Well perhaps installing is too grand a term, as it was really standard slave data input drudgery. However, the computer I was given was barely able to run the program. When it came to calculating the calories, allergy information. cross referencing the ingredients, it would take half an hour bordering on the blue screen of death to perform a task that should have taken two seconds. The four week temp job, stretched out and out, eventually lasting more than a year.
This wasn't a problem for me, I was being paid, but I had a lot of time on my hands. I read the e for additives book, learned a great deal about making soup and sauces, made some new friends, had regular smoke breaks, wandered about, did the tasting sessions, chatted at the water cooler, and generally had a rather pleasant experience.
At the time I was exploring Norse paganism. It is questionable if a Saxon were to stumble into a time machine, and find the New Age me fiddling about with runes and drinking whiskey, they would recognize the mixture of 19th century Romanticism and Wiccan wishful thinking as Norse mythology. Regardless, it was fun.
It also allowed me to spend the hours, waiting for the ancient computer to compute e-coli in PJK456123-a 2mm Diced Chicken, writing poems. They were written in runes, not specifically runic poems, the runes were simply the code that allowed me to write without workmates passing comment. The fact that I was writing poems was weird enough, the unfamiliar linear script just added to the weirdness.
Thus was born a series of epic poems, filled with Gods and mortals, magic and pathos.
As with the way of all flesh, and bits of paper, those poems are long gone. So you'll never know the tale of the man cursed to drink but never be drunk, who wins a magical axe from Thor by beating him in a drinking contest, which he uses to cut himself to pieces in despair at not being permitted life's pleasures. Only for Loki to piece him back together, reverse the curse, and drive him mad with drunkenness at the sniff off the barmaids apron. And so on, with maidens to woo, and monsters to fight, all the while being the play thing of the Gods.
Years later I revived the theme, with this poem, Spring Shoots.
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