My froody writing contest entry


  • kills Dumbledore

    While looking for a better holiday to use than Thanksgiving, I stumbled upon Towel Day, the annual celebration of all things Douglas Adams. The rest of the story came from that. I think it's fairly true to the front page style:


    Arthur was in trouble. He’d promised his largest client, Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, that the bug in their critical line of business application would definitely be fixed before he went back to visit his parents for Towel Day. Unfortunately, Arthur’s friend Ford had turned up out of the blue and convinced him to drink six pints at lunch time, leaving Arthur barely able to stand, let alone debug a complicated issue in sub-etha transport protocols.

    Due to start hitchhiking home first thing in the morning, and showing the amazing initiative that comes with only the highest levels of inebriation, Arthur decided to take advantage of the fact that his boss had already left for the holidays. He would sneak into the office after everyone had left, take his work computer home (Arthur had pushed for source control but the lead architect was a git) and finish the work overnight. He could then push the fixed software out to Sirius, make the parental visit, come back, get in to the office early and replace the computer before anybody realised it was gone.

    After a hectic all-nighter, Arthur managed to complete the mostly harmless fix, topped up his cat’s food and left a lamp on to keep it company while he was away. The weekend went well, except for a party where Arthur met a very nice girl, whom he entirely failed to get off with. When Arthur got back home though, he suddenly felt unpleasantly like being drunk on seeing his house surrounded by firefighters.

    His cat had apparently got a little too friendly with the lamp and knocked it over, starting a fire which destroyed Arthur’s attempts at amateur poetry – often regarded as the 4th worst in the Galaxy – and melted the TV. The liquid plastic had run onto Arthur’s work computer with its single, irreplaceable copy of the all-important source code, destroying the case.

    Luckily, Arthur had a similar machine with an identical case. By an even more fortuitous stroke of luck the internals appeared mostly undamaged. With a bit of work, Arthur managed to swap components around until he had a machine he could take back into the office with nobody any the wiser. The melted case was even salvageable enough for Arthur to continue using his machine with it on, albeit with a slight pain in all the diodes down its left hand side. Arthur’s cat is no longer allowed in any room where things aren’t nailed down


  • BINNED

    Nice but I kinda think Arthur would yell BELGIUM at one point or the other



  • @jaloopa said:

    I think it's fairly true to the front page style:

    A bit Gerny, to be honest... Good writing, but could benefit from cutting down a few references.

    Then again, there's not much of a WTF in the original submission, so that's not as much of an issue as it could be.


  • kills Dumbledore

    I did wonder if I was going a bit over the top, but I figured in for a penny in for a pound



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    A bit Gerny, to be honest... Good writing, but could benefit from cutting down a few references.

    Then again, there's not much of a WTF in the original submission, so that's not as much of an issue as it could be.

    That was a lot of my problem with it actually...



  • @jaloopa said:

    I did wonder if I was going a bit over the top, but I figured in for a penny in for a pound

    H2G2 is naturally a bit OTT and if you're going to embrace it, embrace it with all the flair and imagination of Vogon poetry.



  • And now the cat is SEP.


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