Rule 34 - Charles Stross [30]
The Gnome’s grin slips. “Neither do I, laddie, neither do I.” He puts the wallet away, then pats you on the knee. “But just consider the alternatives.”
TOYMAKER: Headhunter
Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right?
This is not rocket science. (Rocket science: fucking 1930s shit invented by Nazi übermensch engineers and so easy that by the 1990s even a bunch of camel-fucking towel-heads could master it.)
This is not AI. (Artificial intelligence: fucking 1950s shit invented by Jew-boy intellectuals at Stanford and MIT and so useless that by the 1990s its highest achievement was beating a vodka-swilling Russian commie dog-fucker at chess.)
This is not genetic engineering. (Genetic engineering: fucking 1970s shit invented by . . . you get the picture.)
This is logistics!
It goes back to the fucking Stone Age!
They can put a genetically engineered AI on Mars, but they can’t shift a fucking suitcase between two hotels without losing it.
I am surrounded by ants, and if this continues I am going to pull on my size-fourteen boots and go for a stomp. See if I don’t.
This isn’t a complex job. Truly, it isn’t. I move hotels every day or two—in fact, I’ve been doing it every day or two for several years now. It’s not as if my job’s compatible with having a mortgage or living in a fucking suburban shoe-box with an avocado bathroom suite and a bored housewife and nosy neighbours peering over the picket fence, is it? Santa’s got a lot of travelling to do if all good children are going to get their toys, and the jet lag’s a mother-fucker. (And so’s my carbon footprint, but that’s not my problem: The whiners’ll figure out a way to fix global warming. Meanwhile, I fly business class.)
As I was saying, I travel a lot, and I travel light. 5.62 kilograms, to be precise. That’s the maximum payload weight I allow myself to pack in my trolley case—that, and the clothes on my back and the contents of my brief-case. If it goes over 5.62 kilos, I have to throw something out. You can get a lot into 5.62 kilos: shaver, suit, change of shirt and underwear, commercial samples, computers. Hotels have same-day cleaning stores that sell toiletries and I’m on expenses and if something starts getting shabby I buy a replacement and it goes in the trash, capisce?
My needs are simple: I need a hotel room and my luggage and a desk to sit at with the pad at the end of the day (and no, I’m not stupid—I don’t keep anything important on my pad, it’s all waiting in the cloud—I am in a very virtual line of work, almost ethereal).
Anyway, this is what I am paying you for.
It inconveniences me mightily if I get to my new hotel room after a hard day’s work and my rolling flight case with 5.62 kilograms of home is not there waiting for me.
I need a change of underwear, and I need a shave, and I need my luggage. Only somebody has lost my shit.
I hold you responsible.
I see you nodding like a parcel-shelf dog. No, don’t look at me like that. This is about logistics, the necessary life-support infrastructure for the modern commercial traveller. If you can’t get your logistics right, you don’t deserve to be in the hotel business, and I will personally make it my business to see that your corporate customer-satisfaction officer learns that there is a day manager on the front desk at this hotel who is fucking off the customers. And it won’t stop there. You will start to piss away corporate hospitality accounts like a junkie bleeding out into the urinal through his dick. Your staff will cross the road to avoid you, and you will see vultures circling overhead because your days in the hospitality trade will be numbered. You will lose your job and the government will foreclose on your mortgage and you will be cast out on the street to starve like an abandoned dog or be eaten alive by feral mutant children who will skull-fuck your rotting corpse