Edited by Chris McGinty (According To Whim .com)
[Hi, I’m Chris, and I’m taking you on a trip through all of our incomplete material. Here’s an explanation of why. I’ll start with that bastard Nathan who couldn’t be bothered to finish this post that he started. My commentary will be in brackets.]
The End of Times: A Joint Blog
by Nathan Stout & Chris McGinty
[Um, oops. It appears that bastard Nathan was done with his part of this. I was supposed to write my portion. Damn it! Let’s see what Nathan had to say.]
There is this short story idea I started writing out last week in which all electricity stops working worldwide. It’s a disaster that literally sets the world back hundreds of years. Is it a herald of the end of the world? Maybe… I’m not sure how I want to finish the story.
[When Nathan told me about this, I pointed out that he would have to make an exception to biological electricity, since our brain waves are electrical signals. I told him that I had a similar thought that I could never frame into a story. I’ve thought about the fact that what we call technology would be considered magic to people in times prior to steam engines. So what if it was just that? What if we didn’t really know how things work, but instead were creating spells in mass quantities when we made TVs, computers, cars, and everything else? What if the energy that “fueled” magical power started depleting? Because sometimes when something stops working, and there is no rational reason why, I wonder if the magical aura that kept it going just failed. Why is it that a million cars can be made the exact same way, but there are a few (we call them lemons) that no matter how much you fix them, they just won’t work right? What if they’re magical aura just wasn’t as strong, and that’s the only explanation? Perhaps Nathan and I should write this story together. Oh yeah. We tried writing this blog post together, and you see where that got us. Back to Nathan.]
What’s all that got to do with this blog post? Well today we are going to relay several ‘mini disasters’ that have plagued Chris and me in the last week or so. So many disasters in so short a time can only mean the END OF ALL THINGS??? Maybe, maybe not.
[There’s some app called Courage Wolf that I’ve seen on one of my friends’ Facebook pages. One of the nuggets of wisdom said, “Setbacks mean that God is afraid of your progress.” Talk about Id and Ego stuff all rolled into one.]
Nathan will tell you his sad tale first: *******
[Yes, Nathan will.]
My first disaster started a couple of months ago. I sold my house. OK, not so much of a disaster, but it is the reason for the disaster. Selling (or buying) a house is a stressful deal. It’s mainly stressful for those who have to get loans. If you can just buy a house outright with cash it’s no big deal. But with a loan you wait… and wait, and wait. So we find a buyer and wait… and wait, and wait. Then one week before closing (when the house is no longer yours) we get a call telling us the lender didn’t realize the house was a mobile home. They don’t lend on those, so the buyer would have to find another lender. Honestly…………. Three weeks in and you don’t know what you are loaning money for? I think the paperwork sits on some lackey’s desk and it gets done in one week, no need for a month! Anyway, they find another lender, and we are told we will close in a month and a week! So it was 2 months later, and we finally hear the buyer is backing out. 2 months of gut wrenching planning and waiting… poof NOTHING. Disaster 1 – Nathan 0
[This could be classified as an ongoing disaster. They just had another deal fall through.]
Next is a bigger, and more aptly named, disaster. I won’t go into the long details, but you can read about it here. My hard drive fell over and died, taking all my creative work with it. No biggie. There are companies that deal with this sort of thing. I can get it recovered, right…… WRONG! You can read about that disaster upon a disaster here. Disaster 3 – Nathan 0
I am at work. I am frantically finding all the files that I might still have floating here and there that I lost off the main hard drive crash. There are quite a few spread about, so there is a little glimmer of hope. Well, the day I was trying to get my trashed hard drive to do anything, I hot swapped it with another SATA hard drive in my PC. It didn’t work (no surprise) and I plugged the original one back into the PC. A few days later, I went to the hard drive that I swapped out, and the data is gone. I reboot my PC. It says there are corrupted sectors, and the PC is trying to recover files. As if the first disaster with lost data wasn’t enough, this crap happens. Quite a bit of data was lost there too. Disaster 4 – Nathan 0
[It was at this point that I was supposed to outline my disasters. I think I managed to deal with most of my issues in other posts. My car broke down a couple of times, in addition to the battery failing one morning when I was leaving work. I dropped my phone one night at work, and it managed to find the only puddle on the entire property. I had to turn the phone off completely, and let it dry out. It still basically worked after that, until the battery started going out. I have a new phone now. Long after this was supposed to be posted, both my laptop and my desktop had issues that were keeping them from functioning. My laptop was fixed the first time by uninstalling the virus protection software, and the second by running a Check Disk. The desktop, I tried everything, but eventually, I just took it to Nathan to reinstall Windows. He knows how to do things like that. I’m sure there were other things (the can opener finally broke for good) but those were the major things to me, because they keep me occupied at, and in the case of the car get me to, my job.]
Here is Chris with his tales of woe ***********
[Actually, my only tale of woe right now is that we’re out of time for today. But I have four more days of looking through the draft section.]