vr
a novel
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
March 2000
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 3 March 2000
Subject: The Joy of Plot
I have finally mastered the new format of Todd's web site. It wasn't easy,
and I still don't like it, but it can be, and has been, done. I am also the
new master of MS Outlook mail merges and the foolish Hebrew DOS program we
use to book services, process payment, and write invoices and confirmations.
It's actually pretty good. It's not exactly Windows, but there are four panes,
client data, flight data, land services (conference registration, hotels,
tours etc.) and billing, counterclockwise from the upper right hand corner
of the screen. Everything works with tab, enter and F1-12. I really like not
having to use the mouse. Those idiots at Apple fucked up everything when they
invented the piece of shit. Anyway, the test of a web site is how many times
I have to click to get to what I want. (I'm assuming that I should never
have to use the scroll bar, another useless Apple invention.) I've lost count
of how many clicks it takes me to find something vaguely interesting on Todd's
site, but at least you could have the "Continued" link go to the point in
the article where it leaves off, instead of going to the beginning of the
text and making me scroll down. Same remark for the "Back to the main page"
link. It should go back to where I was, not to the stupid logo, which I rather
like, except there's something dreadfully wrong with the motto: "If sex is
a weapon, then we're the war correspondents." I am probably misquoting, since
I'm writing this offline (no unlimited local calling). This is what we call
a non-sequitur, which you misspelled in a recent text. I guess it isn't in
the spell-check. (I never use them. I hate them. I'd rather make mistakes.)
I don't mean that the apodosis is not the logical conclusion of the protasis.
It isn't, but that's not the point. This is not a syllogism, but a rhetorical
flourish, which is fine with me. However there is a weak semantic link between
weapon and war, a link of hyponymy and hyperonymy, where there should be
a link of synonymy. In other words, what you want here is either: "If sex
is a weapon, then we're the arms inspectors," or "If sex is a battle, then
we're the war correspondents." (The later is a slight case of hyponymy/hyperonymy,
but I've done it that way because of the usual expressions: "battle of the
sexes" and "war correspondent".) Anyway, Miss. Anne Marie or whatever the
fuck her Paki name is (I've seen her erotica site. I'd rather watch Buttman.)
(I know she's from Sri Lanka, but who cares? The only useful thing about
that country is the tea, former Ceylon.) What is this foolish obsession with
plot? Will you people please grow up? Plot died somewhere between Flaubert
and Proust. Hypertext has only made it even more irrelevent. What is awful
about most porn is not the absence of plot, but the shameless efforts to
make a plot. If the makers of porn had any education, they would dispense
entirely with plot, as anyone who has ever read Faulkner would do. The greatest
porn movie ever made is no doubt Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which has
not a hint of a plot, no characters to speak of, precious little dialogue,
and only the veneer of a setting. It takes place in Mussolini's Italy, but
it could just as easily be Wild Bill's Mistake on the Lake in Belleview.
Nevertheless the film is so powerful that it created simultaneous brawls
at my home and one of Nichelle's friend's when the bf showed it to his ex-future
gf. It is beautiful and unforgettable. It makes Stanley Kubrick look like
a cheap pimp. My last word for today, Mr. Antichrist, is that anyone who
tells me that something is right or wrong, without giving me the criteria
on which such value judgements are made, is either a fucking idiot, or takes
me to be one. Of course, it takes a little time and effort to elaborate a
system of ethics, and I'm not sure it's worth it. Bertrand Russell says of
Spinoza that he was probably the greatest ethical philosopher of modern times,
and that as a natural consequence he was treated like shit for two hundred
years after he died. Of course my favorite philosopher du jour is Terrible
Tom Hobbes, who is even worse than his reputation, a vicious, cruel man who
would have fit right in at a whore-house cocktail hour with Long John Swift
and Alex "The Dwarf" Pope. His greatest line is not actually that life is
"poor, lonely, nasty, brutish and short" or even "the war of all against all"
or many other beautiful characterizations of the natural state of man, which
is of course anything but natural, but his assertion that God's justice is
perfect, given that the test of a just distribution is that no one complains
of his share, and no one ever complains about his portion of intelligence.
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
From: SAGReiss
Date: 3 March 2000
Subject: New Year's Resolution
You once sent us back a couple of hundred e-mail messages that we had lost.
I am going to ask you to do something like this again. I have managed to hook
up my MS Exchange mailboxes to my aquanet account, but I can't forward the
messages to myself, or they simply come back to my MS inbox. Forwarding them
to my hotmail account and then reforwarding them to my aquanet account would
take forever. I know you are the man to do this. You are the only geek I
trust, except Nichelle of course, but I don't know if she has yet mastered
this kind of thing. So I'm going to forward you about five hundred messages.
Please wait until I am done before you forward them back, because if I am
connected to MS then they will just come back where they came from. I want
them in my Eudora inbox. I'll wait for your approval of course before I begin.
From: John
Date: 3 March 2000
Subject: Re: New Year's Resolution
There has to be a better way to do this that doesn't require any forwarding
or resending of messages, but I'm not in the mood to try to figure out obscure
windows program behavior. I don't even have that shit installed right now.
Before you start, I'd like to set up something on my other computer to fetch
all my messages automatically so I don't go over quota on the mail server.
How urgent is this?
From: SAGReiss
Date: 4 March 2000
Subject: Re: New Year's Resolution
Not urgent, bro. Whenever you find the time to set your shit up, let me
know. It won't take any time. Shit, Ctrl-F, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Enter, down arrow,
repeat. I can send five hundred messages in two hours.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 4 March 2000
Subject: What is a plot?
Sam Bam Johnson says that the greatest plots ever made were Oedipus Tyranus,
Volpone and Tom Jones. I'll assume that we are all familiar with the first,
that none of you have read the second (which I don't remember very well anyway),
and that most of you have read the third, or at least seen the film. It is
interesting to note that the common element of the three is that an unlikely
coincidence determines the result of the actions. The kind of coincidences
that drove Nichelle crazy in David Copperfield run rampant in each. Stendhal
quotes someone or other (It doesn't matter whom because the quote is made
up.) as saying that the novel is a mirror travelling along a road, but of
course a mirror travellong along a road would not show us anything even vaguely
resembling a plot. Indeed life has no plot. There is no beginning, middle
and end, except in the cycle of birth and death, which is an arbitrary distinction
anyway, since the lives of the parents and children reach beyond those limits,
and very few stories actually cover the birth, life and death of the hero.
This is what Larry Sterne is poking fun at. I think Sterne is a good place
to start, since he is lampooing the novel at the time of its birth. (Who really
cares who wrote the first novel? The English say it was Defoe, the French
say it was Balzac, the Spanish say it was Cervantes etc.) A plot is a way
to orgasmize the material. Our notion of plot probably comes from our experience
of the novel, the short story and film and television, with roots going back
to Horace, Virgil, Aristotle and ultimately Homer and the Bible (at least
the New Testament. I don't see much of plot in much of the Old Testament.)
Plot is generally not a great element of lyric poetry or the plastic arts,
this for good reason. A plot is a teleological devise, that is to say it
is mainly concerned with time and causality. (Notice that time is not generally
understood to be linear in this sense. The Illiad is a huge flashback, as
is Oedipus. This is not a recent invention.) But even if time was considered
to be non-linear, it was still made up of discrete elements, until Al "The
Fixer" Einstein fucked up the world's notion of time. Once time can bend,
speed up, slow down, and be expeienced in different ways, then plot loses
a lot of its power to interest us. Add to that the teleological certainties
were being thrown to the dogs by Nietzsche at the same time, and you come
to the crisis in thought that gave us cubism, atonal music and psychoanalysis.
One could probably make a story board of The Sound and the Fury or the Alexandria
Quartet, but it might be more trouble than it was worth. Indeed Faulkner
seems to be mocking us by carefully indicating the dates of the four parts
of his novel. There can be no plot to my own little art, because I write
in real time. I don't know now if I'm going to ream the girl at work's asshole,
but I'll be happy to share the news with you if I do. And, as in the Alexandria
Quartet, if I go back to past events, I change them, willingly or not, and
none of you, except Nichelle at one time, has any way of knowing when I'm
telling the truth and when I'm making things up, except for a few things
you can verify, such as the web site of the company I work for, but even
there, I'm not in the team.gif photo, which was taken a year or two ago.
In fact, again except for Nichelle, none of you has any independent evidence
that I am in the Orient at all. I'm getting distracted. The Tropics have
no plot. Naked Lunch has no plot. If we assume that there is no teleological
end, and that time is not made up of discrete units, I don't see how we can
persist in orgasmizing works of art according to the dictates of plot. We
have to find other ways, using linguistic means, such as rhyme or rhetoric
in a lyrical poem, or visual means, such as color and shape in a painting
or a film. I have never seen a True Cops show or a Buttman video. My guess
is that the True Cops shows don't air when the cops accidentally beat some
poor fool to death or burst in guns blaring on a family enjoying a late supper.
I would like to see real sex videos. In fact I'm planning to buy a hotel
and have negatron install video surveillance cameras in every room, so that
the two of us can sit around watching the guests screw 'n' chew. That's the
kind of porn I'd like to see, people who don't know they're performing. For
all I know it might not even be illegal, at least in some places...
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
From: SAGReiss
Date: 7 March 2000
Subject: The Bourgeois Mind
A rather more disturbing tendancy noted in Todd's latest publications is
his thoughts on privacy in the workplace. (I'm sorry that I seem to pick on
you, Todd, but if you put yourself on the line, you know you're going to
get fired at. I've taken my share of heat. No one else writes anything for
me to read. One of these days I'll put someone else on this list.) I didn't
much care for the snide tone of: "We all MOO so much at work." Did you ever
think that maybe some people have jobs that don't give them internet access?
Or is mouthorgan a site exclusively for geeks and New Agers? I do now, incidentally,
have web access at work, but don't use it to MOO or to write private e-mail.
There's no special reason for this. I'm busy at work. I do twenty to thirty
hours of OT per month. I can MOO at home. (Our bosses not only can, but do
waste an incredible amount of time reading our e-mail, including the personal
e-mail of those who don't have internet access at home and are too stupid
to set up a hotmail account. They have also got a piece of software which
would permit them to view our screens, and thus our hotmail, but they haven't
figured out how to use it yet.) I would simply recommend being a little more
careful about using the word "we". In your mouth it always seems to mean:
"middle-class white boyz 'n' girlz who already agree on everything", so what's
the point of having a discussion? "If you don't like it, just cash in on
the fat severance pay and get another job." Has it ever occured to you that
this is not an immediate option for every one of your readers? Some people
don't get severance pay. Some people might have trouble finding another job.
Some people are poor and unskilled. Some of these people might even read
your column. Far more insidious was the throw-away line about "privacy from
one's peers, such as keeping them in ignorance of how much we earn". That's
like blacks thinking that God and the po-po are there to protect them. This
is not freedom. This is slavery. You give away the only tool for the working
man to protect himself against the boss, collective bargaining, in the name
of some petty, I-got-mine, bourgeois "right" to privacy. I always tell my
fellow slaves how much I earn and under what terms and conditions etc. so
that they will better be able to defend themselves, even though they seldom
reciprocate. The whole strategy of the Man is to keep his minions in ignorance,
in fear, to keep them at one another's throats, jealous of their tiny salaries
and paultry benefits. Geeks of the world unite. You have nothing to lose
but your chains.
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
From: Cyanne
Date: 9 March 2000
Subject: And American Doctors are supposed to be the best???
(You will all have to excuse my typing. my R key occasionally decides to
function.)
Anyway, I had a nasty little accident on Januay 15th that blew out my knee.
I don't know what I did....I shifted weight from one foot to anothe while
speaking to a police officer that I called to take a drunk man home, athe
than let him drive. When I shifted weight *snap*, *crackle*, *pop* were the
resulting sounds.... Fou days later my ankle healed but my knee had not. So,
I went to see someone at the University Health Clinic...that PA told me I
had to have surgery and that I needed to schedule it with some doctor...no
X-rays, no examination...just said I needed sugery. Damn, this R key is pissing
me off. Anyway, I called the health clinic back a few days ago to schedule
anothe appointment with the REAL doctor, not some fucking assistant, and voila!
no doctor. I ended up seeing anothe PA this moning, who was fotunately more
competent, but she knew NOTHING about the doctor who was supposed to work
ove her. The doctor has been out for 2 weeks...and will be out for anothe
two, on vacation. Fine, I got a referal to an Orthopedist, so fuck 'em. But,
I began asking he questions about the doctor, like "What are her credentials?"
The PA replies, "I don't know." Uhm, okay..so is she licensed? "I don't know,
how should I know? Why ae you asking me?". Okay, goodbye, give me my eferal
and I'll go now! So, I left....but, this is supposed to be one of the best
clinics in the city...that frightens me.
-Cyanne
From: SAGReiss
Date: 9 March 2000
Subject: The Curse of User 13
I'm really beginning to hate my boss. I mean hate him with a passion, as
a husband hates his wife, or a dog its master. I'll go to almost any lengths
to annoy him, especially making a show of finding my silly little chickenshit
Rose Symposium (I still don't know the proper title of the God-damned thing.
I don't even use the letterhead for my faxes. The Symposium Coordinator would
have a fit if she found out, but she's a pissy Irish cunt who drives me crazy.
Besides, I'm too well-orgasmized for her to complain. At least she doesn't
have to field irate phone calls and e-mail because the reservations department
isn't answering the guests.) a lot more important than his serious, money-making
events. Tonight I sold a sixty-five-dollar-a-night room to a French cunt.
I hope it isn't really a brothel. That's what the boss said, but I don't think
so. He's a decent human being in a way, except that he's a thief and he couldn't
tell the truth to a Jihad interrogation squad, much less to his clients,
his colleagues, his employees or his wife. But he seems to understand that
I hate him, scorn him, though I'm sure he can't see why. He seems hurt and
perplexed. The fucker called me from the next room at a quarter to five, supplicating
me to wait "vingt minutes" for him. In his own perverse way, he wasn't lying.
He did manage to get out of the meeting at half past five, only to give me
a project that took me until half past eight to complete. What makes me mad
is that I fucked off all afternoon, not MOOing but surfing the web for orgasmizations
and associations who might want to hold a congress in Israel. That is part
of my job, not the most strenuous part, but still. I don't know why I didn't
tell him to fuck off. (I did draw the line at formatting a hard copy. We've
got this stupid fucking letterhead with a huge header and massive right margin
which completely fucks up documents. I cannot understand why anyone would
want to send a hard copy of anything, much less have a paper letterhead.
(The amusing thing is that I literally cannot e-mail someone the program
of our conference, because the printer sends us back PDF files which the
girls print, write updates on, and send back by fax, so we are left with
no updated file that we can send to prospective participants. We can snail
mail them a brochure, but we can't e-mail them information. In his favor,
he does put up with my myriad incompetences and excentricities. I don't think
I could cut it in a more professional office. There's maybe one girl, Miss
Dublin, who sounds like she bought a public-school accent somewhere and has
a bf whom she insists on calling Johnny, who could work for a real company.
The rest of us are losers and misfits. It's a weird business. The bosses
must all work on a commission basis, since they don't give a fuck about one
another's projects and are insanely jealous of their own. They're like waiters:
"It's not my table. I'm not bringing him ketchup." (In my own defense, I
wasn't in too much of a hurry to bring them ketchup even if it was my table.)
There is this insane attention to detail, prices, dates, times, flight numbers.
The smallest mistake or lapse of concentration can result in such a big fuck-up
that everyone's paranoid. That sixty-five-dollar room was a mistake on the
hotel's part. Our faxes crossed. They sent me a contract which stated the
prices. Their contract says: "Group rates, minimum of 20 people". Meanwhile
I sent them a fax taking an option on five rooms. They confirmed my option
at contract rates. I immediately faxed them back asking them to confirm the
prices, not mentioning the twenty-person minimum in their contract. They
confirmed the prices. Good-bye minimum. The Assistant Managing Director,
who is very proud of being able to say: "Merde" in French, told me that the
hotel is also a school for the tourism industry. "How do you say someone
who works in a hotel? Hotelier?" "We say imbecile."
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
From: SAGReiss
Date: 11 March 2000
Subject: Right this way, Officer
I have found that some of the most interesting things in Excel are hidden
away in Page Setup: Sheet, such as printing column and row headings. I'm working
on a template for us to use for our business meetings, as we seem to get
these horrible lists from travel agents abroad. One group sent us three lists
with different information, and the hotel sent us another list. How are we
supposed to check that these four lists contain the same eight hundred names?
And how do we know which list is right? Anyway I'm having trouble figuring
out how exactly Lauren got hurt. I can understand that a dancer might rip
up her ankle and knee at work, but while simply talking to a cop? There's
something I'm missing here. I have never heard that American doctors were
supposed to be the best in the world, though I guess some people think that
everything's the best wherever they happen to be from. I would imagine that
some American hospitals may be among the world's best equipped. Another girl
online is telling me about her new ex-future bf tying her up, though she
felt he lacked "sincerity" because she was able to escape the knots. Is sex
really so boring that people feel the need to spice it up with stupid theatrics.
It seems to me that the simple acts of sex, cunnilingus, felatio, analingus,
intercourse, sodomy, are fascinating without even the embellishments of love,
let alone cheesy costumes. Maybe I'm just old fashioned.
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
From: hillary
Date: 13 March 2000
Subject: sickness
What's WRONG with me?
I mean, everything is going so well. I'm involved in this amazing relationship,
and it's not amazing in the usual oh-he-treats-me-so-well-and-i-love-him kind
of way (well, it's amazing in that way, too); it's more amazing because it
came out of such improbable circumstances. Everyone compartmentalizes their
relationships into categories: People I Want to Be With, People I Will Not
Consider, People Who Will Not Consider Me, People I Might Consider But Haven't
Met, et cetera. This is a person who was once in the People I Will Not Consider,
and in fact in a subgroup titled People Who are Antithetical To My Way of
Being. Turns out I had completely concocted many (if not all) of the reasons
I considered him the epitome of imperfection. So things are amazing and improbable
and good. I guess that's boring. Equally boring is my senior thesis, which
is progressing nicely; all the statistics are completed, now just a lot of
interpretation and analysis, which shouldn't take me the seven weeks I have
until the project is due. I can't even complain about post-graduation, because
I already have a job. So what's wrong with me? I did something very bad.
So bad that it should be illegal. I haven't told anyone, and have disposed
of the incriminating evidence. I'm not sure why I did this thing, but yesterday
I bought a copy of Modern Bride magazine.
I am not planning a wedding.
I am not engaged.
I am not planning to get engaged in the near future.
Why, why, why did I buy this magazine?!?! Because I'm a schlotzy, predictable
member of the female species? Probably. That's a maddening thing to realise.
In slightly more sobering news, one of my very close friends was recently
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Recently meaning two weeks ago. We've been
talking about his "funny sleeping" for over a year, because he often wakes
up with one of his legs numbed. Who knew that it meant he had lesions on
his brain. It's difficult not to be melodramatic in a situation like this.
Disregarding the fact that he was my first love and the reason I ended up
in NY for college, he's quite possibly the most vital, active person I know.
It's true that MS isn't a death sentence; only 15% of people have chronic-progressive
MS, but it's still frightening and debilitating and unpleasant. I'm not sure
how to support him. Maybe this is boring, too.
Hillary
"I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone,
who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so,
is no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining", while it was
in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise
of the rain." [Ludwig Wittgenstein]
From: Nichelle
Date: 14 March 2000
Subject: Re: Right this way, Officer
>Is sex really so boring that people feel the need to spice it up
>with stupid theatrics. It seems to me that the simple acts of sex,
>cunnilingus, felatio, analingus, intercourse, sodomy, are fascinating
>without even the embellishments of love, let alone cheesy costumes.
Maybe
>I'm just old fashioned.
Gee... Isn't the missionary position fascinating enough without the filthy
practices of cunnilingus, fellatio, analingus, or sodomy? I mean *really*
you sick, cheap pervert.
Where do you draw that line? Is analingus a simple act? There are certainly
people who think sadomasochism is fabuloso but who don't want to put their
tongues *there*... I know women who love to be whipped but will *not* under
any circumstances put a penis in their mouths. I mean, who knows where that
filthy thing has been?
Besides, if somebody is going to tie you up, it is only polite to do it
right. Your internet friend's boyfriend should know better.
-Nichelle
From: Cyanne
Date: 14 March 2000
Subject: Re: Right this way, Officer
No, you're not old fashioned at all! However, you're one of the ones who
keeps me from making even more money. Damn...Oh well. :) Yeah, it is pretty
fucked up that I would wrack up my knee just shifting weight from foot to
foot. I do think it's funny that I was talking to a cop at the time (a cute
one at that!). But, shit happens. I had another bizarre thing happen today
though, actually it was quite pleasant. I went in to see the Orthopedic Surgeon.
No, surgery isn't pleasant, and I /might/ get by this without it, BUT there
was one pleasant thing out of the whole time at the office. I was seen within
FIVE minutes of walking in the door.
Damn....getting seen AHEAD of time in a health clinic....gotta write that
down on the calendar.
-Cyanne
From: SAGReiss
Date: 15 March 2000
Subject: Giving Notice
The pissy Irish bitch will soon be no more. I had kind of suspected it.
Her friend left in November, and she seemed a little too ruthlessly efficient
for our low-rent operation. What did surprise me is that the girl I did like,
who sits at the desk nearest mine, is also leaving. That leaves a huge whole
in our conferences department. That's basically the whole department right
there. (I mean the conference organization department. The conference reservations
department, which I have recently lent a hand to, is even worse off. The girl
who is in charge has some kind of health problems. She only works until two
and calls in sick a lot. She left work on Monday with 174 unread messages
in her inbox. She didn't come in yesterday or today.) I think I need to ask
for a raise. Unfortunately I don't want a better job and more money. I have
no ambition. And I certainly can't do what those girls do. Just the thought
of dealing with these idiots on the phone makes me want to quit. My one advantage
is that I can't speak Hebrew, so they can't really throw me to the dogs. I
guess that's why they were moving me towards the reservations department.
It's all e-mail and only incoming. The Israelis go through a different system.
The billing is different because of VAT, and they don't need rooms and don't
want tours and seldom attend more than a day of the conference. I have no
idea what's going to happen. The bosses need to do some serious thinking,
and hire some new help. I hope they hire some babes. They've got some Arab
temp secretary who is hot. I can't remember her name. She's a little cross-eyed,
or maybe she just looks that way to me, kind of a piercing gaze not totally
bereft of intelligence. All of this is happening at the worst possible time.
We've got a swarm of conferences coming up, and this week six hundred and
fifty Germans are in town. Next week it's two hundred and fifty Frenchmen
in Eilat. The horror. Meanwhile I'm coming down with bronchitis. And I've
been waging a guerilla war against my ISP, sending off crazy, drunken letters
threatening legal action. Their response has been to reduce my monthly fee
to a paultry $15 per month, including a second e-mail address, which has solved
my little problem, John, though I'll still need your help later. All of which
means that I'm too tired and hopeless to argue about whips and chains. Whatever
makes you happy, girls. It still seems silly to me, and sex is basically a
serious matter.
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
From: Cyanne
Date: 17 March 2000
Subject: Re: Giving Notice
WEll, the whole sex thing...hmm...(I'm not working atm because of my leg
and I'm BORED.). Honestly Nichelle, as for a boyfriend, I don'thave one..I
do however have a very lovely wife. No offense guys but I find the penis a
revolting thing, go figure, I'm a lesbian. I see sex as something rather clean
in general, quite natural, even though there are now some lovely diseases
going around, etc. I do have my own preferences for certain acts, but I can
not say that one act of sex is better than another, only preferential for
me. My wife enjoys light bondage and light masochism (no scars, nothing more
than a red mark, etc.). Of course, when I first started seeing her I thought
it was a bit ODD. I'd never been with anyone who enjoyed that kind of thing,
and I'd never been on the providing or receiving end. I do enjoy it now though
because it pleasures her. I like to watch her face and her body writhing with
pleasure...is that so odd? Maybe, maybe not...jsut like sexual preference
it is merely one's perspective. I use sexuality to make a living. Though I
don't have sex with my customers/clients, and I don't touch them in any way
except maybe to take a tip (yes, with my hands), it's all sex. It's also all
about money. Is not the oldest profession prostitution?
-Cyanne
From: SAGReiss
Date: 21 March 2000
Subject: Moving the World
I'm fucking tired. I'm in the middle of a twelve-day stretch. I worked thirty
hours on Friday and Saturday. That's the week-end here. Here is what I propose
to all comers. I have succeeded in centralizing the whole World database,
from February 1996 until now. I've got it in a file called: THEWORLD.MBX which
is 6.54 MB big. If anyone is curious, or would like to safeguard this shit
for me, I'd be very grateful. I'm assuming I can just send the fucker as
an attachment. Please let me know if I'm wrong. Also if you're interested.
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
From: SAGReiss
Date: 21 March 2000
Subject: Moving the World
I'm fucking tired. I'm in the middle of a twelve-day stretch. I worked thirty
hours on Friday and Saturday. That's the week-end here. Here is what I propose
to all comers. I have succeeded in centralizing the whole World database,
from February 1996 until now. I've got it in a file called: THEWORLD.MBX which
is 6.54 MB big. If anyone is curious, or would like to safeguard this shit
for me, I'd be very grateful. I'm assuming I can just send the fucker as
an attachment. Please let me know if I'm wrong. Also if you're interested.
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
From: SAGReiss
Date: 24 March 2000
Subject: What came back
Obviously this message was too big. I can think of two possible solutions.
If the problem was with my Eudora, I could send it through MS Exchange. If
the problem is with Nichelle's server, I could split up the file. "Message
size exceeds fixed maximum message size (10000000)" is unclear to me. How
big can it be? The file is 7.21 MB, whatever that means. If someone can tell
me: "Break it into 5 [or 10]" parts or whatever, I can try again. Any ideas?
Any suggestions? Also, the bosses want me to install PCAnywhere, so that they
can torment me into working at home. Is there any reason why I wouldn't want
to do this? Does this mean they can highjack my 'puter? Would they be able
to get into my files and shit?
From: SAGReiss
Date: 25 March 2000
Subject: Mode de paiement
I was flipping idly through the ream of documents and correspondence waiting
for someone in France to pick up the phone. "Cabinet du docteur Dufour, bonjour."
I hung up and screamed: "It's right here the fucking check." Sure enough,
proceedure had been followed. There was the check, duly labelled and photocopied
and stapled and paper-clipped. Only thing was that no one had processed the
payment and no one knew where the check was. I was calling the lady one day
before her departure for a dermatology conference at the Dead Sea to tell
her: "Pay or die." The Assistant Managing Director went crazy, screaming:
"Cus em mec, you fucking bitch, I'll kill you," at the tour operator who had
lost the check. She was laughing too hard to answer. It's been a tough couple
of weeks. I worked thirteen days in a row, including four doubles, three
of them back to back. The new word at work is "ruthless efficiency" because
that's what I say when I dump a pile of payments on accounting. I'm amazed
that our guests have not been more pissed off than they already are. One
guy sent us a bank transfer for two thousand dollars on 1 February. I made
his reservations and sent him a confirmation this week. Another satisfied
customer. I have never seen such a mess. I had to work through piles and piles
of unsorted faxes, e-mail, bank documents and registration forms burried on
two desks and in two computers, literally thousands of pieces of paper relating
to hundreds of people and a dozen conferences. It's a wonder more checks
haven't been lost. My latest love interest at work is an Arab girl called
Odelia. "That reminds me of Ophelia." "People often say that. It's from Shakespeare,
right?" "Yes, she is Hamlet's fiancee." The bosses must think she's at least
a little bright, since they've given her some menial accounting duties in
addition to her even more menial receptionist duties. "You're moving up in
the world." "Yes. This is only the beginning." I almost made a mistake and
said: "Today Ortra, tomorrow the world." I don't think it would be a good
idea to crack jokes about Nazi world domination to an Arab girl in an office
owned by racist Jewish nationalists.
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
From: SAGReiss
Date: 27 March 2000
Subject: Mboxes
Did you get the first Mbox? Do you want me to send you another? (There are
four. I think I should send them one by one, after receiving written confirmation
that you have received the last. My work is getting to me. I might write:
"Please advise. Give me your fucking credit card number and flight details.
Thank you for your cooperation. Best Regards. Gabriel")
From: Nichelle
Date: 27 March 2000
Subject: Re: Mboxes
I received it but somehow fucked it up. Could you please resend the first
one?
Thanks.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 27 March 2000
Subject: mbox 1
Attached: 1.mbx;
I hope this time it works.
From: Nichelle
Date: 27 March 2000
Subject: Re: mbox 1
Go ahead and send the others. It worked just fine.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 31 March 2000
Subject: The Fava Beans
Attached: PAX Billing Template.xls
I thought they were peas. When I got a big bag of them home, I began unpodding
them (or whatever that's called) and realized they were something closer to
green lima beans. I should have realized that the Tikva (Hope) casbah in
Tel Aviv is the last place I should find beans from Peru. I put them in a
skillet with garlic and hot pepper and tomatoes and parsley, covered the whole
mess with olive oil and water and set it simmering, or at least as close
to simmering as my Napalm stove burners will let me. As the shit cooked I
browsed epicurious looking for answers. I finally found something about fava
beans: "very popular in the Mediterranean and Middle East," used to make
an alternative kind of green humus. It said that the shell was very tough,
and that the beans needed to be blanched and hulled (or whatever that's called).
I went to the pot with a sense of dread. I took one out and probed it. Indeed
the skin was hard, and peeled off easily. The inside was getting soft and
the shade of green (FFF09660786 in HTML) was getting darker. I was fucked.
I turned it off and peeled seven hundred little fucking fava beans, burning
the tips of my fingers on the oil and tomato remnants. I think it will be
good, though. I should have it in a risotto, but only Nichelle makes the
best risotto, and I'm lazy and always want to eat spaghetti. My responsabilities
at work have gotten completely out of control. I found out yesterday that
the hotels had been changed for my Pre- and Post-Tours for one of my conferences,
and simply haven't been made at all for the other. So I've basically sent
confirmations to fifty people for rooms that don't exist. I had to update
all of the files manually, since we use the program to send rooming lists
to the hotels, but I refused to resend individual confirmations by fax. I
sent a bulk BCC e-mail. Now I have to find rooms for the tours for the conference
where nothing was reserved. Fortunately it's only about five or ten rooms
for three tours, so I can deal with it. I have seldom seen such incompetence
at work. Of course I have no guides for the tours, but I'll think of something.
The Assistant Managing Director is itching to give me a third conference,
which I can handle, now that I'm caught up on the first two and I know what
dumb-stupid mistakes to look for. He loves me, mainly because I share his
hatred of my boss, am ruthlessly efficient, and am the new uncrowned king
of Excel (see attached file). Notice how rows 14 and 16 are calculated differently,
the former vertically and the latter horizontally, so that they must match
up, if there are no mistakes. This is the kind of insane attention to detail
that's important when you're dealing with five hundred people and five hundred
thousand dollars of their money. Please let me know if you find any problems,
though none of you bastards ever writes me, so my only e-mail in life is shit
from stupid Americans asking if they can rent an automatic car and poor Russians
begging me to waive their registration fee and cheap Dutchmen asking why
the hotel costs so much...
RECTVM VINVM
Scott Alexander Gabriel Reiss
February 2000
April 2000
vr: 2000
