Thursday, March the 18th, 2004

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Mrs Gubbins Throws a Fit

Dark clouds lour'd, and hailstones began to ping upon the pavement. Inside Haemoglobin Towers, Mrs Gubbins and her eighty-three-year-old colleague Daisy De'Ath were putting the finishing touches to their new software development, Pump-Action Graffix Hub 1.0, already being touted as “a harbinger” by Technobilge magazine.

“Would you care for a cup of tea, dear?” asked Daisy, noting that Mrs Gubbins was panting asthmatically and mopping her brow with a dainty handkerchief embroidered with a pattern of crocuses, hollyhocks, mealy bugs, and spurge. Daisy had always been famed for her solicitude.

“Ack…” gasped Mrs Gubbins.

“Tsk! You're getting yourself all flustered, Mrs Gubbins,” said Daisy, a little sharply, “Just because you forgot to insert a backslash into the command line for the ActiveX Pod System Tray Default.”

Reminded of this peccadillo, Mrs Gubbins became even more agitated, toppled off her ergonomic extruded-plastic workstation seating module, and landed on the floor, threshing about in an alarming fashion.

“Dearie me,” muttered Daisy to herself, and resolved at once to call an ambulance, despite the storm which was now raging outside like something from the imagination of the painter John Martin. She flipped through her Rolodex looking for the telephone number of the Bodger's Spinney Ambulance Station, which was close by, but without her spectacles—which she had unaccountably left in the office kitchenette while making some Bovril earlier—she was as good as blind. “One of these days I'll forget my own head!” she chuckled, in her fluting croak.*

Meanwhile a stream of drool was flowing from Mrs Gubbins' thin-lipped mouth, and her head was turning green …

* NOTE : Pedantic readers may argue that a croak cannot be fluting, but they have not heard Daisy De'Ath speak. Oh, and by the way, you will be pleased to know that Mrs Gubbins made a full recovery, before an ambulance arrived, by dint of the first aid skills of Matilda Choctaw (so spritely for a ninety-one-year-old!) who skipped into the office at the ellipsis above.