Brendan Gates

This morning I was awakened by a most non-soothing robot voice that kept repeating: “the electricity is off. alert condition three exists. alert condition four exists”. What madness is this, thought I. Had the robots that eat old people’s medicine mistaken me for one of their quarry? How did they find me? Maybe they infiltrated Walgreen’s Pharmacy prescription rolls. What was I to do? Well for starters, hang up the phone. The robot voice I speak of was one of the alarm systems from my office, calling my mobile phone to let me know that 2 systems were reporting failure. In reality it was nothing more than a simple backup generator test (that causes the power to flick off and back on) that triggered my misguided caller. In any case, I called in to the office and had one of the agents go into the room where said device was housed and confirm for me that nothing was on fire.

Fast forward three hours. I am at the cancer center. My mobile phone isn’t getting any service. I move towards a window so I can call my dad and the phone buzzes. I have a new text message. I scroll up to it and read: YOU HAVE 29 NEW VOICEMAILS. It would seem that my friend the alarm system wasn’t much impressed by the agent I had sent in at 6:30am, nor was it deterred by only getting my voicemail 29 times in a row. Bastard. Gotta give it credit for not giving up, though.

Speaking of old people and their medicine, I currently have the feet and ankles of a 90 year old woman. They’re all bruised and swollen, and I have a dull pain that doesn’t seem to care much what steps I take to abate the hurt. Hopefully the delicious platelets I was transfused today will help.