Saturday, October 29, 2005

Serviced Merchandise

Ditzig scratches his signature down on a three thousand one hundered and fourteen dollar check he just wrote to Service Merchandise. He exhales from his 29 (plus four months) year old lungs as he hands over the check to the African American cashier; she has long red nails which are a perfect accessory to her typing in his account number - the bright red fake plastic nails create an enjoyable aesthetic for everyone, including Shaniqua.


Ditzig knows that the check will clear; he has been saving up for this purchase for quite some time now - he isn't clearing out his bank accout, mind you - Ditzig is an adult and spends accordingly to his need and wants. He writes down the purchase in his check book, accounting for the purchase so that when he recieves all of his checks in the mail at the end of the month, everything will balance out perfectly - like he's running his own little company or something.


But Ditzig doesn't own or run a little company, he is only an accessory in a very large one that was started by someone who was likley much more fortunate than he was, and certainly more wealthy. His apartment was no indication of affluance; Ditzig assumed a humble, quaint hospice on the corner of Corning and Crown, within a building that holds many other hospices much like his. Ditzig couldn't wait to get his new purchase back to his apartment.


After the check cleared and Ditzig was given a record of his purchase, Shaniqua pointed towards a Service desk, "Your computer should be waiting over there."


Yes, a computer. Ditzig had bit the bullet and bought a computer, a machine which would satisfy many of his needs - word processing and digital accounting for home use, as well as games with arcade-quality graphics, and at some point down the road, an America Online account. This was exactly the thing that Ditzig was waiting for all of his life - a machine which could deliver both productivity and entertainment.


Soon, the purchase was sitting squarely in a shopping cart - there was the computer itself - the CPU, and then there was the monitor - the CRT. And to Ditzig's luck, Service Merchandise was running a special - buy any combination CPU, Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse and Speakers and receive a free Inkidyne color dot matrix printer with a ream of perforated feed paper. So there were three boxes in his cart - he couldn't fathom at the moment how he would be able to take all of this up to his apartment in one trip, less three, without making himself look like a weakling, which he was by stereotype.


Ditzig simply adorned Janett - that blonde down the hall from him. His first trip was the printer, as it was the lightest item; he was pacing himself. He hoped like hell that Janett would not pop her hot little body out into the hall, to observe Ditzig making a weak fool of himself. He sweated with anticipation and worry as he approached his door, knowing that the first trip was over, and the next trip, he would be carrying a more heavy item. "I should have started with the monitor first," thought Ditzig.


But he carried that monitor secondly, and low and behold, as Ditzig was making his way back to the elevator on the first floor, Janett has somehow materialized out of nowhere - possibly his own imagination - right in front of the elevator doors. Now Ditzig would have to ride up with her.

He sweated profusley as the doors to the elevator closed, thinking only what she could be thinking - but what he didn't know was that Janett was actually thinking about the black italian sling-back stilettos she just saw at the mall - thinking to herself how sexy she would look wearing them. Janett was thinking about this the whole way up the elevator and down the hall to her room, until she opened her door and discovered that she had left the TV on; then she was thinking about the electric bill thereafter, and how she needed to put it in the mailbox.


Ditzig was thinking about her, though. Mainly, Ditzig was thinking that Janett was thinking he was ugly, sweaty, weak and smelly, and was probably a nerd since he was struggling to hold up CPU that was packaged with Lucas Arts' TIE Fighter and Microsoft's Flight Simulator - and cleary stated this on the outside of the package. Ditzig wish that the computer wasn't called CLICK!, because it didn't look as professional as an IBM, but he knew after careful research and word-of-mouth that the two computers were basically the same on the inside. The processors were the same - both Intel 486's. The operating systems were the same - both running of Microsoft's DOS, and packaged with the Windows 3.1 graphical user interface. Both had 256 kilobytes of the same random access memory as well as the same 512 megabyte hard disk drives - and who can forget the optical CD-ROM for playing spectacular interactive games and Microsoft Encarta videos like the fist moon walk.


12 months later


Service Merchandise had managed to sell Ditzig a two-year warranty which covered the imminant death of the computer, as well as other problems that might have been involuntarily caused by the user. So on this day, exactly one year later, Ditzig stumbled into the service department at Service Merchandise with his CLICK! computer in his bare hands. Blood was dripping out the back of it's casing; something was wrong.


"Please," wimpered Ditzig, "help me."


His manner and sudden presence startled the personnel behind the service counter. They only asked the next possible question, "What's wrong?"


Ditzig had made it to the tall counter and was struggling to put the CPU on it, "My computer is bleeding."


A woman at the service desk covered her mouth with a cold, pale hand; she had never seen a case like this before. She signaled for Benji, the computer repair technician.


"What's up?" Benji asked right before he saw the pool of blood forming on the counter.


"My computer is bleeding."


"His computer is bleeding."


Benji was a bit confused, but he aknowledged, "I see."


The woman asked Benji if he had seen anything like this before, and he said no.


"But I'll have a look."


Ditzig waited in the lobby in tears; waiting for the diagnosis. Nobody else seemed to understand the peril he was going through. Ditzig had spent the best year of his life with that computer, and there it was, corrupted. But why? Why was the computer corrupted? It was only a year old. It made Ditzig sick. The woman at the service counter tried to console Ditzig, saying that everything will be fine.


"But I don't understand," said Ditzig between tears, "Click's only a year old."


The woman held his hand, "Sometimes - these things happen. But you know what? We fix these kinds of problems. Benji does this every day."


Ditzig then saw Benji emerge from the technician's room; he stood up, awaiting the diagnosis.


"Mr. Ditzig," Benji continued in all honesty, "I must say I've never seen anything like this."


"Well," Ditzig was anxious, "tell me what the problem is."


"It seems that a human tissue has been substituted for the computer's random access memory."


~


After some careful investigation by local authorities, it was confirmed that Ditzig had used the flesh of Janett for his computer's random access memory. He encased the flesh in two pieces of plate glass, which held the skin together, and measured it all so that it would fit properly in one of the expandable RAM slots.


The mortician was held as an expert witness for the trial of The People vs. Ditzig, "Underneath Ms. Janett's left breast, we found an incision, and within that incision, was a piece of - what I could only describe at the time - a piece of silicon with solid state memory modules fused to the surface."


The autopsy revealed that the RAM missing from Click was implanted into Janett. It seemed to the authorities that Ditzig was in the beginning stages of tying to emulate Janett with Click.

"We also found - in Ms. Janett's trachaea - what seemed to be red, yellow and black cables that might be used to power certain internal pieces of hardware in a computer system."


In fact, the blood that was dripping from Click's case, was from the blood of arteries that Ditzig had removed from Janett and installed inside Click. Though they were a jumbled mess by the time of the investigation, Ditzig's testimony reveals that he was using Janett's arteries as cables to power an aftermarket processor fan.


"And possibly the most interesting item was found in Ms. Janett's vaginal cavity - that being a three and a half inch floppy disk removed from it's protective casing."


In his response to the floppy disk, Ditzig mentioned that the important thing was not the floppy disk itself, but what was on the disk. Forensics reviewed the disk and uncovered the data; the only data on the disk being a text file that repeated the word "spermatazoa" an unspeakable amount of times.

"I will tell you one thing," said Ditzig, "I did try to use what I believe was Janett's clitorus as a means for overclocking Click's processor, but my efforts seemed futile so I stopped trying. That's when I broght Click in to be serviced."