly cold, sunny, and about noon. I take a left at the Ritz, and in due course, wind up at the front door of this gaff in Berkeley Square. There's a bag slung over my arm with a bunch of cardboard boxes inside with a couple of painfully stylish personal organisers inside.
(I hate these things even more than I hate laptops.)
Now I'm up in this guy's own office. Being an art dealer, it's decked out in horrible Edwardian chintz, with floral carpets and big old teak furnishings and probably an elephant's-foot umbrella stand. Crouching over this laptop and trying to make the Crappié talk nicely to his laptop.
This is made more interesting by the fact that all the while I'm trying to do this, he's packing to leave on a seven PM flight to somewhere like the Cayman Islands. So I'm stooping over this desk rather than sitting down so he can get to the cupboards behind me, which contain front-loading washer/dryer machines. From these he is retrieving great musty bales of clean-but-badly-in-need-of-airing laundry and stuffing them into big Samsonite suitcases. And then swarming around the desk and pulling out drawers to retrieve stacks of blank bank-drafts and they go in his carry-on. It's really quite freaky, and I'm having one of the bad afternoons I occasionally have where I literally can't think about what I'm doing. It's like a physical impossibility.
...the slightly underwhelming long-and-short of it was that in making the organisers talk to his computer, I completely fucked his email storage, corrupting four years worth of un-backed-up messages forever; my *family* turned up, deposited themselves into armchairs, and started arguing and cursing at each other; I somehow made his computer look like it hadn't just been raped by an incompetent blubbering halfwit; and got the hell out of there just before the building blew up.
Somehow, the fact that all of this took place in bright sunlight only made everything worse.
posted by the Dreadful Flying Glove | 4:02 AM
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