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This is the third part of the Medicus Incognitus story line. You can find all the previous parts lined up in chronological order by clicking here. Please note that, while dramatized a little for pseudo-literary value, the events depicted in this story are true.

You work for us now.

The very night that I received the mail, I didn’t think much of it. Spam. Nothing more. But the odd doctor’s visit and the strange encounter with her supposed son in the car, her reluctance to take back her pouch and the mail that I received only a short while later, didn’t allow me to strike the incident from my memory. It was stuck in my head like the Tetris soundtrack. I couldn’t get it out of my head that day and I am still plagued by it. At that point I hadn’t the slightest clue what the Russian text meant.

In front of me stands a steaming cup of coffee. Monday morning. I have a cup of coffee every morning. Curious, that is. I am not even a fan of coffee. Then again I have come to believe that this is the Diesel power I need at 10:15 in the morning. It has become a ritual in my view, though every doctor would probably tell me that its merely a bad habit. Someone once told me that if I have my coffee without milk and sugar, it can actually prevent me from getting heart disease later on. Perhaps I should first lay off the boozing on weekends or after work before that could make any sense. On second thought, however, I like beer more than I like coffee.

I open up my mail account, copy paste the Russian text into a new message and send it off to a Russian speaking colleague. He should be able to translate the ominous message. For a while I stare at the colorful chaos that is the Gmail tagging system - a system designed to keep your mails organized by category. It makes everything look so pretty and useful and yet I have never needed the tags. I snap out of it and before I can even push back from my desk to get up, I receive the answer with the translated message.

Artists wait their whole lives for a moment like this - a moment in which a feeling can conjure forth a new color; a new composition. That color is so unique that it will automatically translate back into the corresponding feeling. Right now I feel very Stalin Red.

There is more than just white noise to an office floor. The air-conditioning, the hum of the vending machine, the perfectly synchronized wheezing of 50 workstation power supplies, the periodic ringing of telephones that have had their ring-tones adjusted to sound like the CTU phones from 24 - all of these become ubiquitous after a while. The dynamic of the office floor is what really makes it interesting. People follow their daily routines religiously. Some play Crazy Taxi on a flash platform, others check their Facebook accounts in a 3 minute  interval while their neighbour engages in their daily battle with a downed SMTP server or a sporadically failing hard drive. On most days such routine would pass me by without me hardly taking note of it. Today it threatens to blow my head off.

I am hypersensitive. Everyone and everything sounds Russian. I pick up the red mug, take a swig from the red brew inside and Russian sludge crawls down my radioactive throat.

Today we serve Russian clients only. They have Russian problems and we deliver Russian solutions. Ivan the sandwich man walks in. He sells me his irradiated Chernobyl sandwiches and comrades around me flock around him to throw their last Rubel  at him. Nostrovia. Or something.

It seems like in Russia time runs faster than in the middle east. Its 19:00 before I know it and I swipe out on the second. Leaving the office behind me, the red tinge that came over the world subsides and my hypochondria powered paranoia with it. Back home I reconnect my laptop and decide to get to the bottom of this. If that message was coincidence, the worst that can happen to me is to give a pingback to a spam bot system, dooming my inbox to everlasting spammage. If it was intentional, then the recipient better be capable of writing in some kind of capitalist language. I’d happily settle for German, English or even the worst of all evil and capitalist forms of expressions - Israelian. No wait, Hebrew. That’s it. Did I mention that McCain scares me and that he looks like he’s keeping two gerbils hostage in his cheeks?

I touch type my way to revelation:

Hello Comrade, blad. Please to tell me what is it that you want, blad.

Regards,

Capitalist Pig

No kidding. I wasn’t in a good mood.

I crack open a cold beer from the fridge, throw some chicken sticks into the oven, turn on the TV and before long my brain goes into stand by. At around the same time that I receive the first mail the other night, the reply to my inquiry arrives. No ding, no “You’ve got mail!”, no silly alert that animates half the screen dramatically just to display the new message. Remember, this is real. I just happened to turn around and saw that there was an unread message sitting in my inbox.

Leaving a deep indentation in the armchair, my ass departs from the soft leather and repositions in front of the laptop. Same sender as last time. This time the message is written in Hebrew.

There was no need to be so rude. My grandmother came to your house over the weekend to treat your sick girlfriend. When she saw your computer standing on the table, she instantly recognized it. You once posted a picture of it sitting on the same table that it sat on the night she came over (that picture is now taken down from the website). We’re fans of your stories. I’m a comic artist. It was she who wrote you that email. It wasn’t hard to figure out since you have a contact form on your website.

Regards,

Sergey

…

What the fuck?

-to be continued-

This is a continuation of the the first part of my Medicus Incognitus story which you can find here. Be aware that this is a true story that didn’t happen too long ago. As of right now, it isn’t even over, yet.

It’s winter on this side of the planet. Winter is normally a relatively short and uneventful period, here. Lower temperatures that make visiting Canadians walk around in shorts, winds that make hardened windsufers around the world yawn with boredom and snowfall only in the most northern regions. It never rains for longer than ten minutes, then the rain stops and may start again for around ten minutes if we’re lucky.

This time around, however, we’re plagued with a freak season. It’s really cold - really. Umbrellas are giving their lives to merciless winds and half of our northern support group at work couldn’t come to the office - they are snowed in.

So we go back to the night where we called a doctor to our home to inspect my sick girlfriend. The doorbell rings and I walk up to the door. I press my eye against the judas and gain view on the wonderfully convex image of a pair of thick spectacles placed on a pudgy, old face. That has to be the doc. I have a TV blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Sometimes we don’t use the AC for heating because it dries out the air and thats the last thing a sick person needs when plagued by hard coughs.

I open the door and stared unbelieving at the odd figure before me. Very short, very obese, wearing horn rimmed spectacles with a horrifying focal point she grinned at me. I didn’t know what to be afraid of primarily. The huge eyes enlargened by the glasses, the yellow man-eater teeth in her mouth or the short sleeved hawaii shirt that she was wearing. My TV blanket has little horsies stiched on it and I looked very smug compared to her.

“Hello! Who is sick one?” she croaks in a thick Russian accent.

“Uh … there.” I make way for her to see the inside of the living room and point at my girlfriend on the couch.

Without waiting for a formal invitation she hobbles in (yes she hobbles) and places her doctor’s bag on my freshly polished and squeaky clean, glass topped living room table. I take a brief glance outside the door as if trying to get confirmation from my neighbors that this gnomish doctor actually exists. Nobody else in sight. I close the door and join the doc in the living room.

“What have you, girl?” she inquires from Dee. She tries to explain her symptoms and past visits to the hospital but can’t really articulate herself properly. The swollen infection in her mouth has gotten bigger, making it very painful to even move the jaw the slightest bit. I decide that it may be useful if I continued with the explanation and get rudely interrupted.

“You…” she regards me and throws a glance to her right side where my laptop is sitting on a small computer table from IKEA. It’s one of those solid wooden blocks that came in off-white, black or dark red. My Dell XPS sits silently on it, emitting an eerie red glow from its air intakes. Trying to remember the events of that night, I think she sneered at it.

“You go to other rrrroom.” the ‘r’ rolls off her tongue like a machine gun.

Suspecting that she may want to inspect Dee properly and in private, I move off to our bedroom. I am currently reading Brother Odd by Dean Koontz. I loved Odd Thomas and hated it when the book ended. When I discovered the existence of two follow-up stories on Odd, I was more than just delighted. Content with my exile, I throw myself on the bed and begin reading.

I finish two chapters before I roll off the bed and decide to check up on things in the living room. My slipers scrape the floor as I sidle back into the odd scene, my horsey TV blanket still wrapped around me.

“So I don’t need the other medication, anymore?” Dee asks, readjusting her sweater.

“No! This no good. You take other instead. Like on paper!” she croaks back, nodding and shaking her head vigorously. What this did to her wobbly chin, I’d rather not explain to you in detail. She finishes a few notes, writes out a prescription, slams a few stamps on the paper and rips off a copy for my girlfriend.

Before we know it, the weird apparition in hawaii shirt is out the door. Silence follows.

“That was weird!” Dee gasps, breaking the silence that lastet for a few moments.

“Uh huh.” is the only thing I can come up with. More silence for a few moments and then,

“Shit! She forgot something.” Dee points at a small pouch next to my laptop - a good 10 feet away from the living room table that they had been sitting at just moments ago.

I grab the pouch, speed out the door and down a flight of stairs, trying to catch up to her. With my horsie cape still adorning my shoulders I step out into the cold, windy winter night. Outside I can see her getting into a car and I put up a heroic sprint holding the pouch out in front of me. When she sees me coming her face contorts in an expression that I fail to interpret.

“You forgot this.” I say.

Reluctantly she takes it back and I get a chance to cast a glance inside the car. She’s not the driver. The man behind the steering wheel could be her son. What’s more interesting is that the car is filled with a treasure load of computer parts.

“Thank you.” and with that she yanks the door shut and they drive off.

Somewhat confused and increasingly cold, I make my way back into the house. We settle back into the mundane and prepare ourselves for an hour of Survivor: China. I am amazed with the black guy’s physique and I’m hardly surprised when Chicken is sent home on the very first tribal meeting. Eventually I run out of beer and I have to get up early for work tomorrow so I peel myself off of the recliner and sit down in front of my laptop. Just checking mail before going to bed.

I open up the mail client. Ding. Mail.

As far as I was told by a Russian colleague the next day, it means: “You work for us now.”

–to be continued–

Sometimes life for a fully ordained user can be quite comfortable. Not everyone can be a user. Not everyone can reap the fruit of technology and find it to their tasting. And sometimes a user can get himself into the weirdest situations because of his aptitude.

Even though we live in the age of Google, the age of search and find, the age of “Google it!”, we still live in the age of people who use the engine search field to look for “myspace.com” in order to get to the Myspace webpage. Somehow the address bar eluded these people. Somehow after over 11 years of browsable internet, some people haven’t yet figured out the http://www concept of directly navigating to a webpage. Instead of using the address bar to directly navigate http://www.myspace.com (which will work just as well if you type myspace.com since http:// is automatically prefixed and www is merely the root folder for all common webpages), they type myspace into the search engines’s search field and then click on the first link presented to them on the results page.

My girlfriend does this as well. As I am writing this article, I just paused for a moment to ask her how she navigates to her Facebook page. She confirmed my suspicion. She still does it. She types “facebook” into Google’s search field and then clicks on the first result. As annoying as that may be to my anal retentive nature, it may have saved her a lot of trouble today. Instinctively using the search field for just about any search query is a good habit which I can only condone. Even if the method may be inefficient in most cases, it prevents her from drifting into the wrong mindset of not knowing where to start. If she were set on using fixed addresses through the address bar, she may start underestimating the power of a good search engine. She may be too fixed on finding a specific URL rather than finding matches to well placed search terms, regardless of the resulting URL. You never know where you end up finding the answers you need. Being oblivious to the address bar may just be a catalyst for imagination.

Only a few days ago, I somehow managed to infect myself with a mean little virus that caused my left side of the neck to swell up, which made eating almost impossible unless I took some heavy duty pain killers. Somehow one of my glands got infected, which was so close to my jaw muslces that each time I chewed on something, it would press against the infected area and my neck would swell up. The pain was extraodinary. I went to see the a doctor and he recommended to let it pass as it was most likely only a minor virus. Before long the infection did pass and no harm was done. Can you imagine the joy I felt when I was once again able to eat a proper burger without pumping myself full of pain killers? If you’re a vegan, spare me the answer.

Lo and behold, two days later my girlfriend gets sick. And when she gets sick, she goes the full monty. No half assed coughs and a bit of a sniffle. Within a timespan of a few hours from waking up, she came up with a heavy bronchitis, a well spiced sinusitis, a migrane so intense it made the LCD TV flicker in fear and retaliation and one hell of a bad temper. It was a Sunday. My day off. My gaming day. My Call of Duty 4 day. On Sundays I don’t move much. I walk to the fridge to get a beer. I rest my hand on the mouse, the fingers of my other hand dance over the WASD Shift and C buttons on the keyboard and I kill virtual people with an M4. I do this for many hours. This Sunday, however, I went with my girlfriend to the hospital. No squad leader awaited me at the entrance. Nobody offered me an arsenal of weapons and there wasn’t a Javelin available to take out the huge receptionist. Time to run for cover. But ALAS! No cover in sight!

She was diagnosed with all of the above and received a prescription for a monstrous drug coctail. Antibiotics, Probiotics, Codein, Iron, Migraine pain killers and Coldex-A. Blissfull numbness was ensured.

The condition seemed to get better over the weekend and the next day I went back to work. At least the migraine subsided and the TV was safe again. Six hours into work and I was happily procrastinating when my cellphone rang.

Dee: Ow!
Me: Whats up?
Dee: Feeling bad!
Me: How’s the migrane?
Dee: Gone.
Me: So?
Dee: Something’s growing in my mouth.
Me: What?
Dee: It hurts, its swollen. Can’t talk.
Me: I hear that.
Dee: What should I do?
Me: Call the doctor.
Dee: But what could I have?
Me: Sorry. Forgot to pick up my PhD last week.
Dee: Fine. Be that way. I’ll google it.

*Click*

Half an hour later, I’m in a video conference with our Santa Clara HQ, my phone rings. For the third time in the last 10 minutes. I mute the computer and pick up. She really Googled her symptoms and it turns out that the swollen thing in her mouth may be an allergic reaction to the antibiotics. The internet wins. Great success. Even though I usually swear by a thorough “Google RTFM”, this didn’t convince me. I didn’t want sharp teethed monsters growing out of her mouth while I am sound asleep at night. I convince her to call a doctor to our house and have herself checked.

Fast forward to 20:00 that same night.

I’m at home. The door bell rings. I open the door and I was greeted in a way entirely unexpected.

–to be continued–

Like so often before, I look at the TFT screen of my laptop to read off the time. It is 3 pm. The built-in speakers of my laptop produce a dry beep as an email enters my inbox - corporate address. It contains a complaint of an agent expressing his dismay at the tone used in an email addressed to him by another agent. I read the transcript of the log and find a familiar scenario.A switch flips inside my head. It even feels like a real switch. An ethereal switch - very Zen.

There is a label on that switch.

Agent 1 asks Agent 2 a question. Agent 2 asks Agent 1 for more detail. Agent 1 tells Agent 2 to get that information himself. Poor communication. Agent 2 forwards the conversation to me and asks why Agent 1 is acting this way. I find this scenario very familiar. It has happened before. Some colleagues are not always on good terms with one another. The reasons are manifold and range from never working together but in two different and remote locations, different interests as dictated by their position and responsibilities in the project, cultural differences, linguistic differences over to right out personal dislike. I see confrontations like this one every day. I deal with complaints of that sort every day. Today its between Agent 1 and Agent 2. They don’t work in the same building. I sit in the same office with Agent 2. Read the rest of this entry »

It smells like bananas in the office. The last two days are pretty much a blur. I look at the clock on my laptop screen and make sure it’s really Tuesday. In the last 20 minutes I have left my office 5 times to check whether the cleaning lady is still busy in the men’s toilet. I really need to go but this woman will not finish up in there. She is very short, obese, constantly has a patina of sweat crystallizing on her forehead and sports a fresh sour smell of sweat throughout most of the day.

Edna is Russian. I am not sure if her name is really Edna. I am quite sure it is not, as a matter of fact. She certainly looks like an Edna, though.
Read the rest of this entry »