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Handy Man
I took one last bite of my egg and bacon sandwich before putting it down on the greaseproof paper. I came to the end of the thirteenth chapter of Breakfast with Ducks and tucked the book into my back pocket. Normally I wouldn't mistreat a book so it could be passed on to the next reader in good nick but I was feeling vindictive towards the author for the simplistic approach he was taking towards communicating over toast and eggs with waterfowl.
Time to get it over with, there was no sense stalling any further, I'd already messed about enough to justify my earnings.
From deep in the guts of the escalator, beneath the marble tiled floors of the brand new shopping mall I sifted through my toolbox and brought out the extruder.
All handymen worth their salt have got one, usually tucked away under the recognizable tools like the hammers and wrenches. The extruder is like the secret formula to Coca-Cola or the handshakes used by the Freemasons, it's the secret that must never be revealed.
"Can't get the parts" or "Needs a new washer" or "looks like the sprocket assembly has confounded the greeble axel across the unreality leafsprings" are all just ways of saying "Its going to take five days to fix at an extortionate rate before I actually get the extruder out and fix the problem."
Most things these days can be put down to the one cause of most malfunctions; gremlins.
PC crashing? Gremlins. Dyson not sucking hard enough? Gremlins. Escalator eating small children in front of their mothers? Gremlins.
So I got out my extractor and waved it around in the crawlspace beneath the escalator. Sure enough, six gremlins were sucked into the aperture and immediately discombobulated out of existence. The escalator started to groan and move again at the lethargic pace such machines always do and I could happily write up an invoice for stupid money. There is pleasure in stealing the souls of machines.
Oct.16.2006