Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

As many of you know, I’ve done a fair bit of work in IT, and I am sure all of you have heard stories of the IT department being called in by someone powerful and senior in the company, their computer isn’t working, IT guys asks if the monitor is turned on as the first of a series of standard questions, IT guy gets the outraged “do you think I am stupid etc” speech, IT guy physically goes to desk, monitor is powered off, IT guy turns it on, silent awkward dance, awkward silence in room, eyes do not meet, silent departure from room.

See, that was never me, I always made a point of saying “You know that thing you were saying about do I *think* you are stupid…”

It didn’t go down well, I’d interrupt the blathering… listen, it isn’t about whether I think you are stupid, it’s about *you* thinking *you* can talk to me like I am a piece of shit because *you* think you are smarter and more important than me…

The first time it happened in any venue the IT director would call me in for a chat, as soon as it was obvious what it was about I’d say I didn’t see a problem, not my fault the company employed ignorant and arrogant assholes who were too stupid to use a computer and too arrogant and rude to deal respectfully with those who were employed to nurse them.

Maybe I’d get called in once more because an internal engineering email was 100% succinct and on top and professional list of bullet point making whatever case it was I was trying to make, invariably it was a wimminz who complained, obviously it wasn’t written in comic sans with flowery gifs and smiley faces and hulloo, how are you feeling today shit all over it.

About then it would stop, I was the Neanderthal who simply could not be brought into the 21 century, but, he is good at fixing shit, so just keep him away from staff.

Customers were usually happy, after all, they just wanted shit fixed, except the ones who “blamed the last guy out the door” at which point they would discover that the last guy out the door had putty logs of everything he had done including arp being up etc etc, smartphone photos of patch cables being correctly installed and blinkenlights showing solid links / sync / whatever… so the claim “your engineer unplugged the point of sale tills from the router and didn’t plug them back in” was kinda blown away by a timed and dated photo of said patch panel, and the other photo of the other guys on site from the till maintenance company… photo graphic and file log proof that the customer in question is either;

• a liar
• stupid
• both of the above

pretty much guarantees instant silence and end of subject from manglement, but it took “where is my fucking apology for being accused of something I patently did not do” to stop manglement from forwarding such complaints to me to see what I had done wrong.

Basically all the above is why I quit the job eventually, the money wasn’t great but the job was a piece of piss and I worked from home and it was all good, apart from dealing with my own fucking company, it eventually got to me to the point where I had to quit.

I said then forget films about future zombie apocalypses, the fucking zombies are here now, and they run IT firms and the customers of IT firms and so on… I also said at the time that typically for zombies they all inhabited places that would be easy prey to hordes of zombies, huge chrome and glass structures with open plan offices and automatic glass doors and glass walls and shit.

Ironically being back in engineering we have our own place on an industrial estate, a place that will be desolate come the zombie apocalypse, and a place that is basically 20 foot high block walls with doors with steel shutters over them and steel beam construction for the rest, zombie proof as it gets pretty much.

Here in the UK we have planning and use laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_use_classes_in_England

They are rubbish at determining what sort of place would be good to hole up in a zombie apocalypse, but they get quite interesting when you dig into the detail.

For example if I task you with setting up an IT fixit service, it’s easy enough, same if I task you with setting up a mobile phone shop or hairdresser, it starts to get interesting if I start adding, OK, now I want the IT fixit service to be 24 hours.

Neither the A2 nor B1 classes say anything about 24 hour operations, so how about if you have bunk facilities and showers and onsite cooking, as we had back in the day doing motorway recovery, it wasn’t residential as you did not permanently reside there (class C3), but it wasn’t just “9-5” either, as it happens I know a guy who has a unit on an estate and parks a small stealth camper van out front, the camper van is road legal, he moves it from one parking space to the other and back again, he has permission from himself to park it there legally, and he doesn’t sleep in the unit itself, so he isn’t breaking any laws… it’s interesting because several people thought he might be, including some from the council, but as it turned out he was not doing anything wrong at all.

I bring him up because he also made a zombie apocalypse comment, his relatively weak stealth camper van is no problem, he just opens the big shutter doors, drives it inside, and closes the doors again…. shit eating grin..

He fell into this zombieland existence by accident after a messy divorce, she took the house and everything (the usual allegations of domestic violence to exclude him from his own home, and btw she needs the car too) so he ended up sleeping on the couch down at the unit, a unit that was rented in a business name, a business started with his brother, simply because he had nowhere else to go.

The next day he went to the local camping shop, also just off the estate his unit is on, and got an inflatable mattress and sleeping bag for the back of the van, and went to an electrical place on the same street and bought a fridge freezer (all on the company account, as his cards had been maxed by the ex) and filled it with TV dinners for the office microwave.

As he says at the time, he was just thinking of the next few days, because he did not know what else to do.

That was 5 years ago, last week he asked me to help him unload and place a 20 foot portakabin, the stealth camper is dying, business is still doing OK so he needs a new company van, and it turned out him sleeping quietly and unobtrusively in his van in the car park didn’t really bother anyone, not even the landlord who owned the two blocks of 4 units per side of which 1 was his.

So the portakabin is for the “night watchman”, and it harkens back to the bunks and shit back when I was doing motorway recovery, it’s not a residence, nobody lives there, and there is no law that says night watchmen must stay awake all night, of course he is the nigh watchman, and the other 7 people on that bit of the estate are all on board…. business insurance is expensive, you either know what I mean or you don’t, but you can easily pay thousands per year to insure a small unit, and it turns out having a resident night watchman 7 days a week reduces that quite a bit.

He’s got 2 dogs, and he does indeed do his rounds, once around 9 pm after he has, as he says it, had his shower in the unit and his scran (food) and locked the unit up and prepared the “night watchman’s cabin” as his patrols a route that takes him to a nearby pub, and again around 11 pm when his route takes him back from the nearby pub, a bit of online gaming then another patrol that happens to coincide with the dogs taking their evening shit, and back to the night watchman’s cabin.

And be it ever so humble and spartan, hell, it’s  no different to a cabin on a ship at sea or a rig or in a desert somewhere, it’s spartan but quite livable.

I’ve known the guy for years as a customer and semi mate, and always wondered when he was going to get a “proper” life back, so I only learned a lot of this detail when helping with the portakabin, but none of that is the punchline.

The punchline is after a bit the penny drops, and he turns to me and says dude, you’re doing the same thing, aren’t you?

That’s why he opened up, he thought I was doing the same thing (my unit is on the other side of the same estate) and he thought it because my front office and reception area isn’t just a counter and some shit, it’s more like a front room, nice old comfy sofa, decent coffee on tap, big screen on the wall (my reasoning was why not, it’s my place and I want somewhere to chill and be comfortable when I am not actually working, plus, customers seem to like it…) so he thought I was doing the same fuckin’ thing…

Seems there is a very quiet community of people doing this shit under the radar, it’s not against the law if you do it right, it’s just so much less complicated to avoid the attention and enquiries in the first place, and now I am looking at places that I know that have similar “homely” front office and “staff” areas and I’m asking myself if I too have been missing what has been going on under my nose?

It makes the whole “zombie palace” or “bug out bolt hole” thing so much more interesting, I mean, I am ON a fucking industrial estate, and I still haven’t actually seen it for what it is properly, sure, the odd open 24 hours nighttime distribution depot and so on, but still….

Most of the zombie shit I am aware of is talking about heading to shopping malls or military bases or small towns with gun shops and pharmacies, nobody sees industrial estates as anything other than a place to maybe go speeding at night and practice your drifting…

I’m sat at home, as I type this, looking out of my glass windows that are barely three feet off the ground, doors that for all their central locking open inwards so just kick the shit out of it and it will give, exteriors that are anything but hard to scale 20 foot sheer walls of block and steel sheet cladding, and I’m thinking, SHTF zombie apocalypse social unrest blah blah blah, never was under any illusions about how vulnerable my home is, I just never really saw my unit as a bolt hole.

An industrial estate isn’t the sort of place hordes of looters will gravitate to first ,climb over the 8 foot steel fence at the back of my unit, cross the railway line, climb over another 8 foot steel fence and you are in the back yard of a local commercial bulk cash and carry, pallet loads of baked beans and toilet paper and flour, carry on across the road to the fixins shop that sells 4″ spikes (over 4 inches a nail becomes a spike) and every size of bolt and fastener you could wish for, 2 doors down is the steel stockist, everything from sheet metal to wire, and nowhere on the estate is there giant TV’s or big stereos or running shoes or booze or cash (that stuff is all on the estate 4 miles up the road) and thinking about it every 5th site here has at least one 5,000 litre diesel bund out back.

You ever get that feeling you just woke up late to the party that everyone else with a brain knew about years ago? I’m feeling that right now.