Switch the Brain to Binary

“Welcome, be seated, and put this non-intrusive head-pan electrode mind-blender upon your bonce.” Or words to that effect. Bless her and her clipboard. The electrodes turn your mind to mush, preparing you for a dour world that is the exploratory equivalent of pot-holing without a light.

“Do not fear monotony, it is only there that you may thrive”, squeaked that really annoying other-personality on my shoulder. The one that, one day, damn it, I am going to poison with weedkiller. “Yes”, she continued, in the voice of a Prozac-addled housewife, gesturing with a rolling pin, curlers in hair, apron on the front, primary-schoolteacher look etched on her scolding face, “Was it not Alexander Solza-wossname that wrote a best-selling novel from within the Gulag? Squeak?” I didn’t answer. Firstly, it seems like ill-respect to compare anything, let alone the perfectly dignified process of data entry, to the Gulag, and secondly, this is a voice in my head. You don’t answer voices in your head out loud, it makes you mental. Not until you get one of those mobile phone ear-pieces and then you can pretend you are talking to a real-life human being through that.

After today I can tell you for a fact that Miss Jane Hurley lives in Marshall Street, Marylebone, London, and that her postcode is NW1 6SE and that she earns £15000 a year. This was a useful thing to know as it meant not having to glance at the bit of paper that I was now tasked with knocking into the hazy screen in front of me as part of my data entry test. I won’t go into how the hell she is expected to live in Marylebone on £15000, because I would be there now if I had the key to that mystery. It certainly doesn’t conform to the hasty number juggling including the 37.5 times table that has been going around my head in the penny-calculating days since my mid-twenties crisis. Perhaps Jane – we’re on first name terms - uses some Imaginary Numbers Tax Credit scheme that kind Mr Brown has guaranteed to people whose ages won’t square root satisfactorily. Apologies for that geek-joke that will alienate me from 99% of my audience. It’s just you and me now, little disembodied fingernail reader. Don’t give up on me fingernail, it’s things like you that keep the world turning.

Sorry, ANYWAY, a while later, still sat in front of the computer, I noticed a gurgling sound. This was seriously disrupting my already knotted fingers, and appeared to stem from a small rodent emerging from the disk drive under the desk. I say appeared, but my eyes need testing, I should probably have mentioned that. I think aiming a large laser at my eye, as is the future of microwave technology might I add, may solve the problem. At £500 per eye, this is probably the most expensive on-off switch ever devised, but I digress. The gurgling sound was in fact muffled instructions issuing from the pair of headphones that I had neglected to notice on the desk in front of me. These had been blurting instructions for all of 15 minutes now. Balls. Looking around me at the watchful waiting room, I waited until no one was looking then grasped noisily at the headphones, ensuring that all eyes turned suddenly in my direction. Fantastic. Someone working there scribbled something. Paranoia set in. It’s fragrant juices set about my veins, warning all my organs to seize up and do something irrational. My pancreas successfully created nuclear fusion, my liver briefly synthesised an enzyme that could have jump-started the cure for leukaemia. My brain simply fucked off and went for a walk, paying due attention to the Green Cross Code.

What now? Jumping out a first floor window onto spiked victorian railings did not seem like an attractive way to escape / die, though it would have looked good in a novel.
Never mind, keep typing. Why the hell does everyone in this pseudo-data live in Milton Keynes? Are they trying to tell me something? Are they trying to warn me that this bleak un-ambitioned existence will end with me slumped, company-branded manacle round my neck, on the island of some retail park mini-roundabout, while planes fly a few feet overhead dropping tonne after tonne of blue ice on my rapidly decaying corpse? And despite taking the test in Scotland, every address was in England. I would like to think that the English version of the data entry test had a few treats like Tighnabruich, Crianlarich, Auchenshuggle and another fourteen-letter place not typeable on normal keyboards because it uses secret characters discovered by a fisherman that were inscribed on the underside of a wooden bridge by morals-obssessed trolls near the source of the River Dee and is pronounced “Ugh”. Go to the keyboard settings and select “Gaelic Moral Troll Mindfuck Helvetica”, font size 12. I’m writing a play about it called “Gone With the Sinned”.

I found my brain, ice cream in lobe, at the corner of St Vincent Street and Wellington Street where it was gleefully misdirecting a tourist couple towards the motorway footbridge with no end. I pulled the electrodes out and gave it a stern telling off before collapsing from the blood loss in my crater-like head. I woke up on the floor of my flat a short time ago in a daze and started typing. So excuse any grammatical inaccuracies.